Media coverage of Pussy Riot versus Artists coverage of Pussy Riot.-Work in progress

Most people around the world by now have heard of Pussy Riot, the Russian politically motivated all female punk band that caused controversy by staging a concert inside an orthadox church. The band were soon arrested and their show trial exposed the greed and hypocrisy both in the Russian Orthadox church and within Russian society itself. I was more interested in the coverage of the bands trial by the media who focused almost exclusively on one of the members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. At the expense of the other two visible members (the others are anonymous) Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich.

 Indeed if you just typed Pussy Riot arrested in to Google you might be forgiven for thinking it was a solo act.

Since the band chooses to wear balaclavas to hide their faces so the media cannot make such simplistic sexist divisions and judgements, now the faces are revealed so is the media tactics to sell papers and to reinforced status quo.

In curiousity i then wondered if artists themselves would focus on Nadezhda .And , even though it was not an exhaustive search that artists protesting the Pussy Riot arrest focused on the band, their music and messages and the group as a collective, not reducing the group to one member. The artists i saw , just from image search depicted the band with balaclavas on, as the band themselves orchestrated their own image. The image being quite a powerful one anyway.

Mainstream media will always reduce debate to its most simplistic level, often bigoted or sexist in nature its power to sell papers depends on exposing and aggravating our fears and prejudices. An image of an axe murderer always sells more than a story about why the murder exists in the first place. In reducing the group to a mass of photos of one member because she is photogenic reduces the bands message, their bravery in exposing the corruption and hypocrisy in their society and is ironically in opposition to their stance on the way mainstream media depicts women. As things to be looked at, as objects, as commodity. That the only reason a woman has value is if she is photogenic, and that is her only value and supersedes any contribution she may make to social or artistic debate.