The late great English author JG Ballard once said "We need the bad boys of art, the Bellmer's, the Bacon's". I couldn't agree more but just who exactly are the bad boys of art and photography today? Do they exist?

This is a tricky question to answer. Today, artists are submissively trapped in an unfortunate stifling atmosphere of puritanical constraint. Brought on by an overwhelming force and resurrected by the very people who claim to be modern, whilst abolishing reason as essential to debate, open discussion and thought.

There's no wonder that fashion magazines sales are in steady decline. Every editorial and advertising campaign belongs to the same generic formula, a new hegemony that has remained unbroken for the last 30+ years and it clearly shows. The same could be applied to the world of contemporary art, literature, music and so forth. Anything interesting currently going on is happening outside of the established circles and change always comes from the bottom up, never from the top down.

When new generations are told not to dream, provided with prepackaged formulas on how to express themselves and to measure carefully their words, we shouldn't be angry or neither surprised, to wake up in an unfree realm of our own design.

Also, we have been taught from an early age that being disruptors is a bad thing, that if we follow that path we will inevitably end up with a coned hat facing the white wall of a classroom. But perhaps we should see things from a different angle, perhaps being a disruptor is a good thing and unpredictability a quality. Disruptors challenge the status quo, rock the boat, fill the world with outrageous ideas.

Paraphrasing C.S. Lewis, I think it is far more dangerous to live under the omnipotent busybody morals of the Tom Buchanan's than the baron bootleggers of this world, the Jay Gatsby's.

In line with these thoughts, I've often wondered why one of the greatest bad boy's of photography, Helmut Newton, is still so controversial today. I shouldn't certainly point to his nudes, they exude that elegant film noir that often gets lazily brushed off as pornographic, nudes surround us on a daily basis and pornography is easily available at everyone's finger tips. So, if it's not the nudes, then what is it? I think what disturbs a certain type of audience is the male gaze, and its partner in crime voyeurism. In today's times of equality shouted out loud from any available rooftop, there is nothing more offensive and unwarranted than the male gaze, which has been pillaged and cancelled from the popular visual arena.

When the bad boys of art do not provide an outlet for peoples anxieties, imaginations and experimental impulses, then people will start to experiment on themselves and eventually on those around them, with all too often disastrous consequences and extreme violence. Our minds must be free to roam from the soft tyranny of thought crime. That is a valuable moral argument that we must discuss. To simply follow the group blindly into the abyss, would be suicide, with fingers pointed towards a vague notion of infantilised virtue. When a vacuum created by materialism is presented, human beings will fill it with more of the same problem.

Solution? My advice would be to embrace risk, exchange ideas and dare to dream again, only this way can a new renaissance be achieved. The thought police still cannot put their hands into our dreams, or at least not just yet.