For Some Art Communities, There Is A Time & A Place For Censorship.
For Some Art Communities, There Is A Time & A Place For Censorship.
I recall an art history lecture at the Laguna College of Art + Design back in 1999. The speaker brought up the controversy over the “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and the outrage in response to Chris Ofili’s Hip-Hop depiction of “The Holy Virgin Mary”. The story was recent and the speaker clearly wanted to wake a sleeping audience. ‘What do YOU think?’ He asked if anyone thought there was any legitimacy in censoring this work. Every art student in the room responded with a heartfelt YES. Each raised hand was followed by an individual testimony of anger, shock, and even a kind of emotional call to action of sorts. I stood up and asked everyone in the room if they knew anything about the work, in addition to the use of dung, why it was used, or anything about the artist they want to censor? They didn’t know dung. They didn’t want to know dung. And at that moment I had become sadly aware of the actual elephant in the room. Then over time, more elephants, much more dung.
Today I gravitated to the topic of censorship, Laguna Beach (Orange County), and conservative communities, after reading the following article by Matt Stromberg in Hyperallergic.
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