|
ah yes, the lasting legacy of the "piss christ" and mappelthorpe brouhahas....the right brings with it a funny understanding of art in general....i expect to read soon that federal funding is being diverted to support for making reproductions of other images of jesus, paintings of seagulls flying over ocean waves, sad clowns on velvet and public sculpture designed around dollar signs.
anyway, i think that this is a move toward censorship exercized by the control over funding, by earmarking. i do not think that it in itself yet constitutes censorship.
the responses could go two ways: one would be to argue that if you do not like this earmarking, then stop taking federal grant money. which would suit the right just fine. (here you see a real difference between traditional and more contemporary types of conservatives: the latter were wedded to the idea that the economic and cultural elites were coextensive: the former see the two as unrelated. for the former, art was seen as an unproblematic general glorification of the existing order, a writing of it into History: for the latter, it is a problem in that artist just wont get with the glorification program, which they seem to see as consisting only of direct affirmation. capitalism yay. self-interest yay. critique boo. and it is not much more sophisticated than that.) i think that the right would be perfectly content if the whole idea of the public collapsed along with idea like public broadcasting.
the other would be to militate against this kind of move for what it is leading toward, under the assumption that state funding for the arts is a given, a requirement for the development of expressions that mirror back to the culture in general its state of being. which could be attacked as a simple expression of the self-interest of the artists. which in a way it is.
what i am interested in, however, is whether you get the same kind of arguments that worked around bush lying with reference to the iraq war (it was not a lie because he really believed it) being applied here (it is not censorship because the administration really believes it)--in which case you could see a more generalized mapping (it is not torture because the administration really believes it isnt---it is not repression because those doing the repression believe it is not) and with that out the window goes any possibility of opposing what these people do.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|