Censored Art Today

By Gareth Harris

Censored Art Today is an accessible, informed analysis of the debates raging around censorship of art and so-called 'cancel culture,' focusing on who the censors are and why they are clamping down on forms of artistic expression worldwide. Art censorship is a centuries-old issue which appears to be on the rise in the 21st century—why is this the case? Gareth Harris expertly analyses the different contexts in which artists, museums, and curators face restrictions today, investigating political censorship in China, Cuba, and the Middle East; the suppression of LGBTQ+ artists in 'illiberal democracies'; the algorithms policing art online; Western museums and 'cancel culture'; and the narratives around 'problematic' monuments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Sep 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781848225428

Book preview

Front Cover of Censored Art TodayHalf Title of Censored Art Today

Hot Topics In The Art World

Published in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Series Editors

Jeffrey Boloten and Juliet Hacking, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London

This series of short, thought-provoking and sometimes controversial books debates key issues of current relevance to art-world professionals working in both the private and public sectors. The texts give wider visibility to some critical areas of professional art-world practice, considering what disruptors are challenging the status quo and how the art world is likely to be transformed over the next decades as a result.

International Series Advisory Board

Georgina Adam, journalist, author and art market Editor-at-Large of The Art Newspaper

Alia Al-Senussi, cultural strategist, patron, academic and lecturer

Touria El Glaoui, Founding Director of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (London – New York – Marrakech)

Jos Hackforth-Jones, former CEO and Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London

Louise Hamlin, Director of the Art Business Conference (London – New York – Shanghai)

Llucià Homs, Director of Talking Galleries, Barcelona

Zehra Jumabhoy, academic, critic and curator

Julie Lomax, CEO at a-n, The Artists Information Company, UK

Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami

Philip Tinari, Director and CEO of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Book Title of Censored Art Today

First published in 2022 by Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Lund Humphries

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www.lundhumphries.com

Censored Art Today © Gareth Harris, 2022

All rights reserved

ISBN (hardback): 978-1-84822-541-1

ISBN (eBook Mobi): 978-1-84822-544-2

ISBN (eBook PDF): 978-1-84822-542-8

ISBN (eBook ePub): 978-1-84822-543-5

A Cataloguing-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images in this book. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers.

Gareth Harris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work.

Copy edited by Michela Parkin

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Printed in Estonia

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Political Censorship in China, Cuba and the Middle East

2The Suppression of LGBTQ+ Artists in ‘Illiberal Democracies’

3The Algorithms Policing Art Online

4Western Museums and ‘Cancel Culture’

5Censoring the Past? The Narratives around ‘Problematic’ Monuments

Conclusion

Notes

Further Reading

Foreword

In recent years, artists and art institutions have encountered unprecedented levels of scrutiny and pressure from those who seek to determine the art that we are permitted to see, experience and admire. In this new study, leading arts journalist Gareth Harris incisively identifies and investigates the many faces of censorship confronting the principle of free artistic expression today. Invoking specific political regimes, museums, social media platforms and artistic practices, and deploying specialist knowledge and meticulous new research (including first-hand interviews), Harris exposes both the overt and the often hidden forces that operate as censors of the art that is open and available to public view.

As this study details, the censorship of art quite often dovetails with the wider societal conflicts, the ‘culture wars’ that assume new forms with each new political regime, administration and/or generation. Today’s vocal ‘cancel culture’ is making an increasingly intense impact upon the public’s perceptions, and ongoing acceptance, of artists, museums, and public monuments, and of art’s role in upholding freedom of expression.

Censored Art Today skilfully clarifies the important question of what constitutes censorship in today’s art world, and why it is a matter of such urgency that we understand its origins, its political ends and its consequences.

Jeffrey Boloten and Juliet Hacking, May 2022

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who have offered insight and commentary in relation to the text, including the numerous experts and scholars who kindly gave me their perspective on this complex, shifting topic. Special thanks go to Georgina Adam, Alison Cole, Aimee Dawson, Gaudêncio Fidelis, Paul Hargreaves, Janet Harris, Andres Serrano, Emma Shapiro, Tim Schneider and Anny Shaw. Any errors are mine alone.

My thanks also go to Lucy Myers of Lund Humphries and Jeffrey Boloten and Juliet Hacking of Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

Introduction

We are in a new age of suppression with censorship on the rise in many different forms. Censored Art Today is a readable, informed analysis of the debates raging around censorship and so-called ‘cancel culture’, focusing on who the censors are and why they are clamping down on forms of artistic expression worldwide. Censorship is a centuries-old issue, but this publication will centre on 21st-century case studies, analysing why artists, museums and curators face restrictions and the extent to which these contemporary cases resonate. An investigation across five chapters examines why censorship has become the hottest of topics, impacting substantially on artists. Artists, museums and historic statues are, to use the contemporary term, being ‘cancelled’ in an ongoing critical debate around their status and value. The perfect storm of a pandemic, the advancement of anti-intellectual populist governments worldwide, and uprisings against discrimination and inequality such as Black Lives Matter have brought about a reset of perspectives and principles. Contemporary art, and works of previous eras, are now judged by completely different, altogether more political criteria, which raises the question of whether transgressive works of art have become pawns in a polarised world, their shock value heightened and deployed for propagandistic ends. As opponents of the cancel culture often stress, most artists of the 20th century, including names such as Pablo Picasso, would by modern standards now be ‘cancelled’.

There have been flashpoints historically that dominate the contemporary art censorship debate. The most far-reaching ‘culture’ war of the past half century centres on the landmark trial of 1990 when the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center was taken to court for showing works from Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1978 X Portfolio. The Cincinnati venue, which launched the Perfect Moment show in April 1990, found itself in the national spotlight when it took on conservative groups fixed on labelling Mapplethorpe’s work as pornography. Later that year, a court found the institution, and its then director, Dennis Barrie, not guilty of obscenity charges. The bitter public polemic – the fallout of the ‘culture war’ pitting orthodox against progressive standpoints – focused on whether state funding, channelled via the US National Endowment for the Arts, should back exhibitions such as the Mapplethorpe show. Other art censorship sagas are ingrained on art history students’ minds, including Rudy Giuliani’s determination to scupper the Sensation exhibition when it launched at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 1999, with his opprobrium directed at Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). Giuliani called the exhibition ‘sick stuff’ but the motivation behind his attempt to censor the show remains unclear (some commentators think depicting the Virgin Mary as a Black woman was enough to raise the former New York mayor’s hackles).¹ Another touch-stone moment came in 2017 when a flood of protests and commentaries decried Dana Schutz’s painting, on show at the Whitney Biennial, of a disfigured Emmett Till lying in his casket. Schutz, a white artist, was called out for appropriating an image of brutal violence against a Black teenager (Till was lynched in 1955, aged just 14). The National Coalition Against Censorship saw the painting as an essential airing of all arguments around ‘representation, race and historical trauma’² and it clearly made raw and real the unanswered question of whether white people can ever empathise with the African American experience.

Jock Reynolds, former director of the Yale University Art Gallery, told me for a 2016 report that ‘the culture wars have gone away to some extent’, underscoring that people’s perceptions have shifted in the internet age with, for instance, increased access to pornography.³ The Schutz row, a year later, opened up a new battleground, and post-2016 a series of seismic political, cultural and socio-economic developments has also led to stricter clampdowns on artists and organisations in the real and virtual worlds. Heightened political tensions worldwide, against the backdrop of epochal movements and events such as the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, have led to unexpected outcomes. Against this backdrop, this publication delves into who is deciding which works should or should not be withdrawn from public view and the reasons why those in control feel the need to cast such judgements. This resetting of values and ideals has transformed how we view creative professionals and cultural organisations. The toppling of statues, such as that of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, has thrown into sharp