Censorship in America.....
No I am not politically correct, nor am I correct at all ...what should be or not politically correct should not be held on the hands of deeply ignorant people.
With a brief reprieve after the ‘90s culture wars, it looks as though the tide is shifting back in the direction of visual art censorship, particularly with the incoming GOP Congress and its disdain for expression that is not squeaky clean. And the war is being fought from the halls of Congress -- as with the much-publicized Smithsonian dismissal of “A Fire in My Belly” -- to perpetually conservative points of consumerism -- as with retail outlets’ disdain for Kanye West’s album cover painted by American artist George Condo. Most nefarious are those instances when museums, galleries and other outlets for art practice self-censorship, preemptively or not, to avoid controversy. The very last place artists should fear morality police are the institutions that are meant to support them, and the willful abnegation of free speech is dangerous indeed.
Here are artists who were banned, censored or arrested, evoking controversy and setting precedents in visual art:
sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’ "Bacchante and Infant Faun"
To our modern eyes, sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’ "Bacchante and Infant Faun" could hardly be more innocuous. A naked but desexualized image of the Roman wine deity, cast in bronze and holding a child, its litheness seems countered only by its gaiety. But in 1854, when architect Follen McKim tried to mount it in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, a huge scandal erupted around the very qualities that seem so innocent today. The statue’s “drunken indecency” greatly offended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, it seemed, and they had enough pull in the city that McKim thought better of his gift and shipped the Bacchus down to liberal New York. It resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to this day, and partly as a result of the uproar surrounding it, MacMonnies became world-famous for the sculpture.
Jean Toche, Flyers, 1974. In 1974, Jean Toche, co-founder of the situationist Guerrilla Art Action Group, mailed 30 flyers to museums and galleries throughout New York City criticizing their exhibition policies as bourgeois and exclusionary. In particular, he was defending what he believed was the artistic right of Tony Shafrazi to deface Picasso’s “Guernica,” having spraypainted the words “KILL LIES ALL” across the masterpiece in a protest against Vietnam and a purported effort to snatch it back from the gullet of history.
Toche’s defense wasn’t incendiary in itself, though the GAAG built its reputation on anti-war “happenings” inside museums, including one 1969 incident that ended with animal blood spewed all over the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. Where he got himself into trouble was this passage in the flyer’s text:
We now call for the kidnapping of: museum’s trustees, museum’s directors, museum’s creators, museum’s benefactors, to be held as war hostages until a People’s Court is convened, to deal specifically with the cultural crimes of the ruling class, and with decision of sanctions, reparation and restitution, in whatever form decided by the People and the Artists.
Though his “kidnapping” was meant to be symbolic, the FBI is not known for its subtlety as art critic, and immediately arrested him at the behest of a presumably more nuanced critic, Douglas Dillion, then-president of MoMA. Toche was compelled by a federal judge to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, after which the charges were dropped. He continues to make political mail art, in caps lock.
3. Blu, MoCa, 2010. It’s remarkable (and confusing) that MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who made his name in New York City by displaying some of the most interesting and innovative contemporary art around in his eponymous gallery for nearly 15 years, would ever censor anything. But that’s exactly what happened in December, after he commissioned the celebrated and controversial Italian graffiti artist Blu to paint a large-scale mural at the museum’s entrance. Their contract was signed without a preliminary sketch, as is Blu’s standard modus operandi. And so, while Deitch attended Art Basel in Miami, Blu worked on his piece: a huge painting of the coffins of war casualties, with dollar bills instead of American flags draped over them.
Blu does not shrink when it comes to making strong statements with his work -- using the dollar bill as a common theme, he’s commented on the varying tentacles of corporate greed since 2000. According to an email conversation between the artist and longtime graffiti archivist Henry Chalfant, Deitch requested Blu paint a different mural over the coffins, “suggesting he would have preferred a piece that ‘invites people to come in the museum’. I told him that i will not to do that, for obvious reasons, and that probably I was not the artist best suited for this task.”
salvator Dali
After Facebook’s censors over-zealously took down a Laure Albin Guillot photograph from the Jeu de Paume’s page and an image of a Gerhard Richter painting from that of the Centre Pompidou, London’s Saatchi Gallery has become the latest victim of the social network’s aesthetic obscurantism. Gallery director Rebecca Wilson told ARTINFO via email that the latest of several offending image that Facebook has removed from their page — and threatened to shut down their account over — is Salvador Dalí and photographer Philippe Halsman’s 1951 collaboration “Voluptas Mors” (above).
“We never post anything that is remotely offensive — unless you think that Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is off limits, or Ingres’s ‘la Grande Odalisque,’ or now, apparently, the work of Salvador Dali,” Wilson wrote. “This is not the first time Facebook has removed works we have posted. They have also threatened to close down our account if we post further ‘offensive’ images.”
Following the removal of the offending artwork on Sunday, the gallery posted a short note on Facebook that reads: “We are very sorry to report that the post we made yesterday showing a work by Dali has been removed by Facebook. This is yet another example of Facebook’s censorship of artworks posted by galleries and museums.”
“I posted a comment about the removal of the work, without a picture,” Wilson said, “and interestingly it generated over 2500 Likes — or perhaps that should be complaints since each person who commented was outraged.”
What art will Facebook deem offensive next?
Karen Finley, 'The Chocolate Smearing Incident"The late 1980s and 1990s were a tornado of art battles, with Jesse Helms having palpitations over Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic portraits and Andres Serrano’s crucifix-in-a-urinal. But feminist performance artist Karen Finley was the first of the targeted artists to have her NEA grant revoked because of a column written by two reporters scolding her without having even seen her work. Rowland Evans and Robert Novack took a belittling, paternalistic slant on Finley’s act, characterizing the 34-year-old artist as a “chocolate-smeared woman” based on a piece she created about male violence toward women. Ironic! Her NEA solo performance grant was defunded, then refunded, leading to a 1998 Supreme Court case in which she challenged the law that required the NEA to be held up to decency standards. She lost, but not before she got in a retort, 1998’s “Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman.” This time, the chocolate was smeared liberally.
Books censored in The United States Of America :
- Mummy Laid an Egg under the title Mommy Laid an Egg was listed as number 82 in the American Library Association's "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000".
- Operation Dark Heart, a 2010 memoir by U.S. Army intelligence officer Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer, is notable for the lengths the U.S. Defense Department went in an attempt to censor information revealed within after the book had already been distributed free of redactions.
- In 2003 the children's book The Family Book was removed from the curriculum of the Erie, Illinois school system due to the book's representation of same sex families.
- In October 2006, a resident of Marshall, Missouri attempted to have the graphic novels Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson removed from the Marshall Public Library.
- Barney Rosset, led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer.
- NewSouth Books received media attention for publishing an expurgated edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that censored the words "nigger" and "Injun."
- King & King, a controversial children's books that portrayed LGBT themes in a positive light
- Ruth Brown, a librarian accused of providing "subversive" materials to the public and indoctrinating children against the principles of America.
- The inferno of Dante ....a classic
- Fifty Shades of Grey by James E.L.....
Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.
Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.
Cuban artist and creative director Erik Ravelo is used to having his artwork censored. He was, after all, the man behind United Colors of Benetton's UnHate campaign, which featured doctored photos of world leaders making out.
Yet his newest project, a personal artwork unrelated to his career as a creative director, has managed to spark even more controversy "I had people writing me, threatening me."
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