Art, it seems, is becoming more and more ubiquitous in today’s world. Whether it be graffiti on a wall, music on the radio or that new movie that everyone is talking about, art surrounds and pervades the world we live in. Meanwhile, the boundaries of ‘artistic expression’ are pushed further and further every day. The advent of media means that it now exists in more forms than it ever has before, ranging from the usual suspects such as theatre and cinema to newer areas such as blogs, street art and even creative and hard hitting forms of advertising. You don’t even have to be present at an event to know what is going on; sooner or later you can just read about it on the internet. We live in an age where it is virtually impossible, a challenge even, to be completely unaware of anything that is deemed to be important enough to be broadcast around the world. In the case of any form of art, it is usually supplemented by a variety of opinions, responses and criticisms.
This expansion in the different forms of art raises questions about the need for some amount of restriction on what can and cannot be said or done in the name of art and its purposes. In the past decade, notorious incidences such as the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons and the removal of the photograph of a young and precariously clad Brook Shields from the Tate gallery spring to mind, when the phrase ‘artistic expression’ is mentioned. Episodes such as these seem to suggest that the boundaries of what constitutes freedom within art have been tightened. Self-imposed restrictions, when it comes to more offensive forms of art, have been advocated as being a form of good judgement rather than self-censorship, however admittedly thin the line tends to be.
The real question that still remains is to what extent should ‘artistic expression’ be allowed a free pass? We all have different ideas as to what exactly the purpose of art is; whether it serves as an expression of time, a way of making information and ideas more accessible or just to be beautiful. Regardless of what they are, how much should art be allowed to push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable? I believe that the publication of art, all art, is worth defending. Freedom of expression survives only as long as we allow it to. The second we start deciding when art is acceptable before it is actually displayed or heard is when art loses its value as a stimulus for public discussion.
Under the guise of protecting the vulnerable and defending others from what they are convinced will offend them; censorship robs people of the opportunity to form any opinion at all. Only when faced with a form of art, be it the radical art of the Australian artist Mike Brown to the controversially offensive comedy of George Carlin, can people truly make judgements for themselves and be challenged by the new and extraordinary.
More concerning is the initiation of self-censorship, whereby institutions place heavy restrictions on what they will show, reflected by the BBC’s publication strict guidelines on taste in 2009 and the Tate’s decision to remove the art piece ‘God is great’ from an exhibition of John Latham’s work over concerns that it would offend others. This further removes any hope that the public may have of ever being faced with anything that has not already been deemed ‘acceptable’ by institutions. Institutions who are too scared to cause any controversy, in an age, when the arts seem to have come under a new wave of scrutiny.
What art can offer us is a unique perspective on matters, in a way that would not normally happen in any other form. The company Lush famously had a human window display of the experiments that are conducted on animals in testing facilities. The exhibition shocked and offended many that felt assaulted by the performance art and declared that it was offensive to victims of abuse. Whatever one’s opinion on the campaign was, it undeniably created awareness of the relevant subject in a way that no amount of poster embossed with the faces of celebrities ever will. Should art like this be censored for fear that it will offend some? Or shouldn’t it rather be embraced for the possibilities it creates and the irrefutable effect it can have on the apathetic.
One of the main purposes of art is to make a statement, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that made us reconsider the power of authoritative figures in society to the famous Pussy Riot performance that protested the leader of the Orthodox Church’s support for Putin. By allowing the confinement of artistic expression we bring ourselves one step closer to a society in which the confinement of expression spreads itself beyond art and into the opinions and ideas that we as individuals may communicate. It is not an overstatement to say that freedom in art is a crucial part of a free society, in which we have the autonomy to think for ourselves and express our thoughts.
In the afterword to the 1971 publication of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote that ‘there is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.’ We need to trust people to examine art for the sake of art, as a means of debate and a way of spreading ideas. To advocate censorship is to condemn another’s viewpoint and sentence it to a premature death without a trial. All art is ultimately simply a reflection of what some of us think, what some of us truly believe and what some of us haven’t even considered. Only by stepping outside of our comfort zones can we confront the good, the bad and the startling.
