MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Overt censorship of the arts has been a relatively rare occurrence in the West, more often associated with authoritarian political regimes. But attempts to censor the arts are not unknown in democratic countries, as several highly publicized art scandals in recent US history illustrate. Nor are such attempts a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, conflicts over cultural symbols in democratic societies such as the US have become increasingly visible since the late 1980s. By the mid-1990s, more than a dozen books had been published on the clash over cultural values that came to be known as the “culture wars,” and while the term has not been limited to conflicts involving art, the arts have assumed a prominent position in these debates.

The conceptual framework that guides this analysis relies on a dual awareness of the complexity of art worlds and the fact that social control of the arts may take numerous forms. Censorious practices (or the threat of such) may be exercised by the state, the market, art institutions such as museums and galleries, and among artists themselves in the form of self-censorship. Equally important is an attention to the contingency of outcomes that may result from both overt and covert efforts at social control of the arts ranging from selective support of particular types of aesthetic expression to the suppression of artistic content.

The analysis focuses on three case studies: the 1999 exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; “Naked Men,” a 2012-2013 exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna; and “The Virgin-Whore Church,” a work by Finnish avant-garde artist Ulla Karttunen whose 2008 exhibition in Helsinki resulted in not only censure of the artist’s work but charges of illegal possession of indecent material.