Comments on: Censorship Redeux: The Smithsonian and MOCA LA

By: Alice Kinston

Alice Kinston — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 01:33:12 +0000

magnificent points altogether, you simply gained a new reader. What would you recommend about your submit that you just made some days in the past? Any positive?

By: jeanne

jeanne — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:37:47 +0000

Thank you for your response. I appreciate thoughtful readers, such as yourself. I agree. Let the Public decide. Public Art is for the Public, after all.

By: Ira Mency

Ira Mency — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 14:05:15 +0000

I am so happy to read this, as referred by Robin above. Being an artist I think it’s absurd to censor works–people deserve a right to view other people’s views or creations. Perhaps it is their fear of the public thinking by having such artwork, the museum or display house agrees with it’s content, but as an artist we know this is not so. Perhaps they ought have one giant display just on the subjective contact creations. I would have to create something off the cuff just for that to prove a point. Let the public decide. It makes me sick as freedom of speech is not so free anymore it seems now it’s these stuffy censors that are telling us what we can and can’t draw, create, or display. Many movies grossing 100 million, or an episode of CSI are in my opinion more harmful and gory to view than a statue of a bloody Jesus. How soon they forget that on every topic there can be right, wrong, and somewhere in between. It is the grey area they are scared of.

By: Robin Ptacek

Robin Ptacek — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:29:55 +0000

Dear Jeanne,
Thank you for this excellent summary and commentary on the current batch of censorship. The Republican (conservative) gains in the mid-term elections seem to have encouraged censors to come out from under their rocks. The art community needs to be ever-vigilant, especially to misguided art administrators who consider the “Botttom line” of donations and funding over freedom of speech.
In both of these cases, but especially that of Wojnarowicz, no one forces people to look. Censors, like too many other conservatives, want to control what others see, to control everybody else’s lives — power and control.