ESSAY

Can the arts rediscover freedom?

Essay By Jonathan Zimmerman

Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson

I have a 1990 photograph in my office showing six people behind a banner at a Cincinnati courthouse. “The Perfect Moment to Stop Censorship,” the banner proclaims.

The protesters were denouncing criminal indictments against a local museum and its director for exhibiting The Perfect Moment, a series of photographs by the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of the photos featured naked children; one showed Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip up his rear end. But a jury in Cincinnati—a famously conservative city—acquitted the museum and its director, ruling that the exhibition was protected speech under the First Amendment.

The American artistic community rallied behind the museum and its tribute to Mapplethorpe, who had died of AIDS the previous year. And when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. canceled a planned retrospective of his work, artists projected slides of Mapplethorpe's photographs onto the facade of the gallery. Censoring his work wasn't just a loss for art, they said; it was a defeat for democracy. You don't have to agree with Mapplethorpe's view of the world—including his oft-quoted assertion that a picture of a fist up an anus isn't much different from one of carnations in a bowl—to acknowledge his enormous influence on the visual arts. And you can't come to your own conclusion about his art unless you're allowed to see it.

That was the standard argument for artistic freedom for most of American history. But in recent years, artists have increasingly turned their backs on it. The question is why, and how we might reclaim it.

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America has had many censors, but only one of them had both a law and a noun named after him: Anthony Comstock. In 1873, Comstock persuaded Congress to pass a law barring “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials from the United States mail. Appointed as a federal postal inspector, Comstock seized more than three million pictures and 100,000 pounds of books over the next four decades. When New York officials canceled George Bernard Shaw's play about prostitution, Mrs. Warren's Profession, after a single 1905 performance, Shaw coined a new term for censorship: “Comstockery.” To Shaw, the term connoted “the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States.” American artists, too, joined hands to mock Anthony Comstock. When he accused Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger of obscenity—for publishing information about birth control—a cartoonist depicted Comstock before a judge, dragging a disheveled young woman by the scruff of her neck. “Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child!” the Comstock figure exclaims.

Likewise, journalists and novelists ridiculed federal customs officials and local police who tried to confiscate allegedly obscene books by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway. “To be a censor today, a man must not only be an idiot,” H. L. Mencken wrote in 1924. “He must be also a man courageous enough in his imbecility to endure the low guffaws of his next-door neighbors.” Five years later, protesters in Boston dressed as characters from banned books and staged a skit in a “Suppressed Book Shop,” which refused to sell Grimm's Fairy Tales. “Don't you know that book contains Bolshevik material?” they asked. “Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Bears!” 

Artists and filmmakers also took aim at the burgeoning effort to censor movies. In 1928, state censorship boards around the country reviewed 597 feature films and ordered 2,960 cuts in them. Over half of the removed material concerned crime, while a third was connected to sex. Censors ordered the removal of a scene showing a woman breast-feeding her child. Other cuts eliminated long kisses—which were shortened to pecks—and a scene depicting a dancing girl “shaking her breasts” and “wriggling her body in a suggestive manner.”

The tide began to shift in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Supreme Court established new protections for literature and film. Formerly banned books like Lady Chatterley's Lover flew off the shelves. So did the Allen Ginsberg poem Howl, which described (among other tabooed topics) sex between men. Gay-themed magazines—long criminalized in the United States—became widely available. It is impossible to imagine the modern campaign for sexual freedom without these publications, which gave strength to older LGBTQ communities and galvanized new ones. 

To be sure, free expression faced constant backlash from conservative politicians and activists. The Mapplethorpe exhibition raised the hackles of the North Carolina senator and GOP firebrand Jesse Helms, who infamously denounced the artist as a “known homosexual.” Helms also spearheaded a campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts, especially after it funded an artwork by Andres Serrano showing a crucifix submerged in urine. Bearing the eye-catching title of Piss Christ, Serrano's piece represented nothing less than “anti-Catholic bigotry,” thundered the Arizona Republic, a right-wing standard-bearer. If Serrano had produced an image of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a jar of urine, the newspaper, added, the NEA wouldn't lend its name to it.

Back in the 1990s, most artists remained united behind the principle of free expression. Today, however, it would be hard to find support for any artwork that mocked a civil rights icon like King. Indeed, some artists have denounced white colleagues simply for depicting people of color, an act perceived as a racist form of “cultural appropriation” and therefore harmful. 

Consider Hannah Black, the artist who called for the removal of a painting about lynching victim Emmett Till from the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The reason? The painter, Dana Schutz, was white. “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” Black wrote, in an open letter. “If Black people are telling [Schutz] that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this.” 

Most astonishingly, Black called for the painting to be destroyed. Yes, you read that right. Even Robert Mapplethorpe's most outraged enemies didn't say his work should be obliterated; they simply demanded its removal from museums. Hannah Black went further: Schutz's painting was so offensive that nobody should see it, anywhere. It shouldn't exist.

In the book world, meanwhile, critics blasted the best-selling 2020 novel American Dirt—about a Mexican mother and her son trying to flee a drug cartel—as “border chic,” because its author, Jeanine Cummins, is not Mexican. At a moment when conservative-run school boards are banning books about race and gender, you'd think that the resolutely left-wing artistic community would rally around free expression. But you'd be wrong. Cummins' publisher canceled her book tour and issued an apology, which put everyone else on notice. “Are we saying that not anyone can write any story?” asked a book editor, who requested anonymity. “Do you have to be a certain identity? There's a lot of fear around that.”

There certainly is. Of course, there's a big difference between a school removing a novel from its curriculum—or its library—and a publisher canceling a book tour. But they have one big thing in common: fear.

That's what motivates censors, in all times and places: the fear that someone, somewhere will say, think, or feel the wrong thing. And, like a virus, it spreads from one host to another. Even people who had initially praised American Dirt denounced it, once they saw which way the censorship winds were blowing. Mexican-American novelist Erika L. Sanchez—whose jacket blurb celebrated the book for its “grace, compassion, and precision”—told the New York Times that she would never have endorsed it had she known how many people would be upset by it.

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But doesn't all good art upset someone or something? And isn't that why we need to protect it, against the forces that would restrict or remove it? 

That used to be the consensus among artists, as recently as the Mapplethorpe controversy in the early 1990s. But it eroded after that, thanks to two widespread cultural changes. Americans became more conscious of racism, in the past and the present. They also developed more awareness of mental health, and of the toll that psychological illness can exact on all of us.

Both trends have made America a more just and compassionate place. But when you put them together, you have a formula for censorship. Why allow racist speech or art to circulate in America, given our brutal legacy of bigotry? And shouldn't we protect the psyches of racial minorities, who are already scarred by that legacy?

The first answer, of course, is that Americans disagree about all of these terms. Hannah Black believed that Dana Schutz was perpetuating racism by depicting Emmett Till. Jeanine Cummins’ critics said the same: her art is racist, so we have to shut it down. But who made them the judges of what is racist, and what is not? Shouldn't that judgment be up to each of us?

Second, censorship patronizes the very people whom it aims to protect. Witness the recent controversy over books by the children's author Dr. Seuss, which were withdrawn from publication because they contain racist caricatures and stereotypes: barefooted Africans wearing grass skirts, an Asian person eating with chopsticks, and so on. Only a racist would want to buy—or read—such books, right?

Wrong. As the attacks on the books pinged across the internet, African-American blogger Danielle Slaughter wrote that Dr. Seuss—her son's favorite author—has helped her teach him about racism. Seuss wrote books that indicted discrimination—most notably, The Sneetches—but he also engaged in his own forms of it, Slaughter noted. It was complicated. And so is America, especially when it comes to race. “Choosing to throw away his books doesn't make you any less racist,” Slaughter wrote. “It does, however, make you the type of person who insists on talking about racism in hushed tones.”

That's a good metaphor for censorship: hushed tones. It makes all of us speak—and write, and paint, and sculpt—more quietly, for fear of causing offense or harm. And you can't have real art on those terms. I realize that some people—including a growing number of artists—insist that removing hateful and offensive images will instead promote good art, by ridding us of the bad kind. But that’s precisely what Jesse Helms said about Robert Mapplethorpe, of course. Hate and offensiveness will always be in the eye of the beholder. In a democracy, that judgment should be up to each of us. We can’t let censors make it for us.

Perhaps artists are once again awakening to the need for open dialogue and expression, especially in the wake of controversies around the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In October, after Artforum magazine editor David Velasco was fired for publishing a letter calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, even Hannah Black was reborn as a free-speech warrior. “It is absolutely McCarthyite and many of the dogmatic anti-Palestinians within the art world have, as Joseph Welch said of McCarthy, ‘no sense of decency,’” complained Black, one of thousands of artists and curators who signed the letter. “They are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.”

Never mind that Black wanted to destroy an artwork to maintain an unofficial ban on white depictions of Black subjects. Velasco spent eighteen years at Artforum, which has “always stood for freedom of speech,” as he told the New York Times. But Black stood for censorship—of a fellow artist, at that—until people she liked started getting censored. Only then did she rediscover free expression, invoking the Cold War red-baiter Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch, the brave lawyer who publicly challenged him.

Did it ever occur to Black that some Palestinian speakers have “caused unnecessary hurt,” just like she says Dana Schutz’ painting did? Of course, that's not a good reason to shut them down. But it is—or should be—a good reason to reconsider prohibitions on “hurtful” art. 

It's the perfect moment to stop censorship. Let's hope the art world seizes it.

Jonathan Zimmerman is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost education historians working today. He has authored several books, including Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, a new edition of which has been recently published. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Zimmerman has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic.

Signe Wilkinson has drawn political cartoon commentary for over forty years. In 1992, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. She has worked for the San Jose Mercury News, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition to publishing the collections Abortion Cartoons on Demand and One Nation, Under Surveillance, Wilkinson has had work appear in numerous anthologies.