Censorship in the US or Fear and Loathing of the Arts

Artists, especially those who also teach, once felt protected by the first amendment and by ‘academic freedom’. It has become painfully obvious that such protections no longer exist. Artists, like everyone else, are vulnerable to the inconsistencies, misunderstandings and deliberate legal manipulations of language and the interpretation of images, especially anything having to do with sex. Everyone from artists to institutions of higher learning and the art world (museums, galleries, public and private granting agencies) now engage in a process of self-censorship to avoid the incongruous logic of a corrupt and conservative political system. In this essay the author addresses the changing social climate and the impact it has had on the now heretical and somehow unpatriotic notion of the freedom of speech. She also reflects on her personal history as both an artist and an academic who makes and writes about sexually explicit imagery, who deliberately involves herself in ethical dilemmas, and who is tired of ‘political correctness’

Academic freedom · Aesthetics · Art · Censorship · Higher education · Linguistics · Media studies · Political correctness · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy

• Barbara DeGenevieve

  Sheelah Murthy•Porn Studies•2015

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