Art is all about nuance. Let’s not lose it in the alarmist censorship debate The Guardian | Opinion is Free | 8th February 2018
In the last few years censorship, or indeed the cry thereof, has become something of a meme. Some well-meaning group of people, usually from a demographic that is still struggling to achieve full equality, will raise objections to the meaning of a piece of art or literature, sometimes – but notably not always – requesting its removal. And then the rightwing press will go ballistic. Crotchety letters will be written to newspapers, rent-a-gobs will start sharpening their poison pens, those who raised objections will be abused and ridiculed – and then, after many column inches, everyone will forget about it until the next censorship row comes along. This is what happened in the case of Lola Olufemi, the Cambridge women’s officer who had the temerity to suggest a more diverse, “decolonised” English curriculum and as a result had her photograph placed on the front page under the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors” (the newspaper has since corrected and apologised, as it should). So often, people such as Olufemi, who was politely making a completely legitimate point about the canon, backed up by a large number of Cambridge academics, are portrayed as hysterical snowflakes who can’t bear differing opinions. And yet it is always the right wing who become pantwettingly upset about having their views and interpretations challenged. Manchester Art Gallery recently utilised the censorship meme to spectacular effect by temporarily removing John William Waterhouse’s 1896 painting Hylas and the Nymphs in order to prompt a discussion about painting choice in galleries. People duly and predictably went ballistic. Parallels were drawn with Nazi Germany (why choose the Nazis as a comparison? Why not the censorship of the feminist avant-garde?), letters were written to newspapers … you see where this is going. The painting row came hot on the heels of a row in New York over the display of Thérèse Dreaming (1938) by the Polish-French artist Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, which has an 11-yearold girl showing her knickers as its subject. It is no coincidence that both paintings depict what appear to be pre-pubescent girls. The #MeToo movement is in full swing, but even before that we were becoming a society in the process of reappraising its artistic output, not to mention its artists – whether that is a statue of a racist colonialist/national hero (delete according to your viewpoint), the films of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, and, indeed, the men themselves, or novels, such as The Great Gatsby, that some students have said require trigger warnings. Despite what we so often read, art is neither one thing nor the other. While one viewer might look at Hylas and the Nymphs and see the young girls in it as “mildly erotic”, as this newspaper’s art critic did, another viewer might remark a paedophilic tendency that is, actually, not at all mild or subtle. Would I ban Hylas and the Nymphs? No, of course, I wouldn’t ban it, just as I wouldn’t ban filthy old pervert Degas and his pre-teen ballerinas. But I would like to see it as part of an exhibition that interrogates why so much of our artistic energy as a society has been devoted to sexually objectifying young girls. We are missing an important moment if we refuse to listen to one another about art that could be deemed dodgy, if we consider our own interpretations of that art to be the only right ones. I know that nuance is unfashionable, but it is also the site in which most art resides. It would be such a shame if we lost it.
