The triumph and benefits of censorship.
136. Edinburgh New Town. (. 1765-1850
Why we sometimes need censorship.
137. Tlic skyline of Brisbane-
character of the interest, and refuse public endorsement. The most sinister programmes arc those that are confident about their own merits, when they arc in fact spectacularly unworthy of regard. They arm idiocy with wealth, pride and fame.
It is a longstanding problem of the human condition that we find it hard to form an accurate and bearable view of ourselves. We are beset by narcissism and self-loathing. Ameliorating this psychological frailty is one of our most important undertakings, and one in which we need the help of our contemporaries and our culture. Some television shows work against the purpose of art; they constitute an obstacle to self-knowledge by encouraging us to give special weight to, and construct our identity around, marginal, unhelpful or dangerous parts of ourselves.
We are now faced with the task not of liberation, but of organization. We have freedom of expression; the problem now is how to use that to our advantage. The strange and disconcerting fact is that benefiting from freedom is not at all the same as winning freedom. We arrived at freedom by casting off censorship, but to benefit from it we need to get more interested in good restrictions. Even if there is some admission that censorship might have merits, we have to confront two questions, which give voice to widespread worries: Who decides? And how do you know what should be censored?
The question of who decides always seems unanswerable, because if the advocate of censorship offers their own services as the arbiter of what should be allowed in the public realm, they inevitably sound unhinged and egotistical. There is a reasonable answer, though: the elected government. We should give the task to the very same people who decide tax policy, workplace safety regulations and the highway code. We already accept the positive role of government in hugely significant areas of our lives.
As for how we can know what is good or bad. too often the impulse to order and beautify the world has been undermined by the claim that 'no one knows what is beautiful'. This expediently places an impossible burden of proof on something that should not require it. If we are asked to 'prove' why the skyline of Edinburgh is 'better' than that of Frankfurt or Brisbane (137), we will not be able to deliver an answer in the scientific terms that are implicitly demanded. We can't point our (usually impatient) interlocutors to a mathematical equation, or at least not yet. Our answer will have to be a humanistic one. couched in careful but not iron-clad arguments. Much of life requires this sort of carefully worded but ultimately still tentative and not impregnable defence: why Shakespeare is better than the prose on a cereal packet, why it is good to be nice to small children, why forgiveness is better than anger, and so on. We can't prove these truths any more than we can prove the importance of beauty, but they seem widely relevant and applicable nevertheless. Postmodern relativism only makes sense if we refuse to be convinced by anything other than mathematical equations.
At the heart of the pro-censorship case is a view about our needs in the modern world. The case for unrestricted freedom of expression was developed during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. It was a necessary liberation from the tyranny of inherited assumptions about how to live, in which some very important and insightful ideas were prohibited or regarded as shocking. It looked as though increasing the freedom of what could be said or shown was in itself a vehicle of social progress. Although that goal has long since been attained, the momentum of that heroic campaign is so great that we keep on imagining our needs in terms of its narrative. We keep on supposing that if only we could go yet further in that direction we will be assured of equally great returns. However, in reality, we are like Arctic explorers who have already reached the Pole. We have already found, and benefited from, all there is to be gained in the direction of complete freedom. Now comes the greater challenge of selective, organizational censorship.
In the history of revolutions and coups, (which tell us the most condensed and dramatic stories of political change), there are no records of militants heading first for the art galleries. If you were trying to change a country, you would go to the TV stations, not the museum. This is not an oversight, but a sober recognition of the limits of art as an agent of change. It does not mean that art is irrelevant to progress; it's simply a limitation that those who love art most should be aware of. The problem can be put like this: art is the carrier of a set of concerns, skills and experiences that we need to make powerful in the world. But art in the traditional gallery sense is a very imperfect agent for helping these values to become more significant in the world. Loving art should therefore, and rightly, be connected with the skills and projects that aren't those of the traditional art enthusiast.
Poussin was interested in marriage, and in The Sacrament of Marriage he shows us a very beautiful and serious conception of the institution as the spiritual union of two people, enshrined in vows made in the presence of their family and community and in full awareness of their deepest views about the meaning of life, represented in this image by their religious convictions (138). Our problem is likely to be not so much that we are unmoved by such ideals, or indifferent to the atmosphere of commitment, but rather that we are unsure of what to do next. If you admire the picture and its moral, what should you go on to do? The traditional scholarly and prestigious strategy has been explored by the History of Art Department at The University of California, Berkeley, as revealed on the news section of its website:
March 5 and 6, 2010
Featuring a much-ancicipated keynote address on Friday evening by Professor T.J. Clark, the conference was so well attended that several rows of chairs had to be added to the Clark Kerr Garden Room to accommodate the crowd, which included out-of-town visitors and prospective students. Clark's lecture, 'What Bernini Saw', concerned Poussin's Sacrament of Marriage 1648 and addressed Bernini's special admiration for the woman at the far left of the painting. Clark discussed symmetry and asymmetry in the Sacrament, and the tension between the central (sacramental) action and the incomplete but transfixing figure at the picture edge.
The scholarly vision of honouring a work of art typically involves going into immense detail about the influence of the painting on other artists. In this case, great care has been taken by a professor to map an unexpected influence: the sculptor and architect Bernini was more indebted to Poussin's work than was ever previously supposed.
And Now... to Change the World
However, our real problem with Poussin's picture is not that we are puzzled by it, but that we are unsure of how to foster the ideal to which
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Advice to the married.
138. Nicola» Poussin. Tlx; Sacrament of Marriage, 1647
A blueprint. not a work of art.