The London Drawing Group with Dr Daisy Dixon
Notes from the talk
-The talk was a conversation between the London Drawing Group and Dr Daisy Dixon (Philosophy and Art research fellow at Peterhouse Cambridge). Daisy had wrote a thesis on how artwork could be a piece of speech and develop meaning over time (‘Alterpieces: Artworks as Shifting Speech Acts’ (2019)
Censorship
-Daisy explained how it had started with ancient greek thinking and Plato has wanted to censor lots of artworks (mainly poetry and theatre but also art) thinking it corrupted our soul
-Previous censored work would be censored for different reasons including,
To control obscenity, (Titian erotic artwork was hidden as it caused such a stir, the fig leaf was to cover (now becomes a symbol of sex) A painting of a vulva was taken from Instagram so rules were changed so paintings can now be shown on Instagram
-State Control, Ai Wei Weis exhibition was cancelled in China after it was said it was too political, The Nazis used propaganda and Hitler cleansing, burning books and changing the curators of galleries for Nazi members
-Hate Speech, Artwork that is complicit in the work it is supposed to be channelling. Statues of white supremacists/slave traders regardless of the of the positive intentions of the artist can be seen as hate speech.
Cancel Culture
-Cancel culture is to withdraw support or to boycott the work of public figures, artists and companies after they've done something considered as objectionable or offensive
-Worries against cancel culture, Loss of great art. Asks the question to should artists be morally perfect in the first place. It erases history and means we have to question everything.
-Issues with the worries, the Slippery Slope Fallacy uses an extreme example of what may happen if we censor art for example. The argument that a small change will in turn change something far away at the other end of the spectrum where in reality it ignores facts and the time to get to that end point on the spectrum.
How to deal with the Issues
Education
Discussion
Removal or Relocation- There has been talk of moving controversial statues to a graveyard site so they can still educate
Performing Censorship- Prompting debate rather censoring the artwork such as the artwork below in the gallery space that was removed temporarily to spark debate
Counterspeech- What can go wrong as in the example of Marc Quinn who created a statue to replace the controversial statue of the slave trader Edward Colston. Although there was a lot of positive news around this statue and it was temporary to spark debate, there were comments to if a white male artist should be capitalising on the moment
-Very interesting discussions into censorship of work and ideas and the history of this. The discussions around cancelling works too was very interesting and how to perform this such as the artwork below, taken away to spark debate.
-The discussions around Marc Quinn was also interesting to if a black artist should have been given that platform
-It will be good to research into the historical examples shown to give examples of censorship relating back to protest and curated public information
Screenshots from the talk
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