Word: censorship
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...believe that A Clockwork Orange was among the very best films directed by an American in the last decade. To those who say that art is sacred and should take priority over social health, I have no reply--except to say that I disagree. But opponents of art censorship must--and I believe will--increasingly recognize that total freedom exacts a heavy price in social health. By the same token, supporters of censorship must accept the fact that effective censorship by its nature will exact a certain price in art, and perhaps a considerable one. In these terms, the choice...
...fact is that almost no one this side of the anarcho-libertarian right is really opposed to censorship in all forms, and I'm not talking only about Justice Holmes' hoary example of the man who cries "fire" in a crowded theater. The method of liberals proposing to impose censorship seems to be to call it something else, or to call it nothing at all. Their recent successful campaign to ban smoking commercials from television and radio, though never labelled with the ugly word, was a measure of censorship more nearly political than anything I am advocating in this space...
Perhaps the biggest fallacy in the debate, though, has been the exclusive property of those advocating censorship. It is the idea that something called "exploitation" can and should be censored if not suppressed, while art should not. I would argue not only that the line between art and "exploitation" is difficult if not impossible to draw, but that no attempt should be made to draw such a line at all. The concern of artists, quite rightly, is art. The concern of government is or should be the negative social consequences of media, whether the piece in question can be regarded...
...would go even further. The censorship of art is, in practical terms, more important than the censorship of trash. If a work is attractive and adept, it has more chance of doing serious social damage than a work which is crude and exploitive. My own favorite candidate for total suppression, of all the films I have seen or heard of, is not a "porno" film, but a work of considerable artistic merit--Rosemary's Baby. This film, which made real a universe in which the power and ultimate triumph of evil are inevitable, did more than any five other factors...
Among those who advocate censorship, conservatives tend to favor suppression of explicit sex, while liberals tend to deplore explicit violence. In artistic terms, which admittedly in my view are not really relevant, conservatives have much the better argument. The depiction of violence, especially in verse and on stage, is an integral part of much great art from Homer to the present. Explicit sex, while depicted by many great writers, has not been comparably important, at least to the art of the West. This lack of important erotica, liberals would reply, was due to the taboos of most western countries until...