September 19, 2015

Drunken Rumination of the Day

The thing I've never been able to understand about campaigns to have this or that bit of art or culture suppressed or bowdlerized is: if your ideological worldview is such that the thing in question depicts an evil important and terrible enough to exercise you to that extent, why would you want the depiction to disappear? It would seem to me you'd want to preserve it, "curate" it even, as an example bolstering your argument about its awfulness, or about the awfulness of the world or cultural context out of which it emerged. Otherwise, to the degree to which you're successful, no one will know what you're talking about when you condemn it. I guess I've never really understood iconoclasm tout court. (And no I'm not saying there's nothing that deserves condemnation; only that the condemnation is only intelligible when you have the thing in question to hand.)

Posted by Dr. Frank at September 19, 2015 11:37 PM