october_rosehip

I once had to teach an art history unit to high schoolers… without mentioning religion, allowing them to see any depicted violence, or any nudity.

Think about every work of art you’ve ever seen… how’s that going for you? I can’t even teach secular works properly without mentioning what they were rebelling from. Monet’s freaking HAYSTACKS were an absolute revelation… and a firm rebuke of a lot of the art that had gone before… that I can’t mention, in a situation like that one.

I did the best i could. We focused on surrealism. I’m not sure how great a job I did but I tried. I did take my future in my hands, dip a toe into dada and mention LHOOQ.

Now, here’s the punchline, though. Librarians are awesome. Anything in the school library was fair game. They had the Sister Wendy videos. If you’re not familiar, I think her discussion of the Lasceaux cave paintings made about half the room irretrievably horny. Beyond that, they got in a ton of modern art books and asked us to look them over. Mind you I wasn’t allowed to say anything about a lot of the subject matter, So they and urine-Jesus were left to their own devices.

This is what censorship gets you. A lot of imperfect understanding, unpreparedness, and nervous wreck adults fearing of the repercussions of stepping out of line.

I know censorship is only called that when the government is doing it… I know tumblr’s not the government, I don’t care. Control over everything people can say is ultimately what we’re dealing with, here, when almost every website where you could express any idea freely has been destroyed, we are dealing with censorship, for all that Apple is acting like a government.