“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice, it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it”

By G. K. Chesterton

This quote popped up in my mind when I read an article on recent controversial removal of a painting at Manchester Art Gallery.

The incident raised a polemical question about “censorship”. What are criterions? Who decides? What is even art?

I am usually against the idea of censorship from a standpoint of freedom of expression. However, one of the important roles of art is to push its limit of what can be expressed and these initiatives by artists have changed our ways of seeing/perceiving/feeling the world and enriched our culture.

If art should be about pushing its limit, then wouldn’t regulations be necessary in order to overcome them? If it is entirely free to do anything in the first place, then there will never be a victory of freedom nor inventives of artists to combat tacit rules of society.

Complete liberty of art might mean that artists lose their purpose of pointing out absurdity of the world and stop the whole evolution of art.

A world with no censorship could be either a) an ideal world where everybody is free to express anything or b) a closed world where expressing freely becomes a social taboo and nobody, including artists, would dare to go against this social norm.