Free Speech, Academic Freedom, & Intellectual Freedom

Suspended License offers a wide-ranging approach to censorship of the visual arts over recent centuries and in a variety of cultural contexts, seeking to elucidate the range of political, social, and artistic circumstances in which censorship has occurred. Using examples from 16th-century Germany and Italy, late 18th-century Spain, 19th-century France, and 20-century Germany, China, and America, leading art historians examine what these various experiences reveal historically and what light they shed on current dilemmas and controversies. Essays explore the censure of artworks by famous masters -- Michelangelo, Veronese, Goya, Daumier, Manet -- as well as the censored art of less familiar figures, such as contemporary artists in China. The rejection of modernism as an allegedly corrupt and dangerous style is considered both in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and in McCarthy era Texas in the 1950s. The recent debates in America over government sponsorship for the arts are also discussed, as well as the claims raised about the allegedly pornographic content of work by contemporary artists Wojnarowicz and Mapplethorpe. Suspended License demonstrates that recent controversies over sponsorship, pornography, sacrilege, and aesthetic integrity in modern art are not without historical precedent, and also shows that many of the works now universally regarded as masterpieces have been the objects of censorious action in the past. Numerous illustrations contribute greatly to the reader's understanding of this important subject.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G brings together essays and commentary by over a hundred artists, critics, and poets, culled from the art magazine of the same name. The editors--artists Susan Bee and Mira Schor--have selected the liveliest and most provocative pieces from the maverick magazine that bucked commercial gallery interests and media hype during its ten-year tenure (1986-96) to explore visual pleasure with a culturally activist edge. With its emphasis on artists' perspectives of aesthetic and social issues, this anthology provides a unique opportunity to enter into the fray of the most hotly contested art issues of the past few decades: the visibility of women artists, sexuality and the arts, censorship, art world racism, the legacies of modernism, artists as mothers, visual art in the digital age, and the rewards and toils of a lifelong career in art. The stellar cast of contributing artists and art writers includes Nancy Spero, Richard Tuttle, David Humphrey, Thomas McEvilley, Laura Cottingham, Johanna Drucker, David Reed, Carolee Schneemann, Whitney Chadwick, Robert Storr, Leon Golub, Charles Bernstein, and Alison Knowles. This compelling and theoretically savvy collection will be of interest to artists, art historians, critics, and a general audience interested in the views of practicing artists.

Many of the essays pinpoint the stagnancy of teaching methods today and discuss the reductive parameters enforced by the current curriculum. The radical tone that echoes through the entire series of papers is unmistakable. Throughout the book, postmodern theory informs the polemical debate concerning new directions in educative practice. Contributors shed new light on a postmodern view of art in education with emphasis upon difference, plurality and independence of mind. Ultimately, the paper provides a detailed insight into the various concepts that shape and drive the contemporary art world and expands the debate regarding the impression of postmodern thinking in art education.