Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression

Description

If your idea of censorship is an anonymous bureaucrat in a government office exercising prudish control over "offensive" art and speech, wake up and smell the conglomeration. Censorship today is just as likely to be the result of a market force or a bandwidth monopoly as a line edit or the covering of a nude sculpture, and the current system of new technologies and economic arrangements has subtle, built-in mechanisms for suppressing free expression as powerful as any known in other centuries. In Censoring Culture, the nationally known author of the ArtSpeak books and the head of the National Coalition Against Censorship's Arts Program bring together the latest thinking from art historians, cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as first-person accounts by artists and advocates, to give us a comprehensive understanding of censorship in a new century.

Robert Atkins is an award-winning art historian, activist, and bestselling author of ArtSpeak and ArtSpoke. From 1987 to 1997, he wrote a biweekly column on art and politics for the Village Voice. A co-founder of Visual Aids, he lives in Palm Springs and San Francisco. Svetlana Mintcheva is the director of the Arts Program of the National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of fifty nonprofit organizations devoted to freedom of expression in the arts. She lives in New York City.