Censorship today hurting America, The public often seeks to proclaim its judgment on the quality and value of art. After all, as Lyndon Johnson declared when he signed the law creating the NEA in 1965, "Art is a nation's most precious heritage." While a decision as to the quality of art is every person's individual right to make, unfortunately in America almost all decisions and controversies, even artistic ones, turn into political questions. Clearly, every taxpayer has a right to have a say about how her tax dollars are spent. Yet there is a fine line between discussing the federal funding of such agencies as the NEA and determining the kind of art that can be selected for sponsorship by such government agencies.
Likewise, there is a fine line between censorship and taste. For in- stance, the art of Andres Serrano and Jock Sturges raised much opposition, but the question is whether that opposition constitutes censorship or legitimate quality judgments. Serrano is best known for "Piss Christ," his image of a plastic crucifix in a tank of urine, and became something of an art-world hero for having provoked considerable ire from conservative Christian groups. Jock Sturges received much attention for his photographs of nude adolescents. As was true in the controversies surrounding the Mapplethorpe exhibit, the defenders of Serrano's and Sturges's First Amendment freedoms seemed reluctant to discuss artistic values.
They saw censorship only as an attack on freedom, not as an attempted statement about the quality of publicly funded art. This labeling of every criticism as oppressive censorship, however, ignores the distinction between censuring and censoring. To censor is to eliminate speech, but to censure is to criticize certain speech and to form judgments about the quality of that speech. Though a free society must refrain from censoring, an........
