In the news
Capitalism on steroids at the Super Bowl stunts free speech (and journalists think it’s okay to use ‘super’ as an adverb in a headline): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/nfls-super-bowl-clean-zoneis-super-bad-for-free-speech/2023/02/10/f7e8832e-a934-11ed-b2a3-edb05ee0e313_story.html (Feb. 10, 2023)
Lincoln Allison outlines the importance and complexities of free speech in an excellent piece for The Critic: https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2023/free-speech-we-should-try-it-again/ (Feb., 2023)
The U.S. government is being sued by attorneys from Missouri and Louisiana over potential First Amendment breaches in its collusion with social media companies to tackle COVID ‘misinformation’: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/business/free-speech-social-media-lawsuit.html (Feb. 9, 2023)
This week in the arts with Ella Nixon
Drag Story Hour at Tate Britain went ahead on Saturday morning despite prior controversy. In anticipation of the event, Art Not Propaganda (authors of the online petition “Stop Tate from targeting kids with gender propaganda”) explained on Twitter how the “the row [between Art Not Propaganda and the Tate] has been co-opted by trans rights and far-right extremist groups who are planning on turning up on Saturday in masks to scream abuse at each other and terrify small kids”.
Sure enough, polarised political groups and everyone from Antifa to Piers Corbyn – tempered by a large police presence – showed up at the gallery on Saturday morning. Art Not Propaganda chose not to attend the protest, advising “families and children [to] steer well clear too”.
It has been announced that a Russian art exhibition will be held at Cooper Union art school in New York after it was postponed in response to the Russia-Ukraine war. The exhibition, Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde, 1920-1930, was interpreted by some as an inappropriate celebration of Russia in the context of their “ongoing brutal invasion of Ukraine”.
In retaliation, many figures criticised its postponement, calling it “a troubling instance of censorship and historical erasure”. In fact, the exhibition itself is a story of artistic censorship: Vkhutemas — active in the 1920s and ‘30s — was shut down by Josef Stalin because its artistic style opposed that favoured by the state. The postponement and subsequent rescheduling raises important questions regarding the conflation of history with current political circumstances, not least because the exhibition will now contain “contextualizing material” when it opens in the Spring.
Finally, the fuzzy legal environment for NFTs has been highlighted once again after a jury in America decided that the NFT series ‘MetaBirkins’ was “not art”. The NFT artist Mason Rothschild appropriated the famous Hermés Birkin bag and covered them in fake fur to create his series of digital images. It was ruled that Rothschild had “deliberately sought to dilute the luxury brand’s trademark”. To make the decision, the jury were asked whether the “MetaBirkins” NFT series contained instances of artistic expression or not (i.e. were they ‘art’?). Artistic appropriation and pastiche — rather common techniques used by artists throughout history — have thrown up various lawsuits when used in the digital realm, questioning the limits of artistic freedom in the impending metaverse.