Bonfire of inanities

Thursday February 12, 2009

How much literature and art never sees the light of day because of the nervous consensus “Thou shalt not offend”?, asks Shirley Dent

Twenty years ago our television screens showed Muslims in Bradford setting light to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The Bradford book-burning in January 1989 was a prelude to the fatwa issued against Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day of the same year.

Looking back The Rushdie Affair was a sea-change in both British politics and British cultural life. As Kenan Malik will argue at a debate this week on free speech after the fatwa the controversy over The Satanic Verses marked the point at which cultural sensitivity rather than political struggle came to define anti-racism. It also marks the point at which cracks began to appear in the liberal left defence of free speech and freedom of artistic expression, ushering in an era where offence-avoidance and outrage-curtailment trumps artistic integrity and provocative risk-taking in the arts.

Shocking

Book-burning is always a shocking spectacle. It is meant to be. But in last 20 years it is not the crackle and flame of the pages we can see burning that we need to be worried about. It is the books burned behind closed doors, it is the art smashed in the curator’s office, it is the theatre where the riot happens off-stage and in camera, that we need to concern ourselves with. We are in an era of self-imposed pre-emptive censorship and it is stifling free debate and free inquiry in both the arts and society generally.

It is all too easy to reel of a list of art discarded and dissent disowned because somebody, somewhere, may take offence, from the Tate Britain’s pulling of John Latham’s God is Great from an exhibition because it featured a Bible, Torah and Koran embedded in glass to the BBC’s editing out of ‘faggott’ and ‘slut’ from The Pogues much-loved ‘Fairytale of New York’.

Consensus

But this is the tip of an iceberg we can see. How much literature and art never sees the light of day because of the nervous consensus “Thou shalt not offend”? It is not just those who make decisions about what to publish and what to put in art galleries that are affected by this climate of censoriousness. It is the individual artist whose default question is no longer “Is this what I want to say? Is this the best way to say it?” but “Can I say this? Who will be offended?”

Not all provocative literature and art and every risky idea is worth the effort or has anything useful to tell us. There is no point in being offensive for offence’s sake. But we are a cowardly, confused society indeed if we, the public, deem ourselves unable to judge, and argue over, challenging art and ideas. The biggest threat to art today is not book-burning fanatics. The threat to art today is the quiet bonfire of inanities where no-one wants to confront anybody else or has the guts to challenge the cultural consensus lest we give offence.

Shirley Dent is communications director at the Institute of Ideas and blogs regularly at Guardian Unlimited Books