Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork

(Hardback)

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Description

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks.

Reviews

An excellent contribution to contemporary discussions on how censorship still frames how art is made, presented and viewed ... A timely and well-judged collection of essays, edited with skill and intelligence by Kennedy and Coulter. Its scope is modern and global. * Irish Arts Review *

Author Bio

Roisin Kennedy is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Irish Art at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on the critical reception of modernist art in Ireland, the role and function of art writing post 1880, and on the position of women as artists and subjects in modernist art. Riann Coulter is Curator/Manager at the F.E.McWilliam Gallery & Studio in County Down. She specialises in Irish and British modern and contemporary art and has over 15 years experience curating and co-curating exhibitions for regional and national institutions throughout Ireland.