You're rocking the boat

article source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/on-censorship-salman-rushdie.html

This article was technically a lecture given by Salman Rushdie, but republished in print I think it remains interesting. "On Censorship" is an account, an analyzation, on the complex relationship bewteen art and censorship - although in truth Rushdie paints the picture as much more black and white: creation and its inherent opposite. He considers liberty, freedom, and the ability to create comparable to the air we breathe, asserting that this freedom is fragile enough to require "not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom". We must, in other words, have confidence in the longevity of our freedom as well. So, with this fragility he considers the darkness that is censorship - the change in meaning that is "censored art", the political impacts of censorship in China, the effects on individual artists when work is banned. He warns, ultimately, against shying away from those artists and their creations that seem to rock the boat. Originality, he says, is dangerous, and it's important that we defend it.

I don't really even read the New Yorker regularly, but I did try to read Salman Rushie once, and while I never finished his book I liked the bit that I did read. Rushdie has a truly amazing way with metaphor, and I agree with a great deal of what he spoke about in this lecure. At the same time though, he classifies creation and censorship as "thing" and "no-thing", asserting that censorship is the absence of presence - but censorship has to be more than just absence. The act of trying to erase something is in itself a statement, not merely the absence of it. Words that have been crossed out do not simply cease to exist. He also relies a great deal on the fragility of artists, which, while romantic, feels a bit patronizing, and denies art some due complexity.