I love art, and I always admire the beauty, and inspiration that come with it, no matter how it looks, and in my honest opinion, I do not support that bans should be placed on offensive murals just because they are offensive to someone. And I am carefully saying this because when we look at such an offense, it is way too slippery a standard to build any law around, and no reasonable society should even do that.
I remember watching this movie about Picasso early this month when he combined different abstracts with human faces just to come up with his own art. At first, some people that didn't like his style of art talked down against it, but at some point, it got wildly accepted by a larger number of people and it got celebrated; now, those paintings are worth millions even long after his death.
And this made it so obvious that what Mr. A might find insulting might be so completely unbothered by another person. And in another instance, what may look harmless in our world today, a few years to come, can be reread as something deeply offensive by the next generation once culture shifts underneath it.
From what I have seen, art is so powerful; it communicates some things that cannot be put to words, and a lot of people get the meaning just by looking at it, so if we now decide to hand tye government such power to always take down or erase an art anytime anyone finds it offensive, at the end of the day, such power will be used against the very voices that need protection the most: dissidents, minorities, or anyone painting something powerful people want hidden.
But again, looking at this topic, I don't feel that gives a solution either, because looking at the phrase "as long as no one gets hurt" is obviously doing something more extraordinary than it's meant to do. Looking at this side of the country that I am in, when it comes to offensive imagery that includes religion, I don't think it has ever stayed contained to the wall it was painted on.
I have engaged in some follow-up news, and some of the stories I see around occasionally know that accusations of blasphemy, sometimes over far less than a public mural, have led to real-time mob violence against real people, not a non-literal harm; I mean actual bodies. So, when I read or hear that someone said that no one is affected by painting, what comes to my mind is what type of hurt it is, that one when they were creating it, or a few days later when some set of people comes together and decides that such an artist needs to be punished.
The honest answer to give to this is the tension that comes with it that nobody really wants to sit with. We say free speech needs real protection, plus those that come out and sound uncomfortable, the type that goes heavy on people and makes them question themselves. But freedom of speech doesn't mean there is assurance that there's no punishment after being said, especially somewhere like this country where people get carried or arrested when they talk the truth about the government, where offense has repeatedly proven itself capable of turning into something far more dangerous than hurt feelings.
What I will stand on isn't banning of content because it looks offensive to some. But it is knowing the difference between content restrictions, safety and consent. Because the wall is free doesn't mean you can go there to paint anything, you need permission to do so, and seriously, our society also needs to do better by protecting people from mobs instead of pouring all the blames on the artist and his art for stirring up provocation in some people who are already prone to violence because the art never hurts anyone. It is how people react to it that brings the problem entirely.
Thank you for reading.
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