JOSÉ LUIS PARDO - The senseless rage of resentment

Intellectuals once mocked clumsy attempts to censor art on ‘moral’ grounds in late-Franco Spain and elsewhere. They’re not laughing now. The shift to identity in politics could give the morality police a new lease of life, argues philosopher José Luis Pardo.

It was in February 1975 that an officer of the municipal police in Cáceres, Piris by name, noticed that on show in the window of a bookshop in that Spanish city one could see, amid several other prints of works by the great Aragonese painter Goya, a copy of the painting popularly known as his Maja Desnuda, the ‘Nude Maja’. He did not hesitate for a moment; convinced that this was an assault upon morality and good behaviour, he entered the establishment to order its proprietor to withdraw the offensive item from public view, above all in order to prevent it exciting the libido of adolescent boys from a nearby school. 

At the time the news of his intervention aroused the sarcasm of the intellectual opposition (the only kind that then officially existed), who reacted almost joyfully, or at the least with amusement, because they saw in this bizarre incident an opportunity to show the world the ridiculousness of the last gasps of the censorship apparatus of the Franco dictatorship, which had only a few months left in which to sour the lives of Spaniards and which was then, like all the other elements of the regime, in a state of decay. The rest of Spain, or at least that part of it that had some awareness of the country’s situation, must have felt, when they heard of it, the same sensations that we feel now from the distance of today: a sense of pity and shame at one more unequivocal sign of the lack of culture and backwardness that, as a prevailing element in that society, had become a cause for pride for its ruling authorities (a full meeting of the city council of Cáceres asked the mayor to congratulate Piris for his meritorious action). A lamentable episode from a period that has fortunately been historically overcome, one might say.


However, a few months ago thousands of signatures were gathered online for a petition to demand that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York withdraw from view a painting by Balthus, 
Thérèse Dreaming, because it was considered that this picture offers a complacently romantic image of voyeurism and the commodification of minors, one that is morally dangerous for the masses who might see it. The connotations are certainly different: in the case of the Maja Desnuda the censors came from the sinister camp of fascism (whose identification with evil cannot be doubted), while in the other the demand was based on the defence of victims of sexual abuse (which is, beyond all doubt, a good cause). Nevertheless, is it not legitimate to see a macabre similarity between both incidents, in the extent to which they appear to represent attempts to restrict civil liberties and impose an obligatory ideology (with all that this entails in terms of an attack upon the foundations of liberal societies)? Any response to this question has two dimensions, which are intimately interconnected: one refers to moral progress, and the other to aesthetic progress (can something be considered progress which 40 years ago was considered backwardness?). Let us try to go a little deeper into both... read more:
https://www.eurozine.com/senseless-rage-resentment/


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