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/