JOCELYN KENNEDY: Hello.
I'm so excited to
see all of you here.
So what we'd like
to do to maximize
the time that we have
available to us is sort of,
keep getting your lunch.
We're going to start the talk so
that we don't run out of time.
There is a class here at 1:15.
So we will have a
hard stop at 1:00.
And I know a lot of you
need to get to class.
If you have your
stuff on a chair,
and nobody's actually
sitting on it,
please put your hand up so
somebody can find a seat.
I think we're going
to run out of seats.
My name's Jocelyn.
I'm the director of the library.
I'm really excited to see you
all here for Banned Books Week.
This is a week where we
really try to explore issues
around censorship.
And the role that a
library has in Banned Books
Week and censorship
really revolves around
the fact that we stand
sort of at the center
of the distribution
of information
and the creation of
knowledge, right?
And so libraries have a very
personal and vested interest
in ensuring that
people have access
to all kinds of
information, not just
certain kinds of information.
We'll talk more about that
tomorrow and on Thursday
as we move through our
Banned Books Week events.
I want to turn it over
to Josh Smith, who
was fundamental in bringing our
speakers onto campus this week.
And he'll introduce
our first speaker.
JOSH SMITH: Thank you,
and thanks very much
to the library.
This very much has its
origin in the library
and is sustained by the library.
This talk is also, before I get
going, cosponsored by the ACLU
at HLS, the Harvard Law
Rule of Law Society, the Law
and Philosophy Society,
and the Federalist Society.
So for many of us, art
is not instrumental.
It's not means to
something else.
It is an endpoint in itself.
And this is, I think in
part, because its beauty,
its ambiguity, its
vagueness at times,
its contradictions,
its paradoxes
say things that can't
be said any other way.
And they bring us
places out of the often
vulgar and crude
drudgery of daily life.
So I'm very excited to be
presenting Svetlana Mintcheva,
who is the Director of
Programs for the National
Coalition Against Censorship.
She is a literary scholar and
a public commentator as well.
And she is going to help
us confront the threat
that moral propagandists
of all ideological stripes
pose to the arts.
Banned Books Week is also a
more national event as well.
It is run in part by the
organization that Svetlana
is from, the National
Coalition Against Censorship,
as well as other free speech
organizations like Comic Book
Legal Defense Fund, the
American Booksellers
for Free Expression, the
American Library Association.
So I invite you to listen
critically to Svetlana.
I invite you to ask her
questions afterward.
And without further
ado, Svetlana.
[APPLAUSE]
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA:
Is this working?
Oh yes.
So thank you, Jocelyn,
and thank you, Josh,
so much for having me here.
And I really want to have
a conversation with you.
But I have to also do my talk.
So I will try to
make this concise
because I think
there's so many things
that we want to
say on this topic.
So a little bit of history--
I've been with the National
Coalition Against Censorship
for a very long time, since
the beginning of the century.
And I've seen a lot of changes.
And NCAC itself has
been around since 1973.
And 1973 was the year
of Miller v. California,
when obscenity law
was constrained,
and it included
community standards.
And obscenity law is going
to play a little role
in this, especially the
"patently offensive"
clause of it.
So I'm mentioning it.
But the change I've
been witnessing
has brought us to
this point where
we have something new going on.
And I have to say that
NCAC does not litigate.
We do mostly policy.
We educate.
We talk to public officials.
We also talk to
private institutions
trying to have an open
environment for free speech.
And litigation, in that case--
it's long.
It's costly.
It doesn't restore the work
when it should be restored.
So policy work-- and I assume
you're all law-related.
But policy work is
really, really important,
especially today, when we have
culture very much happening
within private institutions.
Publishers, art museums--
they're all mostly private.
So what's unique about today?
We have what's referred
to by some people
as a crisis of free speech.
And the crisis of free
speech, of course,
is not about the lack of speech.
In a way, we have
more speech than ever.
We're drowning in speech online.
But what is going on is a kind
of fundamental questioning
of the commitment to the
principle of free speech,
to protecting all
kinds of speech,
and to keeping
cultural platforms
open to a variety of positions,
even positions you don't like.
And that questioning is coming
from a constituency that
has traditionally been
the constituency most
in favor of free speech,
the liberal left.
So this is what I'm going
to talk about today.
But I want to first
put it in perspective.
I'm talking a new development.
There are also
older issues which
have to do with government
pressures, private pressures
on speech, censorship
as we understand it,
as a confrontation between
the state and the individual.
And that is going on.
My organization is
dealing with cancellations
of Drag Queen Story Hour in
libraries across the country.
This is an event
where drag queens read
tales, stories, to young kids.
And people bring their
kids voluntarily.
However, we've had
threats of violence
against libraries calling for
a cancellation of Drag Queen
Story Hour.
We have challenges to books
in schools on a weekly basis.
I can talk about it endlessly.
We have challenges to political
art criticizing the president.
We have one of the
latest development
is government pressure
on Middle East programs
to take a particular
ideological viewpoint.
We have delegitimizing
the press, surveillance,
refusing First Amendment
rights to prisoners.
And then, of course, we have
the online social media cartels
controlling information.
So I fully admit this
is the general problem,
the big environment.
But within the world of culture
and academia, where we live,
the left, who are
my friends, are
proposing a vote of no
confidence for free speech.
And that is, to me, a
problem because these
are our supporters, and
these are my friends.
Hannah Black, an
artist who became
well-known around
a controversy I'll
address later at
the Whitney, who
is a black-identified British
artist, she said in an article
recently in Frieze
magazine, "When
we talk about free
speech, it already
feels like we're ceding
ground to the right."
There is this total
position of free speech
is contaminated as a principle.
And the argument goes, the
marketplace of ideas is rigged.
Until we fix the system
and have equality
for all, and in all aspects,
and until rights fully extend
to everybody, the right
to free speech profits
the socially privileged
unfairly and further oppresses
the victims.
And then it does damage to
the vulnerable by perpetuating
systemic injustice.
And worse, free speech
could lead to violence
and is connected
closely to violence.
Of course, we have 8chan, and we
have the El Paso Manifesto that
reinforces that connection.
And it doesn't help the
cause that neo-Nazis
are marching under the
banner of free speech.
So we have a problem.
And a very concise way that
the position is summarized
is in a recent article by
Nesrine Malik in The Guardian,
who says, "The purpose of
free speech crisis myth
is to guilt people
into giving up
the right to respond to
attacks and to destigmatize
racism and prejudice.
It aims to blackmail good people
into ceding space to bad ideas
even though they have a
legitimate right to refuse.
And it is a myth that
demands, in turn,
its own silencing
and undermining
of individual freedom."
So what's in here?
The first point is
the right to response.
And I think the
right of response
is something we need to defend--
the right to protest, the right
to call for cancellations,
the right to protest
certain art and protest
the Sacklers' funding.
The right to
protest is something
that free speech protects.
And we need visibility
to those issues.
And Professor
Kennedy was asking,
well, just before the
speech, isn't cancel culture
a type of speech?
Yes it is.
Calls for cancellations are.
To me, the problem becomes
when you have the response
of the institution.
So you can protest or want
to question free speech.
How institutions
respond and what
happens to the culture at
large is what concerns me here.
And there, we lead
to the question
of space and deplatforming.
So what should cultural
institutions give space to?
Most calls for regulation do
not demand state regulation,
because the state is not
a friend to the left.
They target cultural
institutions
to deplatform speakers, remove
art, and cancel performances.
And the argument is that certain
voices should not be heard.
Steve Bannon should not appear
at the New Yorker Festival
because it legitimizes them.
And it also spreads
dangerous ideas.
But this is not only
about Steve Bannon.
It's not only about neo-Nazis.
It comes-- and this is what
I'm going to talk about--
it comes down to artists who
are potential allies and who
have the best of intentions.
But somehow, they
have overstepped
by using others' histories.
And this is what
I'll talk about.
And I think it's relevant
to the bigger question
because it brings the issue
of where do we draw the line?
And today, accusations
of offense, of trauma,
of insensitivity, of
cultural appropriation,
of racism within
the art world are--
as you probably have sensed
that on campus, too--
are a minefield.
And these are labels
you cannot shake off.
Somebody calls you a racist.
It's just very hard to
argue, no, I'm not a racist.
And one of the first cases--
I don't know.
How many of you know
about the Dana Schutz
controversy at the Whitney?
Oof.
So last Whitney Biennial,
which was very much a response
to police violence
against black men,
and this was very much in
the news at that point.
This was 2017.
Dana Schutz, who happens
to be a white artist,
did this painting,
which just does not
reproduce well in any
context because it's
sort of three-dimensional.
It has a big gash in the middle.
So this painting is based
on the image of Emmett
Till in his casket, his
mutilated body, the image that
really made a major difference
in the civil rights movement,
and the image that his mother,
Mamie Till, really wanted seen.
She wanted seen, and it was
mobilizing because it's really
an atrocity.
So Dana Schutz did this
painting with the intent
to bring, again, the
attention to violence
over the bodies of black men.
And protests
started immediately.
This young man is Parker
Bright, and he is an artist.
And he stood in a
performance at the first day
in front of the painting,
protesting its appearance.
And then Hannah
Black, who I mentioned
before, she publicized a
letter and a petition that
was very broadly circulated
saying a lot of things.
Among them, "The subject
matter is not Schutz's."
And that's key here.
"White free speech and
white creative freedom
have been founded on
the constraint of others
and are not natural rights.
The painting must go."
And months of debate ensued.
The Whitney did not
remove the work.
They hosted-- actually, they
invited Claudia Rankine,
who is the founder
of the Institute
for the Racial Imaginary,
to hold a session.
It was full.
It was a beautiful
Sunday evening,
and the whole art
world was there
in the atrium of the Whitney.
And people are still
split on that issue,
whether the Whitney
should have shown this,
whether they were exhibiting
their racism by showing it,
and whether it should
have been removed.
The calls for destruction
were more muted.
But they were there as well.
So this stayed.
But then very soon after,
just a month after,
there was a controversy
over this installation,
which was in Minneapolis.
You'll see it as it was
shown in Europe, in Kassel,
in documenta.
And then it was bought
by the Walker Art Center
and exhibited in the park
that's in front of the Walker,
a big public park
in Minneapolis.
So this is a composite
of seven gallows that
are used in capital
punishment, that
have been used from the 19th
through the 20th century
in capital punishment in the US.
And it went well in Germany.
It's about capital punishment.
And everybody's
still wondering why
this country, in
the 21st century,
we have capital punishment.
So it's a critique
of capital punishment
Sam Durant, the artist,
has been very much involved
in indigenous rights.
He did that as a critique
of the capital punishment.
However, one of the gallows
was a gallow used in 1862
to execute 32 Dakota in
Mankato, Minnesota, very close
to Minneapolis.
So protests immediately started
even before it was open.
The park was still
in construction.
And there were protests and
calls to remove the work.
And that was happening
over Memorial Day, 2017.
It was just like,
the controversy
sprang up on Friday.
By Monday, the museum decided
to dismantle the work,
to just destroy it and
to, with the collaboration
of the artist, to cede all
rights, intellectual property
rights of the work,
to the Dakota elders.
And that did not
take into account
that there were
even disagreements
within the Dakota community.
It was a very
quickly-made decision.
The artwork was dismantled and
eventually given to the Dakota
to do what they wanted with
it, whether burn it, bury it.
And I think they spent a
bunch of time figuring out
what to do with it
and then sort of
had a ritual of destroying
it, of burying it.
So both controversies were
more about the identity
of the artists than the
content of the work.
This is not your story, the
same as with Dana Schutz.
It's not her story.
Because at the
same time, together
with the Dana Schutz
at the Whitney,
you had this painting of the
murder of Philando Castile,
and it was a painting by
Henry Taylor, a black artist.
And that was very well received.
Sort of a similar topic, but
the identity of the artist
is different.
So the question is, does a white
artist have the moral right?
We're not talking about
First Amendment rights here.
We're talking
about moral rights.
But institutions are
beholden to moral rights.
So does a white artist
have the moral right
to make artwork about a
story of core importance
to a racial or ethnic group
to which they do not belong,
or to make use of images,
ideas, or characters
belonging to the traditions of
culturally marginalized groups?
And the answer
coming from people
who want to remove or
destroy the work are no.
That only the groups
that have been
the victim of a
particular moment
can claim ownership
of that moment.
And others who also
share a skin color
with the perpetrators of
violence have no right to it
and only cause more pain
by appropriating it.
This is saying, you
exploited our bodies.
Now you're exploiting
our history.
You should not be doing that.
And then, of course,
white artists
belong to a group
that is structurally
still privileging itself.
Therefore, racially charged
work by these artists
is of necessity suspect.
And at worst, it perpetuates
racism and oppression.
So I disagree with some of
the logic of those arguments.
But my role here--
and I think they're
counterproductive to the cause
of social justice--
my role here is not so much to
argue with them, first of all,
because I have to give
them more justice to able
to argue with them, and I don't
want to build up straw figures
and battle them.
But what I'm doing is outlining
a specific environment
because these are not just
theoretical positions.
These are not just arguments.
They have real effects.
And those effects are both on
artists and art institutions.
You have long-term penalties.
You have the
blacklisting of artists.
Dana Schutz, for instance--
she had a retrospective
at the Institute
of Contemporary Art
here in Boston just
after that controversy.
And there were calls to cancel
this entire retrospective
because of this one work,
even though the work was not
in the retrospective, though
fortunately, it went on.
Then there are other
artists that are blacklisted
and that were actually
excluded from shows,
like Vanessa Place, who's a
conceptual poet who did a very
controversial work on Twitter.
And she's also done
very different,
non-controversial work.
But people invite
her to be in a show
and then say, oh,
we got protests.
And she was even going to be
part of the Berkeley Poetry
Festival on the 50th anniversary
of the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement.
The whole thing was canceled
because of her presence.
But most of concern to me are
pressures upon institutions.
And the question
that a museum is
showing something
and validating it,
and they should
not be showing it,
they should not be
having this conversation,
is the problem to me.
And part of the Sam Durant
protests were "No conversation.
Take it down," because
very frequently, we
have a controversy, and we
say, well, let's talk about it.
This is an interesting
conversation to have.
More and more, the call
is, just take it away.
This hurts us.
We do not want to talk about it.
And the broader
context is that defense
is not just about
artwork and is not
just about identity of artists.
It's happening in publishing.
This is a work that
is coming out now.
But this is a young writer
who came from China.
And this is a fantasy
tale about an empire that
enslaves magical minorities.
But critics were
saying that her trope,
using the trope of slavery,
she is erasing a specifically
African American experience.
And she was roundly attacked
on young adult Twitter, which
is kind of like, if you
want to see people attacking
each other, people that
are on the same position,
on the same page politically,
but they're holding each other
to a very high standard.
So young adult Twitter
kind of polices
what people are writing.
So she had to pull her book
because she was attacked
for appropriating
that experience,
even though she was
talking about the epidemic
of indentured labor in Asia,
in countries across Asia,
and also trafficking,
which is a real problem.
Other artists like her,
mostly minority authors,
have also pulled [INAUDIBLE].
And these are the
most vulnerable.
But so there is the
effect on authors.
There's also the effect on
the publishing infrastructure.
The Kirkus Review, for
instance, pulled a review
of American Heart,
which is a novel
about the so-called
white savior narrative.
It's a novel about
a girl who helps
another girl from a
Muslim refugee camp
to escape to Canada.
But The Kirkus
Review was attacked.
They pulled the review.
And they reissued it, changed
it a little bit, and took away--
it was a star review, so
it was a recommended book.
They took away the star.
And that was as a result of
public pressure over the trope
of the white savior narrative.
And finally,
publishers themselves
have pulled books, as
happened with this book, which
is about the story of George
Washington's slave Hercules.
It's a story of this,
like, he's the ur chef.
He was like a celebrity chef.
He was a great chef.
And it was-- happily.
People are happily portrayed.
And it portrays slavery
as a kind of happy place.
It wasn't about slavery.
It's about a cook.
And it's also about a
children's audience.
So Scholastic initially
defended the book,
but then pulled it out
of stores and pulped it.
They didn't add
additional material.
They just destroyed the book.
And one of my
friends was saying,
I really got angry when
I got to a bookstore,
and I wanted to get
a copy of the book.
And they said, no,
we have the copies,
but we're banned
from selling them.
We're pulping this book.
And of course the issue here was
that the content, the slavery,
was not portrayed
in its brutality.
But of course, if you portray
slavery in its brutality--
sorry about the pixelation--
it's also a problem.
And this was something you
might have heard about.
This is an ongoing
controversy in San Francisco
at a school called George
Washington High School.
And they have 16 murals painted
by this Russian artist, who
was a communist, who was here
in the early 20th century
and saying, George
Washington is always a hero.
I have to portray the bad
parts of his legacy, i.e.,
he had slaves.
And he was also--
and this is the
Westward Expansion.
And the Westward Expansion is
on the backs of dead Indians.
And that mural was
controversial in the '60s.
And an African American
artist from San Francisco
was commissioned and did a
work about diversity and people
of color and how they
did in this country.
But that was not enough.
It was very controversial now.
And there were calls
for its destruction.
And early on, I
think, in this summer,
the Board of Ed
decided to destroy it.
And the arguments
here are interesting.
It is about offense
because on the one hand,
people are saying, well,
this is educational.
This educates about the
dark side of the legacy
of one of our national heroes.
But one of the
Board of Education
former members is
saying, "I don't
understand how
people who are not
affected by the depiction of
a mural could come in here
and tell us how Native
Americans and Indians should
see the mural and
what's on there when
Native Americans came here
and told us it was offensive."
And this is kind of the master
of this word of "offense."
You can't argue with it.
It's emotional.
That was the same with the Sam
Durant work with the scaffold.
I had a BBC
conversation with one
of the Native
American activists.
And she started
talking about her pain.
And it's very hard to
make a logical argument
against somebody who is
saying they saw this work,
and they started crying.
But should you make
decisions about destruction
made on the basis
of those arguments?
So the school went
through the whole process.
They convened a reflection
and action group last year.
And the reflection
and action group
decided the mural "glorifies
slavery, genocide,
colonization, manifest destiny,
white supremacy, oppression,"
and so on.
It "glorifies oppression
instead of eliminating it."
It "perpetuates bias
through stereotypes
rather than ending bias."
"It's not a counter-narrative
if it traumatizes students
and community members."
So it was decided to
destroy the mural.
And this summer, there
was huge national protest.
And now they kind of
pulled back a little.
And they say they're going to
cover it with permanent panels.
They're not going to
entirely destroy it.
And so we all agree we should
remember history, and in a way
that recognizes
violence and oppression.
But how is this ever to be done?
Because if it's too
dark, it's painful.
It's offensive.
It's traumatic.
You're reminded
of that every day.
If it's too sunny and
bright, it's misleading.
That's also offensive.
So how do we talk?
How do we reckon with history?
And we've had challenges to Huck
Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird,
to Confederate flags that are
illustrating history lessons.
This is going on.
And how do we talk
about those issues?
And perhaps we have
reached this crisis moment
because the US has never
been able to really address
the issue of historical
guilt. And I'm European, so
much more used to the
historical guilt part.
Or perhaps ironically,
because it has never before
been so truly multicultural.
We actually have more
voices up there speaking,
even though we're
noticing who is not.
But there's never
been a time in history
that a culture has
been so diverse.
We want more diversity.
But show me when we
have been better.
So it's not easy to address
those painful issues
in a nuanced way, especially
at a time of heightened
political tension.
And we can make arguments
about intermixed history,
about the complexities
of speech and power.
But the pressure to take a
strong and unambiguous position
are very, very high.
And the bottom line is,
do cultural institutions
have the stomach
and the PR power
to keep risking a
spot in the crossfire?
And my organization
has been-- actually,
to plug us a little bit--
working on those issues.
We interviewed curators and
did a little booklet which
Josh is going to show,
"Smart Tactics," which is
like, how do you handle this?
How do you show difficult
content at the same time
as not wading into an
unproductive-- can you show it?
Oh, there it is, yeah--
without wading into
unproductive controversy.
We cannot avoid controversy.
We just have to have
a good conversation
and agree to disagree.
And we're sort of
not used to that.
We want to resolve issues.
But maybe we should stay in this
position where we don't know,
and we talk, and we bring
different positions together.
But now people just
can't talk to each other.
So to me, as a
free speech person,
that's what I want to have.
I want to have more speech.
And if people are angry, let
them express their anger.
So again, the question--
does the environment we
have pose a special threat
to the free circulation
of ideas and culture?
And I don't want to have
a false narrative here
about free speech in
the immediate future,
though there's plenty
to feed that dystopia,
and cancel culture is
just a minor part of it.
You know what's
happening online?
What's happening with
governments here and globally?
It's much more the issue.
But what I want to point
out, especially to you,
because you're so young,
is that we should not
make the mistake of
taking free speech
as a solidly established value.
The banner of free
speech actually
has been waving for
a very short time.
And this has been pretty
much in post Second World
War of liberal democracies.
And that is the recent
memory of Americans now,
and probably not only
you, but your parents.
Before the mid 20th
century, first of all,
the First Amendment
didn't offer much support
to arts and culture.
Film, visual art, books
still had obscenity laws.
In the 19th century when
Anthony Comstock's New York
Society for the
Suppression of Vice
took the task to uphold public
morals, he did it very proudly.
And look at the logo.
The logo is, yes, we're
going to put people in jail,
and we're going to burn books.
And it was just
taken for granted
that we should protect
the vulnerable.
And the vulnerable
were children, women,
and the lower classes from
the corrupting influence
of low subject matter.
So you had a very robust
censorship regime,
both public and private.
And publishers, librarians were
very much involved in that,
maintaining a kind of
homogeneous culture
and a censorship regime and
keeping those corrupting
influences from
the lower classes.
So but what happened
is that free speech
became our power as opposed
to our political enemies.
And you had the
Nazi book burnings.
No more of this possible
because it was the Nazis now,
not the good people in Boston.
And you had degenerate
art shows of the Nazis.
The Soviet Union tortured and
killed artists, theater makers,
and so on.
So free speech became
a Cold War weapon.
And in the '50s, the
threat to the moral order
became, very interestingly,
in [INAUDIBLE] v. the United
States, the Supreme
Court kind of
gave its blessing to
offense as a reason
to censor because the
definition of obscenity
shifted from what is
corrupting the vulnerable,
a very old definition
dating to Britain,
to what is patently offensive.
So when we look at offense,
it's not invented yesterday.
It has a long history.
And then it kind of went
from legal discourse
into popular discourse.
And it blossomed with the
cultural wars in the '90s.
The Cold War ended in 1989,
and the cultural suppression
was no longer seen
as symbolic of the--
censorship was no
longer symbolic
of the ugly power of the
Soviets, our Cold War enemy.
So the culture wars that
you probably don't remember
were wars that
started in Congress
over defunding the arts,
saying what artists are doing,
what the National
Endowment for the Arts
is funding is art that is
offensive to taxpayers, i.e.,
art dealing with sexuality,
art dealing with women.
And mostly, the art was
around AIDS, the gay movement,
the feminist movement.
So they wanted to pull
government funding
from that art because
it offended taxpayers.
And one of the solutions
people said, well,
why do we need government
funding of the arts?
If we don't have
government funding,
then the government is not going
to start censoring the arts.
So let's just have private
funding of the arts.
And of course, the
private ownership
of cultural institutions,
then, exposed
them to way more pressure,
both from funders
and from communities.
And there's no First Amendment
to bar a private institution
from censorship.
So today, we have pressures
coming from all sides--
funding pressures from public
and private money and community
pressures.
So to me, there are
three distinct things
that are my fears today.
And one is self-censorship.
And it's quite real.
It is when you're
fearing that somebody
will take your
funding, or when you're
fearing that your whole
show will be occluded
because of a
controversial artwork,
you're just going to
start self-censoring.
And that's happening also
in the publishing industry.
A prominent children's book
agent was quoted as saying,
without revealing
her name, "None of us
are willing to comment
publicly for fear
of being targeted and
labeled racists or bigoted."
So you can't even have
a discussion sometimes.
And that is particularly
dangerous in the arts
because experimentation
is really important.
Mistakes are important.
Nuance is important.
So if you cannot
make a mistake--
if you're worried about
saying something that will end
you as a blacklisted artist--
how can you do your work?
And Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American
artist, saying, you know,
"If I want art that could
handle more than pretty pictures
and simplistic
evocations of identity,
I understand that
I'll have to support
not only difficult subjects,
but clumsiness and mistakes."
And that is really
kind of the other fear,
is that people are worried
about saying the wrong thing,
so they cannot experiment.
And finally, of course, there
are calls for regulation,
both formal and informal.
And I want to end with--
I have a lot more to
say, but I think we're
almost out of discussion time.
In 1994, bell hooks--
and it's 1994.
This is, like, how
many years back?
But it reads so contemporary.
She criticized as disturbing
and dangerous the censorship
deployed as an acceptable
means of social control
in the black liberation
struggle and feminist movement.
And she was involved in both.
She's saying that the regulator
silencing of dissenting voices
and opinions ultimately
undermines free speech
and strengthens the
forces of censorship
within and outside
radical movements.
Wait.
I have to skip ahead.
So back to the question--
will free speech survive?
Probably, but it will be
transformed, as it always is.
And it's already transforming
with new technologies
of communication.
And for cultural
institutions, this
is a particularly
challenging time.
What is their
role, for instance,
in the national reckoning
with historical guilt?
What is their role in
the process of building
a multicultural democracy?
To me, the role of
those institutions
is not to take up straight
political advocacy,
but to stay with the questions,
not fear difficult questions,
and avoid quick resolutions.
And as [? Kathy ?]
[? Holbright, ?] who was
a curator in many
different museums,
wonderfully phrased it, we need
safe spaces for unsafe ideas.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'd love to hear from you.
I don't know [INAUDIBLE]
JOSH SMITH: Yeah, if
you have a question,
just please raise your hand, and
I will come along with the mic.
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA: Or comment.
SPEAKER 1: Many
thanks for the talk.
So you separated
institutional response
from response of private
individuals in your talk.
So I'm just wondering
whether there's
more to cancel culture than
just institutional response.
Because I feel like kind of a
huge part of cancel culture,
and a lot of what stops
us from speaking out,
it's not just kind of a
prospect of losing a job
or get a book pulled
from publishing,
et cetera, et cetera.
But sometimes kind of
being socially ostracized
or being subject to shame is
what kind of motivates people
to self-censor.
And I understand it's
more difficult to police,
even when the response
of private institutions,
because, of course, we
have freedom to associate
with people that we
want to associate with.
So I was wondering,
what main challenges
do you see, [INAUDIBLE]
social interactions
as like a method of censorship?
Or what complexities do you
see in how we as a society
can move forward while
not infringing our privacy
and our freedom to
choose who to like,
choose who to be friends with?
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA:
You're talking
about the impact on
the individual, not so
much the institutional.
And I've so many
individuals that-- curators
at museums and so on--
that say they disengage
from social media because
once they say something that
goes against the
grain-- and again, I
think a lot of this
conversation is happening
on one political side.
So these are your friends.
And you disagree
with your friends,
and you become ostracized.
You become also
professionally ostracized.
So how do we deal with that?
And that's a very hard question.
I think it's partly a result of
how we interact on social media
because it's, like, it's short.
It's open to misinterpretation.
My call would be to have
more in-person gatherings.
And I think museums,
libraries, are great spaces
for that, kind of pulling--
because people interact very
differently when they're-- even
if I know you, and we're online,
and I disagree with you online,
I'll just slam you
and unfriend you.
If we're in a room together,
I'll probably argue with you
and try to understand
what you're saying.
Maybe the etiquette of online
communication and how we engage
will evolve.
I hope it will evolve.
But in the meantime,
the online public forum
is no replacement for
in-person human contact.
And again, I think institutions
are really important.
From schools, to colleges, to
libraries and art institution,
you need that kind of more
complicated in-person contact.
[? SPEAKER 2: ?] Thank you.
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA: Sam Durant,
when the scaffold controversy
was going on, he said he left--
he's the artist-- he
left all social media.
He just did not want-- he
just disengaged entirely.
And I mean, it's just
such a big question,
because we also have artists
coming-- for instance,
we've been working.
There's this woman.
There are many artists
from different cultures
that present their work online,
and this is their native place
for presenting work.
And then they get harassed.
So we had a Yemeni
artist who was kind of
attacked from her own
community, from Yemeni men
that were just--
she just had-- she not only
left online communications.
She left the country.
And she could not use Instagram
to spread her work because
of this harassment.
So we're working, and [? Penn ?]
has been working on that.
How do you respond
as an artist to--
or as an individual--
to online harassment.
We're developing these
kind of new skills
to negotiate a new environment.
There's no magic bullet.
It has to be a process.
And we have to be
all working on it.
SPEAKER 2: So with respect
to the cultural institutions
you mentioned, I sort
of see in this problem
a big principal-agent
problem whereby
the directors of these
institutions, even though they
see the long-term interest
in the institutions
as supporting free expression,
the personal vitriol
that they're going to
face for supporting that
is much more personal.
There's no great
incentive for them
to act, maybe, in the
long-term best interests
of the institution in order
to shield their own situation.
And I was wondering if
you had any thoughts
as to what changes or
institutional changes
that could be put in
place in order to realign
the incentives a little better.
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA:
Well, first of all,
for museums, free speech is
probably not the only thing
in their mission.
They also have to be responsive
to their communities.
More and more, they have to be
working toward social justice.
And there is the safety issue.
There was the case--
I don't know whether you
know about the Guggenheim.
The Guggenheim had a
show of art from China,
historical art from China.
They had threats of violence.
So you have the safety
of the institution
to consider as well,
which is, for me, kind
of the hardest problem.
There were a million signatures
under a Change.org petition
to remove several videos
documenting performances
with animals from
the exhibition.
And then they received
threats of violence.
So they removed them.
So we have been working on that,
protocols of how they respond.
And we did this document with
other art service organizations
called "Best Practices
for Museums."
So it is how you don't
respond to controversy
by removing the work.
But you give yourself time,
and you have a conversation,
and how you handle media.
It's a multi-tiered approach.
But yes.
We are working with
institutions to help
them navigate this
new environment,
because it is a new environment.
And we're also
working with a kind
of mutual support
between institutions
so that they can stand
behind each other.
An institution does not want
to be left alone in the field.
A museum director does not
want to be the lone supporter
of free speech.
But again, free speech is not
their one and only mission
goal.
So there are a lot of
these personal decisions.
And also, do you endanger the
institution and its funding?
Gentlemen, and then-- the
green shirt, black shirt.
SPEAKER 3: Thanks.
So a few years ago, my alma
mater, Brown University,
hosted the former head of the
New York Police Department.
And while he was speaking,
a lot of students
jumped up and started yelling
and waving signs to the point
that he couldn't
be heard anymore,
and he just had to leave.
I was wondering what people,
either within the community,
or what an organization
such as yours,
could do to prevent
situations like that
from happening in the future?
Because that situation at
Brown wasn't the only time
that's happened.
That's happened at
other universities
around the country when it
comes to controversial speakers.
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA:
Well, I think,
actually, the universities have
started learning from that.
And that was one
of the first ones.
And then there were the
Charles Murray and so on.
But I think universities
have been better.
We haven't heard so much about
these kind of disruptions
lately.
And it's a very clear line.
So the university needs to
provide space for protests.
People have to be able to
have their voices heard
if you really paid
somebody who's
coming as a speaker on campus.
On the other hand,
you cannot stop
that speaker from speaking.
So the university
needs to provide
enough security to protect
the ability of the speaker
to speak.
At the same time,
have a real space
for those protesting the
speech to be speaking as well.
And kind of my observation
after the Milo Yiannopoulos
and Richard Spencer and all
these, and the Charles Murray
controversy in different
places, universities
have now started developing
more considered processes
where people can speak.
People can speak on both sides
without silencing each other.
There are always people
that would want to disrupt.
My [INAUDIBLE]
friends [INAUDIBLE]
ANTIFA want to disrupt.
I think that's wrong.
And they'll probably
try to disrupt.
But that's why you
have campus security.
And that's the other issue,
because campus security's
starting to become expensive.
Berkeley had to spend,
like, a million or more
over a potential event that
featured Milo Yiannopoulos.
The event kind of sputtered,
but they still spent the money.
So can the university
afford that?
That should not be
a question today.
It should be law enforcement.
Federal local law
enforcement should be there
to assure safety and security.
But that becomes a problem,
and there is a Berkeley task
force that issued a rather
disturbing statement which
sort of said, well,
if it's too expensive,
maybe we can't do it.
And then with Drag
Queen Story Hour,
we had a recent city
ordinance saying, well,
if you're a group that could
be very controversial, you have
to provide your own
security, which is, you're
putting a price on free speech.
You cannot do that.
But I think the issue
of security and violence
is going to become more
and more of a problem.
Threats of violence
are occurring,
and what do you do, especially
if you're a small institution?
What if you're a
small art space?
What if you're not Berkeley?
SPEAKER 4: I was wondering
if you could say more
about what you think the
role of cultural institutions
in protecting free speech is,
because it seems like they're
always going to be balancing
free speech against something
else.
They're curating.
It's not an open forum where
anyone can come and put
their art on the walls.
And so it seems
reasonable that some
of the other things
that they might consider
are social justice issues, or
representation, or whatever.
And so then even if in some
of these circumstances,
some people might say, they
made their own decision,
I can't fully understand
why that comes down
to them violating the principle
of free speech as opposed
to making a
[INAUDIBLE] decision.
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA:
That's a great question.
I think we face this.
What is responsible
editorial control,
and what is self-censorship?
I think yes, they have
freedom to curate.
And they can curate.
When they're curating,
they do take into account
what their other mission
is and what they want
to do to the culture at large.
To me, the censorship
question rises when they're
doing something under pressure.
But the thing is that they're
doing things under pressure
not only after a show is open.
And in [INAUDIBLE],, that's why
I was interviewing curators.
I was asking them, so in
the preparation of the show,
what kind of pressures
are you facing,
and how are you
responding to them?
So you, as a curator,
can curate a show in line
with the mission of
the museum to do only
on women or only
other unrepresented,
underrepresented
groups, for sure.
But then you get external
pressure to modify that
or to remove a work of art
because it could be read as--
I don't know.
It's like a white
woman doing something.
It could be read
as exploitative.
That's when-- and
it's a subtle line
between editing and censorship.
The issues that come into the
public eye with the Walker,
for instance, yes,
you had something
that had gone through the whole
process, was being put up,
was constructed,
and then was removed
with pretty much no discussion.
So that's a pretty clear issue.
It becomes blurrier when
it is an internal process.
But we've had
cancellations of plays,
say, around Israel from the
pressure from donors, plays
that are already scheduled.
They're going to come out,
and then they're canceled.
So when it's not a
curatorial decision,
but comes under
external pressure,
I'd say that that's when the
fears of censorship arise.
JOSH SMITH: I should have said
this at the very beginning.
You're welcome to speak
with Svetlana afterwards.
We have multiple events.
We have Walt Whitman.
Banned in Boston
has an exhibition
in the library entrance.
Tomorrow, we have Book
Burnings Internationally,
which includes an exiled
Romanian political writer.
And then we also
have, on Thursday,
Professor Randy Kennedy is
talking about censorship
in the American slavery regime.
So hope to see you
at some of those.
And thanks very
much for coming in.
Feel free to come speak
to Svetlana afterward.
[APPLAUSE]
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA:
Thank you, guys.
