Wise words on the Yale "art" nonsense:
- The invocation of “art” doesn’t change that one whit. Indeed, as a society, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something “art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism—as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point.
I've touched on this idea once or twice before.
Government censorship is typically wrong. However, our society-or at least certain segments of it-has a tendency to think that calling bad behavior "art" or saying stupid things in the guise of "art" protects that bad behavior/stupidity under the First Amendment from any sort of criticism. That isn't the case.
The First Amendment gives people the right to say and, in some instances, do stupid things. But it also gives the rest of us the right to call them on that stupidity.
