NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 56th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 18 July 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
The quarterly Miaaw Review will be out soon. The first edition included an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and François Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It’s free, you won’t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your email here.
On episodes 54 and 55, we talked about censorship in the MAGA regime with writer Jeff Change and muralists Amber Hansen and Reyna Hernandez. In this episode, François and I have a conversation about what we’ve learned and the ways censorship has affected our own work.
François reflected on changes since he first worked as a community artist, saying that the two previous episodes had “made me aware of how much the internet and to some extent, social media, have changed the nature of what public speech or public acts are. When I started as a community artist at the beginning of the 1980s we would tend to talk about community in three ways. We would talk about community of interest; people had concerns in common. We would talk about a kind of demographic community; you might be working with teenagers or older people. The most obvious was community based on place, on the people who lived in a neighborhood. Everything that you did was a face-to-face discussion, people becoming involved in each other’s ideas and experiences.
“Listening to recent interviewees I became aware of how much more complicated things are for young artists today. Like in the case of the murals in South Dakota, even if you’re still talking about something that is physically rooted in a place the internet will allow people who may live very far—may never have been to that place—to see, to comment, and indeed to then take a view of and influence and potentially become very vocal.
“Murals are very photogenic, so very quickly will go on social media. People will have an idea about what the iconography that they’re using is, and will take a position on that, and will also be not shy in expressing that. It was salutary to hear how some of their projects have actually been halted on the grounds that the iconography is not acceptable to some people, which is very sad. What worries me about it all is this sense of vulnerability.”
I saw a certain irony in that: more people can see the work, and potentially, that endangers it more. But we both agreed that community-based artists like our previous guests are still using those collaborative methods, with the same results I expressed this way: “the sense of collective ownership of common space and time infused many of the projects so that there was an anchor for a project before you’d ever put a scene up on the stage or a stroke of paint up on a wall.” But then people who don’t share that sense can do damage.
“We’re hearing about situations,” I continued, “in which there’s just no place to put your anchor. Jeff Chang talked about his book about hip hop being censored by the Department of Defense and removed from schools and libraries worldwide. Some of the affected students asked the ACLU to step in. We’ll see if the courts are sympathetic to their point of view. But whether that case succeeds or not, who’s the constituency for that book? There’s a general worldwide constituency; lots of people love hip hop music. But Pete Hegseth (the Secretary of Defense) isn’t listening to them.
“Similarly, when Amber and Reyna were telling us about an incident where they had won unanimous approval for a mural design to go on a parking garage in downtown Sioux Falls, the mayor vetoed the design for reasons that they had heard secondhand but they never actually received a firsthand account of, nor were they given the opportunity to talk to the mayor and plead their case.”
That led us to talk about cancel culture, which has seemed to be petering out on the left, while the right has borrowed the concept and deployed it with a vengeance. We touched on the Nazis’ condemnation of “degenerate art” and the promotion by authoritarian regimes of usually banal and dull art with approved subjects and styles—and how that relates to the MAGA regime’s redirection of federal cultural funds to Trump’s “Garden of American Heroes.”
And then to our own earlier experiences. You’ll want to hear François’ account of a book emerging from a project about the closure of mental hospitals he worked on in the UK 35 years ago, how he and his colleagues had to defend former patients’ right to share their own memories in their own words, but also had to omit photographs that were deemed to violate the privacy of those depicted in them.
“I still honestly don’t know whether we made the right choice,” he said. “I think I would still make the same choice for the reasons that I’ve just given, but there were people who who saw it differently and thought, no, we should have been brave and included those images. I thank God all of that was able to happen in direct face-to-face conversations with the people concerned, not online or with people who were not actually part of the project. These are serious and important questions, and what is so disheartening to me is when they become political footballs and the people have been involved in their creation, their work isn’t respected and taken seriously, they simply become a means to have more arguments.”
In the final section, I introduced another kind of censorship. The first example was a long story, but I tried to tell it concisely. In the mid 1970s, I worked in a project that was funded by the California Arts Council, the state arts agency. They hired me to run technical assistance programs, and they gave me a small budget. The idea was to create a statewide infrastructure. California is a humongous state with at that time a few urban centers that were seen as cultural centers. They got most of the money, they got most of the attention, and the assumption was that’s where most of the artists lived. My goal was to go to the rest of the state. So it was a lot of interaction with people in rural communities, small towns and so forth, and developing a network of those people. In the podcast, I describe how the enemies of California’s then-Governor attacked him through the Arts Council, my project became untenable, and I left. After a lot of drama, the Council engaged me and a partner to develop a cultural policy for the state grounded in cultural democracy. The story of how the red-carpet arts institutions tried to blacklist me to stop it may interest you.
The other example had to do with the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal cultural agency. Once again, I was part of a team engaged to assist with a project promoting cultural democracy. But when it came to the NEA’s governing body to approve the project, we were attacked as un-American for advocating cultural democracy!
Moments like these tend to ripple out and affect the times. Censorship doesn’t always have to be imposed from on high. Sometimes it seeps into the body politic by a sort of osmosis: people see someone punished for advocating a controversial idea, and that makes them fearful and silent.
“Looking at these three episodes,” I observed, “we’re being shown different types of censorship. One is where the heavy hand of the state smashes something: the Department of Defense censoring Jeff’s book and 568 others. That’s the classic idea of censorship. Another is the type of bureaucratic process Amber and Reyna were talking to us about where there’s no public brouhaha. Amber and Reyna did their best to inform people, and they mentioned to us that there was a lot of public defense of their project. But because it fell on deaf ears and no power rested with the community, that kind of slightly softer censorship prevailed. What François described, I wouldn’t exactly call censorship. I would call discernment, restraint, consideration, but still it results in something not being shared that was created to be shared. And the fourth thing is censorship of ideas and possibilities such that people stop thinking something is possible anymore, and that infuses the culture.”
This episode was jam-packed. I hope you enjoy it.
“Everything but the Truth,” Lucinda Williams.