Artistic freedom has been recognised as an international right that needs to be protected because it is threatened when artists question political ideologies, religious beliefs, and social mores. However, today the meaning of such concepts as “artistic freedom” or “freedom of expression” seems more complex and in need of greater definition. As democracies have, to a large extent, abandoned systems of censorship, new constraints have emerged to silence artists in contemporary cultural life. Censorship, as a term encompassing a wide array of mechanisms identified by Catherine O’Leary (Routledge 2016), constitutes complex processes of cancellation, voiding, erasure, or outlawing, which control the level of visibility and audibility of artistic institutions. Censoring practices influence the circulation of ideas, the condition of public debate, and the possibilities of artistic creativity in areas as diverse as museums, art galleries, universities, and the media in ways which dominate the
production and interpretation of knowledge. As Paquette, Kleinfelder, and Miles claim, the current state of freedoms in the arts and culture has been shaped by earlier “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, in which orthodox values clashed with the ideas of progressivism (‘Introduction’ to In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship, Bloomsbury 2022).

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