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How Art Dies
Each generation of artists has made progress pushing the cultural envelope … until now.
In the mid 1980s, a video named “Twinkie” was produced for the access television station in Bloomington, Indiana. It playfully described the American snack item Twinkie as a phallic symbol. When it was submitted to air, there was a lot of outrage and outright censorship. Twinkie pushed the envelope of a prudish culture, was met with resistance, and later hailed as a courageous work of art. By the time the 1990s rolled along, the video looked pretty tame; it was hard for any new viewer to see what the commotion was all about. That is because Twinkie, and other works of provocative art, did their job.
You see this phenomenon over and over throughout generations. Television executives censored Elvis Presley’s swaying hips. Lenny Bruce was convicted and sentenced to jail in 1964 for “obscenity” in his stand-up routine. In 1972, George Carlin was arrested for performing his “seven dirty words” routine. In the late 1980s, the Corcoran Gallery of Art cancelled Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography exhibit because it included “homoerotic” art. The Lieutenant Governor of Indiana sent a warning to Bloomington Indiana TV producers in the 1990s when they depicted cannabis smoking in public on their show J & B on the Rox. When we look back even a few years at what outraged the public and people in power, we tend to shrug our…
