IN RE: Controversial exhibits I'm not suggesting that provocative art go away at all. I'm sorry if my post reads that way. I do think that it is kind of silly to get angry at institutions for being provoked when the object of the work of art in dispute is to provoke those institutions. The art world that I am most familiar with is the "jazz" world, for lack of a better term. This world includes all kind of provocative music, from Archie Shepp's angry political records of the late 60's to the post modern conglomerations of music that you might hear at the Knitting Factory. These musics are produced by serious artists working to push the edge conceptually, but somehow, they are not forced to rely on these sanctified concepts of free speech and subsidy that confuse the visual art world and performance art world. Record companies put this stuff out, some people buy it, musicians perform in clubs, poets perform in poetry slams. Why is there not this annoying sanctity and fustiness around these art forms? This is a genuine question, not rhetorical. What is it about contemporary visual arts that seems to pose these vexed questions about the sanctity of freedom of expression and speech? I have an intuition that it is something to do with the conceptual tradition in visual arts, and something that is promoted in art schools. Curators seem to be somehow glommed together with academics and professors who are supposed to be guaranteed freedom of speech and thought. These two concepts, freedom of speech and thought, as I mentioned in my last post, seem optimized for historical research and exposition, as opposed to artistic expression. There is also something about the perverse and inexplicable art marketplace where independence and expertise seem to be rarer than pressure to find a commercial niche for contemporary art. This truly bizarre bazaar (sorry, couldn't resist) seems also to contribute to a somewhat fragile and panick-y sense of identity for individual visual artists. . But I must say that I really don't know why contemporary visual arts seem so tortured with issues of self-expression and censorship. But I will agree with one of the responses to my original post, that if these ideas are driven underground, maybe they will attract more psychic energy and shake off some of the baroque lassitude that seems to characterize contemporary visual arts. Eric Siegel [log in to unmask]