Letters on Liberty: Art Against Orthodoxy
Partners:
During the pandemic, public life came to a standstill. But long before lockdowns and viruses threatened the freedoms that we hold dear, there has been a problem with our belief in liberty.
Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the 21st century.
In his Letter – Art Against Orthodoxy – art critic JJ Charlesworth argues that the world of art and culture is stifled by attempts to enforce a series of anti-creative orthodoxies. Instead of seeing the achievements of culture – past and present – through the lens of contemporary platitudes about justice, JJ argues that we must fight for the right of art to freely confront reality.
Join JJ and respondents to ask whether institutions of modern culture, from galleries to publishers, should be arenas for free, unfettered artistic expression? Have moves to ‘decolonise’ galleries, or remove sexist painters in the wake of #MeToo led to a new clerisy in the art world? And are boundaries – moral or political – an anathema to the free creative space needed for great art?
