(…) I think the reason that photography in particular is so vulnerable derives from a few aspects of the medium. One is the way that people often confuse photography with reality. It looks real. In fact, it gets much of its power from looking real. But that doesn’t always mean it is real. Sally Mann’s work often exploits this quality. For example, there’s a photograph of her daughter, called Damaged Child, where it looks as if the girl’s been beaten, but in fact she’s only got insect bites.

Another sense in which photography is vulnerable comes from the perception that it’s a lesser art form. Anyone can do it. So a photographer might not immediately seem to be as serious an artist as a painter. But more than any of this, I think the focus on photography is the result of our basic anxieties about the image, anxieties that seem to be quite deep-rooted. Maybe it just has to do with the proliferation of the image; but I think there might also be an elitist explanation of this - traditionally images are the books of the illiterate, you know, just as stained glass windows told the stories of the Bible.

So people don’t prosecute books these days because books are only read by well-educated, upper-class people who are considered capable of taking care of themselves. And God knows the poor don’t buy paintings, or even look at them much. But photographs are available to the masses, who can be set off by them.

There is a history of suppressing and controlling what people see, based on elitist fears of mass access. Censorship is often motivated by class anxiety, and the fear that the lower classes will be out of control if they have access to the same things as the upper classes. This is an argument that I think the Left could use to counter the Right’s accusations of cultural elitism. I think this is a real problem; I think elitism is the unanswered charge in the culture war. The terrible thing about this war is that a good portion of the arts community is just shouting ‘Free speech! Free speech!’ and not really looking at what the issues are. The debate has been conducted on an incredibly juvenile level, without much intellectual sophistication, and with a great deal of indignation and self-righteousness, which I just think does a disservice to the issue.

Yeah, the art world has been very self-congratulatory and smug, and naive. Any more subtle or complex discussion about what exactly images mean within the context of a society has gone out the window.

In the meantime, the Right has managed to implant this notion of the cultural elite in people’s minds.

I think one reason for this is that the art and intellectual communities in the States are almost completely insensitive to issues of class. It’s not surprising that they’ve been labelled the cultural elite. They are one.

It’s true. But one argument that I haven’t seen is that sure, there may be elitism in the arts, but there’s also a long-standing tradition of elitism in censorship. First of all, anyone who censors is putting himself in a position of condescension. He’s saying, oh, I can look at this image in a cool dispassionate way, but I’ve got to protect those people who are weaker than me, because it might drive them crazy, or incite them to rape or violence.(…)