36 - Masculinités médiatiques
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Flore Di Sciullo
Art press and censorship : an uneven itinerary of a struggle for creative freedom
Le Temps des médias n° 36, Printemps 2021.
Our goal in this paper is to investigate several instances of the French periodical art press advocacy of freedom of speech and more specifically, freedom of creation. We strive to outline that each of those cases rely on a similar argumentative structure labelled as “grammar of denunciation” (Boltanski, 1984). Such a grammar implies a dynamic of relations between artists, institutions, readership and spectators. To that end, we examine art press’s editorials. Our analysis is twofold. In the first place, we look at the whole body of art press’s editorials since 1972 to identify how the grammar of denunciation is discursively built up. In the second place, we highlight three moments when artpress managed to make a public issue out of contemporary art : the Ian Hamilton Finlay case (1987-1989), the “contemporary art quarrel” (1992- 1997) and the case of the exhibition “Présumés innocents” (“Alleged incident”), 2000-2011.