Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression
In this book the nationally known author Robert Atkins brings together the latest thinking from art historians, cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as first-person accounts by artists and advocates, to give reader a comprehensive understanding of his views on censorship in a new century.
Bio
Robert Atkins
Robert Atkins is a California-based art historian, activist, journalist, online producer and editor. He is an Associate (Fellow) of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and, most recently, media-arts editor for The Media Channel, editor/producer of Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum, and an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. From 1996-98, he held the position of vice president/editor-in-chief of the Arts Technology Entertainment Network, a New York Times Video start-up company producing arts programming for the Internet and cable TV. And in 1995, he founded the City University of New York-sponsored TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse, among the first online journals about online art and cyber-culture. An anthology of his writing, Seismic Shift: The Collision of the Art World and the Real World In the Late Twentieth Century, is forthcoming as is a current group project, Thanks for Sharing! A Resource Book About Collaboration In the Arts & Beyond.
I think Atkins is painting a view of the people responsible for censorship. It's broad because it is not just the media or the religious right or a single specific entity as many like to assume. I may be wrong since i haven't yet read it, but his book seems to provide extensive case studies to this effect.
Atkins cause seems worthy, however, his presentation of his argument is not very convincing. He seems to mix ideas and loses his central point. The book is supposed to be about art and media censorship, but strays into political controversies and political cover-ups.