But lately, the common wisdom about letting comedy or artworks or even facts speak for themselves has been subverted by a deepening fear of what might happen if something gets lost in translation. A guy who doesn’t get the joke might instead get the wrong idea — and what then? Some sort of catastrophe, for sure, if not outright anarchy.

These anxieties were on particularly potent display amid the recent to-do surrounding the Twitter Files, which are either a groundbreaking act of corporate transparency by the tech world’s biggest disruptor — or a giant, embarrassing nothingburger, depending on who you ask. For those not in the know, the Files offer a glimpse behind the scenes at Twitter during various recent controversies, when content moderation arguably crossed the line into censorship. There have been four Files thus far, released in the form of massive tweet threads by journalists hand-picked by Elon Musk. All have offered insights into the challenges of managing speech on the microblogging site, which holds a place of outsized cultural influence owing to its status as a favourite hangout for media folks, but the adverse relationship between Twitter management and humorous content was on fullest display in Matt Taibbi’s recent thread about the site’s collaboration with government agencies to combat misinformation in the leadup to the 2020 election, which culminated in the permanent banning of Donald Trump from the site.

Among the tweets that Twitter employees had highlighted as cause for concern was a joke from October 2020. Former Arkansas governor and one-time presidential hopeful, the Republican Mike Huckabee, took a jab at the mail-in voting system: “Stood in rain for hour to early vote today,” Huckabee wrote. “When I got home I filled in my stack of mail-in ballots and then voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me!  #Trump2020”

As dumb as this joke was, there’s a certain dark absurdity to the response it inspired behind the scenes at Twitter: “This appears to be a joke, but other people might believe it,” one anonymous employee wrote when the tweet was flagged. Trust and Safety head executive Yoel Roth wrote: “I agree it’s a joke, but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet to a crime.”

He’s literally admitting in a tweet to a crime. If this were a work of fiction, here is the line that would elicit an editorial eyeroll and a polite note about the need to maintain subtlety in satire. But then, in a way, it is fiction. When Roth says, “he’s literally admitting to a crime,” he knows full well that the “crime” in question never happened; he’s telling a joke of his own, concocting a winking pretext for ideological censorship under the guise of policing misinformation.

As Kathleen Stock noted in a recent essay, there are two explanations for this affected literality, this iron-fisted narrative control: either the censor himself is stupid, or he thinks everyone else is. This makes for its own set of problems in the worlds of media and academia, but it has especially worrisome implications for comedy, and for art, where the message of the work, what it makes you think, is a distant second to what it makes you feel. The cult of the fact-check, this notion that we cannot sacrifice accuracy even for the sake of having a laugh, is the antithesis of fun — even when intentions are good.

Last June, Twitter implemented “birdwatch”, “a community-based approach to misinformation”. The feature allowed users to add relevant context to misleading tweets, but people immediately set about not only correcting the record on factually incorrect news items, but also dissecting a whole lot of metaphorical joke-frogs to death. One representative example, a clever jibe about NASA’s history of offering amnesty to Nazis, was instantly ruined by the attachment of an explanation that not only reduced the substance of the joke to a third-grade reading level but reads as though it had been written by an actual third grader (“This is a joke based on the fact that the early days of NASA was ran by Nazis that were granted amnesty in exchange for working for the U.S. government in research and development”). Looking at this note — which a majority of users rated as useful for being “easy to understand” — one wonders whether it is worse to fact-check a joke or to just suppress it outright.  In the latter case, at least the frog survives.

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Beneath the contemporary anxiety over misinformation, it seems something older and more insidious lurks: the eternal, authoritarian urge to stamp out irreverence and imagination lest they give people ideas. The threats to the narrative can come from anywhere: in 2017, for instance, the makers of the video game Minecraft eliminated a whimsical feature that allowed users to feed (digital) chocolate chip cookies to the game’s (digital) parrot population, after an uproar over the possibility that real parrots might be harmed. In 2020, the Auschwitz memorial condemned the Amazon series Hunters, a show about modern-day Nazi hunters, for a depiction of fictional (albeit directionally accurate) wartime atrocities that, per the memorial, was “not only dangerous foolishness” in its injection of imagination into a Holocaust story, but “also welcomes future deniers”. Of course, reasonable people can disagree on whether the show’s human chess match was in good taste, but the notion that aspiring Holocaust deniers are likely to be found watching an Amazon series about a group of Jewish vigilantes hunting down and murdering Nazis seems misplaced at best. Those folks are watching Disney, obviously. (That was a joke.)

This desire to intellectually handhold consumers to the proper conclusions about what they’re watching, reading, or looking at has also found expression lately in the “recontextualisation” of art exhibits. Where paintings were once displayed alongside notes about the artist’s use of light, or the life events that might have influenced the work, some museums now instruct viewers to interpret the art through the timeliest political lens. Last year, a Tate exhibit of paintings by the artist William Hogarth raised hackles for imbuing a wooden chair with sinister subtext: “The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people”, read the label displayed alongside one of Hogarth’s self-portraits. “Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?”

According to this new paradigm, the beauty of the art is a secondary concern — if it’s present at all. Meanwhile, some works have been deemed so offensive that no amount of contextualisation can make them safe for viewing by the general population, as with the cancellation in 2020 of a long-anticipated Philip Guston exhibit. Guston’s depictions of hooded, cartoonish klansmen were always meant as a critical statement on the banality of evil, but how could curators be assured that the public, those fools, would understand this?

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The creative world is increasingly haunted by the spectre of this hypothetical moron, who cannot sort fact from fiction, or art from news, or humorous gags about overconsumption from the mistaken conviction that beer is a fruit. Nobody ever demands contextualisation on their own behalf, of course: they’re not stupid! But other people are — not just stupid, but vapid, a collectively empty chassis awaiting an ideological engine. It’s like the anonymous Twitter employee said: sure, it’s obviously a joke, but other people might believe it.

The irony is that we know more than ever how true this isn’t. The age of social media offers us a far more expansive view of what people think, and why, and how they reach those conclusions, than we have ever had before. Yet as with the Twitter Files, this greater transparency only seems to fuel ever greater mistrust — and a sense that the stakes are far too high to simply leave people to their own devices. And while the impact so far has been largely administrative — a silly museum label here, a fact check there — how likely is it to end there?

This quest to explain art, and in doing so to instruct people how to feel about it, inevitably trickles down until the work itself is being policed at the creation stage. A curator can only do so much to steer patrons to the proper conclusions; the artist, too, must always keep the moron in mind, dumbing down every line, and every punchline, to the lowest common denominator so that it’s comprehensible to everyone (and, coincidentally, truly funny to no one).  Faced with the terrifying prospect that people might get the wrong idea, the best — actually, the only — solution is to get rid of ideas altogether, dissecting them for offence, contextualising the life out of them, until there’s nothing fun — or funny — about any of it.

The journalist Sara Myers disagreed and accused Bailey of racism. She initiated a petition calling for cancellation, which attracted over 22,000 signatures, and co-ordinated a protest outside the venue. The Barbican did what it could to keep the production open, but the protesters were determined to physically prevent people from gaining entry to the work. The police advised closure on safety grounds, effectively abandoning their duty to uphold the free speech of those involved with Exhibit B, leaving the Barbican feeling it had no alternative but to cancel.

A few days later, Bailey wrote: “Do any of us really want to live in a society in which expression is suppressed, banned, silenced, denied a platform? My work has been shut down today, whose will be closed down tomorrow?”

Fast-forward six years.

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Tate Modern, along with three American galleries, recently announced the postponement by four years of a long-planned exhibition of Philip Guston’s paintings because of concerns over a series of images depicting hooded Klansmen. Rather than open in spring 2021, the galleries have chosen to delay “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted”.

But there have been no protests — not even a petition. The postponement is entirely pre-emptive and driven by Tate Modern and its three US partner galleries in Washington DC, Boston and Houston.

The policing of artistic free expression has traditionally been carried out by external actors; self-styled morality campaigners, politicians and religious organisations. But today it is just as likely to be arts professionals themselves who self-censor, and, what is worse, attempt to censor or silence each other.

Jenny Lindsay is a Scottish poet. She performs her own work and produces regular events showcasing the work of fellow poet-performers. In June 2019 she tweeted her objection to the view that violence against “terfs” (women who don’t believe that trans women are literally women) is justifiable. For this, Lindsay was denounced on social media as “transphobic” and there began a campaign of vilification and attempted censorship that continues today. The Dark Horse, a respected Scottish poetry magazine, has just published an essay by Lindsay, “Anatomy of a Hounding”, which details how other writers and arts professionals were active in the campaign against her.

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The Scottish Poetry Library, concerned at continuing attempts to censor poets including Lindsay, issued a statement which affirmed its commitment to diversity and equality: “What we do not support, and will no longer ignore, is bullying and calls for no-platforming of writers in events programmes and in publishing.”

In response, Scottish Pen — an organisation founded to champion writers’ free expression — issued a mealy-mouthed statement that scolded Scottish Poetry Library for failing to “address equality issues”. What Scottish Pen did not do is defend Jenny Lindsay’s freedom of expression, despite claiming to “challenge all efforts to silence writers”. Not all writers, apparently.

The blocs of power challenging today’s artists and arts organisations are not just the government or organised religion (with which artists have sometimes rather enjoyed clashing) but social justice movements — with which many in the arts affiliate themselves. From this internal conflict has arisen a widespread collapse of confidence in the validity of universal free expression.

This collapse was in evidence when London’s Royal Court Theatre cancelled its own 2018 production of Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue, and Bob Too at the height of the #MeToo moment, and in the wake of the news that Max Stafford-Clark, founder of Out of Joint, the company staging the play, and also a former artistic director of the Royal Court, was accused of making lewd comments to several members of his staff. The Royal Court and Out of Joint issued a statement saying that “the staging of this work…feels highly conflictual”.

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“Conflictual” feelings are a product of tolerance; accepting something we find disagreeable comes at psychological cost. We feel the dissonance. The Royal Court’s artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, quickly accepted that the discomfort she felt at the thought of continuing with the production was the price of the artistic free-expression rights of everyone involved with Rita, Sue, and Bob Too. She reversed her decision to censor the show.

But toleration finds little place in the lexicon of today’s activist movements, which tend to see it as tacitly reproducing oppression. As a result, submission to social justice orthodoxies is increasingly the price of artistic free expression. Jenny Lindsay is refusing to submit — whereas Tate Modern is doing so in advance, in the hopes of appeasing future objectors. 

The prospects for Philip Guston in four years time don’t look promising, given that the director of Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art — one of Tate Modern’s collaborators in the exhibition — has already condemned the artist by stating that his work “appropriates black trauma’”. This amounts to a curatorial determination that Guston’s exercising of his artistic free expression was morally illegitimate in the first place.  

When pressure is brought to bear on artistic free expression, arts organisations and artistic leaders have a vital role to play as a bulwark against those who seek to tighten restrictions. But this responsibility exists in tension with the conviction of many arts professionals that their rightful role is as progressive social actors, at the forefront of current activist movements. The tendency towards intolerance and literalism within these movements coexists uneasily with the principle of universal artistic free expression, and, increasingly, artists, writers and cultural leaders are dealing with the resulting dissonance by seeking to restrict free expression.

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The line between legitimate curation decisions and actual censorship is often fuzzy; Manchester Art Gallery arguably put itself on the wrong side by responding to #MeToo with the removal of a popular Victorian painting depicting adolescent girls. Nervousness about commercial risk often mixes with the politics; Hachette was just as surely thinking of its balance sheet when cancelling Woody Allen’s memoir as the board of Tate Modern was when postponing Guston.

McCarthyite punishments are on the rise; Mslexia, a magazine of women’s writing, disapproved of views expressed by the novelists Amanda Craig and Lionel Shriver, removing them from judging panels in response. The theatre producers London Artists Projects removed Julie Bindel from its self-proclaimed celebration of free speech, Truth to Power Cafe, following protest from other performers — prompting Index on Censorship to withdraw support for the production.

Jenny Lindsay has everything to lose, but rather than perform contrition in the hope of an easier ride, she stands her ground and gives hope to other, perhaps less courageous, writers. In contrast, four major international art galleries collectively quake in anticipation of possible future challenges to their work — and, in so doing, they insult their audiences and dishonour the artist they should be championing.

Most damagingly, their actions teach all artists a bitter truth about much of today’s arts world; if you deal with controversial ideas, expect to be abandoned if the going gets rough.