An activity by the Front Against Censorship left its organisers with a bitter pill to swallow after one of their guest speakers urged them to “disband”.
“Art and literature in Malta do not need the Front Against Censorship,” self-described unpublished novelist Anton Bonnici said during a debate held at the launch of an exhibition about self-censorship.
He said the conservative and liberal camps debating the issue of censorship were two faces of the same coin, “two symptoms of the same disease, while both think of themselves as the cure”.
“Both the Front Against Censorship and the Censorship Board believe they are protecting and promoting art and literature, one by keeping it clean and pure and the other by liberating it from conservative and religious ideologies.”
However, both were failing miserably and “simply promoting mediocrity”, according to Mr Bonnici, one by promoting a sterile and neutered conformist notion of art and literature and the other by claiming that art and literature must be “obscene”.
He slammed both sides for discussing the issue on TV and in writing while never referring to “a single, quotable, academic and theoretical formulation”, revealing a sense of incompetence.
“Instead of doing everything humanly possible to show off, Maltese artists and writers should start to learn how to hold back, restrain themselves, not out of cowardice but for the sake of quality.”
No matter how free and uncensored the creative output was, it was never free from physical, economic and intellectual limitations, he said, criticising the Front for promoting the right to be “immature and mediocre” and protecting “crude” works that lacked any form of discipline, skill, vision and literary or artistic significance.
He warned there was a more dangerous form of global censorship going on at the moment, where market forces and the economic slowdown made life very difficult for fledgling artists to be recognised.
“My question is: Why are we here in Malta still concerned with whether profanity and pornography in art and literature should or should not be censored while there exists a global economic cultural and creative censorship phenomenon which we seem to completely neglect?”
His candid speech, which he warned would “pinch” them, was applauded by the tens of young people who attended the event, including members and supporters of the Front.
The event, held at the General Workers’ Union building, in Valletta launched an exhibition entitled the Art of Silence, where a number of artists exhibited works related to self-censorship.