Although censorship as a state institution seems largely to have disappeared in the neo-liberal structure of the world, it has indeed survived not only as a buzz word - this is evident in the discussions about cutbacks in public funding for institutions critical of the government, just as it is evident in controversies involving anti-Semitic and pornographic web sites. Thus there are various practices for regulating the public sphere, which may be assembled under the term "censorship." Yet these practices can no longer be circumvented with unambiguously moral valuations - "good" freedom versus "evil" censorship. The major revisionist debates of the past two decades in particular, which the New Right have set off, show the great extent to which the political "keys" of freedom and oppression have changed, and that these terms cannot be discussed apart from political contents. So which oppression is opposed in the name of which freedom and truth?
 
The Secession, programmatically dedicated to the freedom of art, has lost the final appeal against a lawsuit brought against them by an FPÖ politician because of a picture by Otto Mühl. In addition to this concrete reason, the symposium The Price of Freedom is intended to address legal and economic intimidation policies in the context of the right-wing "Kulturkampf" on the one hand, and on the other to formulate political positions in the controversies surrounding censorship. Starting from the question of how claims for freedom and prohibitive actions are negotiated within quickly changing regimes of truth and policies of visibility, concrete options for action are to be reflected without recourse to moral indignation. This will focus on anti-national perspectives, since a great deal of implicit complicity between social-democratic, "josefinist" and right-wing cultural policies may be discerned particularly in the construction of a specifically Austrian "cultural nation." The consequent difficulties and ambivalences still characterize the debates of "cultural resistance" between or beyond boycott and normalization after a year of black-blue government.



INFORMATION
Bärbel Holaus, Kathrin Rhomberg
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-10, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at