This title completely caught my eye. The title made me answer an obvious NO. You can never limit someone's creativity! That's just wrong. but yeah I found this article on the Art Newspaper. In the light of what happened to my project at Cooper Union [last month, the museum removed a giant banner with a reproduction of a Picasso drawing of Joseph Stalin, after protests from the Ukrainian church opposite], it is a bit ironic that the show was announced under the headline, “Art and politics as usual”. Another event in this series was a talk by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, who said, among other things, that it is of great importance that artists remain independent of curators, institutions, dealers and critics, and I think everyone present that night agreed almost automatically. But what does it mean to be independent? And what are the conditions for artistic independence, or freedom? These are themes I have worked with in both of the projects that were supposed to be shown at Cooper Union, to which the façade-banners were to be an introduction, and to draw attention and discussion.
We are all dependent on others in order to enjoy any kind of freedom; to act independently is not an individual choice only. I would not have been able to hang the banners on the façade of Cooper Union without an invitation, or without collaboration as well as funding. Yet, neither the fact that I was invited to do this, nor the principle of freedom of expression was enough to protect the banners from being removed without warning or discussion. It seems like the only thing that could have kept them there would have been a very powerful person putting his or her prestige behind them—and this didn’t happen.
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