Censorship Is Regulation

horrifying instances like the recent controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe, but rather exists as what I would call the social regula tion of the arts. In spite of its enormous importance to the cultural world, the National Endowment for the Arts has been able to provide only seed money for the art activity which takes place in the United States; for the rest, our art institutions — our museums — are depend ent upon three major strategies: 1. Corporate funding, which means organizing exhibitions susceptible to use as advertising; 2. Increasing audiences, which means organizing exhibitions that can be massively advertised; or 3. Individuals and Foundations which require a con tinuous process of pro-active education in order to understand or support the agenda of more sophisticated art activity. I want emphati cally to distance myself from the simplistic one-sided criticism which is almost ritually levelled at what is called the art market — the primarily New York-based network of commercial galleries—because I believe it is naive to assume that our so-called noncommercial arts