The principal of a high school in Tallahassee, Florida, was removed after showing Michelangelo’s David in one of her art classes. Some parents accused Carrasquilla of showing pornographic material to her innocent teenagers and the Board of the institution gave her two options: that she resign or she would be fired from it.

A month ago, in my Architecture and Civilization class, I projected this same David and I reserve comments on a couple of reactions. I will continue to include relevant examples from the history of humanity that would be considered “explicit material for adults” in the program for the coming years, such as Indian architecture, Greek ceramics and Gothic cathedrals (Christian paradigms of conservative Europe) with their draining gargoyles. rainwater from their vaginas.

We now understand better why Goya painted the Clothed Maja after achieving a better work with the same nude woman a few years earlier; surely he did not want to be censored in Florida two hundred years later.

It still saves me that I teach at a university and in the past when they have come to me with these complaints, a couple of sarcasms and a firm position have been enough for me. I published an article about this very thing in 2005 titled “The Immorality of Art, the Evil of the Poor” about a class at the University of Georgia.

Not one step back from demonizing culture, because it’s culture, not porn, that fans really fear and hate: porn is business; culture is a danger that can open even the hardest and most closed heads. Radical culture is naturally rebellious and subversive. Of the true pornography that adolescents and even children in high schools watch on their phones, not a word; but laws banning books on racism and revisionist history abound.

This is what we have come to in Florida. If before we warned of a movement towards the Middle Ages (to the most brutal fanaticism of the Middle Ages and the inquisition), it must be said that we arrived a while ago.

jorge majfud, march 2023