I've talked about creativity and social responsibility before, and received heated criticism from certain corners of the artistic sphere for daring to suggest that writers and artists might want to practice some sort of social responsibility before deciding how far to go, before deliberately setting out to offend for the sake of offending. Some claimed my suggestion of self-imposed limits strayed too close to that dreaded concept of censorship, even though I merely suggested that artists and writers place limits on themselves out of some sense of social responsibility. Never did I suggest the expansion of institutional limitations, although such limitations do already exist (to protect children and the like).

And yet, when I suggested that it's wrong for writers and artists to tell other writers and artists what they should and should not create, that they are perhaps placing too many external restrictions on the freedom of expression of others, I got criticized for that as well. Perhaps the criticisms of my concerns over these attempts at peer-pressure restrictions came from different corners of the artistic sphere than the criticisms over my calls for social responsibility. Perhaps some merely took issue with my use of the word "censorship", a term already used by others to argue against my point about social responsibility.

However, taken together, these two incidents seem to betray a general inconsistency of thought and attitude. In my view, it becomes a real Catch-22 situation, damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't. Perhaps certain artists and writers are just all too eager to deal out damnation (or condemnation), while most are all too likely to suffer it themselves.

Anyway, I truly believe one can reveal truths, even make readers or viewers squirm, without blatantly setting out to offend certain groups of readers or viewers. A true artist should be able to walk that line between somewhat disturbing and downright offensive. Anything over that line becomes cheap tricks, a mutated perversion of art relying on shock and disgust to get attention, rather than using true substance to make a point.

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that artists should indeed have a moral compass, but in a free society, that moral compass should probably be internal rather than external. Unfortunately, you can't allow for broad creative freedoms without also allowing for the potential creation of offensive materials. And as has been pointed out to me more than once, more often than not, someone, somewhere will likely find something offensive within a work of art, whether that art be visual or textual. As the old saying goes, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.

By the way, in my humble opinion, art doesn't always have to have a deeper message beyond what the art actually portrays. It can contain such messages, and often does, but art for art's sake is just as valid as art for some higher purpose. To say otherwise is to ignore a multitude of masterpieces by diverse artists that did not necessarily set out to radically changed the world, but simply set out to make the world a slightly better place to live in through the creation of a thing of beauty . Perhaps that does change the world after all, but it does so by subtle means rather than in-your-face ones. Sometimes subtlety does work, in its own subtle ways.