A Cautionary Tale on Art, Censorship & Social Media

I’m one of those artists who’s been plugging away in the studio for the past thirty years. Part of the Art World’s middle tier, I am perpetually hovering on the edge of my “big break”, but I no longer hold my breath in wait for it. I have work in a few important collections, and a 25-page CV. I’ve won Arts Council grants in all the states I’ve lived in, I have a few nice exhibition catalogs, and have been in museum shows across the country and abroad. I hope to move up a few more rungs on the art world ladder before I die, but that’s far less important to me than consistently making work I am proud of.

Presently, all but the top 1% of artists are struggling. Several artist grants have dried up, and sales have declined, leaving creatives to expend more energy simply trying to make ends meet. So many middle-tier galleries have closed that a large number of artists like myself are managing our own careers full-time while making art. Social media has been a tremendous help in this area: I can create a new work, post it, get instant feedback, and often, within a few weeks or months, get offers to exhibit it. While a few hundred to a few thousand people might see my art “in real life” during the course of an exhibition, a strong, well-photographed image placed on social media can reach ten times as many eyes through multiple “shares”.

As artists look for new paradigms to cultivate audiences for our work, we gravitate towards platforms like Facebook. Many artists are introverts, or suffer from social anxiety. For them, social media is a godsend, because they can share what they make without awkward personal interactions and dreaded small talk. (Someone like Van Gogh, for example, would have loved it.) I’m an artist living outside of NYC, with a teaching job, a compulsive studio practice, and a child, so I rarely have time to socialize. I post on Instagram, despite the fact that I find the calculated branding, slickness and “following” games off putting, but most of my social media time is spent on Facebook. I like the longer conversational format, the ability to post multiple images / albums, and the opportunity to trade pictures and links back and forth in extended conversations. It’s become my primary source of social interaction with my peers, and my art career “distribution center”.

When it comes to my studio practice, I have always believed that art is supposed to tell the truth about things people don’t want to talk about. Within that realm, eight years ago my focus shifted from the personal to the political. I was thinking about the world my newborn daughter would grow up in. I was overwhelmed by the daily news and was starting to pick up on cultural rumblings all around me that were quite unsettling: that drove me to research and creation at an unprecedented, feverish pitch that continues to this day. My practice is now devoted to calling out injustices against disparate parts of our community, investigating overlaps to suggest that, although the victims may change, the perpetrators are often the same. I have named the ongoing series “#bullyculture”, because I believe that the U.S. cultivates aggression and entitlement in a myriad of ways, both overt and subtle. Much of the work in this series foreshadowed both the 2016 election and the #metoo movement by several years.

The series is difficult and provocative: it requires warning signs when exhibited. Early work on the fetishization of guns resulted in threats to me and my family. Some have said or implied that I am “asking for” whatever happens to me as a result of making this series. In response, I maintain that 1.) I have never heard anyone tell a male artist that he was “asking for it” (that term is, after all, the language of abuse), and, 2.) none of the art I have produced is more disturbing than the things happening in real life that inspired me to make the work. I am simply embroidering, burning wood, drawing or painting… not hurting humans, animals, or the earth, like the perpetrators featured in my work. Get outraged at the injustice, not the art calling it to light.

Within the larger “#bullyculture” context, there are sub-series: the one that currently engages me is called “The MAGA Hat Collection.” I have been ordering MAGA hats (all knockoffs, with the exception of one), ripping them apart, and then sewing them back together into traditional symbols of hatred. The works are meant to both call out wearers who claim the hats to be innocuous, and to sound the alarm that history is repeating itself.

Hate Hat, 2019, deconstructed MAGA hats, cotton, thread, 28 x 9 x 12", edition of 3. Manuel de Santaren collection, two remaining. Image: Gregory Staley

“ Only The Terrorized Own The Right To Name Symbols Of Terror”, 2019, armband made of deconstructed MAGA hats, cotton, thread, 5.25 x 6 x 6". IMAGE: Gregory Staley

The only “official” MAGA hat (putting money in Trump’s pocket) was ripped apart strand by strand, all the way down to individual threads:

”Hate Hat II, Dismantled: The Disease That Thought It Was The Cure”, 2019, unravelled MAGA hat, baseball cap display case (mirrors, plexiglass, wood), engraved brass plate, 8 x 9 x 8.5". IMAGE: Gregory Staley

There are at least three more in-progress pieces to come. When originally posted to Facebook in March & April, all of the images from the ongoing MAGA Hat series received an overwhelmingly positive response with thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. Only a few people were offended by their cursory look at the swastika. Many more said that their initial reaction was “WTF?”, then they loved the piece even more when they saw what it actually was. One of the “Hate Hats” sold to a prominent collector within days.

In early May, several of the images above were removed from Facebook, because they violated “the community standards”. I protested their removal with an explanation that they were artworks, and (like political cartoons) they included the offensive symbol to make a point about it. I later re-posted the images with prominent text photoshopped onto them, explaining that they were artworks: this tactic had worked with the same images on Instagram when they were removed, then successfully reposted, on that platform.

Altered image posted after first one was removed by Facebook.

Adding text to the image of one’s work is something that makes most artists cringe (we want the work to be experienced on its own, without explanation), but we are in a new world, populated by many beings who obviously cannot process subtleties like metaphor or irony. Facebook responded to my protest by removing even more images. On the morning of Thursday, May 9th, I found that my account had been disabled.

When your account is disabled on Facebook, you have one opportunity to make your case through a brief form. First, you have to upload your license (an extortion that was wildly unsettling for someone who has gotten threats in the past and tries to keep her location somewhat under wraps). Not knowing that it was my last chance, I simply explained that the work that got me banned was art, not hate speech. I thought my brief explanation would be enough to have a real human being review the post for more than a split second, realize the mistake, and restore my account… but that did not happen. Once you fill out the form, you are promised an email response, to come “shortly”: eleven days later, mine has yet to arrive. After that initial form, you have no recourse: there is no customer service to call or email. There is a general feedback form I submitted that Facebook makes no promises about. (I invite you to try it as well, to voice your concerns about censorship.) But there is no one to ask, “If you want to keep my account disabled, can I at least have a copy of my own archive?” Facebook is an impenetrable fortress, completely disempowering to any user who feels they have been wronged. As Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recently stated in a May 9th NPR interview, “Mark Zuckerberg is unaccountable. He’s unaccountable to his shareholders. He’s unaccountable to his users, and he’s unaccountable to government.”

Although I have spoken with one person who had her account restored after a month (for nudity), most have said that accounts are restored within three to seven days. I will never know whether the Trump supporters who regularly troll me reported my work (I’m told they are now coordinating efforts to remove work), or whether the images were censored by Facebook’s new anti-hate speech implementation gone awry. While the initial photos might have been deleted automatically through image recognition software, I assume that the review practice was conducted by a human and, if so, I wonder how they are qualified for such a position. It’s disconcerting to think that a 20-something person sitting in a big room in a far corner of the earth (being paid to process yays & nays as expediently as possible) gets to decide with a quick look and the click of a cursor if my work is art and whether it will be allowed to reach my carefully cultivated audience. One would think that a billion-dollar company that has already been taken to court over censorship of art might employ at least one art specialist to review these types of posts.

In the Art World, it is often said “It’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know”. Last week, Facebook effectively destroyed for me the most precious thing any business can possess: a mailing list. Over the past decade, every time I read an article, go to a conference, see an exhibition, or meet new people, I add relevant contacts on Facebook. As a result, I have built up a highly targeted audience for my work that has given me tremendous opportunities in the form of feedback, collegial discussions on art topics, exposure to other artists’ work, articles, interviews, sales and exhibitions. This list of contacts is impossible to recreate. My Facebook archive, more extensive than a scrapbook, contains a decade of my artistic creations, exhibitions, reviews, and people’s responses to them, as well as articles and references that have fueled the content of my work, and the shared work of artists I admire. A third of my career history is now owned by someone else and is being withheld from me, the content provider. I feel invisible, like I have been “disappeared” in some nightmarish dystopian novel.

I could open a new Facebook account, but I fear never regaining the old one. Bravo to my friends who saw the writing on the wall, and have already left Facebook. I am ashamed to say that I have gained too much career-wise from the platform to boycott it completely, but I will make changes in how I use it moving forward, and will actively seek alternative strategies. My advice to artists on Facebook is to take screen grabs and create a private archive of everything that is important to you. Your contact list is the most critical (should you have to rebuild it), but also work you have posted that generated a lot of responses, articles that you might want to reference again, and images that others have taken of you, your work, and exhibitions. Keep building your old-fashioned email list: don’t rely solely on Facebook to get the word out.

While I know that the most likely scenario in my case is that some trolls got together to remove my work through orchestrated complaints (i.e., the Bad Guys won), or that image recognition software got it wrong, and some culturally ignorant human rubber-stamped the machine’s decision at a glance, the end result is the same. My work, and finally, my voice, has been silenced. There’s nothing I can do to get through to Facebook (except this article). And if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone. And perhaps it is only a coincidence that my work is highly critical of the current administration and its followers. And perhaps the absurdity and poetry of having art that warns of impending fascism rendered invisible by a corporation will be lost on most people.

But DO understand that we, as artists using the platform, are at the mercy of a multinational that is making billions off our content, while extinguishing our right to free speech, and failing to provide access to a true appeal process designed to protect the rights of artists. Act accordingly.

This is much bigger than my few offending artworks. Facebook is a tool that many are currently using to organize against injustice. In 2018, “Dyke March”, an annual event, had a Facebook page shut down because the self-identifying name was considered a slur. Constructing “community standards” which can be wielded at will without accountability and transparency is an Orwellian tactic designed to keep us in line: just behave, don’t push any boundaries, and you get to keep your friends and your business. Imagine life without your favorite social media platform: how much power have you given them? How could you possibly offend their standards? What if the standards change? What would happen if the Koch brothers bought Facebook? What if they already have?

Most importantly, I beg you not to censor your work, but instead, find creative workarounds for sharing it. We live in dangerous times, and need artist voices more than ever. Artists are, as Kurt Vonnegut stated, “the canaries in the coalmine.” I wouldn’t make the work that I do if I didn’t believe in its capacity to affect change. Powerful art can get into your nervous system and touch parts of you that rhetoric cannot. People who censor art understand and respect that power, which is why they try to silence us.

Salman Rushdie once said, “A poet’s job is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.” At this critical juncture in history, let’s not allow anyone or anything to keep us from doing our job.

UPDATE 5/31: My Facebook account was restored after 17 days (there was a change.org petition and several reporters called the FB headquarters office). THANK YOU for all of the support!

On Thursday, May 30, Jen Tough Gallery, a San Francisco gallery who will be showing the MAGA Hat work this Summer, received a threatening phone call, and has upped security for her gallery. On IG, there have been threats to “spraypaint that shit” when it goes on exhibit. Also on May 30, my Instagram account was disabled (after no new posts). IG first removed an old post, a B&W video I shot at the Holocaust Museum of a Nazi book burning. I am becoming increasingly certain that this is the concerted effort of people who do not want my work to be seen. I would like to say, “Well, now you can follow my new work on Facebook”, but that seems like an absurd thing to say. There are new MAGA Hat pieces in the works, and all my current work can always be seen on my website at www.katekretz.com.

UPDATE 6/8: Yesterday, I received an ugly, obscene snail mail letter addressed to me at Jen Tough Gallery. It has been documented, the gallerist has taken it to the police, security has been increased at the gallery, and we now have an open case file at the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center. The letter (of course) uses sexual assault language, essentially proving the point of my entire “#bullyculture” series of the past eight years. I am seeking any male artists who have been targeted by conservatives for their political art work to compare notes: please contact me through my website.