Is anything more deserving of censorship than censorship? Controversial decisions taken in recent days and weeks by some of the world’s premier art institutions to cancel from public display a clutch of provocative works have been met with outrage by advocates of free expression, concerned about the trajectory of the trend. The contentious actions taken by the museums provide the perfect opportunity to reflect on which works in modern history, while considered by some observers to be unacceptably shocking, have changed the way we think about art.

In response to protests by animal-rights campaigners, New York’s Guggenheim Museum cancelled the installation of two brutal videos (one featuring tattooed pigs copulating; the other of snarling pitbulls facing off) as well as of a large wood-and-mesh enclosure showcasing a menacing menagerie of hungry geckos and grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, trapped in a real-death survival-of-the-fittest exhibit entitled Theater of the World. The banned works are the creation of contemporary Chinese artists and had originally been selected to appear as part of the exhibition Art and China After 1989, which opened on 6 October.