Window Dressing

Valencia is home to the world's only museum of the Enlightenment, the Museu Valencià de la Il·lustració i la Modernitat (MuVIM). I've not been there and what I know of the exhibitions is hearsay. The museum's webpage, meant to be cool, is clumsy, but I've heard of good academic work sponsored by the MuVIM, and am glad to see the Enlightenment given a platform of any kind.

When the word 'modernity' was added to the name of the institution room was made for more than just historiography, and so the MuVIM hosts exhibitions that are not curated historiographically. For the last seven years it's hosted an annual show of press photographs sponsored by the local press club, the Unió de Periodistes Valencians. This year's show opened last Thursday. The Head of Culture for the Province of Valenica, controlled (as are the city and regional governments) by the right-0f-centre Popular Party, took exception to photographs of political fellow-travellers and issue with the inclusion of photographs of politicians in an exhibition of press photographs. He ordered the offending images removed:

They were removed. The museum's director, on leave from a university post (he holds a chair in Aesthetics), resigned; the press club removed the rest of the photographs. The catalogue of the show is available on-line in Catalan, Spanish and English. It refers to on-going investigations into cases of alleged corruption, run-of-the-mill stuff in the press, and this was a show of work by press photographers.

The irony of censorship at a museum of the Enlightenment seems not have been lost on the political class. There's a delicious quote in La Vangaurdia from the president of the Province of Valencia, so delicious, so simple and so revealing that I'll leave it in Spanish: "una cosa es la libertad de expresión y otra la libertad de opinión".