It's back again! Artistic censorship, which seemed as obsolete and distant as Party meetings and May Day parades, has returned. Well, I may be a bit hasty in pronouncing its full-fledged reappearance, but it could certainly be seen at a recent exhibit at St. Petersburg's Ethnographic Museum.


A scandal was the last thing the "City People: New York-Helsinki-St. Petersburg" exhibit, a collection of metropolitan images captured by Finnish photographer Raoul Grunstein, was intended to cause. The portraits were of marginal city characters like dancers and junkies, priests and boxers, an S&M club hostess, each of which was strikingly individual in its weirdness.


The show would have gone over as quietly as do dozens of other exhibits in the city every week, if the museum authorities, while inspecting the building for fire security, had not insisted on removing one of the photographs. The picture, titled "The Dancer at the Gay Club," showed a man's muscular body, naked except for an elegant snow-white bow tie around the penis. The incident pressed the museum's curators to organize a short conference on ethics in the perception of photographic images, which attracted a large turnout of the city's bohemian intellectuals, all nostalgic for the bygone years of such scandals. The spirit of the conference was clearly promoting art's absolute freedom.


It was not without some doubts, however, that I listened to the debate, which more or less pertained to the show itself. A critic from Finland hailed the present time, which he brilliantly described as "aesthetic imperialism." The current postmodern artistic reality, he said, replacing the "positivist" (scientific) and "fundamentalist" (moral and religious) imperialism of the past, is prepared to accept and hail anything touched with aestheticism and/or falls beyond the realm of the "ordinary."


I hate moralistic censorship imposed on art from the outside as much as anybody, but I have trouble accepting -- and this has nothing to do with Grunstein's work -- an artist's, and especially a critic's, intentional lack of responsibility and ethics in this aesthetic approach to life. A dictatorship of aesthetics is no less rigid than any other kind.


Examples are depressingly numerous: from futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky turning into a Communist mouthpiece, to intellectuals who, bored by the slow and unimpressive progress toward reform, voted for Vladimir Zhirinovsky dlya ponta, just for fun. After all, fun is nothing but an aesthetic category, and you can bet that Zhirinovsky with his absurdist rhetoric fits perfectly into post-modern aesthetics.


It may be safe enough to theorize and play these dangerous games in stable cities, but here? God save us from this kind of "aestheticism."