"these are lesser times."

"Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not Art" - Pablo Picasso

It is not just  about Art and Artists or even about Freedom of  Expression. The increasing attacks are, like Rape, about Power. The blunt assertion of it, for usually political ends.  They are about Publicity. Publicity that feeds the politics of  Power.  

The very media  whose Freedom of Expression needs to be protected actually helps to feed the the attacks on  that, their own, Freedom. 

The  rampant needs of  a  24/7 media cycle  have to be fed. But  that feeding  now seems to be  a  feeding  off itself. Like  the mythical snake eating its own body. 

These are dangerous times in a dangerous cycle. These are  the"lesser times" of  Democracy destroying itself. 

Let me just recollect one paragraph from his memoir, Joseph Anton, and leave the issue to the readers to introspect: “He was not, after all, the first writer to be endangered or sequestered or anathematised for his art. He thought of mighty Dostoevsky facing the firing squad and then, after the last-minute commutation of his sentence, spending four years in prison camp, and of [Jean] Genet unstoppably writing his violently homoerotic masterpiece Our Lady of the Flowers in jail. The French translator ofLes versets sataniques, unwilling to use his own name, had called himself ‘A. Nasier’ in honour of the great Francois Rabelais who had published his first book, Pantagruel, under the anagrammatic nom de plume of ‘Acofribas Nasier’. Rabelais too had been condemned by religious authority; the Catholic Church had been unable to stomach his satirical hyberabundance. But he had been defended by the King, Francois I, on the grounds that his genius could not be suppressed. Those were the days, when artists could be defended by kings, because they were good at what they did. These are lesser times.”

Can we honestly deny that these are lesser times?

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/Readers-Editor/artists-angst/article4375566.ece?homepage=true