What happens when publicly funded art sparks outrage? Throughout history, scandals have raised the same question: should governments censor or defund offensive culture? Our study uncovers four distinct public opinion “types” on this dilemma, revealing how deeper moral and political values shape reactions to art.
What happens when art offends? Throughout history, cultural goods have not only delighted audiences but also sparked outrage. When Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, critics were scandalized by the nudity on display. A later painter, nicknamed Il Braghettone, was even hired to paint over the figures’ exposed bodies. Fast forward to 1999 in New York: Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary—a painting decorated with elephant dung and pornographic images—set off a political firestorm. The mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, threatened to cut funding to the Brooklyn Museum unless the artwork was removed (Young, 2015).
These cases reveal a recurring question: should governments support art that some citizens find offensive? And if the answer is “no,” should the response be censorship (removing the art) or defunding (cutting money to the institution)?
Our study investigates how Americans think about this dilemma. We used survey data collected right after the Brooklyn Museum controversy in 1999 (McGill & Dautrich, 2016). Over 1,000 people were asked their opinions on four possible policies: banning offensive art in public museums, banning offensive books in public libraries, cutting funding to museums with offensive exhibits, and cutting funding to libraries with offensive books.
To do so, we applied latent class analysis (Nylund-Gibson & Choi, 2018) to look for hidden patterns in people’s answers and group respondents into broader ‘classes’ of opinion. As opposed to analyzing each question separately, this helps reveal broader underlying norms that shape how individuals think about censorship and funding cuts. This can be thought of as finding personality types, but for cultural politics.
We found four main groups:
- The strict punishers: They strongly supported every kind of restriction, whether censorship or funding cuts. For them, offensive art or literature has no place in taxpayer-supported institutions.
- The conditional punishers: This smaller group opposed censorship, but still favored cutting funding. In their view, people should be free to display controversial art, but not necessarily with public money.
- The moderate free-expression advocates: These respondents opposed restrictions, but only mildly. They tended to defend artistic freedom, though without much passion.
- The strong free-expression advocates: This was by far the largest group. They strongly rejected all forms of government intervention, with particularly emphasized opposition to censorship, standing firmly on the side of free expression.
Put together, these four groups can be clearly ordered from the most restrictive to the most permissive. What’s striking is how many Americans (half the sample) fell into the strongest free-expression camp.
We then looked at how these attitudes connect to broader political leanings. Conservatives were more likely to be in the restrictive groups, while liberals leaned toward free-expression advocacy. Still, the relationship was not entirely straightforward a priori. For example, liberals may support punitive actions when framed as protecting vulnerable groups from offense, showing that debates over art and morality can cut across party lines.
Why does this matter today? The survey was conducted in 1999, but public debates about “scandalous” cultural goods are hardly a thing of the past. From debates about explicit lyrics in music, to controversies over books in school libraries, to heated discussions about what kind of art public institutions should fund, the question keeps returning: where should we draw the line between free expression and public responsibility?
Our study offers a framework for thinking about these conflicts. It shows that people do not form opinions on individual policies in a vacuum, but adhere to underlying norms about morality, art, and the role of government. Recognizing these “norm clusters” helps explain why debates over controversial art can be so intense: people are not simply disagreeing about one exhibition or one book but expressing deeper systems of values.
Looking back from today’s polarized world, it would be fascinating to see whether these patterns still hold. Would half the population still defend free expression so strongly? Or have political and cultural shifts changed the balance? A new survey, conducted in today’s cultural landscape, could reveal how much has changed and how much remains the same.
References
McGill, L. T., & Dautrich, K. (2016). Brooklyn Museum Art Controversy Survey 1999 [United States]. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor]. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35236.v1.
Nylund-Gibson, K., & Choi, A. (2018). Ten Frequently Asked Questions About Latent Class Analysis. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 4(4): 440-461. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000176.
Young, Allison (2015, August 9). “Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary,” in Smarthistory, accessed October 3, 2025, https://smarthistory.org/chris-ofili-the-holy-virgin-mary/.
About the article
Angelini, F., & Lyrvall, J. (2025). Art on trial: mapping public reactions to scandalous cultural goods in public institutions. Applied Economics Letters. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2025.2549507
About the authors
Francesco Angelini is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna and a freelance consultant, specializing in cultural economics applied and theoretical research. He published his research in several books and journals, such as Journal of Cultural Economics, Kyklos, Empirical Studies of the Arts, and the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics.
Johan Lyrvall is a PhD student at the University of Catania, specializing in latent variable modeling methodological research. He has published his methodological statistics research in Multivariate Behavioral Research and Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal.
About the image
“The Last Judgement” by Alun Salt is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
