Unorthodox Art and the Era of Puritans

I've been more or less thinking over what a friend was trying to convince me on, that about how we should regulate art. This shouldn't have been especially surprising to me, after all both sides of the aisle have this weird knee-jerk reaction to unorthodoxy within the artistic world. Historically we have had far left, far right, liberal, conservative, centrist, marxist, capitalist, this that and what-have-you implement restrictions.

The obvious examples to point to are the Nazis and post-Lenin Soviets, and I think this idea permeates even in circles that are supposedly more freedom of artistic expression. Be it the war against post-modernism or experimental.

Anyway, my friend posited that there should be a federal department that oversees media, which is something so bizarre seeing the current state of the United States and executive overreach and vaporization of individual freedoms because some media isn't good? This is even more laughable because we already have private entities for this! The ESRB, Networks, Streaming services, advisories, and mainstream websites, all go through vetting processes to ensure something can and cannot be shown. Paramount is very politically charged to axe things even remotely critical of the current regime, and the two parties historically haven't been friendly with freedom of expression.

This idea is less about protecting people, but I think more about the current puritanical direction we've been heading. Sex is gross, blood is scary, swearing is vulgar, queers are weird, politics is too controversial, we need to protect the kids! We need to expand faith... this isn't new of course, but it's certainly annoying enough to where I complain about it like a boomer.

Where does the buck stop? It's a question I always ask, how can you regulate something that is inherently unregulatable? Societal determination or governmental consideration? I'm sure there are millions of different answers but the point is there is no uniformal one and that is the point. What one person may think should be illegal the other might not, it's arbitrary rules where it's impossible to apply.

With my long winded rambling done, the main takeaway if you're lazy, like I sometimes am, is that puritans hate 'unorthodox art' because they can't get rid of it and so have to brand it as something deeming of regulation by a powerful force.