Mark Oppenheimer’s article, “Artistic Freedom Is Being Free to Offend Whoever” (Sunday Times, January 25 2026), presents itself as a defence of artistic freedom. On closer reading, it is something far more ambivalent — so ambivalent, in fact, that it risks becoming an apologia for censorship.
Oppenheimer argues that outrage at minister of sport, arts and culture Gayton McKenzie’s termination of Gabrielle Goliath’s work Elegy as entrant for the South African pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is justified only if those critics would be equally outraged in other, hypothetical cases of censorship or foreign interference. Absent such symmetry, he suggests, the defence of artistic freedom is merely ideological preference.
The difficulty is that Oppenheimer offers no evidence of inconsistency. He identifies no instance in which artists, curators, activists or members of the public who have condemned McKenzie’s actions have failed to defend artistic freedom when it was politically inconvenient to do so. Instead, he advances an elaborate counterfactual: a scenario in which Israel exerts influence over South Africa’s pavilion and the selected artwork denounces South Africa’s decision to approach the International Court of Justice — a scenario in which, he speculates, ministerial withdrawal might be applauded as a legitimate assertion of sovereignty.
This hypothetical is not only unnecessary; it is entirely inapposite.
The minister’s claim that South Africa’s pavilion had been “hijacked” by foreign interests was never grounded in fact. While Qatar Museums had, at an early stage, expressed general interest in supporting the pavilion and potentially acquiring works exhibited there, this occurred before the artist was selected and without any knowledge of the work itself.
The minister’s claim that South Africa’s pavilion had been “hijacked” by foreign interests was never grounded in fact. While Qatar Museums had, at an early stage, expressed general interest in supporting the pavilion and potentially acquiring works exhibited there, this occurred before the artist was selected and without any knowledge of the work itself. Goliath’s installation, Elegy, has been in development for years. Crucially, any tentative interest expressed by Qatar Museums had fallen away before McKenzie intervened, in late December 2025, to collapse the pavilion entirely.
Foreign interference was not discovered and resisted; it was invented and deployed as a ruse.
Even if one were to indulge Oppenheimer’s hypothetical, it does not assist his case. The exercise of ministerial power is not assessed by reference to imagined reactions or rhetorical symmetry, but against constitutional and administrative standards. The question is not whether a different act of censorship might be defended by a different audience, but whether this act of censorship was lawful, rational and constitutionally permissible.
It was not.
South Africa’s pavilion was curated through an independent, expert process. The work was unanimously selected. McKenzie did not review that process, seek further information, or engage the curators in good faith. He sought simply to censor Goliath’s work and when this did not yield the desired outcome, terminated the exhibit of her work entirely. That is executive overreach, however one dresses it up, and it would remain so regardless of how loudly or quietly others might object in some imagined alternative scenario.
Consistency, in the abstract, is not a legal standard. The fact that not every murder is prosecuted does not undermine the authority of the criminal law in cases where prosecutions do occur. Similarly, even if one could identify instances where censorship went insufficiently criticised, that would not sanitise the minister’s conduct here.
What is most troubling is not merely the weakness of Oppenheimer’s argument, but the role it plays. It lends intellectual cover to a minister who has acted dishonestly and in plain contempt of his constitutional obligations. That should give pause — particularly when it comes from a practising advocate who presents himself as a champion of free expression.
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder urges readers to “remember professional ethics”, warning that “it is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers”. The point is not rhetorical. Authoritarian drift is rarely announced; it is normalised, justified, softened by reasonable-sounding defences — sometimes by convoluted hypotheticals.
A commitment to artistic freedom does not require conjecture or thought experiment. It only requires clarity: that independent artistic processes may not be overridden by executive fiat; that invented justifications do not excuse censorship; and that constitutional principles do not bend to suit individual ministerial allegiance.
• Fritz is the executive director of the Campaign for Free Expression.
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