I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts by Mark Dery

First:

“Thinking Bad Thoughts is an intellectual insurgency against the friendly fascism of right and left, happy bedfellows in their prohibition, on pain of death, of thoughtcrime. (Exhibit A: Andrea Dworkin, standard-bearer of the penis-is-a-weapon, intercourse-is-rape phalanx of feminism, shoulder to shoulder with the religious right in her jihad against porn and all its works and ways.) It’s the unshakable conviction that, while some beliefs may be ethically indefensible, morally repugnant, or universally unpopular, no subject should be ruled out of bounds, no thought forbidden; intellectual freedom is unimaginable without the right to think the unthinkable.”

Also:

“The momentous discovery, in the late fourteenth century, of mysterious grotte, or underground chambers, in Rome’s Aventine hillside had exhumed the Gothic’s close cousin, the Grotesque. The caverns turned out to be Nero’s Playboy Mansion, a party villa called the Domus Aurea (Golden House) whose droll mosaics and frescoes captivated Renaissance artists: writhing vines, chimerical beings gene-spliced from humans and animals, surreal landscapes. Inspired by these grotteschi, as the decorative elements in Nero’s ‘grottos’ were called, Renaissance artists such as Raphael borrowed the creative license of the pre-Christian Romans — ‘the capricious and bizarre designs of pagan painters who were given freedom to invent whatever they pleased’ — and decorated their friezes with wriggling tendrils and fantastic humanimals. In time, the style became known as grottesco, or Grotesque.”

-Mark Dery, 2012