I agree fully with the statement that art of the past is a portrait of what the world was then, and should therefore rest untouched to give us context in the current era.
To give a better idea of this issue than simple "publications that aren't that old and are edited to keep them marketable", I'll propose a thought experiment:
Imagine we'd have kept editing Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to adapt, censor and euphemise it's heinous ideology to keep it publishable over the decades. There would obviously hardly be anything left of it's original content.
And mind, I am not at all constructing this example to suggest anything in that book would've been worth preserving for it's intrinsic value, I'm rather trying to point out the very opposite:
If current editions of this hateful crap & all it's adjacent publications and propaganda would still be printed and sold, but in a form so radically changed that they conform to the current Zeitgeist and moral values, there would soon be no way left to educate coming generations about how the third Reich and Nazism came about, and what ideologies we should guard against and prevent in the future.
Obviously, this thought experiment bears much more radical and ludicrous consequences than a gun in a kids movie or some casually racist or sexist lines in a 90s movie - but ultimately, what we do by "greenwashing" recent works of art has a very similar effect: we rob future generations of the possibility to comprehend our cultural and ideologic development, and to learn and understand how it came to be. We censor historical context to maximize current profits.
To give a better idea of this issue than simple "publications that aren't that old and are edited to keep them marketable", I'll propose a thought experiment:
Imagine we'd have kept editing Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to adapt, censor and euphemise it's heinous ideology to keep it publishable over the decades. There would obviously hardly be anything left of it's original content.
And mind, I am not at all constructing this example to suggest anything in that book would've been worth preserving for it's intrinsic value, I'm rather trying to point out the very opposite:
If current editions of this hateful crap & all it's adjacent publications and propaganda would still be printed and sold, but in a form so radically changed that they conform to the current Zeitgeist and moral values, there would soon be no way left to educate coming generations about how the third Reich and Nazism came about, and what ideologies we should guard against and prevent in the future.
Obviously, this thought experiment bears much more radical and ludicrous consequences than a gun in a kids movie or some casually racist or sexist lines in a 90s movie - but ultimately, what we do by "greenwashing" recent works of art has a very similar effect: we rob future generations of the possibility to comprehend our cultural and ideologic development, and to learn and understand how it came to be. We censor historical context to maximize current profits.