"The artist has the right, even the duty, to shock if he deems it necessary," said British writer Anthony Burgess. He was quite scandalous when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned the novel into a film in 1971. A Clockwork Orange (1962). We will return later to Burgess, free will, and seemingly arbitrary violence. Today, scandal is on the decline because the true powers that be have long since learned to defuse, assimilate, and monetize the artist's subversive pretensions. In fact, when an institution is scandalized to the point of bringing out the sword of censorship, as the Macba did with a work by Ines Doujak, at the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign (2015), or the art fair Arch with Political prisoners in contemporary Spain by Santiago Sierra, actually shows weakness and insecurity.