Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

The issue shouldn't be the painting; artists should not be told to self-censor as tastelessness, "missing the mark" is always a risk when one undertakes a creative project; if there is a critique to be made at all it would have to do with the institution of the whitney and which pieces they are picking and why. If their selection committee has a pattern of ignoring black artists, that's a problem. Would have nothing to do with these convoluted,narrowly prescriptive conversations about cultural appropriation though

Tend to agree w Treeship

interesting pts by orientmammal

you're both getting fp'd

In her painting, Schutz has smeared Till’s face and made it unrecognizable, again. The streaks of paint crossing the canvas read like an aggressive rejoinder to Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that he be photographed. Mobley wanted those photographs to bear witness to the racist brutality inflicted on her son; instead Schutz has disrespected that act of dignity, by defacing them with her own creative way of seeing.

vs.

Dana Schutz, a blue-chip artist known for making popular pictures I have long regarded as George Grosz Lite, contributes three paintings, two of which are simply outstanding. The first, succinctly titled Elevator, is fittingly positioned opposite the museum lifts: it depicts its passengers involved in a mass eye-gouge, as one might find at a Richard Spencer rally. The second is called Open Casket. A powerful painterly reaction to the infamous 1955 funeral photograph of a disfigured Emmett Till, the canvas makes material the deep cuts and lacerations portrayed in the original photo by means of cardboard relief.

the latter came from the artnet review that predates the controversy. it's not a surprise that work can be radically reinterpreted depending on what you see / want to see in it, but it should be cautionary that we're certainly not dealing with anything cut-and-dried. and it's telling that if the critique is that by obscuring the subject of the work it disrespects his memory, the critiques itt that try to thread the needle condemn it on the basis of it not being meaningful /enough/, too trite. which is to say that if you need to find a reason to dislike it (because maybe you don't like the identity of the person who made it, or you really want to ally with someone who doesn't like it) you can always produce new meaning when talking about art which is always an abstract representation of reality. the first critique is extremely problematic in my eyes in that it condemns any attempt to artistically render reality as "defacing" it w/ the artist's own creative way of seeing. normally we recognize that art can reveal through abstraction truths about life but here we are supposed to believe that it is somehow obscuring the original photo (which as i think someone mentioned above it certainly is not doing - it is calling attention to the original photo).

sund4r ya, sharivari otm

also most on h1b visas are indians

there is some evidence that they are being low-balled but generally the indians i meet in the us have degrees in comp sci or engineering

Ha, I didn't know "blue chip artist" was a thing, tbh. Trying to imagine a "blue chip composer", lolling in my office.

I prefer "bitcoin artists"

In her statements about the piece, she does not show any understanding that her own expression echoes Carolyn Bryant’s expression

this is just willfully disingenuous imo and comparing this painting to Bryant's actions is as tacky and crass as whatever accusation the author is lodging against the artist

When I looked at the painting it reminded me of Francis Bacon.

Top 3 median income in USA

By ancestry[edit]
1.Indian American : $101,591[2]
2.Taiwanese American : $85,566[2]
3.Filipino American : $82,389[2]

Dominant oppressive 'white' culture? I think the people who say these things really haven't had any experience of white Americans outside the privileged affluent white America they themselves are from.

oh wow so weird that people from asian immigrant backgrounds, i.e. a background from which it is only possible to immigrate to the country if they have skills that would get them a well-paying job, have a high median income

racism can't be real

you're going to be gone in like the next 5 minutes so i hope you enjoyed your little trolling escapade, fuck boy

hmmm fp the poster making a simplistic argument about how privilege in the US cannot be easily reduced to ethnicity or the one who calls other posters "fuck boy" so hard to decide

yeah, sure, there's DEFINITELY a genuine sense of curiosity and inquisitiveness in om's argument, he's definitely not someone in total denial about racism in the U.S., and it definitely doesn't seem like he's about to tell us that whites are the truly oppressed group in America.

trolls who appear to be on the verge of posting explicit white nationalist arguments can get fucked, fuiud

otm

i don't find his argument particularly interesting but i don't think it's being made in bad faith. evaluating cross cultural pollination by how the various participants rank against each other in a race hierarchy is a dumb way of discussing art. white nationalism arguments != race in america is more complex than whites rules, minorities drool.

also i promised i'd stop getting involved in these kinds of arguments and over the last few years i've been pretty good about doing it so i'm going to bow out now.

i don't find his argument particularly interesting but i don't think it's being made in bad faith

it is being made in bad faith

you're going to be gone in like the next 5 minutes so i hope you enjoyed your little trolling escapade, fuck boy

― bomb diggy diggy diggy bomb diggy bomb (jim in vancouver),

For posting statistics of the median income of households in the U.S?

lol

Fuck mordy you're being a rube on this one

Please fp me tho, I have definitely done it to you before (think it was for apologia for, what turned out to be false, reports of Kurds ethnically cleansing Arabs in Syria)

I don't think Mordy applogized for ethnic cleansing

i can't find the thread but i think jim is more or less correct. i think part of my argument was skepticism at the reports (and i saw them analogously with reports of israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948) but also that during an ethnic sectarian war some level of disassociation - mandatory and voluntarily - should be expected and establishing ethnic borders might be a good thing for future discrete states. i can definitely see how someone might see that as apologia for ethnic cleansing tho i'd like to point out that ethnic cleansing was a euphemism invented by milosevic to mean genocide and i would never try to defend that in any way or from any angle.

That was worded oddly. You get the drift.

I don't really get why orientmammal is bringing up median incomes. The issue with this anti-appropriation ideology isn't that racism isn't real, it's that these rigid perspectives on issues of representation and the "right to narrate" certain subjects carry their own issues and seem to be of dubious political value anyway

In her painting, Schutz has smeared Till’s face and made it unrecognizable, again. The streaks of paint crossing the canvas read like an aggressive rejoinder to Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that he be photographed.

i read the opposite. the painting is abstracted and purposefully missing a lot of information information because it is not meant to replace the original image, it is meant to reference it. the title is a reference. the real world reaction is a reference. it can't replace the real world image (nothing could) and it doesn't seek to. that is not its purpose. a more photo-realistic depiction would usurp the emotions the viewer gets from the violence of the original image. as an abstract painting that repeatedly references the historical real world context of its source, it functions more like a hyperlink thumbnail.

i think it's not an interesting argument bc he's trying to argue whites are not doing the best of any group but even if they were who cares? why is this a useful framing for understanding and critiquing art? if indian americans are on average earning higher incomes than other groups does that mean that they shouldn't be allowed to make art about the white experience? does it mean whites /are/ allowed to make art about being indian americans but not about anyone else? obv average income shouldn't have anything to do w/ who gets to make what kinds of art. i guess in that sense it's a disingenuous argument but i see it more as a sloppy one - i assume he's trying to make the better argument but doing so by pointing out that weighing ethnic groups against each other is too complex to be reducible to a simple hierarchy - but it's a clumsy way of making that case.

Shakespeare wrote about places, that he, and please cover your ears, had never even been too. Not only that, he inhabited characters from places.... other than England. The gall of the man to simply find interest and curiosity in the foreign cultures he had heard about.

Also, he wrote for female characters. And even played the female characters on stage. Looking back, maybe the whole Shakespeare thing of conquering the English language with control and mastery not seen before or since was a mistake. If only the cultural appros were around at the time this art could've been stopped.

ok i take back my defense of orientmammal. you can troll ilx but to do so sloppily is unforgivable.

lol who is the new valued poster

i think orientmammal is pointing out that one indicator of power (ie one indicator of who is doing the oppression) is financial success

and some minority groups have achieved financial success, as in their median household income surpass that of european americans'

african-americans still have median household incomes that are below european americans tho so there's that

economic power is the most important power dynamic and variable in determining life outcomes, presenting this in the format "look at these asians, they've done better than whites, race based oppression doesn't exist" is not an argument worth engaging with at all

i witness anti-asian racism regularly in a city that is like 40% asian

what om is saying sounds more classist tbh which is v much alive in the us

anti-asian racism in vancouver has a slightly different origin, and that's based on the idea that rich chinese are driving up housing costs

FPed the regular having fun with a sock because "conquering the English language with control and mastery", gtfo, not even in jest

lol I'm not so sure it's a sock

It's raccoon tanuki tom d figured it out

it's a cock

a doodle doo

i think orientmammal is pointing out that one indicator of power (ie one indicator of who is doing the oppression) is financial success

yes truly white americans have long faced oppression from people of filipino heritage, it's exactly that and not in any way the opposite *barfs*

oh wow so weird that people from asian immigrant backgrounds, i.e. a background from which it is only possible to immigrate to the country if they have skills that would get them a well-paying job, have a high median income

― bomb diggy diggy diggy bomb diggy bomb (jim in vancouver), Friday, March 24, 2017 1:28 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

economic power is the most important power dynamic and variable in determining life outcomes, presenting this in the format "look at these asians, they've done better than whites, race based oppression doesn't exist" is not an argument worth engaging with at all

jim in vancouver otm here, obviously

Look at what they make u give

Look at what we do.... to ourselves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C8bvYlqy9A&sns=em

yRFg-MfRyNKUwucE to you too

i read the opposite. the painting is abstracted and purposefully missing a lot of information information because it is not meant to replace the original image, it is meant to reference it. the title is a reference. the real world reaction is a reference. it can't replace the real world image (nothing could) and it doesn't seek to. that is not its purpose. a more photo-realistic depiction would usurp the emotions the viewer gets from the violence of the original image. as an abstract painting that repeatedly references the historical real world context of its source, it functions more like a hyperlink thumbnail.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, March 24, 2017 2:25 PM (five hours ago)

quoted in appreciation

and i wanted to make some space for orientmammal cuz outspoken ilx conservative, cool! but the shit you have imported, om, it is terrible and it smells. pls to remove.

Everyone wants an outspoken conservative on here until they turn up and it's all just racist filth as we should've expected

i'm presently going with "oblivious", but yeah, the venn overlap is huge

https://n1.sdlcdn.com/imgs/a/n/m/Orient-Bond-Men-s-Casual-SDL270149903-1-72c7d.jpg