Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

more paintings ought to be destroyed tbh, a lot of paintings are bad

A lot of bad people too.

i've noticed a semi-recent tendency among ardent progressives to treat conflicts arising from conflicting principles as a distraction. as though supposedly-good principles are only as valid as their ability to aid in the attainment of unambiguously-good ends.

Uh...yes? Yes, exactly. In what way would it be humane or kind or would it help to build bridges between people who have and do experience injustice, to put my principles above their well-being? If I'm hurting someone that I claim to want to support, even if I'm "right" by some definition, I'm valuing my satisfaction against their point of view and I'm saying that I'm more important. Soooooo yes. I wouldn't END there and give up, if I think my principles are crucial to achieving something, but I would definitely pull back and stop trying to speak over ppl and be acknowledged as right. This is exactly what is meant by ally-ship, solidarity, anti-racism practice, etc.

Acting like that's SO WEIRD is just weird.

"profiting" seems an absurdly reductive description of art's function, but what i know

"profiting" may be an absurdly reductive description of art's function, whatever that may be, but it seems quite fitting in reference to the artist and the museum itself for reasons already discussed above. they were both receiving favorable press up until Black's letter, and favorable reviews in the art world often translates into actual profit but if u prefer a white woman artist ~raising her profile~ off of a black boy's death, i think the point still stands.

In what way would it be humane or kind or would it help to build bridges between people who have and do experience injustice, to put my principles above their well-being?

no matter how open-minded we attempt to be, we all ultimately have to decide - to judge - for ourselves where the truth lies, what things mean, which voices are worth heeding, and which are not. listening to knowledgeable others can aid in that, but we still must process, interpret, take the good and discard the bad. our principles and values can aid in this.

in fact, if you're unwilling to let your principles override/overrule the expressed ideas & wishes of those around you - even those who might seem to have some significant claim to righteous authority - then i think you're failing in your most fundamental responsibility as a human being. this isn't, i don't think, in any way at odds with a meaningful commitment to intersectionality.

Also this may sound kerazy but people with lots of kinds of privilege don't really need to have an opinion about EVERYTHING. It's okay to just be like, okay, that doesn't concern me, I neither agree or disagree. I am not even going to devote any mental capacity to that issue because it's so far outside of my business; that fact or thing can just exist without me, even secretly, thinking it's right or wrong.

Like idk this is a softball but people reclaiming derogatory terms (or really using them at all even if they're not, like, INTENTIONALLY reclaiming them). Okay. That is a thing that is none of my business. I think people should do what they want with the words that have been used to marginalize the group/s that they belong to. I don't even want to argue FOR it, because I'm not saying it's always an overall Good (although it could be!). I'm saying it's none of my business. Cool.

Could also apply to a bunch of difft issues in that letter imo.

Wasn't someone just saying yesterday "hey where did all the sjw peeps go??" Yo this shit is exhausting and also I hear outright racism and bigotry and xenophobia enough at my job so at home I like to chill and try to rebuild my shattered faith in humanity.

if u prefer a white woman artist ~raising her profile~ off of a black boy's death, i think the point still stands

i guess i'd like to think that there's - at least sometimes - more involved in the making of art than the profit motive and self-advancement (insert angelic glissando & birdies atwitter). but if you want to be all cold transactional about it, then fine. schutz and black both seem to have profited and advanced their relative social stations. everybody wins.

Lynching: Everybody wins.

Like wtf don't be a shithead.

Just think past the axe you're trying to grind for ONE SECOND and think about other people who are trying to tell you how they feel.

oh ffs. my point was that the knee-jerk reduction of other people's motives to pure self-interest isn't a good look.

and i get the feeling. i respect the feeling. but shouldn't always be the end of the discussion.

Also this may sound kerazy but people with lots of kinds of privilege don't really need to have an opinion about EVERYTHING

Dude, have you met a) ILX and b) contenderizer?

I am on team io here, but it's an odd venue and opponent, is all.

the knee-jerk reduction of other people's motives to pure self-interest isn't a good look

that seems like a simple enough point to make, maybe you should have said that the first time

would be great to have someone to help comb through the dozens of posts on here to find which person trying to explain Hannah Black's sentiments said that it should be "the end of the discussion" - maybe we can add their posts up and then add up the ones that pointed out that her argument NO MAEK SNESE and see if anybody comes out on top

True true, tbh I expected someone to call me out on reading ilx to restore my faith in humanity, I can't believe everyone just let that one go by.

fwiw i don't think art is purely transactional or all about profit, nah. one of the things i like about art is its ability to create new & surprising worlds. worlds, for example, that don't live by the transactional logics of our own. and maybe that or something similar is what Schutz was attempting, i dunno. but i do think Black is right to connect Shutz's artwork with a long and gross history of white people *profiting* off of black life. there's a very real material reality at play here.

anyway, i think Black's letter spells it out much better than i can. also the fact that black artists are continuing to add their names to the letter as well as defend it elsewhere speaks to a truth that imo shouldn't be so easily dismissed.

Rather than attacking or defending the motives of the artist, arguing whether they are pure or venal, it seems enough to look at the piece of art itself and decide whether it speaks clearly about its subject and if so, what it says about it. If the artist made a powerful and complex piece of art that moves people to a greater understanding of and empathy for what happened to Emmett Till, then who gives a damn if they profit from it; they did good work and good work should be rewarded.

Having seen only the reproduction of it on a computer screen, I can't pretend to have seen the work in any depth. But from what I could see, this particular appropriation of Till's image and by extension the appropriation of his suffering and death and what those meant to American blacks, carries no great power, conveys no empathy, and if anything it subtracts meaning from his death rather than adding any, by the very pointlessness of the painting. Therefore it makes sense to me that it could provoke anger at the piece for its misappropriation of a profound image, at the artist for making it, and to raise objections to the prestige it was given by hanging it in the Whitney.

which person trying to explain Hannah Black's sentiments said that it should be "the end of the discussion"

was a response to io, not hb. and it seems to me that this discussing is getting weirdly meta. i think hb made some poor arguments. beyond that, i have no real stake.

the context is the whitney biennial, which is one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world. being included is a huge boon to an artist's career and i don't think it's impugning anyone's motives to point that out. in any case, all artists need resources in order to create their work.

and speaking of context, i don't remember if it was discussed here but the last whitney biennial (in 2014) also had problems with race. out of 103 artists, only 9 were black and one of those was actually a fictional black woman created by a white male artist (donelle woolford/joe scanlon).

FWIW I think cis white dudes SHOULD have a real stake in these discussions, because if we don't try to engage - by listening and then trying to communicate respectfully, have the discussion, let it unfold, and be infinitely patient, as our forebears have effectively demanded of everybody else - then uh I guess if you're not wearing blackface then you must be "one of the good ones?" idk!!!

this discussion should have started out "weirdly meta" imho

the fact that black artists are continuing to add their names to the letter as well as defend it elsewhere speaks to a truth that imo shouldn't be so easily dismissed.

― stphone, Wednesday, March 22, 2017 6:11 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...from what I could see, this particular appropriation of Till's image and by extension the appropriation of his suffering and death and what those meant to American blacks, carries no great power, conveys no empathy, and if anything it subtracts meaning from his death rather than adding any, by the very pointlessness of the painting. Therefore it makes sense to me that it could provoke anger at the piece for its misappropriation of a profound image, at the artist for making it, and to raise objections to the prestige it was given by hanging it in the Whitney.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, March 22, 2017 6:12 PM (three minutes ago)

agree with all that. i don't feel 100% comfortable evaluating the painting as i haven't really seen it (as aimless says, just "the reproduction of it on a computer screen"), but it seems vacant & rather thoughtless to me, even crass. i can see why people might object & call for its removal from the show. i'm tempted to consign, tbh, not that my input matters or would help.

all i'm doing here is attempting to deal with the two thread-relevant points i initially quoted: hb's recommendation that the painting be destroyed, and her suggestion that white free speech is fundamentally self-abrogating. i think i finally got my head halfway around the second, as i indicated upthread in the sidebar about "natural rights". the first still sticks in my craw.

and if anything it subtracts meaning from his death rather than adding any, by the very pointlessness of the painting.

trying to wrap my head around this. how does it "subtract meaning" from his death? doesn't it draw more attention to the tragedy?

is the painting really pointless? like the artist made this in an ahistorical vacuum with no intended social/political context?

how does it "subtract meaning" from his death? doesn't it draw more attention to the tragedy?

The painting draws attention to Till's torture and death, but only via the medium of its created imagery. By mediating the viewer's attention through the lens of an altered, impersonal, and somewhat prettified image, it scrubs away the visceral horror and pathos of the original image. This does, in a sense, remove a certain amount of the meaning from the event, not permanently or absolutely, since that meaning is retrievable from other sources, but it does within the context of the painting and its immediate viewers.

As for what the point of the painting might be, look at it and see what point it has for you. The artist's intentions are irrelevant to whatever point the painting conveys on its own.

i think a white woman artist profiting off of a black boy's death

"profiting" seems an absurdly reductive description of art's function, but what i know

― Balðy Daudrs (contenderizer), Wednesday, March 22, 2017 7:44 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was also the charge the Reed College idiots made against Kimberly Pierce -- that she was a cis white woman "profiting" off trans people's pain. I guess if you see everything as a zero sum power game between factional identity groups, this would be a plausible way to look at works of art that deal with subjects outside the artist's own personal experience. It's pretty bleak though.

I don't have an issue with people seeing this particular painting as tasteless or opportunistic -- a failed work of art. But this notion that people need to "stay in their lane" becomes incredibly problematic when taken as a general principle.

*shits*

Speaking of ilx august 2014 it called and left a message it said leeeettttt mmmmmeeeeee ddddiiiiiieeeeee

And we should respect that

Also this may sound kerazy but people with lots of kinds of privilege don't really need to have an opinion about EVERYTHING. It's okay to just be like, okay, that doesn't concern me, I neither agree or disagree. I am not even going to devote any mental capacity to that issue because it's so far outside of my business; that fact or thing can just exist without me, even secretly, thinking it's right or wrong.

doesn't a lot of intersectionality/allyship stuff push in the opposite direction though, against any kind of "I don't need to have a take on whether this thing is right or wrong" position, because everyone is involved and complicit somehow, there's no "outside" white supremacy/other power relations?

e.g. this from one of the social media responses in that W magazine article linked to above:

Non-Black creatives: Black suffering is not ours to depict. We have work to do in celebrating and appreciating Blackness (by confronting our anti black biases and the history of our racial positions in society), and to support Black artists. And we have to be examining our complicity in the systems that stand in their way. Everything I'm saying rn goes double for my white / non-black POC peers @ art school: think about how white supremacy functions in your work and in your treatment of POC creatives around you. Think about how you uphold the culture that violent, anti-Black, appropriative art like this piece flourish in. Think about how unsafe you are to the POC around you

there's quite a bit of white people have a duty to share Hannah Black's letter stuff which doesn't seem to fit with having no opinion on this, I guess white ppl sharing the letter might say that this is not their opinion, that they're just signal-boosting black points of view, but this always seems kind of disingenuous, you are still using your judgement as to which black POVs you share, how you share them etc

(obv non of this means that it's a good idea for, say, white ppl to start pontificating on the rights and wrongs of poc reclaiming derogatory terms, but the implication of a lot of allyship stuff seems to be that "this could be good or bad, idk" is not a valid option?)

Re: that quote above. Describing the piece as "Anti-Black" is some massive bullshit

It feels mildly unfair to start bringing in responses from social media because that's always a great way to make anybody look dense by association.

"think about how unsafe you are to the POC around you" is deep into "ok let's pause for a moment kids, you're at fucking ART SCHOOL" territory for me. Use words more carefully and have just a little perspective.

The painting draws attention to Till's torture and death, but only via the medium of its created imagery. By mediating the viewer's attention through the lens of an altered, impersonal, and somewhat prettified image, it scrubs away the visceral horror and pathos of the original image

here i kind of disagree. maybe the above applies the painting as an object alone in a room, isolated from historical and current political context, a single transaction between art gallery and artist.

but that's not what we have in the real world. not right now. people aren't finding out about this by wandering into a cold gallery, they are finding out mostly by reading reactions to it. my first viewing of this art was a photo of a protester standing in front of it. which adds tons of context about the ramifications of showing this image (which is uglywhich is named "Open Casket" as a direct reference to Till's mother's decision to expose her son's corpse to the world to spark dialogue. i imagine the artist behind the painting took into consideration the backlash it would provoke and saw it as continuing that dialogue. i don't know, maybe this is giving her too much credit, but usually the artist behind a controversial work will have put some thought behind what they are doing.

fwiw i have no problems with the protesters, tho literally destroying works is nagl.

i had never seen the original image before GIS it last night. it was very shocking. i bet a lot of people will have the same experience as me, not knowing the source of the original image, reading about this new painting, googling the name Emmett Till, learning about this brutality.

it is kind of ironic that googling the name also brings up websites and articles from over the years by Time, NYTimes, PBS, History.com, USA Today, all of whom have "profited" from the original story.

Rather than attacking or defending the motives of the artist, arguing whether they are pure or venal, it seems enough to look at the piece of art itself and decide whether it speaks clearly about its subject and if so, what it says about it. If the artist made a powerful and complex piece of art that moves people to a greater understanding of and empathy for what happened to Emmett Till, then who gives a damn if they profit from it; they did good work and good work should be rewarded.

I don't know if I agree with this at all, as it pushes the debate into a matter of pure art criticism (with all the subjectivity/agree to disagree that this entails), and out of more structural critique. Good, well intentioned artists can still profit from US racial dynamics in ways that are unfair and indicative of larger problems; a work of art can be enormously moving and clear and still be wrapped up in these problems. Isn't that the story of 20th century American pop music, to a large degree?

It's the story of the American economy

some good discussion, I appreciate a lot of these posts

I am not even going to devote any mental capacity to that issue because it's so far outside of my business

I don't think this muggy sense of 'my business' dictating things works; not even refracting everything through a fixed identity you tie yourself to no matter how you feel about it, but judiciously turning away. If you know not to look then you've already made your judgement, borrowing someone else's. it's the classic deferring to authority problem. who gets to decide what people's business is?

also I don't believe in morality ok see you later

the artist has now asked for the painting to be taken down and is promising it will never be sold or displayed again

obviously doesn't believe in freedom of expression

I didn't see her promise to burn the work. She's probably going to keep it in her house and cackle at it from time to time.

I'm waiting for the turn from "take this painting down and destroy it" to "and hang one of my paintings instead." Will be genuinely shocked if it doesn't come.

or what if it was all a scripted, planned stunt

fake art news

I guess if you see everything as a zero sum power game between factional identity groups, this ["profiting" off the suffering of others] would be a plausible way to look at works of art that deal with subjects outside the artist's own personal experience. It's pretty bleak though.

...I don't have an issue with people seeing this particular painting as tasteless or opportunistic -- a failed work of art. But this notion that people need to "stay in their lane" becomes incredibly problematic when taken as a general principle.

― Treeship, Wednesday, March 22, 2017 9:41 PM (yesterday)

two good posts stitched impertinently as one. situational detailing aside, the ground contested is the ability to control the discourse, at least where certain subjects are concerned. i prickle when such muscles are flexed, but no matter how proudly i fluff my noble principles, i know deep down that my reaction can't be cleanly separated from my position in the structural equation. if i stood to gain from the recentering of power, i might see things differently. this admission in turn suggests that some really do have something to gain here, and generally speaking, i'd at least like to think i stood with them (most of the time, anyway). oh, but still those time-honored, status-quo-maintaining principles, jamming their virtuous little elbows in under my ribs. wypipo problems...

I guess if you see everything as a zero sum power game between factional identity groups, this ["profiting" off the suffering of others] would be a plausible way to look at works of art that deal with subjects outside the artist's own personal experience.

I think this makes some sense in the context of the art world--since there's literally limited space in high profile institutional exhibitions, and the artists chosen can make a leap in fame and asking price. Choosing a piece like the Till one by a white artist pretty much meant that a similarly-themed piece by an artist of color was not going to make it into the exhibition.

Good, well intentioned artists can still profit from US racial dynamics in ways that are unfair and indicative of larger problems

When the dynamics of the entire society you live in are inherently unfair, that unfairness is unavoidable by any means available to the individual. iow, asking the artist to solve the structural unfairness of society before allowing themselves to live that society and make a living is asking the impossible.

However, if an artist is going to mess around with imagery that directly derives from the most extreme aspects of that unfairness, it would seem reasonable to ask the artist to confront that issue vigorously and unmistakably. If this was the best the artist could do, then it was the best she could do, but her best was a failure and the Whitney judges also failed, by not recognizing that. The letter that ignited the brouhaha may not have been the best possible analysis of the problem, but the anger that motivated it seems well justified.

I agree that individual artists cannot solve structural inequality but the only way that structural inequality gets to be discussed in mainstream discourse is through examples; a letter decrying it as an abstract concept would gain little to no traction. So it's about keeping a larger debate happening.

Analysing how "vigorously and unmistakably" the artist tackled the issue imo reduces things to personal taste again, which is imo an unfortunate tendency that I've seen in a lot of discussions about these kinds of issues - both via people getting defensive that something they enjoy might not be pure and blameless, and (probably even worse) people only bringing up "cultural appropriation" when it's something they didn't like to begin with.

Cultural appropriation done well is great tho