Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

Daniel's post is why I think this could have been scripted because the cultural provocation and response is almost too neat and tidy, the painting doesn't accomplish anything by itself but the painting plus the letter has created a vibrant conversation.

I mean aesthetically sure tons of stuff I love is cultural appropriation. But if you buy into the concept, I think it's then inconsistent to distinguish between artists who are "good" or "bad" at it. It doesn't make any difference to the economic realities.

These people are Stalinist authoritarians, cultural appropriation does not exist, if you don't like mixing of cultures, you're a segregationist. Most of the time the term cultural appro isn't even accurate, it's often today used in place of the even more base and shallow "skin color appropriation".

True, if Bukharin had been able to push through a return to the NEP we wouldn't be having this whole conversation.

Where do the authoritarians draw there "appropriation" lines? Who in their narrow world is allowed to say anything about anybody? Is it purely down to something as trivial skin color? What about people who have done things people consider are bad. Is a Chinese person allowed to comment on the atrocities of Hitler? Can an African dare mention Vikings? Can a Turk play didgeridoo with aboriginal australians if one racist aboriginal doesn't like it, but the rest of his aboriginal community want the Turk to play the digeridoo with them?

Can an Alpha comment on the plight of the Beta male?

it's like you can't even dress up like a red indian any more

say what you like about authoritarians, but they're very sensitive to cultural power imbalances

Aren't traditions just commodities at heart?

everything's a commodity if you think about it

trads are community and family bonding rituals

http://www.yorkshireentertainment.co.uk/images/gaslight06.jpg

in art school they one of the big things they drill into your head is to make your art socially aware and to foster dialogues and all that crap when i just want to paint trippy lancscapes

I suppose what I meant was that we should be resisting such commodification. One of the annoying things about people who say they are 'of the Left' but rail against 'PC culture', and so on, is that they completely accept the Right's framing of the discussion.

One of the annoying things is that the Right's framing of "PC Culture" has made liberal criticism of lefty dogma seem suspect.

If you say 'PC Culture' with a straight face, your position on the left is pretty much garbage anyway.

yeah, but you can always just pick better words

what is more embarrassing - using the term PC Culture with a straight face or worrying about your "position on the left"?

Using the term 'PC culture'.

we have to respect all cultures now, pc culture and un-pc culture, pc culture said so

Who in their narrow world is allowed to say anything about anybody?

― orientmammal, Friday, March 24, 2017 7:34 AM (two hours ago)

this isn't always communicated well, but complaints about cultural appropriation depend on larger critiques of oppressive power imbalances. no one thinks that simply taking influence from other cultures is bad in itself. cultural appropriation becomes a real problem, however, when a dominant culture simultaneously exploits, distorts and silences the cultural traditions & expressions of an oppressed minority. less dramatically, there are questions of taste that factor in, the appropriateness of this or that appropriation, given the historical context, punching up vs. punching down, etc.

Ah it doesn't really tho

Anyway - I'm essentially agnostic on this. I don't really understand what's going on, not do I feel qualified to pronounce on it. I really enjoy reading the discussions about it here, though. So thanks for that.

Also, I don't understand the (new?) resistance to the idea of punching up/down. It's an old idea - there are texts for centuries where the servant is making jokes at the expense of the master, it's evident in the idea of the court jester. Chaplin didn't choose to play a tramp rather than a captain of industry because his clothes were better suited to the former. I'm not saying anyone here questions it, but it seems to be fashionable amongst the young Right to pooh-pooh the idea of punching up/down.

Who in their narrow world is allowed to say anything about anybody?

― orientmammal, Friday, March 24, 2017 7:34 AM (two hours ago)

this isn't always communicated well, but complaints about cultural appropriation depend on larger critiques of oppressive power imbalances. no one thinks that simply taking influence from other cultures is bad in itself. cultural appropriation becomes a real problem, however, when a dominant culture simultaneously exploits, distorts and silences the cultural traditions & expressions of an oppressed minority. less dramatically, there are questions of taste that factor in, the appropriateness of this or that appropriation, given the historical context, punching up vs. punching down, etc.

― Balðy Daudrs (contenderizer), Friday, March 24, 2017 4:46 PM (fourteen minutes ago)

This is patently not true though, as the cultural appropriation authaarrataans use it in simply every single case of cultural appro, whether it's wearing a Japan kimono, India sari, dreadlocks, whereever and whatever is going. This is the quite hilarious and telling thing about it - no one in say Japan thinks they are being oppressed by anyone. Or China. They laugh at this idea. And they believe it shows that deep down these cultural appro people actually believe they are superior to everyone in the world while on the outside trying to show the opposite.It is actually a projection of their sense of superiority and self centeredness, to truly think that everyone in the world is being oppressed by you. There is no issue of "dominant culture" it's just again this leftist thing of speaking on behalf of people who don't want and didn't ask you to speak for them.

Also, a fact: American Nigerians, Ghanaians, and Asians have a higher average income than white Americans. Where's the so called "systemic" oppression 'of color' there?

This is still a racist country -- economic success of some immigrant groups doesn't undo that -- but otherwise you're on the right track. "Cultural appropriation" is a well intentioned critical concept, designed to cultivate mindfulness of inequality, but in practice it often encourages white condescension, not respect. Sometimes, 'maybe, there is a financial issue woth appropriation, like Elvis being famous instead of Chuck Berry, and that's an issue, but in a general sense a white guy having dreadlocks isn't hurting anyone.