Year of the Scavenger, Season of the Bitch
Recently, Brother Saul argued in these pages that many artists today are “stuck in the shock for the sake of being shocking mode“. And, certainly, many examples can be found. Yet, on the contrary, art critic Jerry Saltz thinks the art world has become too conservative and given to offense. Who is right and who will prevail?
Kara Walker’s “A subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.” People took offense to Jerry Saltz’s comments on this sculpture.
Okay… this is a bit unfair. I see two distinctions here: first off, Saul is talking about artists and Saltz is talking about the art audience for the most part. Secondly, there is art that offends “conservative” sensibilities, usually irreligious in some way, and art that upsets “progressive” sensibilities, usually to do with society’s treatment of marginalized groups. In the culture wars, the arts community usually sided with the former and now, perhaps, sides against the latter. So, it’s possible that, at the moment, artists are just upsetting the bejeezus out of both conservatives and progressives.
And it does seem to be a boom time for manufacturers of smelling salts, doesn’t it? I’ve sort of lost touch with who is upset with who for being too sexist, too feminist, too homophobic, too gay, too militantly atheist, too militantly religious, Islamophobic, Islamophilic, animal-hating, Lena Dunham, or ‘cis-gendered’. My social networking feed has become a painful reminder of how insensitive I am about nearly everything. I feel like Dorothy Parker: inseparable my nose and thumb!
Maybe the Season of the Bitch is upon us once again. These things seem to come in waves. The early 90s seemed to be particularly bad for “political correctness” back when the term meant something. Without sounding too much like a Hollywood version of a Vietnam vet (You don’t know, man! You weren’t there!) I remember watching heated fights about everything from movies to cultural terminology to toothpaste brands, particularly among my left-leaning friends. I suppose this might have been a product of the times- Bush Sr. was in office after a decade of Republican dominance and the left felt pretty alienated. They might have been aiming to change minds through the culture in hopes of having a later political impact. And, let’s be honest, it might have worked.
Actually, the culture wars of the early 90s seem like a repeat of the political fights of the early 70s, back when “politically correct” was first coined as an epithet for Communist Party members who couldn’t think outside of the party line. One of the things I notice is that these fights are most often intense internecine struggles on the left. Maybe it’s just easier to make an impact on, say Tom’s of Maine than Regnery Publishing, and so doing so feels more like an accomplishment. The art world is strongly left-leaning, so it would make sense that the same sort of fights would prevail there.
We’re a little off for a twenty-year cycle, but not much. It is an odd time for a renaissance of political bristling if Saltz is right. After all, the left has been more successful politically than they have been in decades. The culture is embracing many of their beliefs and the right seems to be in disarray about its goals and mandates. Yet, cultural shifts have tended at different points in history to reach these moments where they’re not happening as quickly as those pushing for them would like and frustration sets in. That’s when things get interesting. And maybe micro-offenses are a sort of proxy war, although hopefully not, as Philip Rieff believed, before the shooting begins.
What do you think, Leaguers?
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What do you think, Leaguers?
“Master Po Chang once set a pitcher between his two disciples, saying “Do not call it a pitcher, but tell me what it is.” One of them answered, “it cannot be called a piece of wood.” But Po Chang considered this answer beside the point, whereupon he asked the other the same question, and in reply he came forward, pushed the pitcher over, and walked away. As a result, Po Chang appointed this disciple his successor.”Report
I understand that the point of the story is to illustrate the importance of doing something rather than studying it or analyzing it, so the moral of the story is separating the successful disciple who experiences the pitcher rather than the unsuccessful one who describes the pitcher. So the successful disciple uses the pitcher, interacts with it, demonstrates what its purpose and function are. Doing is more important than knowing.
But, by knocking the pitcher over, the disciple has subverted the pitcher’s purpose. No longer does it contain a fluid (such as water or tea), but rather the fluid will pour out from it and it is rendered an empty vessel inert upon the floor and the liquid, formerly controlled and confined within the container’s walls, is now all over the floor and wasted. Had the disciple used the pitcher to pour a glass of water, I think the lesson would have been much better demonstrated and with substantially the same ease.
And more to the point, the master specifically tasked the disciples with describing the pitcher. The one who used the pitcher, even if incorrectly, did not fulfill the master’s instruction. The master did not say “Show me what it is,” he said “Tell me.” The successful disciple told the master nothing and a fairly high level of interpretative abstraction is needed to render the second disciple’s act communicative at all.Report
And more to the point, the master specifically tasked the disciples with describing the pitcher.
Did he tho?Report
“Do not call it a pitcher, but tell me what it is.”Report
A belly itcher?Report
I believe that is the point. Or at least that is the point that I found.
The distinction is not so much about experiencing vs describing, but about how best to describe the experience of something. Often, the best way to understand something is to have it fail in its purpose. The purpose of a pitcher is to hold water. You can likely never understand a pitcher better than when it is overturned, the water is no longer contained, and it is flowing everywhere.Report
The purpose of a pitcher is to convey water. By releasing it, he completes the action that filing the pitcher began.Report
“Do not call it a pitcher, but tell me what it is.”
A thrower. Someday it may learn to pitch.Report
Gotta nice curve tho.Report
Keep this sort of thing up, and you’re going to get in a lot of trouble over in the PRC, @mike-schilling !Report
We’re a little off for a twenty-year cycle
The PMRC hit its peak around 1985. That’s when Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, and John Denver (!!!) testified before congress.
We’re right on track.Report
I’ll bet Dee Snyder was able to buy a new house based on his appearance in front of congress.Report
I wrote him, you know.
I figured that a “We’re not gonna take it” video remixed to have a young Madrassa student beating up a grey-bearded Niedermeyer would be an excellent weapon in the War On Terra. I asked him to remake the video for a post-2001 world.
He never wrote me back.Report
Oh, you must be about my age… that was thirty years ago. Dangit though, PMRC bashing still feels current to me!!
I was thinking around 1992, when picketing Basic Instinct seemed to people like serious activism.Report
No, it was…. wait. Yes. That wasn’t 20 years ago. That was 30.Report
Feels like it was five…Report
I submit a referendum to make 1985 into something that happened 20 years ago.Report
Approved!Report
[write out a check payable to “Jaybird’s Temporal Contraction Bill PAC”]Report
Then try to convince the bank that a check dated 2004 is still valid.Report
Conversely, I’m okay with just deciding that the world ended in 1985 and the rest has been a weird dream.Report
Lost was an attempt to tell us what is really going on, man.Report
Politics, culture, art, music, sex, public square… doesn’t matter, really.
Given enough time and victories, the guardians of morality always turn to eat their own to continue atop their chain.Report
+1. I’ve bemoaned the GOP’s period purges of pretty conservative members as being insufficiently ideologically strident as bad for the party and bad for the country; I’m less familiar with but unsurprised to hear of similar dynamics on the left — and just as concerned, particularly if, as the OP suggests, it’s something happening in the world of the arts because the arts of today set the tone for the culture of tomorrow.Report
@burt-likko @tod-kelly
The difference being is that the people who are attacking Richard Prince (an artist mentioned in the Saltz article) and Jerry Saltz are not going to topple either from their positions (probably). The people who tweet and facebook against Saltz and Prince have no influence, no name, no money, and no power. There are also probably not that many of them. What they have are incredibly cheap communications platforms where their message can be amplified and given to a lot of people. But not necessarily the people with decision making powers.
The demographic truth is that there are much more people on the far-right in the United States than there are in the far-left. The far-left has announced very loudly that there is no difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties* and that the whole American political process is nothing but a scam. There are people out there who think Bernie Sanders is too conservative but they won’t achieve power because they would rather be leftier-than-thou and not get involved in politics.
This section of the left might have some influence on a few college campuses, some magazines that only they read, and other media outlets like Pacifica radio but nowhere else.
*I was a junior in college during the 2000 Presidential Election. I remember that the Nader supporters liked to taunt the Gore supporters for being “Demopublicans” or “Republicrats.” The Bush II supporters on campus were a very small and largely silent group of people.Report
That’s what the conventional wisdom used to be about the tea party.Report
The Tea Party was always part of the Republican Party. These people are not part of the art world in the same way.
They don’t own galleries, they are not on the staff or board of directors of museums, and can’t afford the prices that people normally pay for Richard Prince art. Richard Prince works can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even millions.
http://news.artnet.com/market/art-market-analysis-richard-prince-vs-christopher-wool-at-auction-15857
The dynamic is completely different. There are still a lot of gate keepers in the art world also barriers to entry like gallery owners who need to pay the rent on expensive prices of real estate, those Chelsea galleries don’t come cheap. I’ve seen artists try doing direct sales or the Deviant Art crowd but it tends to be for radically different stuff than the art world and media is interested in.Report
@burt-likko
I remember people thought that the tea-partiers were an astroturf kind of populism very early on.Report
I lose track of how many “post”s we prepend to “modern” these days.Report
I added so many that I accidentally looped all the way around and ended up fingerpainting mastodons on my wall in berry juice.Report
We only need one “post-” for mortem.Report
Considering that modern was what, the 1950’s?Report
In what? That’s way too late in philosophy, and a few decades too late in art (even if there was still some late modern stuff going on).Report
Literary modernism starts around the turn of the century and pretty much after 1930 or so, the literature is called “late modernist”. “Postmodernity” tends to refer to changes in viewpoint that happened in the 50s and 60s. But, there were people talking about “post-modern” in the 20s to refer to everything after WWI. Post-postmodernism started in the mid-late 90s. I’m going to say we’d be safe with three: post-post-postmodernism.Report
I remember the political correctness wars of the early 90s because I was an early adolescent and just starting to get into art and culture on my own. FWIW I also thought my early 20-something life would be like Singles and Reality Bites. In some ways it was but I have a theory that young adult culture has basically been continued since the early 1990s and we are a bit stuck. Today’s indie rock stars are not really that different from the alternative rock scene of the early 90s. What Lollapolloza has wrought is still around. SF has three major outdoor weekend music festivals (Hardly Strictly, Outsidelands, and Treasure Island). A lot of the Gen X early fashions are still around but in somewhat slimmer versions. Hipsters would not be out of place in 1992 largely.
That being said, I don’t think there is anything wrong with shocking art if done well. I like art that is truly and sincerely shocking because it compels thought on serious issues and makes people question their assumptions and biases on things. Kara Walker’s exhibit is brilliant in all ways from where it is staged to what it is and how to brings up the history of western beauty archetypes, colonialism, capitalism, slavery, profit, racism, and Orientalism and sexualizing the other. On the other hand, Paul McCarthy had an exhibit at the Armory in Summer 2013 called “WS” seemed to be shocking for the sake of shocking. “Oh you have Snow White performing oral sex on a tree while you prance around in a mask like a deranged Walt Disney.” My friends looked at this piece and said “that’s interesting….” Snow White performing sex on a tree was not the most extreme image from the exhibit. Popular entertainment also seems prone to a rather dull kind of shocking for the sake of shocking because it is like click-bait.
I think the Internet gives rise to a lot of people who are seemignly looking for things that really offend them and they want to tweet about it fast, early, and often. They are also willing to take things out of context. Most people who jumped down on Jerry Saltz, probably never got farther than thinking it is morally wrong for a white guy (by their guess) to comment on the work of an African-American woman.
Before the Internet, the communications were small. Now they exist in a roar from tens of thousands of twitters.
I read the Saltz article and googled the Richard Price Instagram prints/paintings. Price’s work reminded me of American Apparel ads from around 2002-2005. These ads were very controversial then and they are now. The AA ads were controversial because they looked like a lot of elicit pornography and featured very young woman. One ad I remember featured a woman who must have been between 18-20. She was on her knees in a wood paneled room with an expectant but dazed look in her eyes like she was about to give an unseen man a blowjob. The ad seemed to cast the model as a teenage runaway in a sketchy 1970s LA and she is given a place to stay and drugs in exchange for sex and shooting porn. We live in an age where stories about sex abuse and covered up sex-crimes are becoming increasingly frequent. There is the recent Rolling Stone shocker about how rape and sexual abuse were par for the course at U.Va. Dov Charney was known for his mistreatment of women for years. I can see how a person can just launch into reaction and think that that Price is praising Charney instead of critiquing him. I don’t think this is a great thought process and the left can have just as many stupid people as the right.
Why does this seemingly happen more on the Left? Perhaps because the left simply cares more about fighting against injustice, racism, sexism, and other prejudices but we disagree on the methods and techniques and how far to go. This can be seen in my Ferguson thread where I disagree with the effectiveness of looting as a response to the Grand Jury’s horrible decision. It is also my general experience that left protests and movements go more for inclusion and have a horrible time sticking on message. I was at the 2004 Protests against the Republican Convention in NYC. You had everyone from standard liberals (including elected politicians) to radical anarchists who want to turn the world into a pastoral commune. The general left view is that everyone needs to be given the right to speak even if what they say is radically off-message. The right is generally much better about being on-message and on-point.Report
Stealing people’s babies from a baby carriage (for the purposes of advertising) makes more people angry than stuntmen breaking into a house, tying the owners up, and frogmarching them to the door.
… The More You Know!Report
I think these fights also happen a lot more on the left because you get into these really strange identity fights about what it means to be X.
There were people who whom the Gay Rights movement simply meant being allowed to be openly homosexual while fully participating in the social and economic life of the United States. Gay people can be patriotic, hardworking Americans, respected in the professions, good parents, etc. There were people who argued against this kind of bourgeois homosexuality and wanted to keep homosexuality as a radical act meant to shock normal and decent society and upend how we think about everything. The mainstreaming variant won the day but I suspect that there are still radical seperatists out there.Report
‘Secondly, there is art that offends “conservative” sensibilities, usually irreligious in some way, and art that upsets “progressive” sensibilities, usually to do with society’s treatment of marginalized groups.’
I think this is an interesting point. I can’t say that I am shocked by Kara Walker’s art. I am intrigued by it and want to think about it but she does not shock me or make me go pearl clutching. I’m probably more likely to raise an eyebrow at something on t-shirt hell like this:
http://www.tshirthell.com/funny-shirts/slavery-gets-shit-done/
Though it might largely depend on the weater.Report
It was even more convoluted than that. People weren’t upset by her work, but by Saltz’s way of praising it. He said they should put it on a Macy’s Parade float as a reminder of the history of slavery. She’s African American and he’s white and they said his praise was racially insensitive.Report
If Saltz is Jewish than he should just remind people that his ancestors were slaves in the land of Egypt.
This gets us into the very tricky field of cultural appropriation. In certain quarters, cultural appropriation of minority cultures by the majority group is the big thing to get upset about these days. Saltz’s critics might have thought that as a white man that he had no business saying where Kara Walker should put her art even if he was praising it.Report
@rufus-f
I was going off on a tangent and a riff on myself. Not talking about the Saltz article 🙂Report
@leeesq
Well, I’ve seen plenty of gay dudes say something terribly racist and then say “I can’t be racist, I’m gay,” which seems like a pretty clueless thing to say.
I know this, if call-out culture is getting out of hand (and it is), folks who get defensive when they are called out remain a dime-a-dozen. Which is to say, the call-outs can get boring and predictable, but the “defensive privilege-bro” is just as dull.
And the ponderous dudebro cries out, “It’s almost like I can’t be a pretentious douchenozzle anymore!”
My heart fucking bleeds. No really. Totally. I can barely contain my pity for poor Mr. Saltz.
Honestly, the whole conversation is boring as heck.Report
@veronica-d, I was making a joke. People can interpret a particular work of art, movie, book, essay, or anything else however they feel like it. Alternative or misinterpretation has always been a career hazard of artists, intellectuals, scholars, philosophers, politicians, and clergy. That doesn’t make the alternative or misinterpretation from audience members necessarily correct. One of the serious downsides of the Internet is that people are to quick to jump on things rather than digest and reflect for a little before posting on twitter or Facebook or a blog. I’ve seen this done across the political spectrum. This leads to a serious of accusations and cross-accusations rather than actual dialog.Report
Only in America, folks.
That people can laugh about other people’s lives, when other people are in dire straits…Report
I actually just read an interview with Chris Rock where he talks about how he doesn’t do college shows anymore because the audience is too stifling these days.Report
Comedians need the folks throwing beer bottles. You can’t get an accurate read on your jokes unless folks are really willing to boo ya.Report
That’s not exactly his complaint. Here’s the quote from the article that I suspect Will is talking about:
http://www.thefire.org/chris-rock-explains-doesnt-want-perform-college-campuses/
Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.Report
A year or so ago, Wal-Mart did an ad campaign for their lay-a-way program featuring a black woman getting extremely excited about lay-a-way. I’m sitting there thinking, “um, I hope that the guys who did this at least know about Chris Rock…”Report
The third comment in the comment section got it right. Art audiences have not grown more conservative than they were in the past. Its just that the Internet gives incredibly publishing power to people offended by something. Its very easy to tweet or write a blog or Facebook post on why something was so terribly offensive these days. In the early 1990s, it was considerably more difficult to get people agitated about something because the Internet was in its infancy. At best you could write a letter to the editor or complain to like minded friends in hopes of starting a protest. Now, its really easy to stir up a controversy.Report
Those who can, do. Those who can’t build boats.Report