The Myth of Artistic Freedom (2017)
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Those who have been following the recent news from the art world may feel, as Hanno Rauterberg recently wrote in DIE ZEIT, "that one has to fear for artistic freedom." Much of the news in question has come from New York City. In spring, artist Hannah Black initiated a protest against the Whitney Biennial’s exhibition of a painting by Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016), that depicted the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a black youth whose gruesome 1955 murder helped inspire the civil rights movement, on the grounds of cultural appropriation and the exploitation of black pain.
Over the summer, the Guggenheim was the target of protests over its decision to exhibit several works that exploited animals, including a video by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu called Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003), which features eight pit bulls on eight treadmills, snarling and bristling with the palpable desire to rip each other apart. And at the beginning of December, a visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art named Mia Merrill circulated a petition, which collected more than 11,000 signatures, asking for the removal, or at least the recontextualization, of Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming (1938), arguing that the painting objectifies women and romanticizes the sexualization of children, and that the museum’s failure to acknowledge these problems affirms or even celebrates them.
A Legacy of Oppression
Many voices have risen to condemn the protestors and to laud the museums for refusing to listen to them or, in the case of the Guggenheim, which ultimately declined to show the controversial works, excoriating them for bowing to pressure. But it's worth taking a closer look. One has good reason to be wary of calls for censorship, no matter where they come from. In these cases however, the calls for censorship arise not from intolerance, hate, or prudishness, but from protestors who seek to address long and undeniable legacies of sexism, racism, and other forms of injustice in art, whether historical or contemporary, and in a contemporary art world that has done very little to correct them.
For this reason, we must be wary of too quickly and easily dismissing calls for justice in the art world, especially those that come not from authority – governments, museums or influential critics – but from the victims of it. In the three examples above, the protestors are either minorities (women and people of color) or speak for beings that cannot speak for themselves (animals).
Panic over Protests that Remain Powerless
Mia Merrill’s petition against Balthus’s painting, a historical rather than a contemporary work of art, seems to have inspired a particularly strong reaction: "Spare us the moral hysteria that threatens a new age of censorship," Rachel Cooke wrote in the Guardian. Cooke opposes the "moral hysteria" of the protestors, but at first glance, the headline could be interpreted to mean something very different. Balthus’s painting has not been censored. In fact, Merrill’s petition, with its more than 11,000 signatures, was dismissed by the Met out of hand. Is it not, in fact, more indicative of moral hysteria to claim that a few minority voices that have largely been dismissed by art institutions will lead to a police state in the art world? The press that Merrill’s petition received is actually more disturbing and dangerous than the "threat" to the painting itself.
Let’s take a closer look at the Balthus case. Thérèse Blanchard, a favorite model of the French artist born in 1908 as Balthasar Klossowski, was about 12 or 13 in 1938, when the painting was made. In Thérèse Dreaming, as in other paintings and photographs he made of her, the young girl is portrayed as both innocent and sexy: Her skirt rides up as she leans back, eyes closed, apparently heedless of the strip of white underwear exposed between her legs. Before her, a cat laps at a saucer of milk. Balthus himself denied anything sexual in these works, repeating until his death in 2001 that it was only prurient viewers who found such content in them.
There Are Good Reasons for Questioning the Canon
But what Balthus claims about his intentions is not relevant – nor is it the response of the viewer that is really at issue. In her petition, Merrill focused on her own "shock" at seeing the painting, but in this case, as at the Whitney and the Guggenheim, the problem is not the viewer’s discomfort, but the subject’s exploitation. This is the primary difference between these calls for censorship and other infamous cases, such as those that dogged Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ (1987), which depicted a plastic crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio (1978), in which Mapplethorpe portrayed sex acts from gay subcultures. Many people were offended by those works, but no one was harmed in the making of them. "At the end of the day, we’re talking about an artist who asked very young girls to come to his studio and take their clothes off" – including the daughters of his servants, who could hardly refuse, Merrill noted in an interview with the New York Times. "What does that do to the question of consent?"
Part of the reason for the strength of the reaction against Merrill’s petition is that to question Balthus is potentially to question a great number of works of art in the Western canon. Balthus’s pedophile gaze is an extreme example of a very familiar kind of exploitation: a person of entitlement (in this case, a renowned artist, a person of means, and a man) using his privilege to take advantage of a person who has no control over how she is portrayed or what happens to her body. How many works of art by men are founded on such an exploitation of women – how many works of art by whites feature such exploitation of people of color? If the answer is not in fact "a majority," it is probably something close to it.
The Entire Canon Becomes Problematic
In the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott objects to Merrill’s suggestion that, if the Met doesn’t want to remove the painting from view, it could recontextualize it with an updated label acknowledging the problematic aspects of the work. "But even that would be a concession too far," writes Kennicott: "By that standard, the museum might have to include hundreds, if not thousands, of warning labels, and not just for works made by heterosexual men with an erotic interest in girls." And if we question the propriety of exhibiting Balthus, writes Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, we must also question work by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Modigliani, Degas, Picasso, and many other great artists.
Though they don’t state it outright, Kennicott and Saltz’s implication – one shared by many other critics – is that this kind of reckoning would be simply ridiculous, disproportionate to the point of danger, a grave error. There is an alarming tendency for such controversies to "go global": witness the routine comparisons of Hannah Black to Hitler and Stalin that accompanied the debate over Dana Schutz, or Jonathan Jones of the Guardian’s comparison of Merrill to the Islamic State regarding the approach to works of art.
Are a Few New Labels Too Much to Ask For?
But in this case, the critics are justified in thinking that it is indeed the Western canon of art that is under attack, not just this one painting. However, the point that inevitably follows – that such a repudiation and reevaluation would be wildly out of proportion – is not true: The call to reject exploitation and to stop celebrating it under the guise of artistic freedom is only commensurate with the history of oppression that accompanied, justified, and was in turn justified by, these beautiful, masterful, interesting, important works of art. Are a few, or even a thousand, new wall labels really so much to ask?
Curators are free to reject such recontextualization of paintings as solutions to the problems raised by protestors. But they cannot reject the problems themselves. If we wish to display works of art that not only record but also celebrate exploitation, we must not allow their presence in our hallowed museums to justify or normalize it. Whether we agree with the protestors’ aims or not, we cannot deny that the potential for violence against art is nothing next to the brutal record of violence that has already been perpetrated against actual human beings.
Opposition to art – whether physical, in the case of the Confederate monuments that have been brought down across the southern United States, or intellectual, in the case of the demands to remove works from view or to recontextualize them in a critical way – is nothing to take lightly. But there is an argument for turning upside-down our entire approach to the canon of Western art, just as there is an argument for destroying every monument to the Confederacy that exists in the United States: They do not merely represent a historical oppression, they enact a present one.
The Myth of Artistic Freedom
In focusing on the fact that Balthus’s painting is from another era, this is precisely what the Met’s response to Merrill’s petition fails to acknowledge. That even though the work may be from another time, the exploitation it celebrates is very much of our own. That’s why Merrill’s petition also references the #MeToo movement.
Kenneth Weine, a museum spokesman, said that, "moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present." Weine’s statement represents another problem in the reaction to Merrill’s petition: the relentless focus on "conversation" and "dialogue" about difficult art as an end in itself. What this means is that while it is fine to discuss sexism, racism, the abuse of animals and other forms of injustice, it’s not acceptable to actually do anything about them. At what point does freedom of speech become failure of action?
Rauterberg argues that the problem in these debates is precisely that people fail to understand that art is merely an idea, rather than a decisive act. "This differentiation, however, between fiction and reality, is being lost," he wrote. For a viewer like Rauterberg, who has not experienced the kind of diminishment and loss of subjectivity that is routine for women, a painting like Thérèse Dreaming may be a kind of fiction, something theoretical. But those who, in looking at that painting, identify more with the subject than with the painter, understand that the mere representation of an act can also recapitulate that act.
Art Isn’t Just an Idea or Fiction
The important distinction is therefore not between "imaginary" or "real," but rather – as Ginia Bellafante put it in one of the few articles to deal with the controversy in a level-headed manner – "between art that imagines or documents exploitation and art that is actively engaged in producing it." Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other does not represent abuse – it is abuse. To exhibit the video produced from the performance is to condone and thus perpetuate that abuse. It could be argued that Thérèse Dreaming is also a document of exploitation: not the physical exploitation of an animal, but the sexual exploitation of a child who was too young to understand what was being asked of her, and too female to be allowed to object to it, even if she did.
Part of the problem is that the so-called artistic freedom that critics like Rauterberg so passionately defend has never actually existed. Under the letter of the law, artists are allowed to express themselves however they see fit. But what such legal protections do not acknowledge and cannot repair is that, until recently, such freedom was nearly the exclusive province of white men. The abstract ideal of artistic freedom is little more than a liberal chimera in a culture that denies women and other marginalized groups the practical artistic freedom that will only be possible when they are full and equal participants in the art world.
In a 1989 poster, the feminist art-vigilantes The Guerrilla Girls famously asked: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" – noting that "less than 5 percent of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female." They updated their statistics in 2011: less than 4 percent are female artists, and 76 percent are female nudes: "Fewer women artists, more naked males. Is this progress?" they asked. "Guess we can’t put our masks away yet." A recently published study shows that women still make considerably less money with the art they create than men – almost 50 percent less – and it receives considerably less attention and takes up considerably less space in museums.
Artistic Freedom as the Privilege of the Few
Why are our art critics so much more incensed about the potential curtailment of a white male artist’s artistic freedom than the very real lack of it suffered by literally innumerable marginalized artists? Is the continued absence of art by women – not only after #metoo, but after decades of feminist activism – not a much more scandalous act of censorship than the one proposed by Merrill? When these critics – incidentally overwhelmingly white and male ones – defend artistic freedom, what they actually defend is its current distribution.
It would be nice to live in the world that these critics seem to think they are living in, one in which we can debate works of art abstractly and dispassionately, because the oppressive conditions of their creation, distribution, and content are mere historical artifacts. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in, and sometimes we fail to realize that our own experiences are not universal – and that what may seem merely provocative to one person might actually be demeaning and oppressive to another. As long as the exploitation at the heart of Balthus’s painting continues to be an everyday reality for women, the painting – whatever its merits – will serve to reinforce that reality.
"The protective frame of the museum is a matter of the past," Rauterberg laments in his article. In ignoring protests like Merrill’s, however, museums frame creative and intellectual freedom not as the right of all but as the privilege of the few. Until that changes, true artistic freedom will remain a myth.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2oX6UIW