SHOULD WE CARE about any of this? Does what happens in institutions that mostly cater to cultural elites matter to the rest of us? Should we worry about what goes on at the Tate Modern, when we face much bigger problems – say, the threat of violent jihadism, or flagging economic growth, or the global retreat of democracy and the ascent of populist authoritarians in the US and across Europe, to name but a few?
The answer is, emphatically, yes.
Ideas that begin with elite, avant-garde institutions invariably trickle down to popular culture, then go on to impact our daily lives. If our politics seem to get more intolerant and illiberal by the day, if social alienation is on the rise, and if people are coarser to each other than ever before – these are all things that can be traced, at least in part, to the conquest of the arts by the New Philistines.
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An anonymous artist toiling in the USSR said of Socialist Realism, the official art theory and art form of the Soviet Union: ‘Impressionism is painting what you see, Expressionism is painting what you feel, and Socialist Realism is painting what you hear’ – that is, what Communist Party bosses told you to see, feel and think. In the West today there is of course no such censorship regime or official ideology of art; no government authority dares tell artists what to paint or how to think. The arts are as uninhibited by the state – and as richly funded by the public and private sectors – as they have ever been in human history.
Yet the Western art world in 2016 isn’t far off from Socialist Realism. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the legal status of culture in today’s liberal democracies and what went on in the Soviet Union are in anyway similar. We don’t send artists to the gulag for crossing cultural red lines. The only form of violent censorship seen in the West nowadays is exercised by the Islamist fanatics who punish blasphemous cartoonists in Europe.
Our artists and their critics and curators, moreover, think of themselves as dissidents. They rage against the powers that be, denounce the West’s injustices, blaspheme against sacred authority (except Islam, that is), piss on capitalism, and drop hammer blows on what little remains of bourgeois morality and aesthetic standards.
They still try their hardest to shock, too: British artist Jamie McCartney last year created ‘The Great Wall of Vagina’, plaster-casting 400 women’s sexual organs in Boulder, Colorado, to ‘quell anxieties about female body image’, as The Guardian’s write-up put it. Similarly, a London exhibit I attended while reporting this book – ‘Perform Gender: A Multidisciplinary Event Celebrating Art, Theatre, Queer Culture and Gender Equality’ – featured a mound of plaster women’s breasts piled on the gallery floor and menstrual pads taped to the walls.
These outré gestures have lost their capacity to shock, in part because they have become so predictable. The average fellow on the street doesn’t care, if he ever did, while the moralistic bourgeois, the intended target of such art, has simply ceased to exist. He was beaten and banished from the culture, or forbidden from passing judgement. It is the hard-left avant-garde and the identity politics hucksters who now dominate the elite institutions.
There is a fascinating paradox at work here. For millennia, cultural establishments drew boundaries and played gatekeeper against rebellious ideas. Now the avant-garde rebels do the same thing, because they are the establishment. Quite simply, they have won elite culture. The difference is that, to gain a foothold in the establishment now, one has to profess solidarity with the marginal (that really isn’t all that marginal) and enmity against some repressive mainstream (that really isn’t mainstream anymore).
And this lot is more dogmatic than any crusty Victorian snob.
Today’s identitarians traffic in plaster vaginas and twerking-as-protest, to be sure. But their closest ideological forebears are the Soviet critics: I mean in their ideological rigidness, in their conformism. Which Victorian, or which fuddy-duddy American WASP, ever subjugated art so thoroughly to political ends? Only the Soviets ever went so far, and even among them, there were a few more enlightened Marxist critics who allowed for art made by bourgeois reactionaries in the West. Such art, they argued, helped good Marxists understand the reactionary mind.
The New Philistines aren’t as forgiving. Their approach to the culture – as a battleground in the war of group identities – is now the default view in some of the most the important cultural institutions, and it is increasingly finding its way into popular culture, as well. Many people who don’t know who Michel Foucault was, or what queer theory is, and couldn’t care less, have nevertheless imbibed the same views.
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The general public long ago stopped looking for beauty in high culture. But it still has TV and the movies. The commercial pressures that govern these media mean that they are at least somewhat immune to the politicisation exerted by the New Philistines. (In fact, I dare say you are far more likely today to find genuinely mesmerising images and real beauty in big-budget Hollywood movies – think of, say, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar or his Dark Knight trilogy – than in any European arthouse.) And when it isn’t exactly beautiful or ennobling, even in its degraded forms, popular culture can still be enjoyable.
Yet the dictates of this new establishment, the nostrums generated in venues like Artforum, now increasingly shape popular culture and our response to it, as well. Open your newsfeed, and chances are you will immediately run across the new philistinism. You will learn that Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of a transgender woman in The Danish Girl is emblematic of ‘Hollywood’s cis problem’. So is Zoolander 2. That the British TV dramas Downton Abbey and Indian Summer ‘give colonialism a glamorous feel’, while the Tina Fey flick Whiskey Tango Foxtrot promotes ‘orientalism’. The recent Powerpuff Girls reboot is a ‘sucker punch to trans women’.
What happens in Artforum doesn’t stay in Artforum, and the result is that for many people in the West, all thinking about culture has been reduced to a single mental reflex: art is worthwhile if it validates the narratives, identities and feelings of ‘marginalised’ groups or, conversely, lays bare the injustices of the ‘mainstream’.
Thou Shalt Foreground and Celebrate the Cultural Products of Marginalised Groups. Thou Shalt Abhor Racism, Sexism, Homophobia and Cis-Bias in the Arts.
A Dolce & Gabbana line of hijabs and abayas catering to Muslim women is worthwhile, because it validates women ‘who walk city and suburban streets with their children and are called terrorists’ and addresses ‘media bias’ against such women, says the Huffington Post. An Australian dance project involving seven fat dancers is ‘inspiring’ because it ‘challenges the notion that our professional stages are prohibitive spaces for larger, fat dancers’ and sheds light on the inseparability of ‘body politics’ and creative practice, says Cosmopolitan.
A new Palestine Museum that, owing to management disputes inside the authoritarian Palestinian Authority, opened without any exhibit content is nevertheless valuable because it represents an ‘affirmative symbol’ for an ‘oppressed people’, says The Guardian. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed hails a photograph series, by Canadian artist J. J. Levine, in which one model appears in the same image as both a man and a woman. The photos are good, Buzzfeed says, because they ‘set out to convince us that gender is changeable’.
The Guardian takes Batman v. Superman to task because the gender relations in the film are not ‘all egalitarian’. The New Republic denounces the Gerard Butler action film London Has Fallen for its ‘retrograde attitudes’ and ‘jingoistic worldview’ in which America is basically noble and terrorists are evil (the horror!). Bitch magazine takes on the X-Files reboot, because in one episode the protagonist, Detective Mulder, misgenders a transgender character and because the episode ‘reinforces a common stereotype about trans women’.
What used to be seen as cultural exchange, intermingling and dynamism, moreover, is now derided as ‘cultural appropriation’ – another concept transferred from the realm of high-culture identity politics into everyday use.
Coldplay and Beyoncé are guilty of it, with the Huffington Post tut-tutting at their Indian-slum-themed ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ video: ‘Coldplay, y’all are British. India was under British occupation less than seventy years ago. So that makes the idea of you talking about “feeling drunk and high” over the felicitations of our children a million times worse. Respect our space.’ As for Bey: ‘It’s easy to play Bollywood Queen for a day; however, it is disrespectful and insensitive.’
The Washington Post devotes a long exposé to ‘How Iggy Azalea Mastered Her “Blaccent”’: ‘Many critics found it offensive that Azalea would appropriate an accent so clearly not hers.’ Everyday Feminism magazine offers readers a detailed ‘Feminist Guide to Being a Foodie Without Being Culturally Appropriative’: ‘Food is appropriated when people from the dominant culture – in the case of the US, white folks – start to fetishise or commercialise it, and when they hoard access to that particular food.’ Another Huffington Post writer agonises over the question: ‘Is My Yoga Cultural Appropriation? What to Do About It.’ Britain’s National Union of Students, meanwhile, passes a resolution proscribing ‘White Gay Men … Appropriating [sic] Black Women’. The identitarian revolution is devouring its children.
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Is it any wonder, then, that Americans and Europeans are increasingly embracing nationalist parties and illiberal movements – or why Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán and the like are making significant gains at the ballot box? The Balkanisation of Western culture into opposing identitarian camps was never going to stop with the plaster vaginas, bastardised Shakespeare, ‘brown’ vs. ‘white’ dance spaces and so on.
Having been told for decades that the promise of universal rights is a lie, that group identity is all there is to public life, that the Western canon is the preserve of Privileged Dead White Men, and that identitarian warfare is permanent, many in the West have taken up their own form of identity politics. There is logic to their demand for validation. When culture only rewards the assertion of group identity (black, female, queer etc.), the silent majority will want its slice of the identitarian pie. They can do identity politics, too: it’s called white nationalism.
The threat to liberalism is clear. Liberal democracy is only possible when citizens see each other as individuals possessed of equal dignity and universal rights, regardless of identitarian differences. Western culture has fostered those generous, humane sensibilities that are the bedrock of ordered liberty, calling forth the better angels of our nature. That culture is now under assault from identitarians of all stripes: from queer theorists as much from Donald Trump.
To repair our politics, we could do worse than to start by expecting better from our arts and culture.