We opened the New York Times last week, and were sadly unsurprised to read an article that began thusly:
This question has been at the heart of the controversy . . .
The last time The Scrapbook checked, destroying art was the province of fascists. But the propriety of destroying offending artworks—even well-meaning works that offend only because there are some eager to be offended—now seems to be an open question among the artsy set themselves.
The offending art debuted at the Whitney Biennial, which opened in New York in March: a painting titled “Open Casket,” by artist Dana Schutz. The work is based on the well-known photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated body, an image that helped ignite the modern civil rights movement. The painting is somewhat impressionistic, but clearly a somber and respectful statement about the powerful original.
The problem is not with the painting but with the painter. Dana Schutz, you see, is white. This is unacceptable to Hannah Black, a British artist and writer opposed to “the appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists.” She penned an open letter to the Whitney curators (a letter that, naturally, went viral) with the riff “The painting must go.” And she didn’t just mean from the exhibition: The letter begins with “the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed,” and goes on to declare that “white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”
Times critic Roberta Smith, to her credit, ultimately dismissed the idea that offending works of art be destroyed. In defending Schutz’s painting, Smith pointed out that some works of art vital to the civil rights movement had authors who were not African American—she gives as an example the Billie Holiday classic “Strange Fruit,” composed by a Jewish songwriter, Abel Meeropol, who, not unlike Schutz, was haunted by the photo of a lynching.
However, Smith is unwilling to take on Hannah Black’s contention that the original sin of whites constrains their rights of free speech and creative freedom. It seems the best that the Times critic can muster is to say that whites should be able to take on “an all-too-American subject, that of hateful, corrosive white racism.” Because, after all, “Who owns that?”
But what is most corrosive is the notion that one’s race limits and determines what one can do, what one can say, what one can perform, what one can paint. It’s a self-defeating notion, too: After all, who is it who has suffered most from restrictions based on race? Who has the most to gain from the elimination of such restrictions?
How sad that in an effort to seize exclusive rights to portrayals of the black experience, there are artists and writers who further the pernicious idea that race trumps art. Beauty. Ugliness. Kindness. Brutality. Love. Hate. Such is the stuff of the human condition. It’s also the stuff of art, no matter the race of the artist.
