No event captures this anxious confusion of activism and criticism better than the time a group of artists descended upon the Whitney Museum during last year’s biennial and demanded, in a protest letter, for the destruction of a painting that morally offended them. Their issue wasn’t only with the painting but with the painter. Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” depicted Emmett Till in a whirring rictus of earth tones. It’s a vague, unsure, respectfully deferential work, different from Schutz’s bigger, more dazzlingly audacious stuff. One problem, according to the protesters, was that Schutz, as a white woman, had no business painting this young black martyr. This was not, the letter agued, her story.There have been arguments over whether Hermione, of the Harry Potter series, is black, accompanied by complaints that the most important black character is Kingsley Shacklebolt.
On the one hand, the politics of identity, in its cultural appropriation guise, says artist Dana Schutz has no right to depict someone of a minority race. This somehow takes away from the minority.
On the other hand, J. K. Rowling is pressured to treat the Harry Potter series like an employment opportunity requiring diversity in hires.
It can't be both. Write about one's own ethnicity and be accused of sinning against diversity. Write about other ethnicities and be charged with using, profiting, and stealing from members of a needy identity.
Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, pointing out that in the classroom a geology professor is not permitted to assert that the Earth is only 6000 years old, observed, "Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline."
A holder of a political position may not impose extraneous "constraints and considerations" on works of art or on those who create them.
We've experienced works of art bent to propaganda. They do not fare well.
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