Alexander Adams
September/October 2017
New Order
An Allegory
Once upon a time there was a society which made objects that had meaning and that people enjoyed looking at. The society put these objects in museums so that more people could enjoy them. Then an elite of that society decided that the objects did not matter so much but the skin colour and reproductive organs of the object-makers mattered a lot. Displaying objects made by people of certain skin colours or possessing certain reproductive organs pleased other people and made them feel virtuous. The elite counted the numbers of museum objects made by people of certain skin colours or possessing certain reproductive organs. These statistics measured how virtuous the society was compared to other societies. More and more people were encouraged to visit the objects to display their virtue or to acquire virtue. The elite wanted all the people to visit the objects even though some people preferred to do other things. When the elite persuaded people of certain skin colours or possessing only small amounts of money to visit the objects, the elite said it made society better when actually all it did was make the elite feel less guilty. It was known that most people liked meaningful or beautiful objects but it was decided by the elite that the virtuous statistics were more important. The elite decided that people’s unhappiness about the elite using people’s money to buy for museum objects that were neither meaningful nor beautiful was caused by people not being virtuous enough. Some people thought the idea of virtuous statistics was silly but most of them did not say that because it would have been rude.
Murder Machines
This year a sculpture by Sam Durant entitled Scaffold was erected in a sculpture park managed by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The wooden sculpture juxtaposed elements of playground-activity structures and gallows. One minor aspect of Scaffold referred to the hanging of Dakota Native Americans in 1862 as part of struggles between the Dakota Nation and the American government. That reference had been missed until it was pointed out, at which time a campaign to remove the sculpture was begun by the Dakota. “This is a murder machine that killed our people because we were hungry,” said a member of the Dakota Nation, equating Scaffold with an actual gallows that hanged members of the Dakota. In May the museum destroyed Scaffold and the artist renounced his work.
This year there was a protest by some black artists against the display at the Whitney Biennial of a painting of murdered black activist Emmett Till. Black activists lobbied to have the painting by Dana Schutz, a white artist, removed as offensive and hurtful. “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” said one protestor, claiming ownership and authority over the representation of a historical event.
In these two cases, activists claimed ownership over aspects of history in order to suppress art works. In one case it resulted in the destruction of art. Pressure groups have noticed the weakness of curators, administrators and politicians and their unwillingness to protect art from censorship. Sympathetic towards notions of social justice, administrators sometimes submit to emotional blackmail by groups which demand censorship.
Delacroix did not have to be Greek to paint Massacre at Chios; Sargent did not have to be either British or a combatant to paint Gassed; Callot did not seek approval of relatives of hanged men before publishing prints. These are iconic touchstones for appreciating events in world history, yet according to supporters of identity politics such art should not be made now. Groups should own their histories, curb free speech and suppress or destroy art deemed offensive. There was a time, not so long ago, when we derided Soviet agronomists’ dismissal of Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois” and Nazi ministers damning branches of science as “Jewish”, yet today art can be “too white and male”.
Identarianism
Identarianism (or identity politics) is a political belief system which has had huge influence over politics in Western countries for the last three decades. It sprang from New Left principles developed in the wake of failed attempts at revolution in 1968 and revelation of the atrocities and failures of Communism. It seeks to advance social justice and enforce relative equality through incremental advances in social capital of supposedly disadvantaged subsets such as women, ethnic and sexual minorities and so forth. There is commensurately punitive retraction of rights from supposedly advantaged groups such as men, white people and so forth.
Identarianism is essentially a political manifestation of Post-Modernism which acts by harnessing factional interests. In the same way Marxism co-opted movements of emancipation, workers’ rights, anti-clericism, anti-colonialism and so on, Identarianism gathers factional interests under the umbrella of Post-Modernist relativism by promising social justice.
Here are some tenets of Identarianism:
1. Every person has involuntary affiliations from birth (ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, physical ability, family religion, etc.) and shares a common identity with other members of his or her subsets. These identity subsets are not generally mutable. (Mutability of gender and sexual orientation are controversial issues within Identarianism.) Subset identities necessarily form a strong part in determining one’s outlook. People do not have universal qualities (as in the Enlightenment model of universal rights) but have compound qualities derived from their subset identities. Equality is therefore relative not universal.
2. Subsets are subject to pervasive networks of personal, institutional and social prejudice, discrimination and disadvantage. This oppression is collective and endemic.
3. Social, legal, political and financial power – and its converse – is heritable.
4. Privilege and guilt is collective and heritable.
5. Subset members have a right to demand redress or reparations for collective discrimination and oppression by oppressing subset(s).
6. Subset members can work together to promote the fulfilment of their potential (called “equity”; see below) and to reduce power/privilege of other subsets. Subsets can work together to form tactical alliances in order to achieve social and legal change. Dialogue is power negotiation between inherently unequal subsets; compromise is acceptance of oppression.
7. Identities are formed of multiple subsets and these overlapping definitions are described as examples of intersectionality.
8. Some subsets experience more discrimination (or privilege) than others. This is (relatively) quantifiable. An individual’s position is determined by his or her specific intersectionality.
9. Culture and language are sources of power/oppression and should be used to enact social justice. Social justice is either a) the relative equalisation of power/privilege of subsets or b) realisation of potential in unequal ways (see below).
10. One cannot understand or judge members of another subset. A subset culture is unique and the experience of its members is unfathomable. Only members of a subset have the right to speak about the experience of members of that subset.
11. It is injurious for a person to use or appropriate culture, history or language of another’s subset.
12. One best understands – and is understood by – members of one’s own subsets. Each subset has a shared culture. It is not expected or encouraged for a person to form voluntary personal affiliations across subset boundaries except for purposes of temporary political action. Strong affiliation for another’s subset is akin to appropriation.
13. Exercise of imagination, empathy and fantasy are opportunities for potential (even unconscious) prejudice, misapprehension and distortion to occur and should therefore be avoided.
14. Any of the rules above can be broken to promote a subset, prove the truth of identity politics or to otherwise further the cause of Identarianism.
An example of rule 14 modifying rule 11 is that it would be fair for a black person to appropriate white Western culture because the black man is relatively disadvantaged. If a white man appropriates black culture this is an act of oppression. If a black man claims he is interested only in black art this is expected (rule 12). If a white man claims he is only interested in art by white men this is narrow-minded bigotry.
Never Fast Enough, Never Far Enough
Identarianism is not a fuzzy warm principle of being nice to people and treating others equally – quite the contrary. It demands people be treated unequally. It divides people into subsets, classifies individuals’ worth minutely with matrices of privilege and social status, undercuts individuals’ autonomy and discourages (even curtails) individuals’ forming personal taste. It is incompatible with humanistic Enlightenment values. It accommodates factional
Look at the groups removing “politically objectionable” statues. Look at university-student mobs which shout down or assault public speakers. Look at student bodies which demand “safe spaces” and ban discussion as “hate speech”. This is Identarianism in its purest form, where it expresses the mentality and emotional tenor of even those who consider themselves moderates. Most activists do not fully understand the origins, tenets and implications of their ideology. No matter. Consider the Cultural Revolution, when commissars harnessed the anger of young idealists to instigate an orgy of righteous cultural destruction. Identarianism is not simply another way of viewing society, which can co-exist with other outlooks; it is an entity which has evolved to suppress opposition and destroy cultural expression.
Identarians do not have much time for old art because a) its artists and subjects do not reflect the demographic profile of today’s society; b) it rarely has a clear “socially progressive” message; and c) it resists co-option to Identarian aims. Beyond justifying the general Marxist declaration that spousal portraits and paintings of livestock and land constitute evidence of the capital classes recording possession of chattels, old art cannot be used to further social justice. This is, to be fair, an accurate assessment in purely political terms if one has didactic aims and no aesthetic, cultural or historical curiosity. If I were a curator in the Identarian movement, I would be consigning old art to the vaults and lobbying for deaccession rights.
To Identarians, when change seems so gradual and the historic burden so outrageous, implementation of affirmative action (including – unstated – quotas) seems not only desirable but necessary and those who will be disadvantaged by quotas are unavoidable collateral damage. Individuals who advocate caution are revanchists. For a firebrand who believes he or she is on the right side of history, change cannot come fast enough or go far enough.
New Criticism and Post-Modernism
To understand why Identarianism has such purchase inside the art world one needs to understand New Criticism.
New Criticism in art history is an outgrowth of Marxist analysis of culture. It produces socio-economic critiques of art production/reception and is driven by theory in the fields of women’s/black/queer/post-colonialist studies. New Criticism is leftist, more theoretical than historical and underpinned by French post-structuralist philosophy. New Criticism is at the core of most art-history university education, existing uneasily alongside traditional art history. A common strand in New Criticism is distrust of aesthetics, formalist analysis of art and anything that could be construed as connoisseurship. New Criticism, Post-Modernism and identity politics began in the late 1960s and developed in parallel and in symbiosis.
New Criticism is predicated upon the fracturing of the consensus in Western values. Post-Modernism states that an infinite variety of perspectives and interpretations means consensus is both impossible and irrelevant. (“All values are relative” is an unqualified assertion of an unconditional truth which negates itself, but never mind.) Where all values are relative there can be no society-wide standards for appreciation and evaluation of art; hence the development of multiple strands within New Criticism, each with different concerns, languages and value systems. Whereas Modernist art was judged carefully in terms of its visual content, Post-Modernist art exists in a zone free of all formalist analysis; its appearance is not only inscrutable and illegible but actually arbitrary and meaningless in visual terms.
Nowadays many art critics, curators and theoreticians do not enjoy art; they do not like looking at art or discussing how it operates visually; New Criticism says that this is unimportant as only contextual power structures around art production and reception matter. This ideology breeds theoreticians with a positive disdain towards the visual qualities of art. New Criticism and Identarianism are tools for identification of power structures and are antipathetic towards aesthetic appreciation, ambiguity, personal reflection, dissent, individualism and even pleasure. Pleasure in appreciation of form and technique, interest in creative decisions, appreciation of beauty, wonder at the experience of being transported into a different world or era, delight in discovery, joy through empathetic engagement – all these are alien to New Criticism and Identarianism.
What Art Is
While New Criticism can provide insights into aspects of art production/reception, it never comes close to describing (let alone explaining) our responses to art as a whole or delineating why we respond more strongly to certain objects rather than to other similar objects. Syncretic criticism on a grounding of formalist analysis, traditional art