[Vwoolf] WSJ: Great Art Doesn't Care About Fairness, Equality or Identity

[George Entenman]

Great Art Doesn’t Care About Fairness, Equality or Identity

Campbell, James. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New
York, N.Y]. 25 Sep 2021: A.13.

ProQuest document ID: 2576215487
Document URL: link
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://nclive.org.proxy036.nclive.org/cgi-bin/nclsm?url=http:**Asearch.proquest.com.proxy036.nclive.org*newspapers*great-art-doesnt-care-about-fairness-equality*docview*2576215487*se-2*accountid=10049__;Ly8vLy8vLz8!!KGKeukY!i_nSKYPNSj2QsIHLqtoeNMRjxJONxepD85EZZfa2yaae9lnwXWuDTrBZTbcbFWGxzn7fiycqtSm3$ >

One of the most charming statements ever made about the development of art
through the ages came from Virginia Woolf in 1924 in a talk at Cambridge
University. “On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Woolf
said. Her subject was the modernist movement. She was speaking two years
after the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s seemingly impenetrable poem “The Waste
Land.” James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” had appeared at the same time. Picasso
was already in his third or fourth phase of innovation. Stravinsky was
being booed off the stage in Paris. A year after she addressed the
students, Woolf herself published the impressionist novel “Mrs Dalloway” –
a book in which both author and protagonist are subject to changes in
“human character.”

To bring Woolf’s observation up to date, I suggest something like this:
“Round about October 2015, human character changed again.” Hardly as pithy
as the original, and there is flexibility in the date. But a change had
come. It was in October 2015 that the feminist intellectual Germaine Greer
was no-platformed at Cardiff University in the U.K. after having, as an
online petition put it, “demonstrated misogynistic views towards trans
women.” In the same month, world-wide attention was focused on Halloween
costumes at Yale, and terms like “trigger warning” and “safe space” entered
the vocabulary. Identity approval gained the upper hand over critical
approval in mainstream appreciation of art and letters. Literary magazines
underwent an unignorable shift, as inclusivity suddenly exerted dominance
over editorial decisions. If you are in the mood to argue, open any issue
of the New Yorker, and compare it with one from 20 years ago.

Woolf’s remark has been widely quoted, as have her allusions to Arnold
Bennett on the old side of the divide, and D.H. Lawrence on the new. But it
was in the next paragraph, seldom cited, that she set the little revolution
in context. “All human relations have shifted,” Woolf said, “those between
masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.” It doesn’t
take much wit to transpose these shifting connections to our own time,
introducing terms like privilege and equity, black and white, public and
police. Woolf went on: “And when human relations change there is at the
same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”

My concern is with the well-being of the last. There have always been
constraints on literary production. You need only look back at the “Lady
Chatterley’s Lover” trial in Britain in 1960, and the publication a year
later of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” in the U.S., to realize that we
have lived under different assumptions ever since about the right to speak
one’s mind and to broadcast what emerges from it. But the advances made in
the 1960s on behalf of freedom of expression went into reverse round about
2015. It is surely one of the strangest of recent cultural phenomena that,
whereas it was traditionally young radicals who fought to throw off the
shackles of censorship, it is their radical heirs who lead the campaign to
fasten them on again.

Often it is done in the name of retroactive justice, or of protecting
minority cultures from further plunder by the alleged beneficiaries of
colonialist privilege. It is hard to object to fairness, but fairness has
rarely been a friend to art. Like nature, art – of the kind made by the
people mentioned above – doesn’t care about fairness. If it tries to, the
outcome will probably be bad. Yet vague notions of reckoning and
representation dictate present-day conversations on the topic. Publishers,
editors, prize judges, members of awards panels – all are subject to the
doctrine of inclusion, whether they admit it or not. Evaluation is no
longer about the best book or the most talented artist. There isn’t a
judging panel in the Western world that would fail to react to a complaint
about a list being “too white” or “too male.” If you haven’t noticed, look
out for the next swath of MacArthur geniuses, or cast an eye over the
National Book Award short lists.

The change affects not only taste but also access. In September 2020 an
exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston due to tour Washington, London,
Boston, and beyond was canceled. At issue, as Peter Schjeldahl put it in
the New Yorker, were “some darkly comic paintings … which feature
cartoonish Ku Klux Klan figures.” Mr. Schjeldahl estimated Guston a “great
American artist,” but endorsed the closure “at a time when it can seem that
no symbol is safe from being politicized.” Isn’t it the job of the
incorruptible critic to put aesthetic worth over political whim? Would Mr.
Schjeldahl support the banishment of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein
if her novella “Melanctha” was suddenly suppressed on account of perceived
racist content?

On BBC television recently, the playwright Tom Stoppard, appearing somewhat
baffled, wrestled with these matters. Fifty years ago, he said, “the
freedom to say what you like, within the constraints of the law, was the
freedom on which all other freedoms rested.” Asked by his interviewer, “Is
it gone?” he answered flatly: “Yes.” He then reached for the more subtle
concept of self-cancellation. Even on a program like this, Mr. Stoppard
said, “I just say one casual thing and I’m screwed for the rest of my life.”

How did we get here? Round about October 2015, freedom of speech underwent
an attack of acute embarrassment. The process was abetted by the appeasing
tactics of editors and commentators at high-profile journals. At publishing
houses, “sensitivity readers” advise writers on what is appropriate to say
and what isn’t, pre-empting accusations of colonialist thinking before the
text is set free and runs the risk of harming the public: precisely the
same mentality that kept “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in legal confinement – a
safe space, indeed – until 1960.

Is there a way back? Yes. Deep down, you know quality when you see it.
Insist on the freedom to say so.
------------------------------

Mr. Campbell’s biography of James Baldwin, “Talking at the Gates,” was
reissued in a new edition in February.

-- 
George Entenman   https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://entenman.net__;!!KGKeukY!i_nSKYPNSj2QsIHLqtoeNMRjxJONxepD85EZZfa2yaae9lnwXWuDTrBZTbcbFWGxzn7fi54bG80g$  +1-919-636-5496
« Besta é tu se você não viver nesse mundo »
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://os-novos-baianos.musicas.mus.br/letras/122204/__;!!KGKeukY!i_nSKYPNSj2QsIHLqtoeNMRjxJONxepD85EZZfa2yaae9lnwXWuDTrBZTbcbFWGxzn7fiyqAWCvR$ >
جورج  من  قفصة
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20210926/5a5e5916/attachment-0001.html>