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

[Jane Marie Garrity]

Hi Madelyn, George, and all,
In light of this conversation, I wanted to send a link to a recent Atlantic article—“The New Puritans” (by Anne Applebaum)—because the discussion of cancel culture and academia and is very interesting, particularly the bit about pedagogical discomfort:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/__;!!KGKeukY!nelsWJ8aHqayogmOFgpH2kEYY_YV6UpMr-_srr2gXccZwxU6brEK4tweEt2h_rGLOEXPepN29jzt$ .

The article is too big to send as an attachment, so I hope you can access it.
Best to all—
Jane




Jane Garrity
Associate Professor of English
University of Colorado at Boulder
226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226
Jane.Garrity at Colorado.Edu<mailto:Jane.Garrity at Colorado.Edu>

On Sep 26, 2021, at 2:33 PM, Madelyn Detloff via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:

Thanks for sharing this, George. To me these issues are more complex than Campbell presents them and I’m finding myself increasingly frustrated with the way such issues are depicted in main stream media as a preoccupation of anti racist, feminist  and/or queer activists who are inevitably depicted as unthinking and reactionary (and apparently unable to appreciate “quality” ?) while in the meantime the right is performing their own brand of cancel culture on anyone who dares to take a knee at a football game or teach critical race theory, which is being outlawed (not deplatformed, not critiqued, literally outlawed) in certain parts of the US. I don’t know what the situation is in the UK, but here in the US left leaning thought is far more regulated and silenced than right wing,  even when the far right propagates blatantly misleading and debunked theories that needlessly  endanger lives and livelihoods.  No, I don’t think we should censor people and please don’t take my response here as advocating the suppression of free speech.   But I feel compelled to point out that the caricature of the snowflake identity policer tends to contribute to a smokescreen that serves to dampen critique of genuinely harmful and unjust  policies.  Woolf was indeed a fierce advocate of “intellectual liberty”  and she did worry that the press was not exactly  free, given the financial interests of any particular newspaper.  So here is a question about The Wall St. Journal’s interests to consider:  When did Germaine Greer become someone the WSJ considered a great artist?  And why? And why now? And what rhetorical  purpose does citing Woolf’s “charming” insight in the piece serve?  The same purpose as the robust and daring Eliot, Joyce, Miller, and  Lawrence (not to mention Stoppard)?  I don’t know if we all know quality when we see it.  Maybe we see the “quality” we are taught to see.  I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, but what  I do see at the moment  is a two dimensional diatribe that cites a few high modernists to bolster its intellectual ethos.

FWIW,
Madelyn



Sent from my iPhone: Please excuse auto-incorrections

On Sep 26, 2021, at 1:57 PM, George Entenman via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:



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.

--
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