Heather Mac Donald describes the latest art-world insanity, this time at the Met. You may have to concentrate very very hard to follow it:
Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.
It’s the old “black bodies” fixation of the woke.
More:
It turns out that if a white artist depicts a black slave, he participates in subjugation himself. Such a depiction suggests, according to the Met, that slavery is the primordial condition of blacks. Elyse Nelson and Wendy Walters explain in their catalog introduction: the “enduring visual culture of abolition and emancipation” posits that “Black persons must first have been enslaved in order to be free.” A wall label in Fictions of Emancipation notes disapprovingly that Carpeaux’s interpretation of the “injustice of enslavement remains embodied in a bound woman.”
I can’t quote the entire article here, but it’s worth reading the whole thing to get the flavor of the “logic” by which the Met’s curators operate. Apparently, white people cannot possible have anything to say or to create about the horrors of slavery that does not implicate them in perpetuating those very horrors, even as they condemn them. White people, and certainly white artists, cannot absolve themselves of their guilt and sin, which consists of being white. And black people must constantly act as though every black person today continues to be a slavery victim in a way that also cannot be healed and cannot be ignored.
Curiously, all three Met officials responsible for this exhibit are themselves white: Sarah Lawrence (in this case a person, not a college), Elyse Nelson, and Max Hollein. Probably they are protecting their own jobs this way, because the art world apparently requires this sort of thing and in particular the destruction of any veneration or reverence for art of the past. In addition, they hired the help of a writer named Wendy Walters to assist them. Walters is apparently black or mixed race (it’s not totally clear; on this page her photo bears a slight resemblance to me when I was younger, but my assumption is that she is black). From an interview with Walters:
As a virtuosic display of artistic achievement, this bust [featured in the exhibit] is probably the best-known 19th-century sculpture of an enslaved Black figure. The composition was modeled after an unidentified woman whose features Carpeaux recorded in exquisite detail. But it is not a portrait of an individual person; rather, it depicts the Black figure as an eroticized and racialized “type.”
In the eye of the beholder…
From the Mac Donald article:
Walters’s closest involvement with art museums at that point had been limited to an obsession with white paint. White paint irritates Walters, especially on the “walls of educational spaces,” so she is writing a book on its “social and cultural implications,” as she put it in an interview.
That’s a fascinating pet peeve. I can’t quite imagine there’s a full-length book in it, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
More:
The Met’s next critique of Why Born Enslaved! erases in one stroke a foundational component of Western art: the nude. The garment of Carpeaux’s captive has fallen below one of her breasts. This partial nudity turns the work into racist soft porn, according to the Met. Assistant curator Nelson describes Why Born Enslaved! as “an eroticized object for visual consumption” that gives form to “colonialist fantasies about the physical possession and containment of black women’s bodies.” A wall text echoes Nelson’s outrage at what she calls “so much flesh.” Carpeaux’s bust allows us to accept that the “Black female body can still be collected and consumed, be gazed at, desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all.”
The curators’ willful ignorance is breathtaking. Since ancient Greece, the West’s greatest artists have portrayed the unclothed human body. This artistic lineage includes Lucas Cranach the Elder, Dürer, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Watteau, Boucher, Ingres, David, Géricault, Goya, Courbet, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Rodin, Klimt, Picasso, and Henry Moore, among thousands of other artists. Cancel the nude, and you cancel art itself. Nearly 100 percent of those nudes have been white. Their state of undress has been far more revealing, and often far more “eroticized,” than the single unsheathed breast in Why Born Enslaved!. If that one black breast teaches us that the black female body can still be “desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all,” those thousands of white breasts should carry that meaning, too. In fact, far from being a mark of contempt, the solo naked breast in Why Born Enslaved! places the work in the tradition of heroic rebellion, recalling, as it does, the naked double breasts of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
A wall text claims that the Carpeaux bust is part of the nineteenth century’s “representation, commodification, and fetishization of Black females and the disproportionate amount of attention aimed at their bodies.” This verbiage is pure black-studies boilerplate, unmoored from historical reality. There was actually little representation of “black females” and “their bodies” in the nineteenth or any previous century—unsurprisingly, given the racial demographics of Europe. The art-historical Left can’t get its story straight regarding the black nude. While the Met decries the “disproportionate” attention directed against the black female body, a feminist art historian blames racism for the “paucity of images of the black female nude in the history of Western ‘high’ art.” In reality, the representation of black females that did exist employed the opposite “binary” (to use academic jargon) more than the one lambasted by the Met: it was the white female who was nude and paired with a clothed black female, as in Manet’s Olympia or Félix Vallotton’s enigmatic La Blanche et la Noire.
It’s a rather long article; I’ve excerpted only a tiny part of it. It makes for depressing reading, but it’s well worth reading nonetheless.
