More on the Tension Between Art and Political Correctness

The New York Times rehashed the career of American painter Andrew Wyeth on Feb. 3, 2022, using the transfer of a couple of small islands off the coast of Maine from Wyeth family foundations to Colby College as an excuse. 

 One paragraph in particular jumped out at me.

 "In a 2017 assessment of his paintings of Black people in the Brandywine Valley, the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw questioned the power imbalance in his representation of race, and also pointed out that in a handful of paintings he had darkened the skin tone of his white model, Helga Testorf, a Chadds Ford neighbor who posed for him in secret for more than a decade." 

 “His nude images of black women embody the power imbalance that characterized interracial interactions in the Brandywine Valley throughout the 20th century,” Shaw wrote in 2017, arguing that the “subordinate positions (of his models) as poor, black and working class enabled the artist to exert a great deal of control over how he imaged them on paper or canvas.” 

 To Ms. Shaw, the New York Times said, the visual representation of race in Wyeth’s work raised the question of how much leeway white artists should have in depicting subjects of another race. Is all fair in the name of art?

 The "power imbalance," and just what leeway artists (presumably not just those who are white) should have in depicting subjects of another race? What's at issue here is political correctness and cultural misappropriation. Sound familiar? 

 One wonders, should we go back through the history of Western art, identifying all the painting where an artist had some sort of "power imbalance" over a subject and/or where he or she depicted someone of a different race or culture and burn them? Or should we continue to evaluate them first and foremost on aesthetic considerations? We are, after all, talking about art.

 To be fair to Ms Shaw, the Times reported that in 2017 "she took pains to note that her work wasn’t intended to injure Wyeth’s reputation, but rather to layer it. "I love Wyeth,' she said. 'I think we can find artists to be complicated and frustrating and disappointing in some ways and still love the work.'" 

 Well, maybe Wyeth also wasn't trying to injure the Blacks depicted in his paintings, just lawyer them.

 I'll leave it up to readers to decide, but these are important issues in the current "cancel culture" mood of certain U.S. sociopolitical actors.

The World of Ballet: Changes Coming to San Francisco

 Today's news: the San Francisco Ballet, the oldest ballet company in the U.S., has selected Tamara Rojo as its first woman artistic director, effective at the end of this year. But, given the long lead time needed for developing programing, just what she has in mind for the company won't be fully evident until the 2023-24 season.

According to a New York Times article, Rojo was rather vague on what that might be, saying only that she was interested in keeping ballet "relevant to a younger audience that sometimes has new values and principles" and that she would be instituting a system of "checks and balances" when it came to casting and dancer evaluations. The latter may be necessary in part because Rojo's husband, Isaac Hernandez, recently rejoined the SF Ballet as a principal dancer, providing Rojo with a built-in conflict of interest. The search committee asked "difficult questions" about that, the NYT said, but not so difficult as to rule Rojo out. 

Rojo also told the NYT that along with focusing on female choreographers, she would bring "new voices to interpret the classics."

In what was probably a foretaste of what is to come on that front, in her current position as head of the English National Ballet (not to be confused with the Royal Ballet), Rojo mounted a reimagined version of "Giselle" created by Akram Khan, a Londoner born to a family from Bangladesh. The choreography was infused with modern dance and Indian dance elements and the story was reset in what has been described as "present-day dystopia."  Instead of peasants, there are disposed migrant workers labeled "the Outcasts" and the underworld is full of "ghosts of factory workers who seek revenge for the wrongs done to them in life" instead of the traditional Willis -- the spirits of maidens betrayed by their lovers dancing in floaty white dresses.

What then will SF ballet audiences see?  Swan Lake set in a Superfund site? Or maybe Coppelia in a highly automated factory with a bunch of out-of-control robots astonishing the visiting children? 

Sunnie Evers, co-chair of the SF Ballet's search committee, told the NYT that the company initially contacted over 200 possible candidates as possible replacements for Helgi Tomasson, who has been the SF Ballet's artistic director since 1985. By last July, when the list had been narrowed down to eight: "we had three people of color and three women in that round," Evers said, adding "there is a lot of talk about ballet being dominated by white men, so I am thrilled we were not."

Well, that's pretty much where it's at these days if one spends much time reading the NYT.  When it comes to the arts, just who created something -- their gender, color and sexual orientation -- is more important than what actually gets created. In the case of Khan's "Giselle," one could argue it was a case of cultural misappropriation, but that is apparently only the case in a reverse situation -- a white artist making use of something stemming from a non-white culture. The Western canon, if not cancelled, is up for grabs.

My Response to John McWhorter on Black Opera

On Oct. 19, 2021, the New York Times published a piece by John McWhorter, a Black professor of linguistics at Columbia University, entitled: "Go See These Black Operas -- Several Times." You can read it by clicking on that link.

What follows is my response to that piece:

Dear Mr. McWhorter,

Your Oct. 19, 2021 piece in the NYT on opera conflated at least three, arguably distinct issues and in the process turned out to be something of a dog’s breakfast. It was sufficiently provocative nonetheless.

The easiest issue is whether Black composers and librettists (as opposed to singers) have been unfairly denied access to the Metropolitan Opera (and various similar organizations) and thus it is high time the Met staged something like “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” I think we can stipulate that is true. On the other hand, just because the piece is a true Black opera (not an opera about Blacks written by a white person) doesn’t mean it is particularly good. As is the case with all other operas, time will tell.

Second are questions of cultural appropriation, or misappropriation – a trendy and highly “woke” topic. If you failed to bring this up, you would be viewed as seriously out of touch by certain constituencies in the current sociopolitical environment.

Artists have always depicted cultures other than their own, or been influenced by them and incorporated the narratives or aesthetics of another culture in their own work. There is, I personally believe, nothing at all wrong with this. The current cultural appropriation wars arguably have little to do with art and much to do with sociopolitical power.

(This is a different issue than what happened in the jazz era and beyond when white musicians and entrepreneurs basically stole music, or most of the revenues accruing to it, that had been originated by Blacks.)

Third, and in my case by far the most interesting topic, is the prevailing state of opera, no matter what the race or cultural background of the creators. Here, you seem to think you “should” like what opera has become although you are far from sure you actually do. Join the club. Why do you suppose opera companies stage only a limited number of contemporary pieces while relentlessly re-staging the old favorites?

In a nutshell and with broad generalization, in contemporary opera the singers serve the music. In most of the older forms of opera, the music served the singers. Singing, or extraordinarily virtuosic vocalization, was what it was all about. The stories were secondary and often somewhat ridiculous, or set well in some often mythic past, in large part because the threat of censorship was always present. Patrons largely bought tickets to hear their favorite singers sing particular roles, and to compare such performances to that of other prominent singers. The rest was spectacle.

That is far from the case at present, and as such raises the question, why opera? Why not just put on a play or make a film, the latter if you insist that background music adds to the story as opposed to at least partially obscuring it – as may be the case in the two operas under consideration in your article. You urge readers to listen to them repeatedly, not to hear great singing, but simply to make sense of them, which is apparently difficult otherwise. Oh well, there is nothing new about the notion of art for the sake of art. Viewers have frequently been told, for instance, that when gazing at abstract art: “it means whatever it means to you.”

You seem to wish that Blacks could, in effect, find a third way that they could call their own: opera somehow different from that characterized by the stand-alone arias of the past and more approachable and more broadly appealing than most contemporary opera. Something that would appeal to and be understood by an audience beyond those who attend because they think they “should” for one reason or another, but different and presumably more “high brow” than musical theater. “Porgy and Bess,” but written and composed by Blacks and with a story that avoids stereotypes? Porgy and Bess survives, of course, because the songs (or arias) are so good one (such as Angel Blue) can overlook the rest. Oops. There we are, back to opera as great songs and great singers with everything else secondary. Well, good luck.

One can argue that contemporary opera started or got into high gear with Wagner and his “it’s all about me” approach. Don’t give the singers arias that put them first and foremost. Make them serve my “total work of art” instead. Well, OK, that’s one approach and it arguably worked for Wagner (whatever one things of him), but less so for most of what has come in his wake.

That’s a sharp contrast to Handel who would regularly alter his compositions, and even drop parts of a story, or add new parts, so that a particular singer would come across at his or her best. That’s what the ticket buying public was paying for and Handel had to sell lots of expensive tickets. Mozart regularly wrote arias with the capabilities of particular singers in mind. And so forth and so on.

Everyone these days seems hung up over the race (or sexual orientation) of the creators and performers. As for me, where did I put that fabulous recording of Kathleen Battle singing G.F. Handel’s “Semele?” (I’m more than happy to overlook Ms Battle’s cultural misappropriation of the role and sorry I missed Angel Blue singing Mimi in “La Bohème” at the Seattle Opera as a result of the pandemic.)

Keep up the good work, and with my very best wishes. Maybe you’ll be able to make sense of it – for ALL of us – someday.

Fowler W. Martin

(P.S.  No surprise: there has been no response from Mr. McWhorter.)

 

 

I Can Just Hear the Screams of Cultural Misappropriation

 Suppose John O'Hara, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had all been Black Americans, wrote a musical set in a black community in 1940s Chicago, called it "Pal Joey." and saw it performed on Broadway more than once and also made into a film.

Suppose then someone came along and said "let's reset this in a white community in Chicago in the 1930s" and bring it back to Broadway in that fashion.

Can't you just hear the screams of cultural misappropriation?  Yet another example of white Americans ripping off Black creativity.

Well, of course (according to the Oct. 5, 2021 New York Times), the situation is the reverse.  The three men mentioned in the first sentence were white, the original was performed with white actors and it was set in the 1930s.  A new version, apparently headed for Broadway has remade the musical Black and set it in the 1940s.

There are apparently a host of other changes as well, including the addition of several songs that weren't in the original.

I'm tempted to say all of this has left me "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," but in fact, it has left me simply wondering when what is bad for the gander will also be bad for the goose (or vice versa).