Culture Wars and an Explosive Word in Indianopolis

 The Arts section of the Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021 New York Times has a half-page spread about the head of an art museum resigning over the apparently ill-advised use of a single word: "white." That was after an equally lengthy article three days earlier about an apology by the museum for the misstep, evidently deemed inadequate.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields was founded in 1883 and boasts over 50,000 objects in its collection, but not enough, it appears, by American Blacks and perhaps other minorities.

At least in part to address such concerns, the museum recently posted a job offer notice saying it was seeking a director who would work to build a more diverse audience while at the same time maintain "it's traditional, core, white audience."  Indianapolis is approximately 62% white, 28% Black and the remainder of the population Hispanic and other identities.

Charles L. Venable, who resigned following a letter of protest from the museum's staff and a host of members of the local art community, told the NYT that the use of the word "white" was deliberate and meant to assure people the museum wasn't going to abandon it's existing audience in the process of moving toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion. In the wake of the furor, the word "white" was deleted from the posting,which apparently otherwise remained the same.

Let's pause for a moment and think about why Mr. Venable undoubtedly thought it was important to explicitly reference the museum's traditional base of "white" support.  In his position, he was in charge of finances and there, the museum is overwhelmingly dependent upon donations.  Direct government support in 2019, the latest year for which figures are available, accounted for only $336,000 of revenues totaling $48.7 million. Since the museum is organized as a private non-profit (a 501(c)(3) corporation), contributors may be able to get a tax break for their donations -- just as they may be able to get a tax break by donating to Black Lives Matter -- so one can argue there is some indirect public support.

But, essentially, this is a private sector entity dependent upon voluntary contributions.  If they back away, the museum could be in significant trouble very quickly. Neither of the two articles in the NYT mentioned this possibility nor did they discuss the museum's financial situation.

For most of its history, entry into the museum was free of charge, but Mr. Venable changed that policy in 2014 in the interest of long-term financial stability. In other words, to hedge against a possible decline in donations. In 2019, "admissions, fees and sales (there is a gift shop) accounted for $5 million of the $48.7 million of total revenues so there is a ways to go.

If you are interested, there is an extensive list of donors at the end of the annual report and my guess is that the vast majority are white. So what's the problem with explicitly referencing them and what may be their concerns -- that in working towards inclusion and diversity, the museum doesn't intend to compromise the aesthetic and cultural values the donors have poured millions of dollars into over the years?

The problem is this: in the current culture wars, "whites" are by definition the universally privileged beneficiaries of a society constructed on systemic racism from it's very origins -- the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. When whites are so privileged, the notion that their concerns should be catered to is in itself racist. But reality is reality so it's best just not to be so explicit. 

Perhaps the donors will be just as reassured by the vague wording as they would be by the more explicit reassurance.  Time will tell.

This all occurred, by the way, at a time when the museum was, with the assistance of two guest curators, mounting a street mural created by 18 Black artists about Black Lives Matter.  

But when the wording of the job posting became widely known, the two guest curators said they could not continue working with the museum unless the museum apologized to the 18 artists, offered them an opportunity to have their other works displayed with appropriate compensation and agreed to display more works from Black artists "in perpetuity," the New York Times reported.

These events also occurred at a time when the museum's website contained a prominent guide to a host of sites in the area connected with Black history.

But there is apparently another side to the story. The museum has been accused of, among other things, promoting the work of Black artists without substantially supporting them. And a Black woman named Kelli Morgan, who was hired in 2018 to diversity the museum's galleries, resigned last July, calling the museum's culture "toxic" and "discriminatory" in a letter she made public.

"Newfields is a very visible, very bad symptom of a much larger cancer," the Times quoted her as saying -- a reference, apparently, to the aforementioned systemic racism that is now seen as the appropriate way to describe the U.S. 

That being the case, at its core, the culture war is a power struggle and the unfortunate use of the word "white" turned out to be a critical chink in the armor of one set of the powers that be.

 

 

Current U.S. Culture Wars Plus An Age-Old Controversy

 Readers interested in what appear to be intensifying culture wars within the U.S. -- specifically over whether "Whiteness" should be toppled, but other issues as well -- are strongly encouraged to read "Blind to Hate or Sounding the Right Notes?" in the Oct. 15, 2021 issue of the Arts section of the New York Times.

The lengthy article also brings up an age-old controversy: whether a work of intellect or art stands independently on its own merits, or whether the merits of it's creator need to be taken into consideration when deciding it's worth.

For example, see "Is It Time Gaugin Got Canceled?" in Nov. 18, 2019 New York Times.

But back to current culture wars, this time centered on a University of North Texas professor of music theory named Timothy Jackson and his chief critic, Philip Ewell, a professor of music theory at Hunter College in New York City,  Jackson is white and Ewell is Black (I'm following the NYT here in that the word "white" when referring to racial identity is not capitalized while "black" is.)

In Ewell's view, music criticism generally is dominated by white males and beset by racism, the NYT reported, and nowhere more egregiousness so than by the work of a Jewish theorist named Heinrich Schenker who died in Austria in 1935.  Jackson, identified as the grandson of Jewish emigres, has, the NYT said, has devoted himself to the study of Schenker's work.

In response to Ewell's views, Jackson and some colleges decided to solicit a series of papers on the  controversy for publication in the "Journal of Schenkerian Studies," which boasts about 30 paid subscribers, the NYT said, and a veritable volcano erupted. Read the article for details.

As for culture wars, the central battle covered by the article is yet another front in the ongoing war over whether not just the U.S. but, indeed, all of Western Civilization, is simply one big racist abomination  that needs to be overturned. In that context, Powell contends that when it comes to the study of music, Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German should be prohibited except by special dispensation in specific instances.  One wonders how English made the cut,

But also at issue is what the article descried as a contention by Jackson that Ewell's position is illustrative of a much broader current of anti-Semitic attitudes of American Blacks. 

Free speech -- an increasingly controversial topic in the wake of silencing Trump -- also comes into question in the Jackson-Ewell flap.  The traditional notion that speech should be free particularly on college campuses competes with a "newer view that speech itself can constitute violence," the NYT article said. In other words, things may be moving beyond concerns over "micro aggressions"  into justifications for censorship -- on both the Right and the Left.

Lastly, there is that issue of what to think about the products of intellectuals and artists who have lived arguably reprehensible lives or expressed arguably reprehensible opinions.

Schenker, for instance, is on record as having referred to "inferior races" and worse -- views that, in Ewell's opinion, are inseparable from his apparently very significant contributions to music theory. The counter view is that the theories should stand on their own merits.

The answer apparently isn't easy as per the comment of an NYT reader identified as "Lisa" (from Boston) who says:

"I have a doctorate in music and while I have always been aware of Wagner's well-known antisemitism (just to name an example) I was required to understand and utilize Schenkerian theory on my comps--and it was not until this controversy came to light that I was even *aware* that Schenker was a racist. To the point, it is up to the individual to decide what to do with information once it is known. But it NEEDS to be known. When it's not, it is indeed what Ewell says it is: whitewashing."

In "Lisa's" case, Schenker's work clearly stood on it's own when she needed it academically, but ... 

 

Metropolitan Museum Evokes "1984," "The Sympathizer"

The latest development at New York's Metropolitan Museum brings to mind books like George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and the equally grim tale "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen. In both stories, the chief protagonist runs afoul of an authoritarian regime and as part of his punishment, must make confessions.

On Nov. 26, 2020, the New York Times ran an article in its art section that the Met had appointed its first Chief Diversity Officer, Lavita McMath Turner, a Black woman with experience in such matters, most recently at the City University of New York.  That's not a big surprise.  Many major U.S. cultural institutions have recently taken a similar step.  Moreover, as the NYT article pointed out, the NY city government informed its cultural institutions that if they didn't take steps to diversify their staffs, they might lose some of their public funding. 

What most interested me was an element of confession associated with the Met's announcement.  It came at least in part as a result of a staff letter five months ago, the NYT said, that urged the museum's leaders to acknowledge "a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution."

The notions of white supremacy and systemic racism are key phrases and concepts in the current movement that sometimes go as far as attempting to "cancel culture" in bringing about change, much of which is arguably overdue. If one doesn't decry "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" in those terms, however, one is insufficiently "woke" and, well, might suffer the fate of Orwell's Winston Smith or Nguyen's anonymous narrator -- periods of punishment and correction.

While those advocating such a reconsideration of the very basis of U.S. society tend to paint it in terms of a moral awakening and reckoning, is also purely and simply a power struggle.

The Met's President and CEO Daniel H. Weiss and Direct Max Hollein stopped short of repeating the key phrases -- "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" -- in the institution's July 6, 2020 mea culpa. But the document made it clear that a confession along such lines is in the offing.

"Our government, policies, systems, and institutions have all contributed to perpetuating racism and injustice, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art must reflect on its past and aspire to be an agent of change," the July 6 statement said.

Along with promised reforms and new initiatives on various fronts -- hiring, staffing, collecting, exhibitions, etc. -- substantive change "will also require that we understand our past and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as a necessary part of the process of learning and reconciliation."  

In other words, forward-looking reforms are not enough. 

"A set of commitments to anti-racism cannot begin without an honest assessment of an institution’s own history and present practices. This process will require that we investigate our own history and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as an essential element of healing and reconciliation. We will begin this work in the coming year through an institution-wide initiative and produce a public report."

That was number one on the list of steps the Museum said it planned to take.

In writing this, I don't mean to beat up on the Met per se.  It's just that these developments are an excellent example of the nature of the culture war in which the U.S. is currently engulfed, and particularly in the arena of high-culture arts and that of academia. 

But at the same time, they give rise to an interesting question: if the Met's forthcoming self-examination concludes that the institution and thus its leadership have been complicit in preserving white supremacy and that the Met is part of systemic racism, can Weiss survive as president and CEO? It's hard to have it both ways.

 

Black Writers Make Progress Despite "Systemic Racism"

 We've heard a lot in recent months about how the U.S. is fundamentally defined by "systemic racism" -- in other words, discrimination against non-white citizens, and especially Blacks, is baked in the cake because the country was established on that very basis despite certain idealistic postulates.

Thus, one branch of this theory goes, reform of existing institutions can't, by definition, produce equality and justice. Absent a major transfer of power, Blacks in particular can't get anywhere.

In the face of such arguments, I've been trying to see if there might be a counter-narrative, at least in the arts. Could it be that things aren't quite as bad as it is currently fashionable to depict them?

The Nov. 9, 2020, Arts section of the New York Times  has an item about a woman, who somewhat against the tide, writes short stories and is just having her second collection, "The Office of Historical Corrections" published. Replete with a photo of the author, Danielle Evans, the piece was awarded two thirds of a page.  Not bad publicity!

Ms Evans is Black and what interested me was what she had to say about that. In a nutshell, while there is still room for improvement on one front or another, a lot of progress has been made.

Asked how things have changed, Ms Evans had the following to say:

"I'm less afraid that I'll be the only Black writer that somebody reads or that there will be only one book by a writer of color each season that people are talking about. It's much more true now that you'll hear, 'Here are eight books by Black writers. Let's think about what they are saying to each other.'"

While that's good news for those unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to making America a better society, it's also good news for Ms Evans as a writer. It gives her, she said, more freedom to write about riskier, weirder material because she doesn't have to worry about being taken as representative of her race.

Where is change still needed?  In Evans view, white writers need to talk more about race and Black writers should be asked to review books written by whites, in part to point out what's missing there. 

"People of color notice absences, we notice the treatment of secondary characters, where the language gets weird. And that's useful for everybody."

There was a time -- well, it seems very naive now -- when the notion of where thing ought to go was "integration." The concept was that if discriminatory barriers could be broken down, we could all be the same despite differing skin colors, religions, whatever. Well, not anymore. Racial differences need to be noted, acknowledged in a positive fashion, explored, understood and valued.

Here's Evan's take on that when it comes to literature:

"We should be talking about race more as a function of craft -- of everybody's craft. Maybe it shouldn't be the first paragraph of every review, but it should be noted that books have a racial context. Conversations would be more interesting for it. Part of the answer is making that conversation more visible in more places, so it doesn't feel hyper-visible  when it's focused on the work of Black writers."

Moving away from race and onto the state of literary fiction, Evans believes it has a future despite many claims to the contrary.

"If I put the right story in someone's hands, it can change their life," she said. In that context, she pointed in particular to Toni Morrison's 1992 novel "Jazz."

 

The Arrival of "Black Privilege" When It Comes to the Arts

 "Despite the really horrific climate we've reached, it still doesn't distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now,'' Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh told the New York Times upon being selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

She's right about that. 

Even if one only reads the arts sections of major American publications episodically, one thing is crystal clear. Museums, theaters, operas, galleries, the film and television industries etc. are falling all over themselves to feature Black artists and Black subject matter.

In the last couple of years or so, we have repeatedly encountered the phrase "white privilege" -- the notion that whites are showered with benefits, thanks to a county having been founded on "systemic racism." While there may be some truth to that, there are plenty of whites who have not been at all privileged and many of them seem to have voted for Donald Trump on the view that it was time for change. Experiencing now prolonged economic stagnation or decline, they see immigrants and minorities as a threat from below (fears Trump plays upon), but they also feel totally dismissed by the coastal elites who are for the most part, but not exclusively, white.

Many of these people, particularly in the Middle West, are descents of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island with no money in their pockets and started their American journeys in New York garment industry sweat shops, in coal mines, in lumber camps or on hard scrabble farms. 

But back to the arts.  The pendulum is swinging and many are probably saying it's about time. Blacks in particular, but also other U.S. minority groups, of one definition or another, are finally getting their due. At the extreme of this trend is the "cancel culture" movement -- not just getting rid of statues of Confederate military heroes and removing the names of people like Woodrow Wilson and Flannery O'Connor, deemed to be unacceptably racist, from buildings, but at its extreme, dumping pretty much anything deemed to be "Eurocentric" in nature. We may be back to book burning before it's over, but maybe climate change will get us first.

There's nothing wrong with selecting Simone Leigh -- clearly a sculptor of distinction -- to represent the U.S. in Venice. Interestingly, as the Times article points out, Blacks represented the U.S. in the last two Venice Biennials as well: Martin Puryear, a sculptor in 2019, and Mark Bradford, a painter, in 2017. They also are artists of distinction, but how many points on a line does it take to make a trend, some might ask? Still lots of lost time to make up, others would say.

But as I read the arts pages and material sent to me by various opera, theater and music groups, one cannot help but wonder if, in the current environment, the race, sexual orientation, and gender of artists has a lot more to do with the prominence that they currently achieve than the works of art they produce, many of which are hailed more for sociopolitical messages than for aesthetic values.  But that's another topic. One that I have addressed before and will probably return to.

To be fair, however, aesthetic considerations are a major element in the work of Simone Leigh and her statues can be fairly evaluated on such considerations alone.   

Here's an example - a photo I took of her sculpture "Brick House" (emblematic of the character of a strong Black woman) near the north end of New York's High Line Park.

The bottom line: in at least one area of American life -- the world of high-culture arts -- "Black privilege" has arrived. As Ms Leigh put it: "how amazing to be a Black artist right now."