Art

Un-Common White Angst

Fox News’ latest jihad against the rapper Common is a creation of such spectacular idiocy that it really deserves a monument of some kind. Jon Stewart’s takedown of the whole thing — which Bill O’Reilly basically concedes, but then strives to cover up with a smug tone and some handwaving — is probably as good a one as any, but truly, when again will we witness such an obvious confluence of so many of the worst parts of the culture wars? Probably not in this generation. It’s like the Halley’s Comet of inane social cleavages. You’ve got new art/music vs. old art/music (I mean, kids these days!), young vs. old, cities vs. heartland, and probably some I’m missing, all against a background of black vs. white, and rolled up to drive home this central point:

Middle America: The Obamas Are Not Like You!

Who else but Fox News could carry this “story”? It was practically written to fit their business strategy of alternately scaring and soothing anyone threatened by the pace of cultural change. Listen to any anchor carrying the story, and you can practically hear Fox’s go-to rhetorical baseline:  ”get off my lawn!” Remarkable.

One point feels worth addressing: is Common specifically, and rap music generally, “poetry,” worthy of joining the White House’s poetry night? I don’t feel particularly equipped to answer the question. I actually don’t like rap a whole lot — ask my little sister about our epic battles over the radio — but maybe that makes me an even better judge. So, one response.

Most to ask this question don’t actually answer it. Instead, they respond to the question of whether rap is good poetry. But to steal from my chosen profession, doesn’t that go to weight, rather than admissibility? Art can be really quite bad while still remaining art; and it strikes me that, if rap speaks to a certain individual, no matter how slapdash the rhyme scheme, I don’t know who anyone else is to deny that power. Imagine for a moment the wide breadth of creative experiences that have moved you: for me that would involve the basics of paintings, sculptures, literature, music you would expect, but also music you would not expect, and things farther afield, like video games. No, not like MarioKart. Like the original Knights of the Old Republic – one of the best examples, I think, of a game’s ability to tell a compelling story — or more recently, Fallout 3. That’s a new thing for my generation, but it’s no less valid.

Patrons of art, like heads of state, are within their rights to use the position to endorse a particular type of art, and if the opposition doesn’t like it, well, maybe they should win more elections. More, I expect heads of state are free to endorse art without endorsing the underlying message, too. Unless we’re to presume President Nixon’s hearty endorsement of parties in the county jail.

Feminism & the Light of Other Days

This may be an odd post for what turns out to be International Womens’ Day (oops!), but I think it’s nonetheless important. So here we go.

I’m generally a fan of political correctness, which I understand as little more than the noncontroversial proposition that we ought to speak civilly to each other, and be mindful of past prejudices that, if not laid to rest, could disturb our newfound peace.

But political correctness deals with how we handle ourselves in the present, not how we describe the past. It’s not politically incorrect or insensitive to read Huck Finn as the author intended it, without removing or altering words we wouldn’t speak today. Nor is it insensitive to represent western art as it was, not as we wish it had been. So I’m not sure I get the point of this campaign:

It’s no secret that premodern and modern masters were predominantly male, as a function of the relative newness of the women’s rights movement. And the female form was a common subject. These percentages, then, are meaningless, unless they represent a further distortion of an already male-dominated history. But I can’t draw that conclusion from this limited information. There’s a lot in the Met that’s objectionable, removed from its context. But surely we don’t embrace the rape of the Sabine women by displaying arts about it.

Should we struggle for an equal presentation of men and womens’ works? Of course. But not at the expense of telling the story as it was.

What Republican Majorities Do

Scream about controversial artwork. Nothing else. All of this has happened before; and all of this will happen again.

Common Cause

I hoped I’d never have to write this post. But my God, Ross Douthat is close to right about something.

Last week, South Park, in its inexorable quest to offend, sometimes for its own sake, sometimes to educate, met its match, when fringe elements of Islam threatened violence if the series was allowed to depict the Prophet Mohammed in semi-comic manner. In the face of controversy, Comedy Central relented, and pulled the episode. Replying to the situation, Douthat comes close to expressing the rage that we should all feel when extrinsic threats come close to threatening free speech, the very core of our society: 

Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.

For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

And yet, he still manages to go amiss by attributing our inability — or unwillingness — to defend our institutions against radical Islam to some problem with society as a whole, surely wrought by cowardly liberals (bolded elements). This isn’t a time to point fingers.

First, I initially balked at using the phrase “radical Islam,” because the right so commonly uses it to marginalize all Muslims. But if we use the entire phrase — “radical Islam” — and take seriously the first word of it, there is no risk of being misunderstood.

Next, this isn’t a case where we need to identify some internal enemy, so corrosive as to weaken our resolve, and sap the courage of our convictions. When reacting to a threat, we don’t blame the victim for taking it seriously, especially when the threat has been carried out before, and when the effects of the threat are, elsewhere, well-known. Violence, or the threat thereof, has always been the enemy of free speech, especially when coupled with radicalized religion. If we are so willing to trash our own ideas, but not those of others, it’s because we value satire, and we generally don’t threaten existential war against ourselves for using it to question our ideas (although our own religious extremists regularly do threaten lawsuits: see Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988)). Fault, here, lies exclusively with the maker of the threat. Look no further.

Against such threats, we on both sides of the aisle should be able to recognize and prosecute a common cause. Radical Islam (see caveat, supra) is a danger to American values, and America’s survival as such, and where members of our society chance the dangers of that threat, we should rally to their side as allies and show as one that we will not be intimidated.

When the threat fades, we might also profit from the experience, and learn, for all our sakes, that there’s something noxious about being controlled by a restrictive foreign morality — whether foreign to our nation, or foreign to ourselves. If we fight radical Islam as a basis for self-censorship, but embrace other exclusionary radicalisms as a basis for the same, have we really learned anything?

Adventures in Fair Use: Mormon Revisionist Art Edition

Remember the painting from this morning’s post, which basically took a hatchet to American history to produce a massively distorted piece of propaganda-art? Well, the good news is, someone’s corrected the subtitles: thank you, Shortpacked.

As a useful thought experiment, consider whether this is “fair use.” The author has appropriated the entire image — as represented online — but none of its commercial derivatives, and substantially changed the meaning. Recall that despite a claim of copyright a secondary user may appopriate a work depending on (1) the purpose of the use (commercial or satirical); (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the work copied, and; (4) the possibility of “market substitution.” See 17 U.S.C. § 107.

In other words, if you satirize a song by changing the last word only, and remarket it, you’re succeeding on the first prong, but failing on all the others, and your use is probably not fair.

In this case, the secondary user infringes upon the market value only by pointing out how foolish it is — which is not a protected interest, although that question has been litigated — and, although he uses the entire visual element of the work, substantially changes the text component.

What do you think? You might want to check out Mattel v. Forsythe, 353 F.2d 792 (9th Cir. 2003) — a.k.a., the violent Barbie case.

This Week in Art

Jon McNaughton‘s new painting — “One Nation Under God,” a heavy-handed symbolic work depicting all of American history bowing before Jesus, holding the Constitution — contains some important insights, chief among them that Jesus is Isildur’s heir (comparison, right).

The resemblance was always uncanny, but they even got the branches right (“Seven stars and / seven stones, / and one white tree.”) Anyways, moving on…

As you view the painting, make sure not to miss the ALT-text, which converts a mediocre painting into the oil-on-canvas equivalent of a Chick tract, complete with an expansive list of right-wing phobias. Select the starry background to view a fair statement of the right’s selective patriotism (referring to the states, “some stars [real America] shine brighter than others”) and, naturally, there’s the weeping “activist judge.” Our friend, apparently, is regretting Jesus’ coming judgment: “If I only had more time! And hair!”

But a review of the opinions scattered at the Justice’s feet quickly reveals that rather than venerating the Constitution, our artist friend appears to know very little about what it actually says — although you may have gathered as much from the implication that Jesus inspired the document.

Indeed, three “dead letters” in particular give a great summary of points of law commonly misinterpreted by conservatives. A quote from the ALT-text follows the citation, and precedes discussion:

• Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 1801: (“…made it possible for activist judges to become appointed and to be able to interpret the Constitution.”). Yes, in a way — but more accurately, no. This stilted description overlooks the fact that the Constitution itself created the Supreme Court (see Art. III), if not the lower courts; the Constitution defines itself as the “supreme law of the land” (Art. VI, § 2); and the Constitution makes the Supreme Court the arbiter of that law (Art. III, § 2). Marbury was foreshadowed by the Federalist Papers, and debate at the Constitutional Convention, and only closes this previously open circuit by giving the Supreme Court the power to terminate, by judicial decree, contravening law. This admittedly game-changing element follows naturally — but of course, it’s not free from intellectual debate. Which a blurb on a painting is not.
• Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1, 1824: (“Gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.”). Categorically false. Again, the Constitution so provides. See U.S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 3. Gibbons merely adds that provision to the Supremacy Clause to conclude that contravening state law is invalid. Again, a huge step. But without it, the Constitution reverts to the Articles of Confederation. If the artist’s concern is the expanse of the Commerce Clause, rather than its existence, then Wickard v. Fillburn (1942) is his concern, not Gibbons.
• Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 14 U.S. 304, 1816: (“This gave the Supreme Court ultimate authority over state courts in matters of federal law.”). And how bloody else would it be?! If states can define away federal law, we’re in John Calhoun’s dream, but we’re pre-Constitution and pre-Articles of Confederation, because the Union becomes a legal nullity. Admittedly, Martin gives the Supreme Court the ability to decide issues of federal law, wrongly decided by the states, and predicate state issues, but the Supreme Court cannot review issues of pure state law (Murdock v. Memphis (1875)), and cannot review state court decisions where state issues control (Fox Film Corp. v. Muller (1935)).

The Supreme Court has been known to get the law wrong. Nobody’s perfect. Roe may even be one of those cases. But, one cannot seriously question the foundations of the federal system while purporting to venerate the Constitution. What would Númenorian, Constitution-holding Jesus do?

How Glenn Beck Stole Yom Kippur

From Glenn Beck’s Twitter account –

“2morrow my family will b fasting & praying 4 the Country & it’s leaders.Please join us. No better day than Day of Atonement?”

Apparently, Beck dreams of a day when Americans nationwide — be they fundamentalist Christians, Mormons, or tea party “patriots” — will co-opt others religions’ holidays and use them to pursue his hyper-partisan, delusional goals, preferably while masked in a veil of concern for the country and “it’s” leaders.

It should go without saying that days of private atonement are best reserved for private atonement, rather than bizarrely politicized. It should, but I guess it doesn’t. I suppose the latest front in the “War on Christmas” is a conservative counter-insurgency against the Jewish high holidays?

A humble suggestion, then, while we’re co-opting holidays. Although you’ve probably not heard of Pioneer Day, unless you’re from Utah, or a major fan of HBO’s “Big Love,” it’s a regular holiday in Utah, and it celebrates the anniversary of the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers. It carries significant meaning especially for conservative Mormons, like Glenn Beck. Well, 7/24 just seems like a perfect time to celebrate other “pioneers” — doesn’t it? Say, pioneers of the art world, like Robert Mapplethorpe. Mark your calendars — Next 7/24 is America’s first Edgy Gay Art Day!

Patronage, Politics, and Art: a First Glimpse at the NEA Micro-Scandal

Although it’s not receiving much press, most likely owing to its complexity and deep factual record, right-wing outlets broke yesterday the “story” that elements of the Obama administration had discussed organizing and funding art to support the President’s agenda. The truth is more complicated — but we’ll get to that.

Not to belabor the “Roman history” introduction, but governments have patronized the arts, for their own purposes, for as long as governments have existed. The scope of the government’s mission as a patron of the arts varies between instances, but always exists to some degree. Augustus’ informal “Circle of Maecenas” planned, funded, then executed a vast image programme ranging from coins, to poems (including the Aeneid), to temples; the Medici funded art as a testimony to their grandeur; and Queen Victoria had Alfred Lord Tennyson, her poet laureate, whose famous works explicated the majestic roots of British hegemony, and tied Victoria’s England to a grandoise mythical past. Just so, Hitler had his propaganda, and so did (do?) we.

America’s link between government and the art world — the National Endowment for the Arts — is best viewed, then, as a variation on a theme. Intended as a neutral government agency, the NEA’s limited mission, at conception, was to foster “artistic excellence,” free of any further qualifiers. Today, the agency’s actual neutrality is questionable, owing to a number of factors that far predate Obama. For example, current law (the “government speech” doctrine, see Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173 (1991)) permits the NEA to selectively advance certain viewpoints without intruding upon First Amendment values, thus entitling any given White House to, by exercising the power of appointment, influence the direction of the nation’s art. Perhaps more invidiously, though, courtesy select right-wing organizations like the American Family Association, the NEA is banned from funding any art that does not promote “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American people.” See 20 U.S.C. § 954(d)(1); Finley v. Nat’l Endowment for the Arts, 524 U.S. 569 (1998). While that sounds like a good idea at first blush, consider this: most good art was, at the time of its creation, somewhat sensational. Several of Mozart’s operas — today seen as harmless, or even boring (for shame!!) — inspired riots at their premiere, and were nearly banned by the Austrian government.

More recently, Jeff Koons’ seemingly innocuous works have depended on their apparent simplicity for the propagation of subversive, sexy, and kind of creepy messages; Robert Mapplethorpe raised awareness about gay culture in the AIDS crisis to howls of conservative rage; and Damien Hirst — well, let’s leave him for another day.

If the right’s concern, then, is that the NEA is a “political” organization, where art is polluted by left-wing politics, they’re late to the party, and ignoring their own contributions to the problem. Again, it was the AFA that first wrote into the U.S. Code a definition of “good art” (it must never offend!), and it was the right’s obsession with clamping down on abortion that secured to U.S. government agencies a right to promote partisan agendae. If the NEA has become a monster — alternately boring and propaganda-ish — it is a monster of the right’s own creation, one whose existence they must now endure, or suffer for their lack of foresight.

And so we turn to the instant case. Apparently elements of the NEA, acting quasi-independently, set up a conference call to develop an arts programme dedicated to service in the nation’s interest. Selective quotations from a transcript of the call make the group’s definition of “service” sound narrower and, consequentially, dangerously partisan. How much one should worry about this call is, to me, an open question. Taking the call for the least it’s worth, I suppose artistic integrity has been compromised, but that’s been the case since at least 1996 (with credit for that going to Gingrich, not Clinton). But government patronage, even to partisan ends, has been responsible for great & challenging works, even recently.

Besides, good art is never without an agenda. But if the concern is the explicitness of the agenda, and its traceability to recent government action, then perhaps we should consider leaving art truly to the artists. A good start might be severing the NEA from government influence entirely, terminating the obligation to subjective standards of “decency” along with the last vestiges of political control. I’m ready when you are.

Abortion, Bongs, Jesus, and the Right Wing’s Continued Inconsistency on Speech Rights

Imagine, if you will, that you suddenly find yourself a federal appellate judge. Congratulations! Thirsty? Law Clerk #2– two mocha frappucinos, and make it snappy!

Much better. Now that we’re both hydrated, let’s take a look at the docket. Today we have two cases, both appeals from adverse judgments. In the first, we have High School Student #1, suspended for carrying a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” sign at a school rally. In the second, we have High School Student #2, suspended for wearing a shirt that graphically supports the “pro-life” position of the abortion debate. Both claim that the First Amendment protects their right to politically advocacy at their schools, even and especially if that advocacy includes shocking but non-profane words or imagery.

No matter what your instincts on these two cases, you have to admit, it’s hard to craft a rule of law that provides different outcomes for the two students. The only apparent difference between these cases is that, in the former, the religious overtones are purposefully ironic, while in the latter they’re sincere and deeply-held. But that shouldn’t really matter, should it? Either both students are entitled to their admittedly shocking forms of political expression, or neither are. There may be nuances that differentiate the two cases, but few will find them, and even fewer will find them controlling. Of course, one form of speech is “liberal,” and the other “conservative.” But one of the strongest mandates of First Amendment law is that the government may not favor one viewpoint over another. These political notes shouldn’t matter, at all.

Unless, of course, you’re the religious right. For them, the reverent subtext of the pro-life demonstrator’s shirt is inherently “good,” while the mocking subtext of the pro-whatever demonstrator’s banner is inherently “evil.” Furthermore, this political distinction should be given legal effect: pro-religion speech is good, and anti-religion speech is evil.

Increasingly, with their ouster from nearly all political offices, we see the religious right taking shelter in the First Amendment, to make increasingly frantic, increasingly violent appeals to religion or “conservative values,” whatever those are. How curious, though, that this strong form of First Amendment protection applies, in the right’s eyes, only to their speech — still more proof that, for the religious right, law is the game itself, rather than the rules of the game.

Remainders: Enjoy Your Weekend

Short things you shouldn’t miss:

1. Michelangelo’s first. painting. ever. is at the Met Museum. If you’re in New York city, you know what to do.
2. Twitter continues to be a liability to Republican Congressman. Did you know Iranian protests are basically the same thing as tea parties, and Nancy Pelosi is basically the same as the Ayatollah?
3. The latter of those Twitter fails is notable for the reply it created.
4. Ron Paul hates democracy. Enough said.
5. Michael Savage thinks it’s only the white, Christian, married men that make America great. Can we get this guy off the air yet?

Enjoy your weekend!