Dear Mia and Christopher,
I am writing to publicly request that my painting, “Open Casket,” be removed from this year’s Whitney Biennial. Though it was not at all my intention to cause harm, many artists have come forward to announce that my depiction of suffering is in turn causing them suffering. I cannot rightly protect a painting at the expense of human beings.
I understand that many have attempted to defend my work in the interest of free speech, and with calls against censorship. However, the artists and writers generously critiquing “Open Casket” have made plain to me that I have benefited from the very systems of racism I aimed to critique, in a way that blinded me to what my re-presenting this image would mean to Black audiences. Particularly because, with my stamp of authorship, “Open Casket” could enter into the market and, in turn, commodify the very suffering I wished to explore. And while I agree with your curatorial statement that art can be an appropriate venue for political expression and debate, I do not agree with your implication that Black pain—what you refer to as “tremendous emotional resonance”—is a social good to be sought after through art. At least, not within a historically white-run institution, at the hands of a white artist, in an exhibit organized by a predominantly non-Black staff.
Indeed, I wanted to critique anti-Black violence and explore the real empathy I found between myself and the mother of Emmett Till, but I have learned that my re-presentation of violence against her son has proven to demonstrate its opposite: appealing to the universal truth of motherhood goes against what I have learned about the denial of motherhood, and of humanity itself, on the basis of race. I recognize that the calls for the painting’s removal have been made not as an imputation of my person or my career but of this artistic choice, this work, and the system that supports, even celebrates, such a gesture. Donna Haraway credits getting “called to account” by Black feminist thinkers for her most famous text (itself a call for sensitivity, a willingness to be wrong and a commitment to anti-racist coalition building). I want to model a willingness to learn from my mistakes, and honesty about accounting for them.
People who have been harmed by and are at risk of continued harm by systems of racist violence are in a much better position to know what is needed for restitution for that violence. If the removal of my painting has been called for by Black artists, writers, and activists, I can no longer protect an object at their expense. The painting must go.
I now join them in calling for the immediate removal of “Open Casket.” I have already promised the work will never be for sale, and I will also promise to make it impossible for the work to re-enter the public sphere. I also plan to redirect all funds from the sales of my other paintings included in the Biennial towards the Black liberation movement.
Finally, out of continued respect for those harmed by the work, I ask that the catalog and the press in the future and retroactively remove all images of the work from circulation, and replace it with images of the work’s subsequent protest.
Sincerely,
Dana Schutz
Phil wrote:Dear Mia and Christopher,
I am writing to publicly request that my painting, “Open Casket,” be removed from this year’s Whitney Biennial. Though it was not at all my intention to cause harm, many artists have come forward to announce that my depiction of suffering is in turn causing them suffering. I cannot rightly protect a painting at the expense of human beings.
I understand that many have attempted to defend my work in the interest of free speech, and with calls against censorship. However, the artists and writers generously critiquing “Open Casket” have made plain to me that I have benefited from the very systems of racism I aimed to critique, in a way that blinded me to what my re-presenting this image would mean to Black audiences. Particularly because, with my stamp of authorship, “Open Casket” could enter into the market and, in turn, commodify the very suffering I wished to explore. And while I agree with your curatorial statement that art can be an appropriate venue for political expression and debate, I do not agree with your implication that Black pain—what you refer to as “tremendous emotional resonance”—is a social good to be sought after through art. At least, not within a historically white-run institution, at the hands of a white artist, in an exhibit organized by a predominantly non-Black staff.
Indeed, I wanted to critique anti-Black violence and explore the real empathy I found between myself and the mother of Emmett Till, but I have learned that my re-presentation of violence against her son has proven to demonstrate its opposite: appealing to the universal truth of motherhood goes against what I have learned about the denial of motherhood, and of humanity itself, on the basis of race. I recognize that the calls for the painting’s removal have been made not as an imputation of my person or my career but of this artistic choice, this work, and the system that supports, even celebrates, such a gesture. Donna Haraway credits getting “called to account” by Black feminist thinkers for her most famous text (itself a call for sensitivity, a willingness to be wrong and a commitment to anti-racist coalition building). I want to model a willingness to learn from my mistakes, and honesty about accounting for them.
People who have been harmed by and are at risk of continued harm by systems of racist violence are in a much better position to know what is needed for restitution for that violence. If the removal of my painting has been called for by Black artists, writers, and activists, I can no longer protect an object at their expense. The painting must go.
I now join them in calling for the immediate removal of “Open Casket.” I have already promised the work will never be for sale, and I will also promise to make it impossible for the work to re-enter the public sphere. I also plan to redirect all funds from the sales of my other paintings included in the Biennial towards the Black liberation movement.
Finally, out of continued respect for those harmed by the work, I ask that the catalog and the press in the future and retroactively remove all images of the work from circulation, and replace it with images of the work’s subsequent protest.
Sincerely,
Dana Schutz
chad wrote:"How can I make this about me and also congratulate myself in some way" - basically every hipinion bro
Art, on its own, is powerless to change political realities.
Earlier this week, the video artist and Artforum darling Hannah Black penned an open letter protesting the inclusion of a 2016 Dana Schutz painting in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Titled “Open Casket,” it depicts the dead body of Emmett Till, a teenager who was tortured and lynched after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman in 1955 Mississippi. (His mother, Mamie Till, held an open casket funeral for him, so the whole world could come face to face with the horrors of American racism, hence the title of the work.) A dark episode in the nation’s history, it is a reminder, seven decades on, just how little things have changed.
The letter, which attracted several dozen signatures and a shitstorm of coverage, calls for the immediate removal of the painting from the exhibition and enters the “urgent recommendation” that it not be sold or shown again in the future. But Black isn’t done there. She also demands that the canvas itself be destroyed. Yes, destroyed. From zero to book burning, all in the opening line.
Black’s beef with both the work and its display is understandable; “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time,” she writes. And later: “those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material.”
To her credit, it’s one of the more intelligible things she’s written in her career. After all, she has a point: it really makes you wonder what kind of internal calculus was involved in the decision by Schutz, a white woman and blue-chip artist, to portray this subject matter. Or why, for the love of God, she would try to equate the material agony of African Americans as a people to the hypothetical anguish of a mother who has imagined losing a child in her mawkish, backpedaling response to the scandal. Given that there’s no shortage of contemporary examples of black children and adolescents being killed by racist white men, you probably wouldn’t be wrong in speculating that she chose this incident precisely for its historic distance.
In the dog-and-pony show that is the art world, worthy causes may come and go but virtue signaling is always in style. But now that the damage is done, what are the moral dimensions of this political statement?
Artists would like to think of themselves as agents of political change, but the fact remains: art is a barnacle on the side of capital, which is why it can never be a political platform. The best it can hope to do, then, is comment on the political situation after the fact or, in rare, often purely serendipitous cases, anticipate it. The luxury status of art under capitalism leaves artists in a compromised position, reducing the most urgent debates to the level of internecine turf wars.
“[N]either art nor the artist has a moral responsibility to liberal social causes,” wrote Camille Paglia in a 1990 op-ed on Madonna. (To mansplain for the sake of accuracy, Paglia is referring to those human issues that are foundational to a society based on the principles of liberty and equality for all, not to the current meaning of liberalism, or its many pet causes.) When artists do attempt to act as moral arbiters of the political landscape, the result is usually contrived and almost always cringeworthy. Just look at Shepard Fairey. As a private institution, moreover, the Whitney is under no moral obligation to promote social justice or protect people’s feelings.
As for the protesters, meanwhile, their attitude, “‘This art offends me, therefore it must be removed from public view’ is identical to the stance of Jesse Helms and Rudy Giuliani,” notes Freddie DeBoer (the left, it turns out, is no less prone to censorship than the right). Unlike the Bible-thumping ghouls and Spanish Inquisitors who patrolled the culture debate stages of the nineties, however, they have both morality and a relative lack of power on their side. So while it’s morally indefensible to ban “Piss Christ” on the basis of so-called obscenity, a moral argument can in fact be made as to why “Open Casket” is misguided and, possibly, harmful. Yet the purpose of admitting morally questionable cultural products into the public record is not to protect the right to evil in the name of free speech but to ensure that evil itself does not go undetected. In the most basic sense, it forces us to have hard conversations about inconvenient truths.
Recently, the author announced that she is only letting black people sign the petition from here on out, and has purged the names of any original non-black signees from the list. If the point of the letter is to expose the blindness of white privilege to the materiality of the black plight, lobbing off at least a quarter of the signatories (I counted) sure is a weird way of doing it. It’s not that we ought to feel bad for the excluded “allies.” They’ll find a way to manage. Or, that anyone can tell the remaining petitioners what they should be feeling. They’re right in their suspicion and anger. But that this reasoning serves exactly no one involved. The sort of catharsis that comes at the expense of dissent can only ever be symbolic. “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless,” Black acknowledged in an update to the post. “But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.” This isn’t justice, it’s madness.
Reparations are certainly in order, but they cannot be made by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone. Even if you think that this is a small price to pay for what black people have endured throughout American history—what’s the destruction of one art work to the destruction of countless lives?—it’s unclear how extracting punitive concessions from glorified market consultants is supposed to help anybody in the long run.
The civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum have good intentions and are justified in their outrage, but they’re just the foot soldiers of an inside-baseball wager among people whose main point of difference isn’t the color of their skin but how many MFAs they have. In the end, everybody wins, and yet no one does. Both Black and Schutz, intentionally or not, get a boost to their brands, while the Whitney goes back to selling tickets, business as usual.
This isn’t to discourage young artists, writers and intellectuals from demanding political reform, which needs the idealism and energy of youth to propel it forward. Only to say that it’s a fool’s errand to expect sincerity or progressiveness from the art world’s institutional gatekeepers. We can all agree that the Whitney’s choice to include the painting in its bland, clunky survey of played-out conceptualism and poverty porn was a bad idea: factitious, insensitive and, all around, perplexing. Cynics might also reason that, given the visibility and rawness of the race question in the national consciousness, the show’s curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, could’ve anticipated the fallout. Predictably, the museum has been slow to take action outside of issuing an extremely potboiler statement justifying itself with a few lines of artbabble about “facets of human experience” and “empathetic connections.”
In the meantime, Dana Schutz’s painting of the defiled and mutilated corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till remains on display in the chic, minimal galleries of a major art institution for the eyes of jetlagged French tourists popping in on a break from shopping and “critical design” hipsters with thousand-dollar parkas. What better indictment of the folly and myopia of the art world than to let it hang?
greasefire wrote::
pablito wrote:im never dtf and always keep it covered
greasefire wrote::
pablito wrote:im never dtf and always keep it covered
Da Bing Boy wrote:future of work is going to be hilarious, actually
gold and glass wrote:When you get to heaven, do you get to see a list of which gimmicks belonged to who?
Da Bing Boy wrote:future of work is going to be hilarious, actually
PROBLEM ATTIC wrote:I see dear sweet Vivian, one of the boys of Lmao
galactagogue wrote:i imagine she didn't really need it to work well for her tho, she's already got plenty of status
gold and glass wrote:When you get to heaven, do you get to see a list of which gimmicks belonged to who?
greasefire wrote::
pablito wrote:im never dtf and always keep it covered
Da Bing Boy wrote:future of work is going to be hilarious, actually
PROBLEM ATTIC wrote:I see dear sweet Vivian, one of the boys of Lmao
The sort of catharsis that comes at the expense of dissent can only ever be symbolic. “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless,” Black acknowledged in an update to the post. “But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.” This isn’t justice, it’s madness.
Reparations are certainly in order, but they cannot be made by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone. Even if you think that this is a small price to pay for what black people have endured throughout American history—what’s the destruction of one art work to the destruction of countless lives?—it’s unclear how extracting punitive concessions from glorified market consultants is supposed to help anybody in the long run.
The civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum have good intentions and are justified in their outrage, but they’re just the foot soldiers of an inside-baseball wager among people whose main point of difference isn’t the color of their skin but how many MFAs they have. In the end, everybody wins, and yet no one does. Both Black and Schutz, intentionally or not, get a boost to their brands, while the Whitney goes back to selling tickets, business as usual.
chad wrote:"How can I make this about me and also congratulate myself in some way" - basically every hipinion bro
Da Bing Boy wrote:future of work is going to be hilarious, actually
naturemorte wrote:The sort of catharsis that comes at the expense of dissent can only ever be symbolic. “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless,” Black acknowledged in an update to the post. “But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.” This isn’t justice, it’s madness.
Reparations are certainly in order, but they cannot be made by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone. Even if you think that this is a small price to pay for what black people have endured throughout American history—what’s the destruction of one art work to the destruction of countless lives?—it’s unclear how extracting punitive concessions from glorified market consultants is supposed to help anybody in the long run.
The civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum have good intentions and are justified in their outrage, but they’re just the foot soldiers of an inside-baseball wager among people whose main point of difference isn’t the color of their skin but how many MFAs they have. In the end, everybody wins, and yet no one does. Both Black and Schutz, intentionally or not, get a boost to their brands, while the Whitney goes back to selling tickets, business as usual.
so is the author suggesting something along the lines of: it's bogus to assert that contemporary art is a "fundamentally white supremacist institution" and to protest representation along cultural lines when the "actual" problem is in the real subsumption of the entire sphere of artistic production under capital?
greasefire wrote::
pablito wrote:im never dtf and always keep it covered
chad wrote:"How can I make this about me and also congratulate myself in some way" - basically every hipinion bro
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