Why Are White Men Touching Art?

It’s opening night at the gallery, and the stress level is high. Directors are running around trying to appease the donors, the caterers are attempting to maneuver kegs and carts through the crowded floor, and the guests, though sparse on any other day, are flooding the space and trickling throughout the several new shows.

I, meanwhile, am at my post, body stationary and neck on a jittery swivel as I attempt to cover five hundred square feet of space, a human sign silently reminding all: DO NOT TOUCH.

The main objects of concern are a set of sculptures by a black male artist from LA. Sea Pigs, as they are titled, the pieces are made of reclaimed buoys hung from the ceiling and covered in layers of paper, acrylic medium and bungee cord. Though abstract sculpture doesn't exactly lend itself to written description, the point stands that the room is littered with bovine-sized sculptures dangling at shoulder height and, due to their peculiar blend of material, begging to be touched

Hour one passes with little trouble, the closest instance being an elderly woman who, engrossed in her phone, nearly walked into Sea Pig #2. But I spotted the potential incident, placed myself in her path and took the blow to protect the art. She apologized and seemed embarrassed, but I told her not to worry, knowing how much more embarrassed she would’ve been had she clotheslined herself on the sculpture.

Soon though, another potential hazard approaches. He’s in his mid-forties, white and approaching the pig nearest me with what looks like either immense passion or rage. Though he’s standing a bit closer to the sculpture than the prescribed distance of arms’ length, his chin is cupped in his hand, and he appears to be not only aware of but also deeply interested in the piece.

I tend to struggle in these moments, when I see someone with the potential to touch the work, but I decide that I’d rather not intervene and risk scolding a patron who is in full control of himself.

But then it happens.

He lifts an open hand, palms the side of the sculpture and shoves it as if he were pushing a child on a tire swing. When I walk up to him and inform him not to touch the art, trying to mask my annoyance, he smirks and walks away, leaving the sculpture to swing about the room, a wrecking ball that will likely sell for more than my yearly salary.

The next one to touch the piece walks over with his arms outstretched. Though I shouted for him to stop, he proceeded to catch the piece in his bosom and toss it back out for another go-round.

Shortly after, another man comes up and laughs at the piece as its swing slows. He turns to the woman on his left, says something about art these days and raps his fist on the piece’s side, continuing to laugh even after I ask him to stop.

Now entering my second year as a museum guard, I've come to see instances like these as less of a stressful surprise and more of a perennial nuisance. As a white man myself, I'm hesitant to cast blanket aspersions on my own kind; however, the fact stands that the only adults who I've witnessed intentionally handling the art have been white, straight-presenting males. But why?

One idea I find particularly relevant to this phenomenon is the recently recognized trend of manspreading. What seemingly began as a wry way of mocking the bow-legged occupants of public transit has begun to penetrate mainstream consciousnesses and stir up voluble scorn from feminist communities and the greater public.

What the New York Times described as the “lay-it-all-out sitting style that more than a few men see as their inalienable underground right,” manspreading is a derisive descriptor for the way that men tend to take up two, and often more, seats with their spread legs, forcing other passengers to either stand and suffer or compress themselves to sit.

The popularization of the term seems to have originated with blogs such as Move The Fuck Over, Bro and Men Taking Up Too Much Space On The Train. Deceptively innocuous, these blogs themselves—near totally comprised of photos submitted by readers—present a crowdsourced account of men on public transportation who take up more than their fair share of space. Sometimes, they’ve occupied the adjacent seat with their bags while other photos show the male subject reclined across an entire bench. Most though, depict men sitting upright with legs splayed open, encroaching upon nearby passengers and often forcing them to stand.

Apart from photos such as these, the only other content on these sites appears to be responses to the massive amounts of criticism that they have garnered. While some of the detractors take issue with the public shaming of various men without their consent to being photographed, most concern themselves with the male form.

Some examples:

“this is a matter of anatomy”

“try being 6foot 4inches and having a massive pair of balls between your legs.”

“men have balls. they can’t close their legs otherwise it really, really hurts”

Though the many comments vary in terms of indignation, the general sentiment behind each of them seems to be that someone with testicles cannot comfortably sit close-legged. The anonymous editor of Move The Fuck Over, Bro fields these criticisms with articulate statements rooted in gender theory, often citing widely accepted notions of women wrongly being forced to accommodate male bodies.

MTUTMSotT, on the other hand, the anonymous editor of the second blog who self-identifies as a person with testicles, responds in a less predictable manner. Rather than take the time to give each comment an individualized response, MTUTMSotT simply lumps their critics together as men defending their balls. Compiling all of these criticisms into what they label as a poem, Men Defending Their Balls: A Superpoem, the editor snarkily reduces all criticism—quite literally—to the male thought that their genitalia grants them the right to occupy extra seats. Implicit in this thought is the idea that men, aware or not, feel it their privilege to consume more space than women.

Furthermore, if one should examine all of the men featured on these blogs, he will notice that, in spite of a wide range of ages represented, the men seen manspreading are largely white and straight.

(Though my gaydar does lose a bit of accuracy when only judging from photos, I feel it is not too much of a stretch when I assume a heterosexual majority of this group.)

Manspreading seems not an act of conscious malevolence but rather one that demonstrates a lack of awareness and consideration. Still, the enraged male response to the widespread derision of manspreading proves very telling about the ways in which, while ignorant to privilege, they will fight to defend it when someone attempts to revoke it.

Straight white males, for the most part, are never taught to regulate their bodies. Likely never having existed as a member of an oppressed group, they are never forced to police themselves in the ways that women, people of color, queers and disabled persons come to learn. While I am not arguing that the societal imposition of said self-policing is a good thing, I do feel one of its direct results is the growth of one’s self-awareness, particularly with regards to one’s environment.

From a young age, people belonging to these oppressed identities recognize the ways in which a public embodiment of said identity can put them at either a disadvantage or risk of harm. With this in mind, most will adapt through a simultaneous affecting and suppressing of various traits. Code switching can serve as an example of this, but the sort of policing I’m referring to consists of more than the verbal and can include the modification of one’s appearance and behavior.

Though examples of this phenomenon exist for all sorts of groupings, the specific traits modified and the extent to which one modifies them—if at all—vary tremendously based upon context and personal preference. As such, I feel that, rather than attempting to ignorantly unpack the complexity of a black girl getting a weave or a Spanish speaker adopting a white affect, it would be the most accurate and productive for me to speak from my own experience.

Growing up gay in an environment hostile to aberrant sexualities, I quickly learned that presenting myself in accordance with my natural inclinations would make me subject to taunting and violence. With that in mind, I—like many gay boys—was forced to examine myself and determine which of my behaviors read as homosexual and how I could most effectively conceal them.

My preference for tight clothing and obsession with Christina Aguilera were relatively easy fixes, a simple matter of relegating these interests to moments of privacy; however, other traits proved trickier to stifle.

My theatrical phrasing, my effeminate walk, my tendency to flail my limp wrists in conversation, these could only be hidden through laborious concentration, and there was always the risk of a lapse.

Routinely lowering my vocal pitch and clutching onto my belt loops in an effort to prevent girlish gesticulation, I grew exhaustingly ashamed. Eventually, I realized not speaking at all achieved a similar assimilatory effect, and it left me feeling slightly less hateful of myself than my other option. I shrank and withdrew from situations whenever possible.

Maintaining the façade required an immense amount of restraint and high levels of attunement to my environment, my relationship to it and the way that its occupants may perceive me. For example I would ramp up my efforts on the baseball diamond as opposed to an art museum where I would feel more at liberty to relax.

Though other accounts certainly differ in terms of mechanism and urgency, I maintain that all those belonging to an oppressed identity category go through a similar process of recognition and regulation that inevitably leads to a heightened sense of self-awareness. Straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied men, on the other hand, are much less likely to encounter a similar experience and are thus less likely to have so honed a sense of self and its relation to others.

During adolescence, when biological sex differences become apparent to teens and an increase in social cognition creates an acute sensitivity to one’s peers, girls and boys are subjected to an entirely different set of messages. While young women gain fat, grow undesirable hair, acquire breasts and begin to grapple with society’s imposition of their role as a sexual object, young men gain muscle, grow beards and, through a lack of a restriction comparable to that of females, are led to believe that anything is within their reach, that they possess the potential for limitless expansion.

How this all relates back to art is a bit more complicated.

While one could certainly make the case that the white man’s tendency to touch is an enactment of his entitlement to space, I feel this is an oversimplification. The touching phenomenon, while able to be partially explained by notions of maleness, self-awareness and space, is incomplete without noting how these complexes of white maleness interact with mainstream perceptions of contemporary art and the increasing prevalence of oppressed voices within the field.

A small museum devoted to contemporary and modern art, my workplace rarely displays anything in the realm of realism or representational works. The shows in recent memory tend to fall somewhere under the surprisingly large umbrella of abstract expressionism that, while no less interesting, can prove rather obtuse to those who never studied visual art.

Though the past few decades have seen visual art fall from the mainstream, evidenced by the absence of contemporary household names in the vein of Warhol and Pollock, the field nonetheless thrives and continues to be viewed as something characteristic of wealth, sophistication, and most importantly intellectualism.

The ability to appreciate visual art is read as synonymous with the aforementioned traits, meaning when one fails to understand a painting, he is inevitably confronted with the unpleasant thought that he is unintelligent.

A recent trend in contemporary art has been the embracing of marginalized voices, particularly those of black Americans and women. Should we treat space for expression in a similar way that we do physical space, then the gradual incorporation of these oppressed perspectives can be thought of as edging out or—at the least—competing with those of white men.

These new voices, either highly critical of or wholly uninterested in conditions of white maleness, create a space that neither surrenders nor makes itself accessible to white men. Though on a subway car, the man can blithely occupy as much space as he wishes, his privilege ensuring little objection, an art museum posits itself as a more formidable terrain.

Walking into the museum, the white man becomes a foreigner in the sense that he is no longer in exclusive possession of the space. He sees the works of black artists, reads the wall text detailing themes of African Diaspora, the process of othering, and the desperation of reinvention, but he fails to locate these themes within the various pieces and does not feel it worth his time to look further. He turns to his wife who, while no less perplexed by the show than him, is more willing to entertain the idea of this art not being tailored to her sensibility.

He makes a remark about the sad state of art today.

When a white man touches a painting, he is in effect rallying against the idea that something will not bend to make itself accessible to him. He is airing his frustration that something so symbolic of intellect could evade him entirely. He is confronted by the fact that something once belonging exclusively to his kind is gradually being infiltrated. He realizes that there may no longer be surplus space for his expansion and concludes that the best way to come to terms with such a thought is to totally dismiss it at its source.

As demonstrated by their hostile reaction to the manspreading movement, white men, while seemingly unaware of their privilege, will fight rabidly to preserve it.