Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists. — Guy Debord
News that the Institute of Contemporary Art has commissioned The White Pube to serve as resident critics should come as no surprise, even if it marks a fresh nadir for an institution that once hosted COUM Transmissions and Einstürzende Neubauten. But the appointment merits some discussion.
Zarina Muhammed and Gabrielle de la Puente have never written a single interesting sentence, or coherently expressed a single good idea. Nonetheless, in a sense, they are more remarkable than any other current art world personalities, because they represent the pure expression of the intellectual and ethical corruption of the contemporary art system, and the cultural regime in general.
The authors of a deranged and infantile style representing the introduction of Newspeak into art criticism, the front page of their website explicitly declares their own dishonesty: ‘the only reason The White Pube can still exist is because some of our readers choose to support us each month via Patreon. We sometimes do talks n other jobs but Patreon is how we get paid for the actual writing here — the reviews, art thoughts and so on. it’s important to us to stay independent critics without ties to big funders or institutions, public or private.” In truth, they’ve been pushed by institutions from the start of their career: astroturfed into prominence following their graduation from St. Martin’s College by propaganda newspaper the Guardian in 2018, where GCHQ moved in in 2013, and some say never left, they were given a year-long residency by grey man apparatchik Alistair Hudson’s Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art in 2017, then Somerset House, where they bullied feminist internet in dropping a talk with Nina Power. And now the ICA.
In the intervening years, they’ve distinguished themselves as the authors of a series of diatribes against the same malicious white people so strangely eager to reward them. Specializing in now standard accusations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘fascism’ employed like buttons to increase their power, their general procedure is slanderous targeted harassment campaigns, mainly aimed against more thoughtful women than themselves, from the Liverpool Biennale under Sally Tallant, baselessly accused of supporting a ‘sexist and racist curator’; to the artist Nina Edge for reality-based opinions on feminism, resulting in the loss of her job at Liverpool John Moore’s University, and the artist Rachel Ara, hounded out of a lecture she was due to give at Oxford Brookes University.
(It would be remiss here not to mention the ridiculous fake e-mails which they circulated under my name, and then threatened to get me attacked for. If I was another kind of man I might now spend the next two years accusing them of antisemitic death threats, but I can take care of myself.)
The ICA, no longer able to distinguish between criticism and sadism, endorses this behaviour; today standard practice in a psychopolitical aggregate of similarly motivated individuals including the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Lulu Nunn, the “Antifascist” instigator of the Terfs Out Of Art account, some say with friends, and the Birmingham School of Art lecturer Linda Stupart, who last May published a garbled denunciation of the individual to whom she explicitly recognizes she owes her career (admittedly not Nina’s finest hour) on the White Pube website at the same moment she was organizing clandestine meetings in London to coordinate a Zersetzung campaign against her.
These are the kinds of personalities institutional contemporary art promotes, in fact, not despite their behavior, but because of it. The key point is that low intelligence, mental instability, and amorality is not contingent, but essential to their function within a contemporary regime of cultural power amounting to a coalition of mean girls and weak men.
MEAN GIRLS AND WEAK MEN
Weak men or mean (or ugly) girls can be either sex, and specific individuals may showcase elements of both; the one-note sociopathy of Lulu Nunn and the White Pube is paradigmatic mean girl activity while the individuals responsible for hiring them, at the Cherie Blair Foundation, or the ICA, are, structurally, weak men. Marta Kuzma, the ex-director of the Soros Center for Art in Kiev, and current dean of Yale School of Art, who sent out a pathetic e-mail informing her students that she was “deeply disturbed” that the artist Deanna Havas, persecuted now for four years for the crime of being funny and supporting Trump, “achieved a platform within the School” and Krist Gruijthuijsen, the mendacious and confused director of the Kunstwerke in Berlin are both weak men, while Stewart Home, the has-been writer, who last winter felt compelled to declare his feelings of disgust towards Nina Power (to be sure, the one emotion he can feel) while being too cowardly to even mention my name, is a dual-class weak man ugly-girl. David Graeber, the ego-maniacal LSE professor and Joshua Clover, the hereditary academic and male feminist creep whose adolescent homicidal fantasies are funded by the University of California, are both, in fact, quite sad weak men.
Sainsbury’s employees Andrew Osborne, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Benedict Seymour and friends who instigated the 2017 campaign against LD50, and then spent the last three years lying about me on social media are all extremely ugly girls, while the artist John Russell, who cynically joined their campaign, despite having previously exhibited at LD50, and thus knowing perfectly well that the allegation it was a “neo-Nazi recruitment cell” was preposterous (the voyeuristic Russell then travelled to London to watch the demonstration) is a parody of a weak man; like Goldsmith’s MFA program director Suhail Malik, who in 2017 gave Osborne and friends a platform to menace his students.
None of these people are important in themselves, and others could be named instead. The important point is that they constitute the types of personality that today composes the regime on every level from knitting circles to the top of the pyramid. The Obama Administration consisted of the binary of Hilary Clinton, the ultimate ugly girl, and Barack Obama, the consummate weak man; ideologically the “weak man” of neoliberalism is supplemented by the “ugly girl” of Antifascism as unaccountable secret police force and systematic engine of derangement. Have no doubt: when six-figure salaries and book deals are handed to eager-to-please, psychologically fragile sycophants like Clover and Graeber, holding prestige positions at the apex of a trillion dollar tumulus of student debt (understand: it is not the purpose of the debt to pay for education; it is the role of education to hide the function of the debt) or when “Antifascist” Lulu Nunn is employed by Cherie Blair to intimidate independent-minded women, it is safe to conclude that nothing which they say is threatening to the power structure, but has another function: to extend it.
DIVERSITY AS ALIBI
As Thomas Pynchon noted: “If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t need to worry about the answers.” The fundamental point is they don’t need to win the argument, but rather to prevent it taking place, by systematically confusing issues, either through myopia, or active malice; not just the role the White Pube will play for the ICA, but the function of the ICA in general. Thus a self-involved Student Union apparatchik midwit understands enough to talk over Kathleen Stock on Good Morning Britain rather than allowing her to state her case: he was not promoted for his sins, he was promoted by them.
From a systematic point of view, the purpose of the scapegoat mechanism is only to individualize in order to obscure the issues (so that the question is reframed to whether Tucker Carlson, for example, is a racist, from whether what he says is true). Likewise, the diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE) agenda is fundamentally misunderstood to the extent it is identified with authentically subaltern interests, except in the spiritual sense. In reality, diversity is a shield for maintaining incompetence in positions of power — so they cannot be occupied by competence — and a weapon for waging class war from above. Hence the promotion of intersectional theory after Occupy Wall Street briefly flickered to threaten the Washington consensus, and the changing of the conversation from capitalism to fascism and intersectionality and race — as Horkheimer remarked; one talks about the one, in order not to talk about the other.
The fact that many of the most loyal contemporary regime followers identify as “PoC”, this grotesque neologism homogenizing into a single bureaucratic category the culture of six continents and six thousand years (“no Vietcong ever called himself a PoC”) serves this purpose: to disincentive positional criticism through intellectual and moral blackmail. Nobody with half a brain from any background would need to read more than a paragraph by Morgan Quintance (“bollocks, bollocks, it’s all bollocks,”) to realize that this man is not equipped to be an art critic. Yet, thanks to the disordered conscience of the self-hating bourgeoisie, together with his willingness to tell them what they want to hear, namely nothing, he continues to be employed to do so, just as Ta-Nehisi Coates is encouraged by Manhattan liberals to continue to write books. But it is his compliance with the narrative, not his racial background, which is decisive — the brilliant but non-compliant Armand White, Larry Elder, or Thomas Sowell, not to mention Manick Govinda, hounded out of work by the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Lulu Nunn and the White Pube for insulting a cyberstalker don’t enjoy the same protection, and Kanye West is turned into the target of a rolling smear campaign for having the courage to tell people they can think for themselves.
Thus the neoliberal enterprise with its useful Antifascist idiots rolls on. But not for long. A regime built on intellectual and moral weakness is built on quicksand, and now increasingly a clear and strong voice of dissent is beginning to make itself heard.
