Art’s Watery Grave
When curators become moral arbiters, art becomes propaganda.
In what now appears to be a publicity stunt, Manchester Art Gallery removed, and then quickly reinstalled, the iconic painting of water nymphs by John William Waterhouse. The gallery claimed the move was intended “to prompt conversation.” Visitors were invited to place post-it notes on the gallery wall formerly occupied by the canvas, explaining how they felt about the absence of the masterpiece. Had I traveled from California to Manchester to see Hylas and the Nymphs, I’d be plenty pissed, and I wouldn’t play along with their post-it’s game; I’d proceed straight to the office and ask for my money back — not just for the admission, but for the whole trip.
Gallery curator Clare Gannaway did not think that the removal of this hugely popular painting amounted to censorship because “It wasn’t about denying the existence of particular artworks.” Right. It was just about denying the experience of it.
Why would anyone need to actually see the painting if she — some self-appointed judge of artistic value — can explain why it’s wrong to look at it? And what did she think was wrong with it, exactly?
The work usually hangs in a room titled In Pursuit of Beauty, which contains late 19th century paintings showing lots of female flesh.
Gannaway said the title was a bad one, as it was male artists pursuing women’s bodies, and paintings that presented the female body as a passive decorative art form or a femme fatale.
“For me personally, there is a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with it sooner. Our attention has been elsewhere … we’ve collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”
Being the kind of person who prides herself for thinking improper thoughts, I find the idea that a curator would “deal with” a painting the way middle school principal deals with a disobedient child, by sending it to detention, repugnant. A curator’s job is to bring art to the people, not to police it.
I am humbled by the hubris of this art world apparatchik who believes that her ideas and feelings about Victorian art are more important than the art itself, and that her obligation is not to make the highest achievements of our civilization available, but to use them as her personal playground. In a better world she would no longer have her job. I don’t know why, other than for reasons of self-aggrandizement, she took it in a first place.
The assault on beauty
Tom Wolfe argued in Painted Word that although modern art likes to present itself as an expression of the pure visual liberated from narrative, it has always been driven by the narrative — that of the critics who came up with the theory which the artists later illustrated in their ever-evolving “movements”. Still, this dynamic is informed by the internal logic of arts and not any kind of restrictions imposed by political bodies.
Unfortunately, in the age of #MeToo what’s guiding the artist appears to be not a clever high brow theory, but an attack on beauty coming from quarters far removed from the world of arts. Feminist social theory finds male gaze threatening and aims to dethrone all of its products.
We’d been here before, of course.
In my previous post, I talked about how twenty years ago Camille Paglia became the voice of reason and a staunch defender of beauty; she said what had to be said, and in way that resonated with people across political spectrum. I credit Paglia with rescuing Western heritage from the claws of political correctness for our generation.
Alas, the rescue was tempoary. Manchester Art Gallery presented the removal of the Waterhouse painting as an artistic act that will feature in the show of one Sonia Boyce. I googled Sonia Boyce. She comes across as a nice enough lady who is also a serviceable illustrator. Definitely no male gaze issues, and her CV hits all the right, that is, politically correct, marks. Below is her piece, “Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain so Great,” 1986.
The day Manchester Art Gallery removed Victorian masterpiece from display, Seventeen, an American magazine for teen girls, featured a manicure from Asa Bree, whose “manicures literally deserve their own museum exhibit.” This was a realistic vagina manicure. So realistic, that when “nail artist” Bree from Portland, Oregon designed her creation, she “even looked up medical models of the vulva online to make sure she got it right”. (That should be heresy because Our Bodies, Our Selves teaches us to hold the mirror to our private parts for inspiration.) Bree swept five shades of pink polish over a nail and topped it of with a deep wide gush and a pearl. Georgia O’Keeffe she is not, but at least she made her creation shiny. Again, no male gaze issues: the ballooning amalgamation of polish on a woman’s nails makes one look like a carrier of a gnarly disease, or, worse, a mutant. Which would be fine, I suppose, if Bree’s stated goal was to show ugliness and depravity, but it is not. It’s rah-rah Sisterhood a la pussy hats.
There’s a Harold Bloom quote, “All bad poetry is sincere.” Bree’s “nail art” is like bad poetry — it really wants to make a heartfelt political statement.
And the political statement she is trying to make happens to be very much within the criteria of the good old Soviet genre of Socialist Realism which, according to the official definition, aims to show the world not as it is, but as it’s becoming. I remember.
When Soviet artists created their state-sponsored work, they were instructed to show their countrymen’s alleged heroic struggle to build communism. Since communism, we were assured, is inevitable, artists were showing the world as it’s becoming. They didn’t paint alcoholics passing out on the streets or poets en route to GULAGS. They painted only record harvests, new constructions and blue-eyed partisans in Belarussian forests. It wasn’t the the real world or even the world as it was becoming. It was the story that the propaganda wanted us to believe was unfolding.
And that is the feminist artists’ quest for female gaze. It is the world as certian feminists want it to be: the alluring female form masked by bulky shapes and in-your-face women’s parts. There are no bad dates, no hormonal injections in a belated effort to conceive a child. Only “Look at me! I am the fierce matriarchal future, as described by the theorists, in the rape-free world of peace, justice, and artistic pursuit for all. Thanks to you who reigned in the men!”
The Quest for the Approved Female Gaze Misses A Far More Interesting Comment on Women and Art
It’s not like female artists had never existed in the past. Did they view women in this desexualized way promoted by modern radical feminists? Consider the following note about the Waterhouse removal controversy:
Rae’s is a far more erotic (and conventional) take on ancient mythology and very much a celebration of female form. Unfortunately, while it’s heavy on seduction, it’s light on treachery and murder. Waterhouse created a work far more blood-chilling and mysterious, less flesh than a horror story.
Christina Hoff-Sommers commented that Waterhouse’s biggest fans are teenage girls:
I previously wrote about horror as a genre that speaks especially to women coming of age. This is just another example. A girl coming to terms both with her newly-discovered sexual power and emerging sex drive is instinctively driven to the image of solemn seductresses and the dark still waters they dwell in. Water is sensual, water holds mysteries, water holds answers to questions of life and death.
Manchester Art Gallery could have started a much more interesting conversation about female preferences in art and revived the understanding of classical art in the modern era by asking viewers to compare the two versions of the myth. But the curator and her team did not see it.
Can the current quest for female empowerment in art produce a masterpiece like Hylas and the Nymphs? Stranger things can happen. Russians today are re-evaluating Socialist Realism, finding technical mastery and not-so-obvious meaning in its products. And yet, if ideology-guided feminist artists will create art for the ages, it will probably be despite their chosen ideology and not because of it. Until then (and here I differ with Cathy Young) Woody Allen’s Manhattan will remain the feminist masterpiece.
