The Leiden painting, Blond Ambition, and what we miss when we talk about art

Take nothing for granted - even if the culture wars implore otherwise

(Personal freedom-of-expression heroine - her 90s work has aged brilliantly, and will continue to do so, due to this understanding of art - its inherent ambiguities, the impossible task of controlling it or fencing it in. This speech is way better than ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ and is really useful to revisit today for obvious reasons.)

The whole 'cancel culture' debate is deeply tedious and boring. It is tedious because it consists of an attempt to take something that contains no concrete truths, lies, rights or wrongs (ART) and dilute it into a system composed entirely of concrete truths, lies, rights and wrongs. 

I reject any notion that art can be right or wrong. I believe those moral absolutes are what's driving the actions of the current media/critical/literary establishment when it:

• Takes the narrative scope or focus of a piece of art (whom the artist has chosen to ‘centre’ or ‘sideline’ in a narrative) as grounds for blanket rejection and censorship

• Uses ‘own-voices’ rhetoric to dictate who has ‘the right to tell a story’, with certain narratives off-limits to certain people… and operates under the view that certain narratives are inherently unrelatable to some audiences, or that some writers are inherently less relatable to some readers by virtue of comparative social privilege  

• Proclaims, with no self-criticism and often on the behalf of audiences, museum-goers and students, some art to be ‘relevant’ and some to be ‘irrelevant’ to people today, calling art ‘outdated’ because it was made a long time ago and/or ‘contains’ views and depictions considered politically incorrect.

• Uses the rhetoric of ‘punching up’ as a blanket tool for the criticism of comedy and satire - with no critical thinking about the complexities of social stratification or the ‘surprising’, often inherently counter-cultural nature of comedy and how it can interact with narrative.

• Operates within the assumption that all art is, or should be, didactic, with an intended conclusion that furthers a political cause. Views art as inherently ‘right’ if it has a ‘therapeutic’ quality for those considered marginalised, while offence resulting from art is inherently wrong, ‘harmful’, irreparable, something that must be prevented at all costs.

• Sometimes treats depiction of a moral ‘wrong’ as automatic endorsement of that ‘wrong’. Sometimes ascribes imagined opinions expressed by imagined characters, or given under the conditions of satire and irony, to a work’s creator in real life. Makes absolute conclusions about the morality of an artist from the moral qualities and transgressions that are apparently found in their art, and vice versa.

• Acts as if an audience’s moral (=political) compass is affected upon interaction with said art, or that art can only be interacted with if its creator is intentionally disowned (one or the other, no grey area)

I do think that ‘cancel culture’ exists and that it is basically summed up by the tendencies above. I feel quite angry when I see it dismissed as a right-wing canard because I see it affecting people of all political affiliations and in all areas of society, especially those who have to grapple with these new rules and goalposts without having access or much say in the institutions where they originate, ie. mostly the culturally-defined working class (who don’t tend, as a group, to take the top jobs in mass media, publishing and academia, all generally ‘genteel’ upper-middle class industries - but who still make and interact with art). 

The debate about whether ‘cancel culture’ should exist would clearly progress if participants stopped taking the meanings of huge loaded abstract concepts for granted and started actually asking questions and thinking about them. I will use a current controversy as an example - a 1970s painting by the Dutch artist Rein Dool, which is subject of much argument regarding its display in a boardroom at the University of Leiden. According to the Guardian, some students see it as an endorsement of patriarchy (?) and cigar-smoking (???).

This bad press surprised me because the men in this painting are intentionally distorted in size and shape, and their arrangement on the canvas is awkward and squashed, nearly claustrophobic! They fill its whole width. The standing man is cut off with no space for his full height. The angle we are viewing from makes it seem as if we are surrounded by a circle of scheming executives, with no way out. Only one is looking back - or rather, down - at us, wryly and sceptically - the rest are absorbed in themselves or in private conversations. The painter’s style contrasts with the actuality of his subject - his brushstrokes are blocky, rhythmic and playful. He seems to be poking fun at the men in the painting - their power, their habits, their close social structure - rather than merely recording a moment in their lives.

On first glance I took the painting to be a humorous commentary on insular all-male boardrooms, not an endorsement. I can’t really see it as an endorsement of cigar smoking, either - when cigars were advertised in the 1950s, the models tended to be ineffable, relaxed, handsome men. The artist is right, it is “stupid and sad” that his painting was turned to the wall by attendees of a university meeting - it shows an ignorance of art history and an inability to think beyond the simple logic of depiction equating to endorsement.

‘Not everyone feels represented by this iconic work’, says the university’s president in her diplomatic response to the resultant media backlash. Sadly, she is fending off the authoritarians by feeding into their misdirected concern. Why would anyone want to be represented in this position or style? I am reminded of the backlash Lena Dunham received for the racial makeup of her sitcom Girls, which is supposed to be specifically about the comedically insular and narcissistic lives of young white cosmopolitan women, and in which every character is deeply flawed. Not all ‘representation’, of course, is inherently positive or charitable - artists are free to make fun of the people they portray, even if they are also depicted as well-meaning, even if they are ‘centring’ them by telling a story in the first person (see Adrian Mole).  

What does it mean to 'feel represented’? Is this always essentially good? Are there times when it is actually uncomfortable to be presented with a mirror self?  

A question also worth asking: how might, eg. Rembrandt and Vermeer and Bacon and Freud have differed in their motivations for painting a portrait? How does the general meaning of 'representation' change and diverge post-Monet (experiments with colour and light) or post-Cubism (commentary on the nature of image-making) or post-Duchamp (commentary on the nature of art itself)? In storytelling, how does it change post-Joyce or post-Woolf? How can we take this intellectual background into account when criticising art?

The single piece of art that has had the greatest impact on me thus far =  Madonna's sacrilegious 1990 concert performance of Like a Virgin, which involved a sequence of simulated masturbation running into another sequence of religious ecstasy. I have no Catholic ancestry or belief and was still momentarily compelled to seek a sort of religious pardon, both on my part and the artist's, after viewing a recording. I felt disturbed for about a week afterwards and could not sleep properly. Madonna made me obsess for days over the meanings of sex, religion, freedom and respect. There was no straightforward answer to this rumination (in terms of, like, ‘freedom>sex=religion<respect’, etc) - the performance was successful, and a turning point in my own conception of what art was, precisely because it invited deep thought and came with no intended conclusion. This is not an essential function of art (for there are essentially none) - it's testament to the potential of artistic expression when uncompromised by straightforward doctrine. 

The Blond Ambition backlash may look excessive three decades later - she was condemned by the Pope! She was nearly arrested in Toronto! - but the same knee-jerk outrage greets artists today when they stray from accepted narratives and condoned imagery. We have outsourced the backlash to religions that aren’t Christianity, to teenagers on social media, and (scarily) to the media-publishing-music-film industries themselves. 

The ‘cancel culture’ debate will stagnate forever until we open the following concepts up for widespread discussion, taking into account their current and historical meanings and whether they are always good or bad in any stable sense: ‘representation’, ‘narrative’, ‘offence’, ‘art’, ‘blasphemy’, ‘comedy’, ‘satire’, ‘pornography’, ‘progress’, ‘education’, ‘harm’, ‘trauma’, ‘abstract’, ‘figurative’, ‘powerful’, ‘marginalised’, ‘subliminal’, ‘to centre’, ‘modernism’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘condemnation’, ‘outdated’, ‘endorsement’, ‘relevance’, ‘irrelevance’. We need to stop thinking in memes and adapt the complexity of the debate to the inherent complexity of its subject. It probably is memes that got us to this point - the post-2014 online construction of ‘cultural appropriation’, the normalisation of simplistic Young Adult fiction in every book-related sphere, the conflation - on social media - of artists with illustrators, the rebranding of everything online as ‘content’. Art deserves better!