Burning art - the latest Progressive initiative

I'm one of those people whose response to art is to say 'I know what I like' so don't take what follows as a piece of art criticism.

The painting in question is called 'Open Casket' and is by an artist called Dana Schutz. Here's one review:

The painting is based on a photograph of African American Emmett Till, laid in a coffin. The 14 year old young man was brutally murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white woman, his face horrifically disfigured in process. Earlier this year, it came out that the accuser, Carolyn Bryant, had lied and made the story up. The painting in question is a marvel to look at and currently on view at the Whitney Biennial. Schutz layers and builds paint in such a way that it appears economical even though she’s literally built a swollen lip out of paint.

So far, so good - and ever so right on. The problem is that Dana Schutz is white and, therefore, “It’s not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,”. As a result the author of that line has decided to go beyond mere criticism and to call for the painting's destruction:

UK-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Black has launched a campaign demanding the Biennial curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket from the show, and calling for its destruction.

In a long and angst-ridden letter Ms Black explains that the terrible imagery in the painting - 'black pain' she calls it - might, in the event of the painting's sale, result in profit. Meaning that white people will have gained from the exploitation of that pain. And, moreover, that the artist should know better than to continue to use such expropriation. Dozens of fellow artists have lined up behind Ms Black in saying that the Whitney Gallery should remove and destroy the painting - though Ms Black has only allowed black artists to sign the letter.

It seems to me that, whatever the merits of the painting (and everyone, even Ms Black, seem to think is is powerful and well-executed) the idea that we destroy art because we don't like its message, its image or its artist simply takes these Progressive voices into the same world as the book burners of 1930s Germany or the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Ms Black and others may see their cause as righteous but then so did those who, back in 1989, tried to ban Robert Mapplethorpe's "The Perfect Moment" exhibition because it featured explicit gay sex. Or a thousand other examples of censorship by the state and other authorities - on grounds of taste, religion and the ethnicity of the artist.

It's fair to say that our Progressives are a bit mixed up over this:

Prior to that conversation, if you’d asked me if I thought it was a good idea for white artists to refrain from rendering certain racially charged subjects, I would have responded with a rant about how all this debate would lead only to white artists depicting black subjects less frequently. I’m not sure that position would have been wrong, but I’d now add the caveat that some subjects might be worth leaving alone. I write this knowing this road has “slippery slope” written all over it. After all, I’ve now written about this painting. Am I now profiting off black suffering too? I don’t think so, but then again it’s in my interest to think that.

Confusing eh? For my part I suspect that the politicised hypersensitivity of the black artists seeking the painting's destruction serves the cause of art badly and the idea of liberty not at all. Such actions merely reinforce the idea that offence and sensitivity must be policed, the very same idea that led to literature, music and art being suppressed by public censorship for its portrayal of women, gay men and sexual liberty. This is why - despite the arts world describing itself as such - I have called the protagonists here Progressives rather than liberals. Suggesting it is liberal to want a painting destroyed simply because the artist is white is the very opposite of of artistic freedom. Indeed it is little different to the idea, from another bunch of modernist illiberals, of degenerate art.

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There shouldn't be a choice between social justice and free speech

The Parable of the Mote and the Beam by Domenico Fetti

Don't get me wrong, I think the term 'social justice' is a misleadingly weasel phrase that most of the time is used in the manner of a toddler's foot-stamping scream of 'not fair'. But that's not the point here. The point is that we have created a world where people - in frightening numbers - think it OK to call for the arrest and incarceration of someone for the generic crime of being offensive.

Worse still, the response of the police and other public authorities is to indulge these screaming toddlers - and please let's make a distinction between specific threats of rape or violence and generic racist, sexist or otherwise unpleasant comments. So instead of simply doing nothing (the correct response) what the police do is issue statements saying they are 'monitoring' social media for offensive comments. I'm guessing this is done in the manner of the teacher who can't control his class - 'one more sound from any of you and you're all on detention'.

The problem is that today's society seems filled with people who say things like 'of course I believe in free speech, but..." Revealing by this statement that they think it entirely proper to pass laws, enact regulations and lead twitter mobs with the aim of preventing people from expressing something they find unpleasant, distasteful or offfensive. And some of these people even get offended on behalf of some other bunch of folk - "if I were (insert name of possibly offended group) I'd be deeply offended by that..."

I don't know where all this started. Nor do I think that there's anything wrong with challenging people who express unpleasant views. But at some point we started to believe a particular argument that somehow free speech wasn't really free speech because many people didn't feel safe or confident to challenge the misogyny, the racism or the general self-regarding offensiveness. This brings me to the conversation with my neighbour (who, shall we say, is not hesitant in expressing unpopular opinions) - his point to me was that, as a politician, I can't say what I really want to say because me saying it becomes 'top Tory in offensive tweet scandal' whereas his saying that something is just seen as the fat bloke at the bar sounding off.

My response is that I do self-censor (we all do this but I do to a greater extent). There is a long list of things I will discuss at home that I won't discuss at the pub. And a longer list that I'd avoid in public - whether at council or on social media. You could argue that my free speech is curtailed - it would be good to be in a position to speak more of some things on that list because they are very important - but it is me doing the curtailing not the public authorities. It is sensibility - as the Georgians would have seen it - that constrains my speech not the threat of arrest and imprisonment.

It seems to me that the debate about speech has got to the point where the idea of free speech is so curtailed that any argument can be closed down simply by using the term 'offensive' (or the terms that specify that offence - 'racist', 'misogynist', 'anti-disabled' and so forth). Worse still people who aren't really offended - those thousands signing that petition - grab their pitchfork and join the mob calling for the offenders head on a stake. Each one of those people should, as Christ pointed out at the Sermon on the Mount, examine his or her own conscience - consider their own offensiveness before laying into someone else for the same crime.

Free speech is one of the three pillars on which our liberty is founded. All three are under attack but there's no doubt that the desire - from governments and from those who would create an Orwellian newspeak - to restrain what we are allowed to say is becoming one of the biggest challenges to freedom. That some ideas cannot be debated at universities because some students night not feel 'safe'. How we've extended the term race to encompass any self-identification as a minority. And the fearful closing down of debate about religion and the multiplication of perceived language offences. This creeping authoritarianism threatens free debate, the creation of ideas and acts merely to cow people into an approved manner of speech and behaviour.

But the real battle line lies with the law, with the use of that law to shut down debate and to destroy your opponents. Worse still with the application of that law to destroy someone because the mob demands it. This is the real offence, the real attack on our freedom. This - not someone you don't have to take any notice of posting insults on twitter - is the thing we must challenge. Free speech is too important for us to allow people to carry on adding the word "...but..." to it and using that word to justify calls for arrests, for bans and for stopping debate.

There shouldn't be a choice between social justice and free speech. Indeed no sort of justice is advanced by preventing someone else - through the mob or through the force of authority - from expressing an opinion, even where that opinion may offend someone. And no sort of justice is served by arresting and charging people for saying something. I recall the campaigns against Britain's blasphemy laws - I can remember arguing with fellow Tories that we should support the campaign regardless of the company we would have to keep to do so. This was the 'progressive left' successfully extending free speech. So why now do the same people now campaign for laws to limit free speech?

We need to make the case for free speech. To point out that it's this freedom that allowed the debate about women's rights, that provided the platform for gay liberation and that sat at the heart of the civil rights movement. The sort of mob rule we see on twitter is not morally distinct from the mobs who would have stopped Martin Luther King had the USA not had a constitutional protection for free speech. So if you're saying we can't debate some things because some folk choose to be offended - whether it's feminism, Islam, Liverpool football club or the character of Glaswegians - then you are helping create a society where control, oppression and submission destroys liberty. In the end you can't have a free speech only for those things you approve - that's not free speech that's censorship. That's not a free society.

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Government is bad for your health and worse for your liberty.

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And that means not allowing governments to censor what we say:

Google said in a blog post: "As we've gathered and released more data over time, it's become increasingly clear that the scope of government attempts to censor content on Google services has grown.

"In more places than ever, we've been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services."

The biggest offender is not one of the obviously oppressive nations but a country with a democratically elected left-wing leader - Brazil.

Government is bad for your health and worse for your liberty.

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