There is an episode of Arrested Development in which the Bluth family promote a fund raising campaign for TBD. TBD is exactly what you think it is - to be determined. By the end of the episode an even more absurd but plausible disease is substituted and the crowd riots insisting TBD is far more important.
The Art World has managed to manufacture a factory that mass produces TBD studies, causes and reparational aspirations.
I encountered one that every once in a while makes the rounds and it is the meme that access to art is highly restricted, too expensive, and intellectually damaging for all the poor souls who are denied access. I mean this is a tragedy that escaped even Shakespeare. Oh, my god. How do we live with ourselves as artists while *this* goes unchecked?
Of course this belongs to the Artistic Justice Warrior's arsenal of no-such-thing urgent existential problems.
Digitally, almost every major museum has its entire collection of works online. No cost. None.
And most, if not all, museums nationwide and elsewhere offer periodic free admission entry. It may be first Saturday or by specific date, or by celebratory event but your closest museum certainly can be accessed for FREE!
And if the claim of any social group is that they are - heavens to Mercatroid - marginalized, unrepresented, or otherwise disturbed even, every local art gallery has a door that is open during hours of operation that... opens to let you inside FOR FREE! Furthermore, anyone who represents YOU (and you know who YOU are) can exhibit when the gallery has an open call for art.
Furthermore, and this is secret knowledge, the art community has never practiced discrimination against anyone with rare AND unrepresentational (of the community) exception. There is zero need for the unnecessary expense of fancy EQUITY, DEI, or other virtue signaling inoculations.
So why do these cottage industry nonsensical "causes" attract flash mobs, angry identity politic movements, and nothing-better-to-piss-and-moan-about opportunists?
The answer points to a much more difficult problem that involves arithmetic.
Pick a category of art. I've researched visual art for years so let's use that as an example and your mileage will vary with your own research. The Guerrilla Girls have long claimed that biological women are under represented and marginalized and with every passing decade they claim "little has changed".
Well I've used the best information I could find and Women visual artists represent 40% of all visual artists in the United States. I have logged years of juried art shows in NY and New England and performed the arithmetic. Women's art is accepted more than 65% of the time year after year and I suspect this has been the case stretching back decades.
Nothing's changed?! Underrepresented? I define these accusations as fraud and abuse.
We suffer from a social disease that is caused by having our sensibilities imprinted with the idea that art is discriminatory and artists are bigots of one kind or another. It isn't true now and it wasn't true then. historical disparities and injustice are eternally redundant and never one-dimensional.
Grifters and opportunists will always find ways to distort and abuse the dissatisfaction of individuals to create ever larger and directed attacks on the other. The arts community needs to decolonialize our shared intellectual space from these bastards (radical feminists at the forefront of that shitlist).
They over-represent and misrepresent us.
Do your own arithmetic. What percentage of whichever art category does your favorite identity group of artists represent to the whole? Your concept of fair representation will introduce itself to reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment