Like many people, we have pretty much given up reading The New
Yorker. Under the editorship of Tina Brown, that venerable
bastion of limousine liberalism has been jerked sharply to the left
and infused with the same sort of preening frivolity and radical chic
that Miss Brown brought to the pages of Vanity Fair. Imagine our
surprise, then, when a friend called our attention
to Arlene Croce’s extraordinary and wide-ranging article
“Discussing the Undiscussable” in the issue of December 26–January
2. It is certainly one of the most important pieces of cultural
criticism that The New Yorker has published in recent memory.
Although she has not been writing as much these past few years as she
once did, Miss Croce is well known as one of the most vigorous and
authoritative dance critics of her generation. In this instance,
however, Miss Croce’s subject was not dance but the cataclysm that
has overtaken our cultural life. The occasion for her meditation was
Still/Here, a multimedia performance piece about AIDS by the much
celebrated black, gay choreographer Bill T. Jones. (It is reviewed in
this issue by Laura Jacobs.) This was hardly Mr. Jones’s first
appearance in the pages of The New Yorker: in November, for
example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., doyen of Afro-American studies at
Harvard, published an appreciation of Jones in the magazine.
Featuring videotapes of terminally ill people talking about their
illnesses—Mr. Jones has made the fact that he is HIV-positive
part of his act—Still/Here
was recently presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the
predictable hosannahs from all politically correct quarters.
Equally predictable was the response to Miss Croce’s piece:
enthusiastic support from critics of political correctness, abuse
from such dependable sources of liberal orthodoxy as The Village
Voice (which published two attacks on the piece in the same issue)
and the op-ed page of The New York Times. The fact that the piece
appeared under the novel rubric “A Critic at Bay” suggests that the
editors of The New Yorker were themselves uneasy about the piece.
Miss Croce did not review Still/Here— indeed, she dropped the first
bombshell of “Discussing the Undiscussable” by explaining that she
had not seen the performance and had no intention of seeing it.
Instead, she adduced Still/Here as a vivid example of her real
subject: the proliferation in our culture of “victim art” and its
attendant attitude of politically correct self-righteousness. “By
working dying people into his act,” Miss Croce writes, “Jones is
putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as
literally undiscussable—the most extreme case among the
distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as
artists but as victims and martyrs.” Miss Croce continues:
The thing that “Still/Here” makes immediately apparent, whether you
see it or not, is that victimhood is a kind of mass delusion that has
taken hold of previously responsible sectors of our culture. The
preferred medium of victimhood … is videotape, … but the
cultivation of victimhood by institutions devoted to the care of art
is a menace to all art forms, particularly performing-art forms.
In fact, this disaster infects virtually every department of cultural
life. In the visual arts, for example, what Miss Croce refers to
variously as “Warholism” and the “Humpty-Dumpty view” of
art—If I say it is art, then it is art—has
“pretty well demolished the need for serious
criticism.” Avant-gardists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage
were instrumental in nurturing this anti-artistic approach to
cultural life—as, later, was Andy Warhol and the whole phenomenon of
Pop Art. In the end, these exercises in artistic futility depend
upon that version of aestheticism which seeks to erase the boundary
between life and art. The announced goal is usually
to immunize art from the incursions
of philistinism, but the result is that both art and life are
denatured. As Miss Croce notes, although this move was originally
meant to confound cultural philistines, today “the philistines are
likely to be the artists themselves.” It is perhaps ironic that what
originated as part of
an anti-establishment avant-garde should now work to consolidate a
new establishment. But Miss Croce’s point remains: “The kind of
‘innovation’ that seeks to relieve critics of their primary task
of evaluation is always suspect.”
In this sense,
Miss Croce’s remarkable essay is “a plea for the critic.” “I can’t
review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about,” she notes. Nor
can she review someone who has short-circuited criticism by foisting
off social grievances as art, a capacious category that includes
performers who
present themselves
as “dissed blacks, abused women, or disenfranchised homosexuals—as
performers, in short, who make out of victimhood victim art. I can
live with the flabby, the feeble, the scoliotic,”
Miss Croce writes. “But with the
righteous I cannot function at all.” What we are dealing with here is
not really art but “a politicized version of the blackmail that
certain performers resort to
… Instead of compassion, these
performers induce, and even invite, a cozy kind of complicity. When a
victim artist finds his or her public, a perfect, mutually
manipulative union is formed which no critic may put asunder.”
Miss Croce is quite right that ideology has had a lot to do with the
development of victim art, and she is right again that the ideology
in question has its roots in the cultural radicalism that began in
the 1930s and came to full flower in the 1960s. “The ideological
boosters of utilitarian art,” she writes, “hark back to the political
crusades of the sixties—against Vietnam, for civil rights.
The sixties, in turn, harked back to the proletarian thirties, when
big-government bureaucracy began.” In the case of
Bill T. Jones,
when he declared himself HIV-positive and made his medical
condition the focus of
his performance, “the permissive thinking of the sixties was back,
and in the most pernicious form”—a form that combines
radical politics and narcissistic
grandstanding to produce the moralizing spectacle of victim art.
As Miss Croce points out, it is not only criticism but also art
itself that is threatened by this cult of victimhood. She speaks here
of the “utilitarian” view of art that has triumphed in our culture:
the view, fostered by our arts bureaucracies and reinforced by the
academy, the media, and even by many artists, that art is valuable
primarily as an instrument of social enlightenment and moral
consciousness-raising. What this approach undermines is the
independence of cultural life, replacing it with a pious moralism
that poaches on the prestige of art in its effort to enforce
political conformity. The curious result is that art is
simultaneously overvalued and undercut: overvalued in the way a
fetish is overvalued—valued, that is, in a perverted, uncritical
fashion—and undercut in that its true function, as a medium for
aesthetic exploration, is systematically thwarted. Criticism
degenerates into a species of propaganda and the ideal of
disinterestedness becomes, in Miss Croce’s term, “anathema.” This is
the nidus in which victim art festers, defying criticism “not only
because we feel sorry for the victim but because we are cowed by
art.”
In this context, Miss Croce astutely introduces the case of Robert
Mapplethorpe, another AIDS victim whose life and work
has
“effectively disarmed criticism.” When the jury in Cincinnati
acquitted a museum director of charges of obscenity for mounting
Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochistic photographs, they did so primarily
because
“expert testimony” had convinced them that the pictures were
art—and hence beyond the reach of criticism. “The possibility that
Mapplethorpe was a bad artist or that good art could be obscene,”
Miss Croce writes, “seems not to have occurred to anyone.” The point
is that if art is an important value, it
is nonetheless not the
only value; it takes its place in a constellation of values that
make up the texture of human life; by placing art and the artist
beyond criticism, the champions of victim art succeed in trivializing
both.
Miss Croce’s essay is a virtuoso performance. Yet what is most
significant is that it was published in The New Yorker by a
distinguished writer not hitherto noted for her resistance
to the ideology of victim art. Many of her chief points have
already been made by others—including others writing in
the pages of The New Criterion. But they have never
been made so categorically in the mainstream liberal press
by a critic with unimpeachable liberal credentials. Which is
why the politically correct reaction against Miss Croce has
been so vituperative. Writing in The Village Voice,
Deborah Jowitt dismissed “Discussing the
Undiscussable” as a “screed,” while Richard
Goldstein, the Voice’s executive editor, mounted
a tooth-and-claw attack that imputed “a Helmsian, not
to say Stalinist, stench” to the essay and purported to
discover “racist and homophobic aperçus” in
Miss Croce’s prose.
Mr. Goldstein’s animadversion includes a number of silly
things—including a description of T. S. Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky
as “deans of victim art”—but perhaps his
silliest blunder is
describing Arlene Croce as a “neoconservative.” As we have reason to
know, “neoconservative” has emerged as an all-purpose term of abuse.
And while we welcome the appellation and everything it stands for, we
dutifully acknowledge that despite Miss Croce’s many virtues she is
anything but a neoconservative. But to a mind smitten with the
pieties of victimhood, anyone who exposes the sinister fatuousness
of political correctness is guilty of “neoconservative” tendencies.
Thus Mr. Goldstein’s rant about the “cruelty” of Miss Croce’s
“neoconservative rhetoric.” And thus the ever-flatulent Frank Rich,
who in
The New York Times also derided Miss Croce as a “neoconservative”
and then—amazingly— concluded that her attack on victim art meant
that she believed “death and dying can be off limits as subjects for
art.” Miss Croce never said or implied any such thing; but for the
likes of Miss Jowitt and Messrs. Goldstein and Rich she said
something far worse: that the sentimentalization of
death and dying is not itself a
replacement for art. Miss Croce’s essay brilliantly anatomizes
the seduction of art by narcissistic political barbarism. It is that
which her critics find unforgivable.
