While preparing my latest lecture on Russian art of the 1920s and ’30s, I was struck by some disturbing parallels between the current American and the historical Soviet cultures of “unmasking the hidden enemy.” The comparison was brought on by a group letter, written in the style of an early-twentieth-century Russian Modernist manifesto and headed: “We’ll stay silent no more over sexual harassment in the art world.” Published in The Guardian on October 29 with over one hundred signatures, the letter called upon all women in the arts (it actually referred to them as “workers of the art world”) to denounce their abusers, citing “an urgent need to share our accounts of widespread sexism, unequal and inappropriate treatment, harassment, and sexual misconduct, which we experience regularly, broadly, and acutely.” These women identified as a victimized group, claiming to have been “groped, undermined, harassed, infantilized, scorned, threatened, and intimidated by those in positions of power who control access to resources and opportunities.” In other words, the letter was an open call for hashtags, a free-for-all social media dispensation to accuse any male colleague who, at some point in our careers, subjected any of us to sexual harassment. Crucially, the definition of “harassment” is left vague, since it encompasses everything from forcible rape to “gender microagression,” which was recently identified as a “gateway to sexual harassment and sexual assault.” Anyone paying attention to the events of the past few months would recognize this letter as one among many such appeals
-
The art world’s “hidden enemy”
On accusations of ideological impurity and the abrogation of the presumption of innocence in the art world.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 36 Number 4, on page 86
Copyright © 2017 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-worlds-hidden-enemy/