Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age
Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age
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Overview
For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon—kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art.
Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people’s demands for better ethics in art.
But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power?
With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race.
By asking and answering questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9798200860036 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2022 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
Art is power.
Since the beginning of time, works of art have had an extraordinary ability to elicit human emotion. From one century to the next, from one medium to the next, art has mesmerized, repelled, titillated, terrified, shocked, and enraged viewers across the Western world. And because of its unique impact on humankind, it has been viewed with suspicion by individuals in positions of political power.
For generations, those individuals were kings and courtiers, popes and cardinals, dictators and their flunkies. They monitored, controlled, censored, and suppressed art and artists to keep themselves in power and prevent social upheaval. Artists were at their beck and call, in their pay, at their mercy; their lives depended on keeping the powerful sweet.
Today, artists in the West have finally thrown off the shackles of crown and court, church and clergy, and one-party tyranny. They are freer than ever to express themselves without fearing retribution from a prince, a pope, or a president. Their works no longer face censorship, or even censure, from people in official positions of authority.
Instead, artists are increasingly being held to account by individual citizens and voters—people like you and me. As liberal democracy becomes ever more entrenched in the Western hemisphere, the voice of the citizen is getting louder and louder. And that voice is demanding equality for all those who were previously overshadowed, overlooked, and overpowered: women, ethnic minorities, colonized peoples. For the first time, younger generations in the West are seeking to atone for a history of exploitation and discrimination, and to wipe out the misogyny, racism, and colonialism that prevailed in the past. A wave of citizen-led, social-media-enabled advocacy and activism is overtaking all aspects of society.
And it’s quickly spreading to the art world. Suddenly, thanks to the powerful impetus of two global movements, both in response to serial crimes—#MeToo and Black Lives Matter—groups that were long underrepresented if not erased are being foregrounded in art. Museums and galleries that, for decades, paid lip service to gender and racial equality are now actively rushing to collect, exhibit, and hire women and people of color, and to put on shows that highlight the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
Institutions in major Western capitals, in other words, are waking up, smelling the proverbial coffee, and making sudden and seismic changes. Seemingly overnight, women and artists of color are appearing in museums, galleries, auction houses, and art fairs everywhere, and issue-driven exhibitions are multiplying. The art market, needless to say, is in on the game. Meanwhile, using the bullhorn that is social media, citizen-activists are watching these gatekeepers carefully, and judging their efforts with a raft of new egalitarian and ethical yardsticks.
This digitally enabled revolution is long overdue. For centuries, museum-goers, amateurs, and collectors of art have been exposed to extraordinary talents, but mainly white and male ones—to the exclusion of all others. Half of humanity, meaning the female half, has been ignored. So have artists who are not descendants of white Europeans. How can such a sizeable population be silently disqualified by the world’s most important cultural institutions? What good is social progress if it stops at the museum gates? Are museums not mausoleums in that case?
Takedown takes a close look at that revolution, at its durability, and at the impact that citizen-led activism and demands for diversity and inclusivity are having on art, as they transform it into a broader and much richer church. The book shows how women and long underrepresented minorities are now, finally, getting a seat at the table—sometimes the top seat. It examines the implications for art and museums, some good, some less good.
While the effects of misogyny, sexual harassment, cultural appropriation, and racism have been examined in other disciplines—film (Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski), music (Michael Jackson, R. Kelly), and publishing (Jeanine Cummins, Woody Allen)—no mainstream book has yet tackled the impact on the visual arts. Takedown is my effort to fill that void. It brings all sides together—those pushing for change and those with the power to deliver it. It exposes their views and allows the debate to play out on its pages.
TAKEDOWN IS, IN short, about the overlap between art and politics. As it happens, the twin forces of politics and art have dominated my life both personally and professionally. And I seem to bring that dual vantage point into everything I do—including this, my first book.
I was born in London into a family of Iranian diplomats, and spent my childhood in Iran as well as in countries to which my father was assigned (Morocco, Egypt). The Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 derailed the trajectory that was laid out before me. I was catapulted into a life of exile—and of aesthetic enchantment. We moved to Paris, the city where I had always longed to live. The wondrous art and architecture, the infinite cultural possibilities were enthralling to a young girl who, until then, had never lived in Europe.
I had always had a proclivity for the arts—particularly music, to which I almost dedicated my life. But I had next to no talent in the visual arts. My elementary-school drawings and paintings were lousy, and to this day, my sketches remain ham-fisted and embarrassing. Plenty of talented people have told me that anybody can draw. But I don’t believe it. To me, drawing, painting, sculpture, and the plastic arts are innate gifts, and I seem to have had a talent bypass in that department.
So art was not something that I paid much attention to in childhood and early adolescence, let alone understood. All that I remember of a trip to the Louvre at the age of thirteen is locking gazes with the Mona Lisa, and gaping at the headless Venus de Milo as I walked up the stairs. I was like the millions of kids who were dragged to museums every year: not there by choice.
Within a few years, all of that changed. Paris became my first art instructor. Culture was hard to avoid in the French capital: it was what most Parisians partook in. Daily conversations were peppered with talk of the latest book, movie, or expo. On weekends, come rain or come shine, dozens of people stood in line outside the Grand Palais, the Centre Pompidou, or the Musée d’Art Moderne, patiently waiting to see this or that blockbuster exhibition. I was one of them. I vividly remember seeing the Amedeo Modigliani retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in 1981 and being mesmerized by those elongated faces and almond eyes. Pontus Hultén’s Paris-Paris exhibition at the Centre Pompidou later that year left an even more lasting mark. It was a vast survey of artists living and working in Paris in and around the war years, many of whom I was unfamiliar with. Its catalogue became my first art-history manual.
Paris also led me to a great mentor: Michael Brenson, the art historian, curator, and critic. He taught English literature at the American School of Paris at the time, and I was one of his students. Michael’s passion for art was contagious, and by the time I had graduated from high school, I had caught the art bug.
What sealed my conversion to the cause of art was Italy. Somehow, that boot-shaped, midsized country had the highest number of UNESCO world cultural sites of any. Starting in my early twenties, I set out to visit as many of those sites as I could and taught myself Italian along the way. Every chance I got, I escaped to some corner or another of the Italian peninsula, visiting or revisiting the great art cities—Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples.
Florence was a frequent stop. On my trips there, I would set off every day, fresh-faced and excited, to discover one of the city’s mind-blowing art-historical sites: the San Marco monastery, where the monks’ cells were frescoed by the divine Fra Angelico; the Duomo, with its gorgeous dome and its sculpted baptistery doors; the Uffizi Galleries, containing Sandro Botticelli’s twin miracles, The Birth of Venus and Primavera. In the evenings, my art education continued. I would take my latest tome to the nearest trattoria and eat a plate of pappardelle with my book open to the page.
I learned the vocabulary of art by looking at it a great deal. I toured the major museums of Europe over and again, studied the lives and creations of great masters, visited every art exhibition on my radar.
In my journalism career, I covered culture only episodically, at first. My main focuses were politics, foreign policy, and economic policy. It wasn’t until 2003 that I started covering culture full-time, initially for Bloomberg, then for the New York Times.
As a daily occupation, it was a source of unadulterated pleasure. Instead of going to the office on most mornings, I would go to the press preview of this or that museum exhibition. I felt my soul come alive as I lingered in front of this painting or that sculpture. The job’s other incredible perk was that it allowed me to have one-on-one conversations with artists.
Not that interviewing artists was easy. Unlike movie stars or pop musicians, they were unaccustomed to the media game and sometimes incredibly timid, unforthcoming, and even awkward. Winning their trust and getting them to open up took time and gentle persuasion. It was like releasing a precious pearl from a sealed oyster. Yet it was never anything less than rewarding.
At their best, artists were oracles of our time, deeply empathetic beings who asked the big metaphysical questions and offered answers through their art. Their works were like visual riddles, or poems: thought-provoking, evocative, atmospheric, mysterious. Art was emotion, just as music was. With a few strokes on a canvas or a few chips in a stone, an artist could lift your spirits, speak to your soul.
OVER THE YEARS, I became a regular interviewer of artists and architects. I was determined to find out what made them tick, discover telling details of their lives. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei remembered how, as a little boy, he watched his poet father serve out a sentence to hard labor, cleaning messy public toilets that were fly-infested in the summer and frozen in the winter. Richard Serra recalled being taken at the age of three to the launch of a ship that his father had helped build, and spending the rest of his life making towering sculptures of industrial steel.
Zaha Hadid described how she found her calling at home in Baghdad at age eleven when an architect dropped off intriguing maquettes of her aunt’s future house. She asked her parents what you called people who made buildings, and went around thereafter declaring, “I want to be an architect.” David Hockney explained why he had turned down a commission to paint Queen Elizabeth II. “She has majesty,” he told me. “How do you paint majesty today?”
My focus was not just on living artists and creators. I also delved into the lives of departed masters. On trips to the south of France, I stopped off at the home of one or another of the great artists who had made the Riviera their stomping ground. There was Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s grand one-story villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer, surrounded by vines and olive trees, where he and Madame Renoir hosted a steady stream of visitors. Walking through his vast atelier, I saw brushes and dried-up paint tubes last touched by him nine decades earlier, as well as the tall wooden wheelchair that he used late in life, and the rug-draped bed where he had young village girls pose for him.
A half-hour drive away was the smaller but no less spectacular villa in Le Cannet where Pierre Bonnard lived and worked to the end of his life. I had the dizzying experience of standing in the tiny, blue-and-white-tiled bathroom with the clawfoot tub where his wife endlessly bathed, and which is the subject of many of his most celebrated paintings.
Back in Paris, I was taken behind the scenes at the Picasso Museum by one of the world’s top Picasso specialists, Anne Baldassari, who ran the museum for years and spearheaded its redevelopment. Meeting Anne there was like being at home with Picasso himself. I remember standing with her in front of Picasso’s Grand Nu au Fauteuil Rouge (1929), a screaming, contorted nude with dangling limbs, and Baldassari telling me that while some might see this as a depiction of his jilted wife Olga, it was simplistic to view Picasso through a purely biographical prism. Years later, Anne took me on a hard-hat tour of the museum as it underwent redevelopment, and just before it reopened, she let me look on as she and her team positioned a delicate terracotta figurine in a museum vitrine, and hung a giant oil painting on a bare wall.
All of this gave me an incredible taste for art’s so-called masters. And I certainly saw many an exhibition of their work inside the great museums of Paris and London. In the case of Picasso, the shows just kept on coming. They were a surefire hit and they helped museums pay the bills.
In a word, I found myself attending exhibitions of, and writing about, one white male artist after another. It was the way of the world—and certainly the way of the art world. Gender discrimination was endemic and a somehow tolerated aspect of the status quo. What was not apparent to me at the time was how radically these great male masters were snuffing out artists of other genders, origins, and orientations.
Campaigns for gender and racial equality inside museums and art institutions would regularly come up. Yet they would simmer without ever coming to a boil. The institutions in question were like supertankers: hard to turn around. Meanwhile, they regularly put on exhibitions of (white male) art that no one in their right mind could fault them for. These were once-in-a-lifetime shows, breathtaking spectacles. So few paid attention to the underlying disparities.
In a word, we had blind spots—transmitted to us by generations of Western art historians, museum directors, curators, and critics, who identified the greatest masters as being male and of European descent. These were called Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Monet, and Picasso. Their talent and genius were beyond dispute, and everyone just assumed that they were the only game in town. Women and nonwhite artists were, in the meantime, invisible.
Artists who were lucky to be part of the canon got away with murder—sometimes literally. Caravaggio was a confirmed murderer and died a fugitive from justice. Yet that did nothing to diminish the admiration so many (including myself) had—and still have—for his art. Would contemporary audiences worship a prodigiously gifted killer? Less unconditionally, I would think.
Paul Gauguin, a married father of five, lived in Tahiti with girls in their early teens. Yet until recently, Western museums programmed one Gauguin blockbuster after another without pointing out what today would be viewed as pathological pedophilia. Egon Schiele drew and painted underage girls who struck graphic poses in his studio; he even spent twenty-four days in prison for seducing one of them. Yet until very recently, he was widely exhibited and admired. Somehow, white male masters, even those who lived well into the twentieth century, were above the law. Their art spoke louder than their misdeeds.
Gradually and incrementally, as the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements shook societies on both sides of the Atlantic, museums and cultural institutions started feeling the winds of change. They realized that the decisions they made—who they showed and collected, and who they didn’t—merited more careful and evenhanded consideration. There were risks to resisting change: long-silenced minorities suddenly had access to an instant global platform called social media. With a single hashtag, they could summon up an army of loud and angry voices and shame a museum.
The time had come for museums and cultural institutions to give attention to categories they had shunned forever: women, artists of color, and colonized peoples. A revolution got underway. That revolution is still going on. As a result, Takedown is a work in progress. It’s a starting point, not a culmination—the beginning of an investigation of art’s many blind spots across the ages, the political consequences of those blind spots, and how those blind spots are now being reversed. Through thematic chapters on gender, sex, race, religion, money, public art, and vandalism, I will look at the art world’s excesses and how they are finally being called out. I will examine the forces at play, and explore the challenges of this new age of art and activism.
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
1 The Clash of Art and Politics 10
2 Just Not Good Enough 31
3 Morally Reprehensible Trash 65
4 Still No Seat at the Big Table 94
5 A Despicable Display of Vulgarity 141
6 All Money Is Dirty 168
7 Take Them All Down 192
8 A Load of Rubbish 212
Epilogue 236
Image Credits 245
Bibliography 247
Acknowledgments 261
About the Author 263