It Must be December 1st, Let's Blame "The Gays"

When the Republican Party ignited the Culture Wars in the late 1980s, it was after the failure of the Ronald Reagan and then George Bush governments to lead the country out of the economic crisis that followed the 1987 stock market crash.
Now that two decades have passed and that out-of-control deregulation (it's the point of deregulation to be out of control, isn't it?) and the ferocious greed engineered by Bush The Second and his cronies have unleashed on the United States its worst recession since the Great Depression, they are at it again.

If you've been following a bit what happened, you know that Senate Majority Boehner, He Of The Ridiculous Name, has decided to curate the current Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington instead of, I don't know, doing more pressing legislation.

For example, voting on extending the unemployment benefits of several millions Americans whose sudden lack of funds will mean more economic hardship for everybody.
It's a no-brainer, really: unemployed people lose benefits, therefore can't pay the rent/the mortgage, landlords/banks lose money, housing stock go derelict, less money gets into the economy to encourage consumer spending, Santa won't come this year for  the millions of little Christian offspring of the unemployed (take that, Glenn Beck - or is it O'Reilly?-  and your idiotic rants about the "war on Christmas"). It's 2 millions people who are going to lose their benefits. Out of a population of roughly 300 millions Americans. You likely know one of them. I know one, a hardworking grandmother whose benefits have been cut and who may find herself homeless in a couple of weeks if she can't come up with the rent.

In a nutshell, Mr. Boehner got his penis in a tick because of a David Wojnarowicz video, demanded that the video be removed after being alerted to it by a right-wing religious organization, and the Smithsonian powers that be caved in. It's the video above, which you can find easily on YouTube, obviously.
This all should remind you of the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition being canceled at the Corcoran in DC which, in fact, did much more for Mapplethorpe's posthumous fame than if the show had processed ahead.

Now let's be clear here: as an art lover, former curator, writer, and plain old human being, FBC! is resolutely against censorship of any kind.  I find censorship abhorrent mainly because I resent the fact that anybody would think they can decide in my name what should or shouldn't be allowed to read, watch, see, listen to, attend, witness, enjoy, react to, or even dislike.  Heaven forbid. If I'm going to be shocked by a David Wojnarowicz video, I demand the right to see for myself whether I will, in fact, be shocked or not. For the record, I'm not. But even if I was, I'd want to see it to decide for myself.

And, I also feel that if I have moved all the way to a country that embedded the right to free speech in its Constitution, I should  demand that this right be respected. In France, we don't have a right to free speech embedded in our Constitution.

Lastly, we are constantly bombarded by tons of right-wing propaganda from the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and their ilk. You just need to long on the internet and go to a newspaper homepage to see their last idiotic, outreagous comments.
Do I demand that their pictures and videos and speeches be removed from the airwaves, medias, the internet and all that because they shock my atheist and progressive core beliefs?
No, I don't, because I think wingnuts should be allowed to express their own baseless, fact-less beliefs if they want to, even if they disturbed my Cartesian, scholarly and scientific values.
To be fair, what really shocks me about US right-wing propaganda in general is how stupid it is and how it assumes that the American People at large are a populace largely constituted of morons.
It may very well be, but I have a bit more faith in human decency and intelligence than the condescending Republicans have in their own constituency.

In any case, I strongly feel that the National Portrait Gallery shouldn't have caved in to Mr. Boehner's demand and should have kept the Wojnarowicz video in the exhibition, even if threatened with federal funding cuts. If you put something in your exhibition, it's because it has a place in it, so removing it is senseless and spineless, intellectually speaking.

I'm pretty sure that in real life, Mr. Boehner doesn't give a damn about David Wojnarowicz, who has been dead for 20 years and can't therefore defend his own work.
What Mr. Boehner, as a politician, is likely to be interested in, is  to find a way to distract the public opinion from the project of his own party to stall all bills until the Bush-era tax cuts in favor of the wealthy are extended, instead of creating a strong fiscal policy that would help reign in the nation deficit.
A large part of it being inherited from 8 years of George Bush's administration, including the TARP banks bailout (remember? it was before the Nov. 2008 election). As were the useless, senseless wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan that have drained the nation of the blood of its youth and of the money in its coffers to enrich  the arms dealers and private contractors in cahoots with the people who initiated the slaughter in the name of the Nation. Your "representatives".

Which leads me to the Pentagon study released yesterday in favor of repealing the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, and to the date chosen by Senator Boehner to target an artwork made by an openly gay artist who died 20 years ago.
Have you noticed today is December 1st? It's World Aids Day?
Instead of writing about Republican's smokescreens created to dissimulate their own economic ineptitude, I would have much preferred spending the time remembering the wonderful people who died of Aids, gay and straights alike, anonymous and famous artists alike, and look at the work of Gonzalez-Torres or maybe watch a Dominique Bagouet dance piece. Many great artists died of Aids, and today should be a day to remember them and their contribution to world culture.

Instead, I can't help but reflect that each time conservative political parties are in a bind, they like to deflect the attention from their lack of results, from their criminal inaction or worse, from the corruption that is endemic to political life (hello, secret corporate donations to parties!) by blaming the Other.

Now, since the atrocities of World War II, Western democratic governments can't really go on blaming the Jews as their political forebears did for a couple thousands years, so they have to find another Other to blame.

In France right now, Mr. Sarkozy has found a perfect build-in minority to point the finger at and enact discriminatory measures against, the Roms, after distracting the French from his failed economic policies - which also favor the rich -  by making the wearing of the burqa illegal in public.
It should be noted that less than 2,000 women were wearing it in France, out of a population of 60 millions.
I have no idea how many Roms are currently living in France (ethnic statistics are illegal in France because they are inherently a racist tool of oppression, and because we have quite an ugly history with our own Jewish population, as I'm sure my erudite readers know), but I'd be ready to bet it doesn't hover much more above 200,000 people.

In the United States, the two Others that the Republican party has been trying to blame for the last couple of decades at least are either the illegal immigrants; a minority that is easy to construct because immigrating legally to the United States is almost impossible, or "The Gays".

For clarity's purpose and because this is a long post, "The Gays" encompass all LGBT, a category of Americans whose core identity is in fact increasingly being accepted, albeit slowly, by the American people a large (see: repeal of DADT above).
There are setbacks to gay marriage, obviously, but just the fact that it is a legislative issue is a big advance, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were definitively legalized everywhere in the States within the next two decades or so. The instance of gay teens bullying have generated a large viral online campaign in support, the It Gets Better one, though your truly thinks it would be more effective to ban bullying in all schools, period.
Now *that* would be a piece of legislative work the Republican Party could enact and I'd totally support it. I can be bi-partisan that way.


The GOP has to thread a thin line when targeting illegal immigrants because they are trying to attract the legal Latino ones who are bound to become a huge political force in the next few decades. Since many Latino are catholic, what's best than manufacture a symbolic scandal that costs the Republican Party nothing, can be disguised as fighting "anti-catholic propaganda" (whereas no one gives a damn about defining the US as a "nation of Christians", which I personally resent as anti-Jewish, anti-secular, anti-other religions propaganda), and that targets the work of a dead gay artists on the eve of World Aids Day?

What I'm trying to say is that the date chosen by Rep. Boehner to enact censorship is a highly symbolic one, one to warn the LGBT part of the population that they are being the next target.

The Republican majority is rearing its ugly head, and already prepares whatever symbolic action it can take to hide the fact that is has become the party of the ultra wealthy and not of the poor millions schmucks who voted them back into power.
The next few years are going to be hideous economically for 80% of the American people, and the Republican policies are going to make them worse. Because the Republican Party knows it is bound to fail economically, it is now choosing a convenient scapegoat to divert the attention from its own future political and economic disasters, be it at the price of discriminating against The Gays.

If you feel as strongly as I do about the issues at hand, please join this Facebook page where the email address of the various concerned officials are given (including Mr. Boehner's) for you to express your disappointment at this act of censorship and its deliberate attack against the gay community at such a symbolic period.
Meanwhile, give as much support as you can to your LGBT friends, to artists and to the arts, and fight senseless discrimination.

Things My Students Would Love To See At Museums

No, not the art, but the stuff around it.

[Before I start, please note my students are a sample of 39 people, with a ratio of 55% women for 45% men, a very diverse crowd that includes African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and White students. All of them work to support themselves and sometimes their families, the age rank is overwhelmingly under 25 with a few students (about 5) in their early 30 and one student in his 50s. They are all majoring in either fine arts, graphic design, communication and marketing, or art history (only 3 of them).
They are not your everyday sophisticated art crowd, but the type of people most likely to be paying visitors in museums.]

1. They want the museum admission to be free. They rightfully compare museums to libraries in the sense they both have the same type of mission (making a certain type of knowledge accessible to all). However, they don't realize it is a funding issue (libraries publicly funded, museum mostly privately in America). Some of them explain that if they have to pay, they expect to have the same type of experience as going to Disneyland or to the movies: being entertained.

2. Information, information, information, of the printed type. They complain about the fact there is no easy way to get it during the visit, especially in permanent collections where they feel it is the museum's true job to tell them about the era, the geographic location, the civilization, what the artifact was used for, its signification and if there is some information about the creator of the piece. It sounds pretty straightforward, but they are absolutely right in stating this information is almost always missing.
I know most curators are worried too much print near an artwork can be distracting from the aesthetic contemplation, but there are ways to do this (i.e. floor labels).
Their major complaint is that if they want to know about one artwork, the info is usually abundantly available only on the website (yay for this) but not right in the building when they visit.
Also, something they were not aware before the class but they got attuned to: if the collection isn't comprehensive (as it is indeed in most California museums) they would like some type of explanation about the gaping holes: what's not there, which are the missing links, etc.
Lastly, it seems super simple, but it isn't: they want to know where to go when they get inside the museum. Where to start, in which order if there is one, and where things are. Effective signage is rare.


3. The security guards (cutely named "museum attendants") usually know zilch about the exhibit. Obviously, the public has no idea most security guards work for subcontractors and are not part of the museum staff. Nevertheless museums everywhere should train their security staff, subcontracted or otherwise, at least in the basics of what is where in the building, and how to direct the public to where it can get information.

4. Speaking of which, photography policies that vary from one point of the building to another are confusing. Some students feel under attack if they fish in their bag to fetch their phone or lipstick and are yelled at : "no photography". Museums should stick to a decision (allowing photos everywhere or forbidding them everywhere) as long as it's consistent, and train the guards about the policy. It's confusing if it's allowed in one exhibition but not at the one next door.

5. They feel that most museums that have activity rooms are only geared toward children and families, and that as young adults they feel left out. They would love to participate in hand on experiences.

6. They hate audioguides, and refuse to join tours if they have to pay for it. There's also a peer aspect to it, i.e. if no one in their age group tends to join a tour, they don't want to be in one. They don't really care for aging docents. For some reason, they expect to learn about the works on display form other visitors. There may be some untapped potential for educators here, but I don't know how.
BUT they really like: podcasts, and any interactive info they could get during a tour on their iPhones and such like (I know there's a contradiction between wanting a free admission because one's a poor student and owning an iPhone, but it's their contradiction, not mine).
They also want free wi-fi throughout the museum (which makes sense if the info available about the works is through the website).

7. They want ... more seats! more benches! more cafés, possibly with cheap and good food.

8. They overwhelmingly enjoy all-nighters at museums with live bands, food, interactive activities, etc. They want their type of music (which varies, but not Jazz nor Classical, I was surprised to see they mostly favor electronic music) so they can dance. Many of them are unaware of the various movie programs or lectures, which would benefit from more PR.

9. They have suggestions. Like installing interactive kiosks with touch screens in museum galleries, where they could select the work they want to know more about and quite possibly, print it out on demand.

10. They want... holograms! Yep, like "Leonardo talking about the Renaissance".

11. They would love to see more reconstitutions of period rooms where they get a sense of how people lived, but also how the art was used and displayed. One student even asked for a church-like room where altarpieces would be displayed the way they were, etc. But what they mean really is that they would want to be in the period room themselves, handling the objects and learning how/why they were used (replicas, I see a market for you). The kitsch factor doesn't seem to be on their radar.

12. About contemporary art... they really, really want to know about the work without having to buy a $55 catalog. They feel also the contemporary art museums environment is the most sterile (painting the walls a different color and putting in some seating would help). They suggest to have the artist himself, since in most cases (s)he is alive, to give a small talk about the work that could be podcast/Youtubed/received on their iPhone, etc.
Which I think makes sense, and would probably teach a bunch of artists I know how to express themselves clearly without using gibberish. Most people don't want to know "you're trying to subvert the codes of perceptions" because they don't understand what you mean, and chances are, you neither. What are the codes of perceptions your paradigmatic shift is subverting?

13. About non-Western art, some of them feel there should be contemporary art from the same region/culture exhibited in the same department: i.e. art from Iran or Northern Africa in the Islamic Art Dept., same with Indian art, Chinese, etc. They don't want it to be separate and shown in the Modern and Contemporary Art Dept. (where it isn't shown anyway but as a token, punctually).

14. They can stomach obscene/transgressive content as long as there is some explanation about why it's there or why it is important in this or that aspect of a particular culture. A very devout catholic girl told me about being shocked when seeing erotic Indian art but upon reading the explanatory didactic right next to it understood its function and felt comforted by knowing how important it was in Hindu culture at the time. They also feel that religious content isn't sufficiently explained/described i.e. when they see an Annunciation, they have no idea what it is about, except there's Holy Mary and an angel. Since its the basic of Art History 101, a refresher in the guise of an extended label would help.