Looking for a certain ratio

[imomus]

Last week saw a stupid thunderstorm popping in a stupid teacup. A crusade, campaign or witchhunt alleging racism on the part of Stephin Merritt came to a head when Slate published an article by John Cook entitled Blacklisted: Is Stephin Merritt a racist because he doesn't like hip-hop?

The charges were levelled by two journalists, Sasha Frere-Jones (New Yorker) and Jessica Hopper (Chicago Reader), and they've been taking pops at "cracker" Merritt for a couple of years now. What brought the latest round of allegations to a head was Merritt's appearance on a panel at the Experience Music Project conference (EMP) themed around "guilty pleasures", in which Merritt said he liked the song "Zippedy Doo Dah" from the Disney musical "Song of the South". Hopper understood Merritt to say that he liked the whole musical (now widely considered stereotypical and filled with "Uncle-Remusisms"), when in fact he'd said quite the opposite, that he liked just this one song, and thought the rest of the musical was terrible.

He's also on record as saying that he likes "the first two years of rap" but thereafter finds that it plays into the worst stereotypes of black behaviour. But what mostly seems to have annoyed Hopper and Frere-Jones, and started their witch-hunt, is that Merritt didn't include enough black artists in a personal Top 100 list he published back in 1999, shortly after the release of "69 Love Songs".

"Explain to me" asked Frere-Jones on his blog "why you wouldn't be a little bit nervous, upset even, to read a music critic who lives in New York City draw a map of the 20th century that seemed so intent on diminishing or excluding the work of African-American musicians? Is distress such an odd reaction? Mean words aside?"

Musicians weighed in on the side of Merritt: "Picking on a tiny Southern queer for his music tastes and calling him a "cracker" is about as stupid as criticism can get", said Steve Albini. "I don't feel that Stephin made any racist remarks whatsoever and find this whole thing pretty jacked up," said Drew Daniel of Matmos, who was on the same EMP panel. Bowing to this pressure (and a lot of flame-mail in their in boxes), Frere-Jones and Hopper have since apologized, in rather mean-spirited and qualified ways, to Stephin Merritt.



But I find their whole premise fascinating: let's call it the "Certain Ratio Fallacy". I came across another example of it yesterday when I ran into feminist activists the Guerilla Girls shooting a video at the door of the Whitney Museum. The gorilla-suited art stars (they commanded the first room at the Venice Biennale last year, filling it with agit prop posters containing stats on the percentage of women artists shown in major museums) were asking visitors how many women were featured in the Biennial.

They interviewed me, and I expressed some perplexity with the idea that, like some sort of fractal, every microcosm in American life should feature the exact same proportions as the macrocosm; that there should be a little representative picture of the population demographics of the whole country in every exhibition, and every playlist, and every institution. The Guerilla Girls replied that I hadn't understood: they weren't advocating an exact duplication in art shows of the percentages of women in America, just something approaching the 50% figure. It seems a reasonable argument, but it's very problematical.

First of all, what is the criterion for inclusion in an art show? Surely we'd all agree that it should be that one makes great art. Gender or race should be irrelevant. Imagine how disappointed a black or female artist would be to learn that she'd only been included in an art exhibition "to make up the numbers" or "to represent the wider demographics of this country". Such tokenism would, I hope, occasion fury. Secondly, the worlds of art and entertainment have a complex relationship to everyday life: quite often these worlds invert all the values of the outside world. (This leads into a point Stephin Merritt has often made about "minstrelsy"; a racist world loves a minstrel show, and will grant black entertainers all the indulgences, onstage, it denies black people offstage.) Thirdly, affirmative action always has victims in a world where positions to be filled are limited. A policy demanding that 10% of jet pilots be disabled (because 10% of Americans are disabled) would result in a number of fully-qualified, fully-abled pilots ending up on the scrapheap, hunting for other jobs.

Asked why the 2005 Greater New York show at PS1 contained only 53 women artists out of a total of 160, curator Klaus Biesenbach replied "Any discrepancy is due to the quality of the art." A blogger called Roberta Fallon exclaimed "I'm sorry, but do I hear an echo of Harvard President Lawrence Summers implying that the natural inferiority of women is the reason there are not more of them in the sciences? Is Biesenbach implying women naturally make inferior art? I don't suppose it could be that male curators have a pre-disposition to like what male artists are making and see art by men as, well, better quality because it's made by, well, you know, a man?"

Let's situate Biesenbach: like Merritt, he's a gay man. I think this is important. One of the most intelligent comments in the I Love Music debate about the Merritt Cracker affair came from a black man, Pitchfork writer Nitsuh Ebebe, and concerned precisely this question of situation as a means of avoiding what I call Pompous Universalism:

"Why are we concerned that a middle-class white person might have tastes that align with middle-class white idioms?" asked Nitsuh (whose screen name is Nabisco). "Why is this any different than pointing out that Jay-Z grew up in a Brooklyn project and has tastes that come from a particular hip-hop idiom and culture? I mean, to put it bluntly, I feel like white people often try to make themselves neutral, to kind of run down their own particular experience and culture as non-experience and non-culture -- often (maybe) out of fear that admitting they have a culture means further dominating everyone else's, further oppressing everyone else's. They want to step out of the game and act as neutral parties observing everyone else's culture. But that's even worse, because it puts them in an even more dominant position, and a patronizing and untruthful one, too."



Nitsuh hits the nail on the head. Exhibitions or playlists that attempt to "represent" demographics by means of "certain ratios" are "pompously universalistic". They set themselves up as metonyms, reparations, microcosms instead of subjective and situated selections. They also presuppose a social model, a "big picture" in which everyone in a society is integrated, represented according to their numbers rather than by their vision, their ambition, their aptitudes. And they propose institutions or individuals as big daddies, authorities who must be shouted at by Oedipal little lobby groups, rival siblings each demanding more for their special interest.

How many Native Americans were in the Whitney Biennial, and why aren't the Guerilla Girls concerned about that? What if you're Native American and male? Does that make your maleness more forgiveable? Should we include negative traits in our search for "a certain ratio" -- should there be as many murderers in an art show as there are in the general population? And should the same principle apply to negative contexts: should there be as many women in prison as men? Which victim hat will I wear today, in order to get into a show, or a playlist, which says "These are good artists"?

"Looking for a certain ratio," Brian Eno sang in his song The True Wheel, "someone must have left it underneath the carpet". Best place for it, if you ask me.

Comments

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

That photo with the monkey costumes is funny!


Which one are you?

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

And this post is a masterpiece of good reasoning. I agree 100%.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

I agree. A very reasonable post.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Not that I really disagree but do you mean artistic talent before geographical origin?

Pandas in black and white and glitter.

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

The angry displaced ghosts of identity art reveal themselves on the steps of the Whitney to harrass Momus! In my opinion, the Guerilla Girls have never been artists. They are saavy marketers, however, milking the undergraduate lecture circuit on an outdated political one-liner for about 30 years. I think that it has something to do with the disporportionate number of lesbians with crushes on the Guerilla Girls teaching in art history departments across the nation. ;)

Nitsuh Ebebe is spot on about Stephen Merritt.

If you aren't already aware of artists Rob Pruitt and Jack Early, I'd like to direct you to their 1992 collaborations, which earned accusations of racism. Google their exhibition at Leo Castelli, "Red Black Green Red White and Blue Project," which included paintings and posters of well-known African Americans. I think it's very relevant, dare I say ahead of its time, especially now.

[iamcoreyd.livejournal.com]

Let's see how many gay artists Hopper and Frere-Jones have in their favorites...

[(Anonymous)]

We live in a world where positive discrimination clearly is needed. OK, so it isn't fair, but neither is regular discrimination. I agree that you couldn't possibly see to every minority there is, and shouldn't , but I think you should try to strive for diversity. A long line of white males aren't diverse, no matter how glorious things they produce. Therefore I think there's room for the debate, even if it does tend to get a bit silly. The thought of diversity should be there when they make the choice. I don't think it would hurt the quality either.

BTW; is one of the monkeys trying to feel you up?

//
http://homepage.mac.com/produkt/

[giggomachine.livejournal.com]

that's absolute bullshit. an imperialist view. positive discrimination inherently calls attention to negative discrimination, and to concepts, such as race, sexual orientation, gender, that should theoretically have no impact on curatorial decisions. pandering to concerns of political correctness is even worse than concensus-based curatorial decisions. they make everything be completely bland and unexiting.
i find your comment 'patronizing and untruthful,' and, out of touch with the topic discussed. as a norwegian, white male artist, i would not really expect you to understand the intricacies of racial discourse in america, since most americans themselves don't understand it. and even the difference in understanding between different 'races' can be enormous. however, i still think your comment is a moot point, and a pretty misguided one as well: biennales are not about diversity, they are about quality in art.

[yhancik.livejournal.com]

i don't always agree with what you write (still i read it with interest), but i couldn't agree more with what you said here

here (in belgium) we have imposed women-men parity on parties' list of candidates (at least 35% 3 years ago - 50% for the next elections), and i always felt something "wrong" with the fact that it was imposed

and you perfectly expressed what i was feeling uneasy about with your microcosm vs macrocosm idea

[(Anonymous)]

Since a political party should represent the poeple, anything but a true representation would a mockery. Do you really feel comfortable with a government of only men?

//
http://homepage.mac.com/produkt/

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

A policy demanding that 10% of jet pilots be disabled (because 10% of Americans are disabled) would result in a number of fully-qualified, fully-abled pilots ending up on the scrapheap, hunting for other jobs.

Change "disabled" to "African-American" and "fully-abled" to "white".
Are you still as comfortable with your analogy?

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

I'm all for competent pilots being hired to replace incompetent ones.

'Certain Ratio' laws driven only by percentages of populace are so relentlessly simplistic as to wreak havoc, and little else.

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

"should there be as many murderers in an art show as there are in the general population? " I think you're taking the wrong ideas to their reductio ad absurdum, here. It's not that there is a "certain ratio" of black artists that are required, but that their scant presence reveals an implicit bias--which, at the very least, is embarasing, if not amoral. I believe Nitsuh's quote to be pretty spot on, but all it resolves is that having an enforcer of cultural preference is idiotic and reinforces the dominant class in another way. Yes, we all have cultural biases, but it would be nice if they were acknowledged.(not criminalized)

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

What proportion of active, non-male or non-white artists are aware of/intereseted in participating in the Biennial, versus the number of white male artists that were accepted? I think this would be the crucial question when establishing where things went wrong.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

you should run for burgermeister. affectionate punch. pax man.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative, Aesthetician vs. Eustachian

[antisyzygy.livejournal.com]

What's disappointing about this episode, judging from Momus's account and the Slate article, is the low level at which music criticism is carried out: rather than engaging with Merritt's argument about hip-hop's use of stereotypes, Frere-Jones and Hopper rest their case on the most reductive quantitative arguments, along with some misrepresentation of Merritt's case. With music reviewers confined to short accounts of what's on a given recording, usually padded in any case with extraneous biographical and fashion-oriented comment, there's little space for anyone to articulate what they qualities music could have or should have. It might have been interesting to ask whether the artists on Merritt's preferred playlist escaped the stereotypes of their own cultural milieux. And I'm sorry to be such an unreconstructed aesthetician, but it's disappointing that neither side seems to be talking about music.

(Hilariously, when I try to say "aesthetician", Livejournal suggests "Eustachian.")

[ixzist.livejournal.com]

one person or group can't fix every inequality. you gotta pick your battles and do the best you can to make an improvement in society.

nice entry. i enjoyed it greatly.

[glassplastic.livejournal.com]

it gets even more sticky when people come from less defined cultural regions. I'm a Puerto Rican who grew up in the American South and not lives in the North East (I also just visited the Whitney and ran into Momus). But I don't listen to much music made by Puerto Ricans. Nor by too many Southerners. At the moment I listen to a lot of British rock and roll, and hip hop from places other than America. Am I a self hating Puerto Rican Southern American for not listening to Puerto Rican sounding music made by people who grew up in the American south? And I also short changing my hispanic heritage by likeing South American writers instead of Carribean ones? Do black people who only like hip hop hate white people?

It's especially weird because this years Biennial is trying to have people from as many different cultures as possible. To me, it's more of a type of art that the Whitney likes: it likes art that comes from an upper class point of view. Even if the artists are dirt poor like I am, I'm going to assume they care highly about art, writing, music - usually concerns of an upper class. And more people in the upper class are white males, or at least the ones who have the time to do art. For better or worse, art needs free time to be made, and we still live in a world where people of different classes have different amounts of free time.

For better or worse, everyone likes the Art they like "due to the quality of the art." If no one else on the planet listens to music by 50% males or 50% females, or the exact numbers of different races, why should curators?

excellent point.

[pop--kandy.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of assumption that your genes = your culture. I'm multiple-mixed-race, bilingual living in a multilingual city in a French province in North America, and I don't really cleave to any of my "genetic" or even "local" cultures. I've assembled my own cultural identity, like you based on a lot of British rock (that outsider mentality?)...a collage of things that appeal to me. I would still call myself a Canadian though, because postmodern collage seems to be our defining national characteristic.

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

i don't like to get into this argument too much because it's terribly sticky and i find my logic gets muddled somewhere along the way...
but as an example, at my art collective we're presently trying to find 3 new housemates. we've decided, after ample debate time, to reserve 2 of these spots for women to maintain a more balanced gender ratio. the next item brought to the table was whether in the absence of enough suitable women, we should play the diversity card and try to select someone who was of varying ethnicity or sexual orientation.

but this seems slippery to me. sure, we have a few candidates that are VERY queer or VERY black and reflect these things in their art [which in each case does not IMO make their art better]...but then there are issues such as...i'm half southeast asian. my boyfriend is half mexican. we could both probably pass as white. neither of us are entirely straight, and we both have "hidden" disabilities that while not requiring wheelchairs or the like factor into our daily quality of life. as candidates, there's also, say, a visibly white individual who plays in a famous afro-caribbean band. does that make her more diverse? what about playing in a gamelan? being raised in Russia?

i guess my point is just that aiming for diversity can be messy. i don't know...i think that selections for our art collective should be based foremost on the yes, quality of art, as well as how viable it seems that we can LIVE with the individual.

also i feel bad for Stephin Merritt.

absolutely

[malejested.livejournal.com]

Using diversity as a lone qualifying factor could result in some very messy living situations.

[jasongtokyo.livejournal.com]

Has there never been an exhibition of note where the works were chosen without knowing who the artists were?

I suppose it could lead to a situation like that in horror anthology Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (the "Disembodied Hand" segment), where an eminent art critic played by Christopher Lee is made a monkey after praising a piece actually painted by...a monkey.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's what happened to the Gorilla Girls!

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

stephin merritt, the cracker.
how absurd, the whole debate.
so he doesn't like this openly homophobic, über-heterosexual, sexist bordering complete brainlessness bling-bling propaganda. gosh, i wonder why, everybody else SURE DOES. and you know, there is NOT ONE heavy metal artist in his personal Top 100 list, so maybe he hates
i don't know, norwegians?

[bricology.livejournal.com]

A brilliant post, and a pretty brave one.

Of course, you should disqualify my opinion, as I'm guilted by being born into my demographic.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I always assumed that Sasha Frere-Jones was female.

I've never disagreed with anything Steve Albini has said.

[larameau.livejournal.com]

imposing affirmative action/quotas/ratios is perfectly useless, and even dangerous, if you don't simultaneously work on a deeper level to change the social and cultural causes that prevent women (and minorities) from engaging in art - and, when they do become artists (or, for that matter, politicians, economists, scientists), prevent them from being as creative, daring, and innovative as men.

as momus beautifully put it

"I was born to be a girlish boy-
And my lover is a boyish girl-
And if everyone could be this way-
We could change the world"

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

"imposing affirmative action/quotas/ratios is perfectly useless, and even dangerous, if you don't simultaneously work on a deeper level to change the social and cultural causes that prevent women (and minorities) from engaging in art - and, when they do become artists (or, for that matter, politicians, economists, scientists), prevent them from being as creative, daring, and innovative as men."

exactly! that's where the emphasis should be.
gosh, i don't know how to put it what scares me the most about these issues. i once knew a guy who said women should be locked up in their houses cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children and given no education because that's the way it has been before because women are naturally inferior to men. as a proof to this male superiority, he stated, foaming, eyes gleaming: "well, all Great Men have been men!" jesus, what else do you expect if you don't give others a chance. plus also a racist, he pointed out how all great men have also been white. talking about circular reasoning.

[zephyrcrow.livejournal.com]

Totally, totally awesome. Neatly summarizes things I've been trying to explain to people for years.

[scola.livejournal.com]

Can't was just forget all this talk of race-politics and instead have a nice chat about these boys?



They're from Manchester!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good ratio of black to white, Greater Manchester-wise, too!

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

interesting though,
that whenever the ratio flips in some community or institution in favor of a minority (or group other than the generic white-heterosexual-male) it also tends to cause vague grudge and suspicions of some kind of foul play or not-talent-based preferential treatment. even more so.
like the popular idea here in finland seems to be that the art world is somehow swooped by neurotic lesbians + a couple of effeminate men and that that's something despicable/ridiculous. i don't know the statistics, but it could be true that the guerilla girls wouldn't really have much to do here, since to my experience a majority of young artists and especially art teachers are women these days. (plus an interesting sidenote is how this womanization of the arts has led to a certain devaluation of art or The Artist as an unearthly creative genius, thus in a way democratizing the whole thing.) anyway, to me it is obvious that it all comes down to there being more women making good art than there are men making good art. most modern artists i tend to find interesting and worthy of admiration simply are women. could be i'm biased, but my strategy of finding art i like is really looking at the works first, then names.
anyway, as an example, last week on a tram driving past the museum of modern art kiasma i overheard some young men pointing out (actually quoting the national chauvinist, boxer, former MP, drug-abuser tony halme) how, if they'd send a box of shit to the museum and label it as a "feminist pro-women" statement made by lesbians, it would be in exhibition in no time. and this attitude is not rare.
also a big debate was raised 2004 when once again (for the second time) a lesbian received the finlandia -literary price. apparently, three homos having won the price during it's 20 year history was enough to cause suspicion of "favoring homosexuals". /patronizing.

[pocket-pierre.livejournal.com]

The idea that the Whitney Biennial and the Greater New York show had more men than women artists was because men make better art than women is preposterous. The fact of the matter is, setting aside naive and romantic notions about democracy in curation, the art world is essentially a market. We aren't dealing with democracy so much as capitalism, and in the art world, both gallerists and collectors tend to view women under 40 as a bad investment, because chances are they will give it all up to have babies anyway, and their work won't appreciate. It is bad enough to be a woman artist making the same sort of sacrifices as men--crippling student loans, moving to New York to work all day at shitty jobs and try to make art all night in a tiny apartment in the outer burroughs--only to be dismissed as a baby machine; without the misplaced backlash and the idea that by even making art in the first place, she is putting on a "victim hat." Good lord.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Not quite sure who's saying that, though?

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

I think that New York is good for you, Momus.

number

[(Anonymous)]

First there was slavery, then there wasn't.
So now that's okay, all done, everyone starts from the same zero. Right?
There's a much larger field of action available than the flat binary of micro-macro representation or meritocratic exclusivity.
There's the recognition that the socius is kind of emerging, kind of in a way - or being drug unwillingly from - centuries of paternalistic sadism and pathological certain-types-of-male dominance.
Was it enough to "abolish" slavery? Did that fix everything back up?
Okay, was it then enough to explicitly codify the civil rights of the racially disenfranchised? Did that fix it?
Okay, was it then enough to establish and enforce affirmative action programs?
Been to New Orleans lately?
Okay so maybe the struggle continues and a lot of people in the professional talking niches make their middle-class bones on being all up on the anti-anti.
But the field of action should at least have room for the Guerrillas asking questions.
At least that.

rollo

Re: number

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< Okay, was it then enough to establish and enforce affirmative action programs?
Been to New Orleans lately? >>

We tried affirmative action and have had some success with it. But I side with the University of California Ward Connelly on this issue. Continuing to call attention to the differences in the races only serves to perpetuate the differences. Favoring one race over another, in order to remedy wrongs of the past, was a noble idea, and it's good we tried it, but by setting separate standards, doesn't it ultimately do more harm than good?

[bardofawen.livejournal.com]

First of all, what is the criterion for inclusion in an art show? Surely we'd all agree that it should be that one makes great art. Gender or race should be irrelevant.

Certainly there is no way to quantitatively analyze the demographic so that each and every minority is perfectly represented in each and every case. One would hope that the art world does recognize merit over ethnic/sexual demographic. What you said here makes a lot of sense, and you've provided a great analysis of the situation.

However, since you are quite a vocal opponent of pompous universalism, it raises the following question for me: are we truly seeing the best of what the art world has to offer if art shows are dictated by our own cultural biases? If the majority of art gallery owners are white males, and the majority of critics are white males, won't their own cultural biases influence their art appreciation, and thus, what we the viewers view?

When art of other cultures is viewed through the filtered lenses of our own cultural and moral systems, we subconsciously endow those art pieces with the virtues and vices of our own particular subculture. As such, we may be inclined to select artwork that resonates not within its own cultural parameters but within our own.

This is where pompous universalism comes into play. It is pompous to assume that all artists regardless of race or sexual orientation can be held to the same measure of merit. The inherent gap of sociocultural misunderstanding makes it difficult for minorities to be equals in an art scene whose merits are dictated by the cultural majority. Who are we, for instance,to determine what represents the forefront of Samoan art if we are not ourselves Samoan?

Even those of us who feel drawn to other cultures tend to view them through our own cultural filters. It is hard (perhaps impossible) to fully understand a culture without living within it. Even so, we can live for years or decades in Japanese society and yet on some level, we will always be gaikokujin.

Of course, imposing a sort of affirmative action on the art scene won't allow us to dismantle those filters. If anything, it creates an additional boundary. Nevertheless, I think we ought to be conscious, when stating that art should be chosen by merit, that the concepts of merit and quality are transient in their own right. Just as Nitsuh quite rightly remarks that Merritt is out of his idiom, so are we all when faced with cultural standard we can't fully comprehend. Thus, as long as the majority dictates aesthetics, artistic merit cannot be the great equalizer.

Perhaps it can at least be said that within our own cultural grounding, these artists are exemplary regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. However, as I believe that art is meant to stretch our own perceptions, I'm not sure I find that ideology satisfactory.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

Agreed. When an Islamic suicide bomber kills a busload of people, I have to stop myself short from criticizing them because, as a white male, I do possess certain cultural biases that influence my understanding of justice.

While Merritt may recognize that a certain sub-culture promotes sexism and self-destructive tendencies, he must remember that his concepts of "sexism" and "self-destructive" are relative to his own culture.