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

Re: crippled straw man argument

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

In the disability rights community we use a simple test. If someone tells a joke about a guy in a wheelchair or uses an analogy about a gimpy airline pilot, we ask them to substitute the disabled person with a member of a minority. Is the joke still funny? And if so would you tell it in public?

Re: crippled straw man argument

[pop--kandy.livejournal.com]

I guess that just proves two things:

a) Humour derives from specificity, not the generic.
b) The disability rights community has no sense of humour.

[ferecito]I'm JUST KEEDING![/ferecito]

Seriously though. Humour, and jokes in particular, thrive on specific details. A joke about a gimpy airline pilot is probably funny because it plays to what we know about airlines and pilots. A funny story is made funnier through the repetition of telling detail, not bland universalisms.

I did improv and sketch comedy for about 10 years and while I'm far from being a comic genius, I do understand that if you don't create rich characters with believable details, the audience won't buy it, and cultural details are part of that mix. Interchangeable, bland, stale characters and jokes are a recipe for disaster. Comedy isn't supposed to be safe!

For example, Fred Armisen's Ferecito character might be seen as a "stereotype" of a Spanish light-entertainment talk show host, but Armisen (who's part Venezuelan himself) is actually creating a loving pastiche of real hosts of real shows - if they didn't really exist, his humor would fall flat - and often the reality is more bizarre than the parody.

Certainly the case can be made that times change and certain things aren't funny anymore, but home truths are always funny, and every subgroup in a society has a basket of these that are comic fodder. When Chris Rock jokes that "If [we] didn't spend so much money on rims, we might have some to invest," it's initially mean-sounding, but funny and poignant (in the sense of, an affectionate punch - kidding on the square) and his largely African-American audience shakes their head ruefully while laughing at the same time, because they know there really are people like that in the world.

Of course, it's contextual - Jeff Foxworthy could never get away with the same joke in public, but then he has different, culture-specific jokes about himself and other white southerners.

Re: crippled straw man argument

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Comedy isn't supposed to be safe!

Tell that to Red Skelton.

[ferecito]I'm JUST KEEDING![/ferecito]

Or should I say Jose Jimenez?

I appreciate your treatise on humor and I'm happy to say that not a single word or phrase went over my head.

Did you see the South Park episode about the "crips" which included a conflict between those who were disabled at birth and those who became disabled from an accident. It's funny. It's probably on You Tube.

Back to "the test". It's purpose is to provoke thought and discussion. That's one of the activist's most important jobs.

Re: crippled straw man argument

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Got a funny story.

I was once attacked by a guy who used a wheel chair. I came out of a store and was unlocking my bike lock. This guy approached with very slurred speach. He had a keyboard but he wasn't using it. I leaned over so I could understand him. I thought he was asking for directions. Finaly I realized he was saying "get off the fucking sidewalk asshole!"

I said ok ok and got on my bike and moved to the curb cut. He kept repeating "get off the fucking sidewalk asshole". It was a motorized weelchair. He floored it and rammed me and I fell over. I got back up and said "stop that". He backed up about ten feet and then came at me again slamming into my leg. I didn't fall over but it FUCKING HURT! I rode away and I was pissed. I thought "I'm going back there and I'm going to tip that son of a bitch over"

I didn't. I still see him around town and I just give him a dirty look.

Re: crippled straw man argument

[pop--kandy.livejournal.com]

dude, that's so like a scene from Seinfeld.

Re: crippled straw man argument

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Funniest if it happened to George.

Re: crippled straw man argument

[(Anonymous)]

I'd say Red Skelton was more of a clown / vaudevillian than an observational comic. Everybody Loves Ray might be a better example.

Jose Jimenez was a white guy "doing" a Latino character - to his credit, Bill Dana disavowed that bit later in life. Which isn't to say that a white actor couldn't "do" ethnic characters, but there's an additional burden to do it well, to make an interesting character where their cultural background is part of what makes them interesting, and not make it an insulting stereotype. I think Fred Armisen is just a little bit immune from those charges.

I'm all for provoking thought and discussion, but I find theoretical extreme situations (i.e. reduction ad absurdum) not very helpful to advance one's particular case. Going back to the original point, Momus' case seemed to be that trying to artificially set quotas for participation in an art show patronizes those who are "quota-fillers" and engenders resentment from other equally qualified people who are rejected for not meeting those requirements. Does this do the art any service? Does one injustice mitigate another?

In these cases, all else presumably being equal, quality of work should be the deciding factor, after that it's first-come, first-served.

Obviously, what we have to work on is the "all else presumably being equal" part - removing institutional bias and barriers, ensuring equal access, etc. but of course this doesn't mean anyone has a "right" to be included in a private exhibition, no matter how large and "public" it may seem.