It's Pablo-canceled

On Ben Davis's review of "It's Pablo-matic."

Young victims of Foucaultian biopolitics regard Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses II (1990-98) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis (source)

Anyone who, in 2023, insists on putting cancel culture and its variants into scare-quotes but leaves cultural appropriation bare is a twerp. I have more points to make about Ben Davis’s two-part review of “It’s Pablo-matic” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but they flow from this one: cancel culture is definable and real, “cultural appropriation” is undefinable and fake, and the effort exerted by postliberal progressives to establish the converse is emblematic of why liberal progressives must join with the rest of us dissidents to rout it.¹

Cancel culture is the phenomenon in which those who are offended by a given intellectual claim or creative work respond with a campaign of shaming, censorship, professional destruction, threats of violence, or actual violence targeting its author. Proponents of the idea that cancel culture isn’t real argue that because its victims are often able to reposition themselves professionally and continue to find audiences for their work, few people have truly been canceled. This evades the true problem, that cancel culture disdains critique and dialogue in favor of personal attacks, moving argumentum ad hominem into the realm of praxis. The ends are bad, but the chief trouble is the means. Postliberal progressivism has a Stalinist or fascist flavor largely because it regards such means as acceptable. The process of cancellation is the punishment. Subjecting someone to a cancellation campaign is itself cancellation.

“Cultural appropriation,” in contrast, is an incoherent complaint that the people who win recognition and compensation for a given cultural expression are not always the same people who originated it. It begs intricate, context-dependent questions of whether it could or should be otherwise. The most recent attempt by the New York Times to reify “cultural appropriation,” issued last fall by Ligaya Mishan, offered that it is…

…a member of the dominant culture — an insider — taking from a culture that has historically been and is still treated as subordinate and profiting from it at that culture’s expense. The profiting is key. This is not about a white person wearing a cheongsam to prom or a sombrero to a frat party or boasting about the “strange,” “exotic,” “foreign” foods they’ve tried, any of which has the potential to come across as derisive or misrepresentative or to annoy someone from the originating culture — although refusal to interact with or appreciate other cultures would be a greater cause for offense — but which are generally irrelevant to larger issues of capital and power.

But that was revisionist. When in 2018 a reportedly white Utah high schooler named Keziah Daum wore a cheongsam to her prom, her excoriation on social media made national news. “My culture is not your goddamn prom dress,” wrote one Jeremy Lam in a now-deleted but forever famous tweet. It subsequently had to be pointed out that the cheognsam was a Westernization of Chinese couture, trading elaborate robing for a simpler garment that better suited a more egalitarian society.

At base the objection is not to capital, which in Daum’s case was not at stake, but miscegenation. In contrast to anti-miscegenationists of yore, for postliberal progressives, the polluting race is the white one. Otherwise the mechanisms of taint are the same. If “cultural appropriation” has a definition, it is “a transgression against cultural anti-miscegenation.” But since postliberal progressives can’t admit how much they have in common with run-of-the-mill bigots in that regard, and resort to definitions of “cultural appropriation” like Mishan’s that don’t describe the full extent of the phenomenon, it may as well have no definition at all.

“It’s Pablo-matic” was an act of shaming and professional destruction, that is, of cancellation. The curators tried to head off that accusation, as Davis reports.

“One of the really important takeaways that we are stressing, and that we know is really important to Hannah, is that the idea of ‘cancellation’ is not remotely the point of this exhibition—nor is it mostly anyone’s goals in anything these days—as a simple, reductive kind of gesture,” Catherine Morris told Ben Luke before “It’s Pablo-matic” opened. Morris added that the show was about “giving complicated things the space to be complicated.”

Davis saw through it.

But in the audio guide, Gadsby says plainly: “I don’t have much hope that the needle is going to move on ‘P.P.’—and by ‘P.P.’ I mean ‘Pablo Picasso.’ A cancellation of P.P. is an incredibly unlikely outcome.” They are saying that the patriarchy won’t let them cancel Picasso, while also very much arguing to the audience that we definitely should cancel Picasso. Morris may argue for complexity, but Gadsby’s arguments about what Picasso’s art means today are so totalizing and limiting that the majority of the feminist artists in the show disagree with them!

Davis is not the most postliberal of progressives. He is a socialist, which is an increasingly vague and obsolete category of political tendency. The dwindling adherents of Marx are not wholly comfortable with the extremism of postliberal progressive identity politics, though obviously the postliberals will toss him out of the art world if he doesn’t show them obeisance. Davis goes into detail about how curator Hannah Gadsby’s prosecution of Picasso fails to connect and disregards smarter feminist scholarship on the topic. His own argument is cogent, but it strikes me as beside the point. Was the museum attempting a serious critique in the first place? It’s not clear to me that it was. Either a building’s worth of PhDs were suddenly rendered incapable of issuing the kind of turgid apologetics in which they’d been trained, or they were simply trying to do something else.

As best as I can tell, their purpose was to humiliate admirers of Picasso and steer their taste toward a regime-approved, racially diverse slate of contemporary women artists.² As I already discussed, Picasso represents a particular achievement of Western art, and the noble image of the West is standing in the way of the postliberal progressive dictatorship into which we are lurching. This is the Monoculture at work, and it brings us to what I find most interesting about Davis’s two-parter, the conclusion.

Five years on from [Gadsby’s quasi-comedy] Nanette, most of the anti-Trump comedy shows have been canceled or have declined. People used to mock the very idea of mainstream conservative comedy. Now Gutfeld!, Fox News’s answer to the Daily Show, is the biggest thing in late night.

In art, the same kind of shift hasn’t totally happened, but there’s a definite percolating fatigue with “woke” culture. I’ve said for months that “It’s Pablo-matic” might be the moment when the mainstream art institutions had to grapple with just how uncool moralism had become.

And as I’ve been saying since I last wrote about Davis, there is no limiting condition for woke moralism at the museums.³ The philanthropy money keeps rolling in. That’s all that matters, not the critics’ opinions, and not (yet) the cratering attendance numbers. The billionaires are underwriting the postliberal progressive dictatorship and stand to do just fine when it is finally established. There is, perhaps, a level of attendance too low to justify the museum directors’ jobs or even some of the philanthropy, but we haven’t reached it. I would bet money that the donor base of the Brooklyn Museum is entirely satisfied with “It’s Pablo-matic,” and is looking forward to more presentations of “women or artists of non-conforming gender who challenge the supposedly universal figure of the white man guided by reason,” as curator Cecilia Alemani put it regarding the last Venice Biennale, and “artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees,” as curator Adriano Pedrosa put it regarding the next one.⁴ Returning to Davis:

I argued, at the beginning and at the end of the Trump era, that putting too much stress on cultural consumption as the vehicle for salvation risked doing more harm than good. Among other things, by collapsing aesthetic judgement with moral evaluation it would train its audience to judge art by how worthy the person behind it was, thereby losing sight of whether an artwork was independently compelling. This would, in turn, inhibit people’s ability to see what worked, as art or as an argument, leading to isolation and fragmentation.

I agree, while noting that Jed Perl made this argument two years earlier. Davis observes that support for woke moralistic judgment is cratering even among its target audience, and that a backlash is coming.

And plenty of lefties are alienated too, having been forced to defend anti-intellectual arguments, seeing politics reduced to virtue signaling, and watching progressive institutions paralyzed. The popularity of Olufemi Taiwo’s great book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics is proof that there is a strong hunger for some kind of left critique of bad social justice discourse….

But the hour is late. What’s scary is that we live in the middle of a gathering super-storm of political reaction. Women’s rights have been decisively eroded, and gender non-conforming people are at the center of a nasty campaign of bigoted scapegoating. And yet exhaustion, disaffection, and recrimination are gaining steam on the cultural level.

With all due respect to women and gender non-conformists, you should see the campaign against the dissidents from postliberal progressivism. Today the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism announced its representation of Professor Zack De Piero in his lawsuit against Penn State:

Professor De Piero was required to attend professional development meetings to view videos such as “White Teachers Are a Problem”, and was directed to “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.”  Incidents like these made it clear that Penn State harbored a bias against him based on his skin color. So he took the prescribed course of action and filed a bias report.  The Penn State Affirmative Action Office quickly called Professor De Piero into a Zoom meeting where its Associate Director informed him that, “There is a problem with the White race” then directed him to continue attending antiracist workshops “until you get it.” 

Me, I worry that the backlash will be insufficiently severe. If we’re going to avoid disaster, postliberal progressivism is not just going to have to become alienating or uncool, but radioactive. Yes, it really is fostering bigotry. Yes, it really is undergirded by a conception of social justice that resembles Aryanism. Yes, it really is totalitarian. Yes, it really is incapable of producing culture of significant value. Yes, it really is tanking the institutions. Yes, it really is breeding accelerationists and counter-elites (Hi!) who would not be entirely sorry if said institutions got wiped out.

But the people who would need to recognize that can’t even concede that “cultural appropriation” is a failed critique, and that cancel culture is a genuine and widespread assault upon discourse. Not only is the hour late, the clock is unwound.

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1. A reader asked for my thoughts on the matter. Please do likewise; it’s hard to gauge reader interest on a given topic and I try to err on the side of silence.

2. Telling people what to like and what not to like is a grotesque violation of their autonomy. I’ll gladly discuss my taste as a critic, but I don’t regard my taste as normative. The duty of the museum is to present the art as well as it can (namely, not on walls painted in circus colors) and let people decide what to like for themselves.

3. I’m not scare-quoting woke either.

4. Prediction: “diasporic” artists in this case will not include Jews.