Mary Richardson, an early 20th century suffragette, believed that for a painting to be beautiful, it also had to reflect justice. "Justice," she said, "is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas." Richardson felt that this painting of Venus by the great Spanish artist Diego Velazquez lacked justice.
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She didn't like "the way men visitors gaped at it all day long." To make the picture more just, she attacked it with a meat cleaver.
Richardson was upset because her fellow suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, who used arson and explosives to win women's rights in England, had been arrested the day before. Richardson published her explanation for slashing the painting:
I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.... If there is an outcry against my deed, let everyone remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy."
Richardson was imprisoned for six months, which was the maximum penalty under British law for destruction of an artwork.
Fed up with sexual inequality under the British government, Richardson turned to fascism as the “only path to a Greater Britain.” She joined the British Union of Fascists and demonstrated such commitment to authoritarian government that she was quickly promoted to a high level management position prior to World War II.
As we've previously discussed on this blog, the ability to create great art is very rare, yet any moron has the ability to destroy it. Perhaps that's why accountants never make good artists: art's odds are so terrible, a career in art would make no sense to anyone who understands math.
20 comments:
Unfortunately timely.
Attacking cultural symbols that people care deeply about is guaranteed to get the eyeballs that these spoiled children crave so much. Doesn't even matter if it hurts the cause, because the dumber the act, the more the true faithful must rush in to defend it and prove their allegiance. And always, the next move is to chastize you for caring more about art, beauty and culture, than the important issue. A logic that, with infinite important issues and finite pieces of art, would quickly leave us with very little worth celebrating. The power rush from taking seconds to destroy what took talent, time and preservation, must be a happy coincidence.
The impulse to destroy, an urge to vainglory, or a combination of the two are the real motivators here.
The pseudo-religious/moralistic/cause-de-jour justification is a deception that costumes the act for the perpetrators and their milieu.
Totalitarians have been destroying art--and books--since at least Savonarola. I expect it to get worse before it gets better. So little art corresponds with the ideals of the fanatics, after all. It's easy to destroy, and good practice for getting rid of people later. I see a future of abstract art with spaces underneath so titles can be swapped out, making them always in support of the cause of the day.
But no, I don't think artists are less able to calculate odds than normal people. Some of them have been pretty shrewd financially. But the odds on art as a career are poor. Three possibilities: (1) the inescapable human tendency to believe what we wish to be so, (2) an artistic impulse so strong they have no choice, or (3) it's create art, or work regular hours and have a boss. You'd do a lot to avoid that, if you could.
Two fronts here:
1. A radical activist finds beautiful whatever alleviates the stress caused by the moral torture and psychological abuse of their ideological indoctrination.
With their aesthetic powers detached from the sensual world they do not experience the synthesis of beauty and meaning.
2. A couple of years before this event, the Mona Lisa was stolen. Which made big headlines.
This post made me realize that the 'transcendent outrage' model of attention-stealing has a longer history than I thought. But a history still directly tied to the insatiable need for mass media to evoke fear, horror, revulsion, and anger to gain viewership and sustain readership.
The attention economy - a parasitic occupying power in the West - has been broadcasting from the bottom of the barrel for at least 120 years. Symbiotically giving mass exposure to every pathological narcissist willing to wield a weapon to gain renown. Thus encouraging more of the same.
Popular lately and today hitting a Vermeer. People need to step up to these "activists" and -- put them on the ground and kick their teeth to the back of their skulls.
Do it twice and this silly crap will come to a screeching halt.
If one believes in their apocalytic version of climate change, it's perfectly reasonable to take whatever extreme actions are going to get enough attention to save the planet and save humanity from Mad Max: Fury Road. According to AOC, we have 9 years left to stop the apocalypse.
I think if anyone is at fault, it's the scientific community and the media for buckling under political pressure instead of informing the public about what the models actually project.
IPCC published a number of models, one of which was considered extremely unlikely to happen. Predictably, politicians took the worst case scenario (RPC8.5) and now present it as if it is the most likely outcome if global warming continues unabated by large scale social changes.
If this unlikely cataclysm were to occur, after a few hundred years Atlanta would become as warm as Kissimmee, Toronto would be the same temperature as Chicago, and Tanzania will be as warm as Kenya (a 5C annual average temperature increase).
Under RPC8.5, in 75 years, several cities globally will be under water.
Under the RPC8.5 scenario, in 500 years, Florida will look like this.
While this is an unsettling thought, even in the most drastic scenario we wouldn't end up with a planet devoid of life. Where are the grownups to quell this hysteria? If I believed that the experts were uniformly of the opinion that an asteroid was going to blow up the planet in 9 years if we didn't take drastic measures, I think I'd be doing some pretty wacko stuff too. My first instinct would not be to glue myself to Vermeer, but it wouldn't be off the table.
For good or bad, no social revolution of significance ever occurred without the horde impolitely interrogating the hegemony of the day.
Commitment is setting yourself on fire for your cause.
Terrorism is setting somebody else on fire for your cause.
(Somewhat metaphorically speaking)
Fear and resentment of the human condition with its unconquerable vulnerability will forever birth puritanical urges of every type.
I'm glad everyone agrees that vandalizing art is unacceptable (although Øyvind Lauvdahl euphemistically describes it as "impolitely interrogating the hegemony of the day.") And I'm also glad that art is still important enough to inspire strong emotional responses.
I didn't focus on it until I read these comments, but Mary Richardson complicates our analysis by offering two very different reasons for her action. The first: that she is willing to destroy something of beauty because her political agenda has not been satisfied. The second: she is willing to destroy a nude painting because she doesn't like men ogling it. At least the second rationale connects the act to a relevant cause.
Kev Ferrara-- Well said. I like your distinction.
Vanderleun-- While my instinct is to eschew violence in policy debates, some of the monsters involved in vandalizing art for political reasons are so despicable I could be persuaded to adopt your proposal.
The framing of this matter as an attempted assassination of beautiful Venus by bloody Mary is well-suited to inspire strong emotional responses, and the seductive power of your allegory certainly shows not only rhetoric, but also artistic flair.
"I'm glad everyone agrees that vandalizing art is unacceptable."
The vandal does not agree or disagree. The vandal acts. The vandal does not walk into the National Gallery with obeisance, as the ruling ideology dictates. It does not have the right clothes, it does not have the right words. It is worthless and subordinate in nearly all matters. It is a nobody among the many with no leverage but its mass, its body.
But that body, that mass, that is what directs the course of history.
Richard-- Thank you for the citations, and for compelling me to get off my butt and actually read the latest IPCC report, which I should have done long ago. You have inspired me to go beyond popular media summaries.
My sense of things is that the IPCC scientists responsibly came up with four alternative paths in order to cover a range of realistic scenarios. RPC8.5 is a sensible "worse case" scenario based on certain population, economic and political assumptions (including, for example, advocacy from the fossil fuel industry and climate change deniers for future drilling and coal mining). It's hard for me to fault "the scientific community" as the assumptions behind RPC8.5 are comprehensively spelled out for the public to inspect (can you find any with which you disagree? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y)
Even though SSP3.70 is now regarded as the "very likely range" in the IPCC report, the very specific and "unequivocal" catastrophic impacts of climate change that have already taken place, as documented in the "Observed Impacts from Climate Change" section of the report at paragraphs B.1 and B.2, are extremely alarming. That's before we begin to make predictions under SSP3.70. I didn't find anything in the report about the temperature in Kissimmee but even SSP3.70 reads pretty darn close to the apocalypse.
Your comment about the "scientific community... buckling under political pressure" made me think back to my days working on remedial orders involving the Koch Oil Company, which was found guilty of stealing oil from Indian reservations and federally owned lands for decades. Koch had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines in addition to reimbursements (and later for covering up repeated environmental violations). The Kochs were already billionaires back then, but they wanted more, so they poured millions into pseudo-science denying climate change was real. They also bankrolled the political campaigns of candidates who would help them deny it, and hired the same public relations firms and think tanks that got rich working for tobacco companies who wanted to deny the science that smoking caused lung cancer. As years went by and the Kochs could no longer deny the science of climate change, they shifted their strategy to challenging the economics of climate change solutions.
You suggest that AOC is applying "political pressure" regarding climate change. I personally spoke with ultra-conservative Republican congressman Bob Inglis from South Carolina about a different kind of political pressure. Despite his impeccable conservative credentials and his long history of being re-elected, he made the fatal mistake of saying that the US should follow science on climate change. That was enough for the Kochs to heavily fund his primary opponent, Trey Gowdy, and rally tea party groups against Inglis. They knocked him out of a safe seat and replaced him with a climate change denier. Now that's what I call political pressure.
It's hard for me to fault "the scientific community" as the assumptions behind RPC8.5 are comprehensively spelled out for the public to inspect (can you find any with which you disagree?)
I don't think that RPC8.5 is a likely scenario, but it is possible. The authors do not claim RPC8.5 is likely, so there's nothing to explicitly disagree with them about.
In terms of likelihood, 8.5 models a 12 billion population in 2100. This would require a significant change to the current trends which are that the world at large has crashing fertility rates as they become more educated and industrialized. The UN envisions three population scenarios in their 2022 population report:
Low: The third world becomes educated and industrialized, which results in further declining global fertility rates, driving population back down to 7.5 billion by 2100.
Medium: The world remains roughly in its current state, fertility rates continue their current declines, and global population peaks at 10b in 2086, and falls to 9b by 2100.
High: Industrialization forces collapse worldwide, with fertility rate reversals across all continents, and global population grows to 14b.
Paradoxically, the RPC 8.5 model assumes the accelerating fertility rates of the UN High estimate, in combination with a heavy industralization of the UN Low estimate. For example, RPC8.5 would require Africa to modernize and industrialize without any decline in fertility rates. This would mean that Pakistan, China and India continue to industrializing at the same rate as well, but with a significant increase in their fertility rates. Could this happen? Possibly, though it's an unlikely combination of events.
The model assumes that the global energy mix moves markedly towards coal, and away from oil/gas and renewables. They only project minor increases in the efficiency of solar and other renewables, so that they would not become cost competitive globally. Is this possible? Yeah, it's theoretically possible. However, it seems unlikely when paired with the model's assumption of accelerating industrialization. Crazier things have happened though.
"I think I'd be doing some pretty wacko stuff too. My first instinct would not be to glue myself to Vermeer, but it wouldn't be off the table."
Why ? Does the target have a link to the cause ? Or are the people doing it just attention seekers / people with inner mental issues projected outwards, who are just feigning their imbalance as Righteous Anger, the 21st century heir to false religious moralism ?
Like the nutcases who burned and rioted over the (certainly disgusting) murder of a violent criminal by the police, but are silent about, say, the ongoing murder of innocent young women by the Iranian Moral Police because that particular cause carries no cachet in their political group ?
There are a million effective actions that can be taken both personally and collectively to prevent environmental degradation.
As for Climate Change, a number of years ago the British environmentalist David Bellamy said that it was being used by governments and corporations to distract from the real issue of habitat loss.
I don't know if this means that the issue has been invemted or exaggerated, there certainly are facts that suggest strongly that it is real.
But Bellamy was certainly right in so far that it has been adopted by the biggest criminals in environmental harm to distract and co-opt mass unease or concern about our environment and channel it down particular avenues.
For example, the european Green Parties still fully push for the same unlimited growth economic model (constantly grow populations = grow production = grow consumption) as all of the formerly right-wing global mega-corps, who now are pushing their newfound 'green' technologies as a panacea. (But what should we really expect of organisations, such as the German Green Party, who openly had the legalisation of paedophilia, involving child victims right down to two years of age, as a policy platform for over a decade - this is not a 'pizzagate' thing: it is widely known over here and you can find it reported in, eg, English language Der Spiegel & many more if needed)
Where I live we have government telling us to reduce our power usage while telling everyone to buy electric cars (environmental disasters in both their production and use), actively inviting data centres (set to consume twenty percent of the power from that national grid), and policies encouraging colossal population growth.
Globally, massive energy is wasted on personal electronic devices, the devices are designed to pack in after a certain point, and these same cunts at fault for this are among those who have appointed themselves the greenwashed corporate & ngo priesthoods.
So anyone who thinks there is some virtue in these twats blocking ambulances in London and egging paintings is either an idiot, a fellow-traveller in their righteous fraud, or just hasn't really looked at the situation honestly.
"The vandal does not walk into the National Gallery with obeisance, as the ruling ideology dictates. It does not have the right clothes, it does not have the right words. It is worthless and subordinate in nearly all matters. It is a nobody among the many with no leverage but its mass, its body."
No idealised 'vandals' as described were responsible, all have been very well-off middle-class activist twits.
Congratulations Aptoff. You have shown yourself to have fully colonized mind. You no longer need any work. You are fully finished.
So anyone who thinks there is some virtue in these twats blocking ambulances in London and egging paintings is either an idiot, a fellow-traveller in their righteous fraud, or just hasn't really looked at the situation honestly.
If you earnestly think the world is going to end unless everyone wakes up and fundamentally changes their every behavior over night, it doesn’t need to rise to virtue. It’s something much more basic. At that point we’re talking about survival.
Most of the boomers going apeshit over the soup on the paintings and the traffic blocks would go full-on jihadi terrorist if their country was invaded and colonized by China. Yet, these kids think something much worse than Fascism is happening, they think the planet is dying.
'Most of the boomers going apeshit over the soup on the paintings and the traffic blocks would go full-on jihadi terrorist if their country was invaded and colonized by China. Yet, these kids think something much worse than Fascism is happening, they think the planet is dying.'
You're applying nonsensical american tropes where they don't fit, which skews your own grasp of the acts and their context. It really looks nuts over here when an american tries to describe and explain these events in the Uk and the continent in this way. No, we're not all living in existential dread of the yellow peril or a commie takeover; I'm not sure what a boomer is.
The harms to their planet are far more complicated than the fossil fuel issue - which is of course real - and there are issues in their own lives and lifestyle the morons should be addressing first.
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