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November 8, 2007
White Guilt at the Whitney
Through February 3, New York's Whitney Museum offers another appalling example of what moonbattery has done to art with an exhibit of works by Kara Walker, who specializes in pandering to the white guilt of liberals.
Walker doesn't paint, exactly. She finds it easier to do black and white silhouettes. Technical skill is no longer emphasized in art; you just need the proper mix of political correctness and degenerate nihilism. Newsday describes her work:
[Walker's] bleak fantasia fragments into vignettes of abusive sex. A dandy in a high-collared tunic flirts with a hoop-skirted belle — but his sword nearly skewers a slave boy who has taken his own aggression out on a turkey's neck, and an extra pair of legs emerges mysteriously from beneath the woman's skirts. Elsewhere, a pigtailed slave girl services a trouserless man, another woman (or the same?) stands, lifts a leg and drops a pair of babies. A scrawny, naked figure with a bloated penis hangs in the sky, a slave owner's nightmare of a black youth executed for his lust.
Walker seems as fascinated by these racist reveries as she is intent on piercing them. She fills her shadow plays with pickaninnies, mammies, Sambos, mandingos and Uncle Toms — the whole repertoire of nasty caricatures from the era of lynchings and blatant intimidation. By quoting these degrading stereotypes, Walker means to point up how insidiously they persist even now, perpetuated both within and without the black community. As Harvard cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1997, Walker seeks "to liberate our people from the residual, debilitating effects that the proliferation of those images undoubtedly has had upon the collective unconscious of the African-American people."
So, by wallowing in demeaning caricatures from the century before last, blacks are liberating themselves? Not even Walker herself seems to buy it:
"Every image produced of 'us' is mediated — filtered through the grounds of years of misrepresentation, bitterness and suspicion," she scrawled on one of the beautifully illustrated diary pages on display at the Whitney. She doesn't think it's possible to mold new, untainted forms. We can only deconstruct those that already exist and uncover their ongoing corruption.
Her work is neither anti-black nor anti-white; it is broadly misanthropic. Both groups, as far as she is concerned, have forgone their claims to nobility or integrity. Walker scoffs at the notion of progress. To her, the distortions in self-image wrought by slavery's power relations have been completely internalized by both groups, which remain helpless in the face of history.
How uplifting. History has stopped, as far as white guilt profiteers are concerned; it will be the middle of the 19th century until the end of time. The only thing that changes is that art keeps getting worse.
On a tip from V the K.
Posted by Van Helsing at November 8, 2007 7:59 AM
Comments
I've seen this trash. Technically, its not up to the level of Little Lulu comic book art.
Both the Whitney and Guggenheim museums have been exhibiting excrement for a long time.
Taken together over the years, it seems that these museums have found a formula that works: Bad quality + PC correctness = that'll show all those dead, white artists.
Posted by: Fiberal at November 8, 2007 11:21 AM
Its a Rorschach test for Moonbats.
Posted by: Anonymous at November 8, 2007 1:13 PM
It's disgusting. Furthermore, it's pandering to those who eat their own product.
Posted by: mockinbird at November 8, 2007 2:57 PM
Its a Rorschach test for Moonbats.
Posted by: Anonymous at November 8, 2007 1:13 PM
I think modern art in general is Rorschach test. Art has become (intentionally) devoid of any intrinsic meaning because it is much easier for the artist to let the viewer make up his own meaning than to actually give one to a work. Anyway, reading the article, the words "fake but accurate" come to mind. This "artist" is calling attention to a problem which doesn't exist.
Posted by: Arthur at November 10, 2007 7:50 PM
