At a current Paul Gauguin exhibition at London’s National Gallery, visitors are warned that the famous French painter had sexual relationships with young girls, including two with whom he fathered children.
A wall text notes, “Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner [in French Polynesia] to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.”
An audio guide even raises the question, “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?”
This is what art appreciation has come to: a PC prism through which a painting, a work of literature or even a popular song must be scrutinized for racism, sexism, gender bias or just plain hurt feelings.
New York museums haven’t banned anything yet. But look out: Metropolitan Museum of Art director Max Hollein told The New York Times that, “Art cannot solely be perceived in regard to its beauty and craftsmanship. You also have to evaluate it in light of its political messages.”
If you say so, chief. I thought most human beings turned to art not for ideological hectoring but for the joy of beauty and insight into the human condition — whether from Dante, Shakespeare or Springsteen.
The “warnings” against Gauguin are another step toward excommunicating every Western creative talent from the realm of permissible enjoyment. If left unopposed, the PC fascists will inevitably ban everything by Western-world artists, writers and musicians due to perceived “sensitivities” or “colonialist” violations.
Why stop with Gauguin? Another revered European painter, Caravaggio, was a murderer, a pimp and a sex abuser of children. His “Victorious Cupid” and “St. John the Baptist” depict a naked young boy “with whom Caravaggio is believed to have been having sex,” according to Guardian critic Emine Saner.
By any consistent standard of political correctness, Shakespeare’s got to go. While he was no pedophile, his play “The Taming of the Shrew” celebrates misogyny. “Othello” is full of racist tropes. Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” betrays a deeply anti-Semitic spirit.
By that token, Vladimir Nabokov should be exiled to Siberia for “Lolita.” Though it’s widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest novels, his character Lolita is 12 years old when narrator Humbert Humbert falls for her. He beds and ultimately loses her to a romantic rival, whom Humbert enthusiastically bumps off. Burn the book and ban the movie adaptations!
Mark Twain’s masterpiece “Huckleberry Finn” has — barely — survived the onslaught of “racism” charges. It’s been dropped from some campus reading lists over a character whose nickname is the N-word. Shouldn’t Twain, who wrote the novel as an anti-racism saga more than 120 years ago, have predicted that the slur widely used by whites in the pre-Civil War South would be deemed impermissible in a work of fiction in the 21st Century?
If “Huck Finn” needs condemnation, so do the poems of Walt Whitman, who referred to black people as “baboons.” Or the novels of Joseph Conrad, whose racism was implicit in the African fable “Heart of Darkness.”
I’m overreacting, right? Well, last year, Kate Smith was dropped from the Yankee Stadium soundtrack for having once, at 24, sung a racist tune at her record company’s behest at a time when segregation was the law of the land in many states. More recently, a few busybodies changed the teasing lyrics to “Baby It’s Cold Outside” lest the original be misconstrued as a lead-up to rape. (Of course, rap artists who celebrate actual sexual subjugation of women — see 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” — get a free pass.)
If the PC purity test continues to rule, we’ll be left with empty bookshelves and bare-wall galleries. Art may survive only if it’s twisted to politically correct ends — like the Broadway staging of “Oklahoma!” that’s so warped from the original, it’s been ridiculed as “Wokelahoma.”
It’s time for some brave pushback to arrest the slide — or woke me when it’s over.