Who owns history?

[Langue_doc]

In today's NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/us/vermont-law-art-slavery.html

In Vermont, a School and Artist Fight Over Murals of Slavery

Created to depict the brutality of enslavement, the works are seen by some as offensive. The school wants them permanently covered. The artist says they are historically important.

After the appeals court rules, the last recourse for either side to continue the case would be a petition for review by the Supreme Court.

Whatever the outcome, some Black students said, it will not bridge the gap between the artist's experience and their own.

"What is real to me is a painting to you," said Maia Young, a second-year student from Houston. "The artist was depicting history, but it's not his history to depict."

Discuss.

[Hegemony]

Well, I get what she means. "It is an artistic exercise for you, but for me it has real relevance to things that are still very painful and closely related to issues that are ongoing in our community." A point of view that has certainly been dismissed in the past.

[dismalist]

That's a really good way to put the question, as one of ownership. Many, many threads on this board can be subsumed under the question of ownership. And ownership is determined by politics.

Vermont Law and Graduate School is private. The owners get to decide! Who owns the school? Its bosses. They have to come to a decision that assures the long-run viability of the school. I am completely unconcerned with such questions because the 3500 colleges and universities in the US is so big a number that it will guarantee variety.

The recent Hamline scandal didn't bother me, either, except for the fact that the place promised free speech, so the instructor was wronged.

Florida's New College, though public, doesn't bother me one way or other either. It belongs to the State. The State can do what it pleases. There are 50 States, though I wish there were more.

Put negatively, if people wanna attend sicko places, let them. Those people will not succeed and the institutions will fail.

Put positively, what keeps productivity and  variety going is competition.

[Wahoo Redux]

This could be on the Dr. Seuss cancellation thread.

We have waves of censorship crisscrossing our country, most of it based upon who utters the message, not the message.

[apl68]

Yes, this sounds a lot like the sorts of things one sees on that thread.

I guess the moral of this story is that in today's society there's not much expectation that public works of art will be allowed to immortalize the artist's name.  The shelf life of what's considered acceptable for public art seems to have gotten pretty short.  If you want your work as an artist to last, limit yourself to works that can be easily moved out of the way when your time to fall into disfavor arrives.

[dismalist]

If you want your work as an artist to last, limit yourself to works that can be easily moved out of the way when your time to fall into disfavor arrives.

Not out of the way, rather limit yourself to works that can easily be moved to other exhibition venues! :-)

[Parasaurolophus]

Yes, this sounds a lot like the sorts of things one sees on that thread.

I guess the moral of this story is that in today's society there's not much expectation that public works of art will be allowed to immortalize the artist's name.  The shelf life of what's considered acceptable for public art seems to have gotten pretty short.  If you want your work as an artist to last, limit yourself to works that can be easily moved out of the way when your time to fall into disfavor arrives.

I think the only time that's been true, to any extent, was for time periods when the public did not have any kind of say in public art (e.g. Roman statuary, Napoleon's enormous elephant, etc.). Remember Richard Serra's Tilted Arc? That was dismantled in the 1980s because the public hated it.


The article characterizes the law used to prevent the work's destruction as 'obscure', but it's just a codification of artists' moral rights which is well known in other countries. In the US, moral rights aren't federally recognized (to my knowledge), though many states do recognize them (e.g. California and New York). These debates are in fact fairly common in other countries; here, for example, there was a bit of a scuffle about moral rights when the AGO decided to retitle a painting by Emily Carr in 2018. (In fact, the jurisprudence on moral rights in Canada is more extensive than pretty much anywhere else.)

The school's attorney is absolutely correct that ownership confers the right to display or not; but depending on your jurisdiction, it may not confer the right to alter or damage the work in question. Permanently covering it without affixing anything directly to the work is not damage to the work, of course. So the school seems well within its rights to do so.

But, more broadly, where commissioned art is concerned, it seems to me that the community it serves ought to be able to decide whether it wants the work any more. If the law school and its students don't want the mural any more, then regardless of whether they're properly informed about it, it seems to me that's their prerogative. Artists must also be sensitive to the fact that their work may not ultimately communicate what they think it does.

EDIT: I should add the wrinkle that I think the kind of art in question should make a difference, too. Some art-kinds are by their nature more ephemeral than others, more mobile, etc. And it seems to me part of the nature of a mural that it's fairly ephemeral, and thus subject to being covered over. (This may depend on the medium in question, too--fresco-secco seems more permanent, to me, as does a mosaic.) But that's just me speaking, not the law.

[Wahoo Redux]

That's very interesting about Tilted Arc.  I'm of the opinion that works such as Serra's are versions of the Emperor's New Clothes robed in "conceptual art"----that is, "art" that will not stand the test of time once the games we play with these things get tired. 

The crucial difference between these murals in Vermont and Tilted Arc is that people do not think the murals are "ugly" and "inconvenient," as New Yorkers did with the Arc, but, after 30 years on the walls, the murals are suddenly "offensive" to the point that they must be covered over.  Also, the race of the artist is also suddenly at issue three decades after his work was commissioned. 

One can only imagine the terror that Floyd's torture and murder must instill in people, which changed the mind of administrators in this instance.  And I agree with Para that the school owns the art in question, owns the walls it is on, and has the right to do with their campus what they want.  It just seems too bad that horror and paranoia are changing the way we deal with controversy by trying to shut it down rather than negotiate it or appreciate the earnest effort of the artist. 

[Parasaurolophus]

In the '80s and '90s, the Catholic League and others (including the Republican Party) made it their business to end public funding for the arts by objecting to exhibitions they thought included offensive works (such as the Sensation exhibition, especially Andres Serrano's and Chris Ofili's works).

So, yeah. Still not a new thing.

[Wahoo Redux]

I do remember the Catholic League protesting the modernist opera version of Sir Gwain and the Green Knight in London.  If I remember, "modernist music denies melody to the world" or some such drivel. 

No one is claiming that censorship is "a new thing." Of course there is nothing new here.  No strawmen, please. 

I came of age in the late '70s and early '80s and I remember the objections to Hulk Hogan, Twisted Sister, and even the toys which some claimed were "versions of Satan." Heck, I remember the Sex Pistols, the objections to Queen's "We Are the Champions" as a gay anthem, and I've studied Allen Ginsberg and the obscenity trials regarding "Howl."   But it is the extent and reasoning behind the current wave and the disturbing fact that these items are affecting college campuses.

Or perhaps the O.G.s can fill us in on their experiences with "censorship" (is "O.G." cultural appropriation?).

[Langue_doc]

In this instance, it's the law students who are claiming that the only people who can write or paint about slavery should be the descendants of slaves. Are they also demanding that laws be written by judges of the same ethnicity/gender? That laws relating to abortion, for example, be written by women, and those relating to the decriminalization of sodomy by gay judges? Why bring in "white fragility" into the discussion about the murals, which I think are hideous and should probably be removed for aesthetic reasons alone?

Feel free to move this discussion to the "Dr. Seuss" thread.

[Caracal]

That's very interesting about Tilted Arc.  I'm of the opinion that works such as Serra's are versions of the Emperor's New Clothes robed in "conceptual art"----that is, "art" that will not stand the test of time once the games we play with these things get tired. 

The crucial difference between these murals in Vermont and Tilted Arc is that people do not think the murals are "ugly" and "inconvenient," as New Yorkers did with the Arc, but, after 30 years on the walls, the murals are suddenly "offensive" to the point that they must be covered over.  Also, the race of the artist is also suddenly at issue three decades after his work was commissioned. 

One can only imagine the terror that Floyd's torture and murder must instill in people, which changed the mind of administrators in this instance.  And I agree with Para that the school owns the art in question, owns the walls it is on, and has the right to do with their campus what they want.  It just seems too bad that horror and paranoia are changing the way we deal with controversy by trying to shut it down rather than negotiate it or appreciate the earnest effort of the artist.

I'm two generations removed from the holocaust, but there's definitely some intergenerational trauma. My grandparents left Poland before the war (my grandmother in the summer of 1939) and most of their families were murdered in the holocaust. I avoid a lot of holocaust adjacent media. I couldn't watch Man in the High Castle, it just made me anxious. I don't avoid everything holocaust related, over the years I've read plenty of stuff, but if I'm going to watch a tense dystopian thriller in the evening, I don't want it to involve Nazis and gas chambers.

In the same vein, if I worked at a school where there was a giant mural I walked by everyday with scenes from the holocaust, I would find it upsetting. I obviously have no problem with memorializing and remembering the holocaust, and there's no reason artworks about terrible things should be sanitized. But, that doesn't mean I want to see a graphic mural about something that's traumatic for me as I'm walking to my 10 AM  survey class.

The context also matters. If I was at a school with very few Jewish students, I would be inclined to feel like the people who had put up this artwork didn't really understand the effect it would have on me. Maybe for them, it's just a sad, distant, tragedy but this is really personal for me. If the s school had a lot of Jewish students, and/or Jewish groups supported or had commissioned the artwork, I would still not like that this was something I had to look at everyday,  but I probably wouldn't have the same feelings of alienation.

Public art is public. That means people are exposed to whether they want to be or not as they go about their daily lives. Since that's the point, it's disingenuous to turn around and claim that it shouldn't matter how people who have to see the art all the time feel about it. That doesn't mean that public art can't be upsetting, or that if anyone is bothered by it, it has to be removed, but it is perfectly legitimate for people to argue that a piece of public art should be removed because they find they find it upsetting, distracting or alienating. Communities-through governments and institutions-are then in charge of weighing these objections against other factors.

The artist is making bizarre claims. Murals are obviously a legitimate art form, but there are inherent risks to painting something on a wall. You can't movie it. The building might eventually be bulldozed, or heavily renovated in a way that results in the destruction of the mural. There could be water or structural damage that results in the wall having to be replaced. Or, as in this case, thirty years later, somebody may decide they don't want this painting on their wall anymore. If you can't deal with those possibilities, don't take commissions to paint murals.

[Caracal]

In this instance, it's the law students who are claiming that the only people who can write or paint about slavery should be the descendants of slaves.

In that entire article, one student was quoted as saying something along those lines. For some reason, the writer of the piece decided to end with that quote, but nobody else was making that argument.

[Anselm]

Art is being removed all over the country for all sorts of reasons.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/oak-park/ct-oak-julian-school-mural-tl-0418-story.html

[Wahoo Redux]

Public art is public. That means people are exposed to whether they want to be or not as they go about their daily lives. Since that's the point, it's disingenuous to turn around and claim that it shouldn't matter how people who have to see the art all the time feel about it. That doesn't mean that public art can't be upsetting, or that if anyone is bothered by it, it has to be removed, but it is perfectly legitimate for people to argue that a piece of public art should be removed because they find they find it upsetting, distracting or alienating. Communities-through governments and institutions-are then in charge of weighing these objections against other factors.

This is very like the argument Hamline University used. 

I understand your concerns, but I also recognize that virtually anyone can object to virtually anything under this rubric.  I can object to homosexuality, for instance, which many have, and demand that any gay themed art be taken down.  As a recovering drug addict, I can demand that any references to drug and alcohol use in pop music be eliminated because it endangers my sobriety.  I have as much right to make this claim as you have to make your claim.

When we wish to censor people it is always the same story: we think we know what specific things should be disallowed.  We believe that we know what is right or wrong based upon out own sensitivities.  And we never consider that we might be the ones being censored.