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http://kenanmalik.com/2020/10/06/welcome-to-flatland/

Publisher:  Pandaemonium - Kenan Malik Blog
Date Written:  06/10/2020
Year Published:  2020  
Resource Type:  Article

On the shallowness of cultural and political debate in relation to the postponement of Philip Guston's exhibition.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The four galleries - Tate Modern in London, Washington's National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts - decided to postpone, until 2024, a long awaited show by the artist Philip Guston because the Black Lives Matter movement has shown the need for the "the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston's work... [to] be more clearly interpreted".

But why should the galleries do all the "interpreting"? Art, after all, is about engagement - the same painting, novel, play, or film can have many readings. That's one reason why art can be so thrilling. We live in a world, though, in which many insist that there can only be one way of interpreting contentious issues, whether racial justice or trans rights.

The other side of the denial of independent interpretation is the tyranny of the literal: that what's on the surface is all that matters, that the external form cannot be distinguished from deeper meaning. The problem with Guston's paintings, for the show's curators, seems to be that many depict the Klu Klux Klan in white hoods. Guston was unswervingly anti-racist - one of his works, The Studio, shows him painting in a hood, to illustrate what he saw as his own complicity in white supremacy. If any artist fits the current political mood, it's Guston.

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