Some protests are silly. Some are toxic.
The protest against New York artist Dana Schutz over her abstract painting of Emmett Till falls into both categories.
I had not heard of Schutz until one day last week when a reader sent me a link to a piece about the controversy from the online edition of the conservative magazine National Review.
Nor am I particularly crazy about her style of painting. I prefer my art to look at least somewhat like the subject being portrayed.
But artistic connoisseurs with less restrictive taste obviously like Schutz’s stuff. At a recent exhibit in Germany, her paintings sold for $90,000 to $400,000 apiece. Rumor is that one of her early works changed hands from one collector to another for $1 million.
Schutz’s painting of Till lying in a casket, an image reminiscent of the stomach-turning photos that appeared in Jet magazine at the time of his 1955 murder, debuted in Berlin to no controversy. But when “Open Casket” showed up early this summer at an exhibit in New York, the protests began. Some stood in front of the painting to try to keep others from getting an unblocked view of it. Others demanded that it be taken down, which the curators of the exhibit refused to do.
The protesters claimed that Schutz, who is white, and the museum had no business profiting off of the suffering of a black person. Schutz soon took some of the wind out of that argument by saying that she would never sell the painting.
That concession, however, has not satisfied some of her critics. They now want her work banned in total, calling on the venue where a collection of her painting is now being exhibited, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, to take it all down, even though the museum had earlier tried to appease her critics by keeping “Open Casket” out of its showing.
Schutz is an odd target for the racially hypersensitive to hone in on. Raised in a Detroit suburb by a pair of schoolteachers, the 40-year-old painter is a political liberal. Earlier this year, she donated an unflattering painting of Donald Trump as part of a charity-raising exhibit by artists upset over the Republican’s election last year.
It is ludicrous, first off, for the liberals to be attacking their own. Worse, though, is the threat to artistic freedom posed by the argument that the only people who can legitimately try to depict another’s trials or tribulations are members of the same racial group.
Schutz, from what I read, was moved and upset after learning about the murder of Till and the white racists who got away with it — a part of the nation’s civil rights history she said she wasn’t taught in school. In recent years, the case has received renewed attention, thanks to some new books about it (written incidentally by whites) as well as comparisons that black activists have drawn between Till’s murder and the killings of black males by police or, in the case of the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer.
Some of Schutz’s critics, though, draw a parallel between her “whiteness” and that of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the shopkeeper with whom the 14-year-old from Chicago fatally flirted while visiting relatives in Money.
“Emmett Till died because a white woman lied about their brief interaction,” Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye wrote on the website of the liberal magazine The New Republic. “For a white woman to paint Emmett Till’s mutilated face communicates not only a tone-deafness toward the history of his murder, but an ignorance of the history of white women’s speech in that murder — the way it cancelled out Till’s own expression, with lethal effect.”
If you took this argument to its logical extreme, Till would be off-limits to not only caucasian painters but also caucasian songwriters, documentarians, novelists and historians.
And not only Till. Members of other minority groups — American Indians, women, homosexuals — would become inappropriate subjects for artistic contemplation by their majority-group counterparts. White singers couldn’t write songs about those who died on the Trail of Tears. Male filmmakers couldn’t make movies about women victimized by gender discrimination. Straight novelists couldn’t write about persecuted gays and lesbians.
What Schutz said she was trying to do was honor the decision of Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, to expose the horrendous treatment her son received in the most powerful and painful way she could — by allowing the world to see his face, tortured beyond recognition, at his funeral.
As an artist, Schutz was exercising empathy — putting herself in the shoes of someone else and trying to imagine the world through that person’s eyes.
That is not a crime. It is, rather, what compassionate human beings should do, whether they have a paint brush in their hand or not.
Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
