National Coalition Against Censorship and PEN defend Met’s showing of a “controversial” painting

December 9, 2017 • 10:30 am

Four days ago I reported about an attack of the Pecksniffs on a painting at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: Balthus‘s Thérèse Dreaming”, created in 1938. Here it is in the gallery:

THOMAS URBAIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A New York Pecksniff, one Mia Merrill, launched a campaign to have the painting removed (one call was simply for a “trigger warning”, but the petition—as of this writing signed by over 11,300 Pecksniffs—was to remove the painting. Merrill’s beef, as I said in my previous post, was this (from her petition and her emphasis):

When I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past weekend, I was shocked to see a painting that depicts a young girl in a sexually suggestive pose. Balthus’ painting, Thérèse Dreaming, is an evocative portrait of a prepubescent girl relaxing on a chair with her legs up and underwear exposed.

It is disturbing that the Met would proudly display such an image. They are a renowned institution and one of the largest, most respected art museums in the United States. The artist of this painting, Balthus, had a noted infatuation with pubescent girls, and it can be strongly argued that this painting romanticizes the sexualization of a child.

Rather than cave to these leisure fascists, the Met refused to take it down, with Ken Weine, the Museum’s chief communications officer, saying this:

“Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression.”

So the painting stayed up, as it should have. Now two other groups have come forward to defend exhibiting the painting. As Time Magazine reports, one is the National Coalition Against Censorship (see their own article here), which said this:

“The idea that this painting suggests that the Met supports, on some institutional level, an unhealthy sexualization of young women misunderstands the role of a cultural institution,” Nora Pelizzari, a spokeswoman for the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), told Newsweek. “Attacking art is counterproductive to the open discussion necessary for us to confront the realities of sexual harassment and abuse,” the NCAC had said in an earlier statement.

The anti-censorship organization applauded the Met’s decision to keep the painting on view. To their mind, said Pelizzari, “Hiding potential sexualizaiton of young girls throughout history does not help…the current conversation around sexual harassment.”

. . . Pelizzari is disturbed by the “escalation of the culture of outrage, as well as the move towards threats of violence as a means of stifling artistic expression and artistic display.” The Whitney’s decision to keep Shutz’s painting up was, in her view, precisely right. The museum engaged in discussions with the protestors and other artists, allowing for “a wider conversation on our interaction on race and history and grappling with our history as a society.”

From the NCAC’s perspective, “the removal or silencing or erasure of art is never good.” That, she said, includes the works of individuals who have sexually harassed or assaulted others, like Louis C.K., although she emphasized that the viewers’ decisions about whose art to consume and support financially is of course up to them.

“Everyone is allowed to react to art in exactly the way they naturally do,” she said. “Where we intervene is when you try to impose your reaction to a piece on others’ ability to see it.”

The other organization was the estimable PEN, dedicated to furthering literature and free expression (do remember, though, that some of its members objected to PEN giving an award to Charlie Hebdo). In its defense of the painting, PEN said this, as quoted by Time:

PEN America, which works to protect literary and artistic expression, agreed. They see such petitions as part of a troubling trend. “We are alarmed about what seems to be a rising tendency to turn to artistic censorship as a way to express social, political, or other grievances,” PEN America said in a statement to Newsweek. “Some advocates seem to have decided that artists and art institutions represent soft targets, more vulnerable to public campaigns than are the actual power structures that perpetuate the ills these campaigners are fighting against.”

Pelizzari is exactly right in her last statement: these kinds of calls or demonstrations—like black activists blocking people’s view of a painting of Emmett Till by a white artist—do nothing to solve problems like pedophilia or racism. They are not attempts to create a dialogue, but to keep people from encountering viewpoints that the activists don’t like. Seriously, does the painting above foster pedophilia and contribute to the sexualization of young women? I don’t think so. It stimulates dialogue, like the kind we had on my post. And does a sympathetic and graphic painting of Emmett Till in his casket, body battered by white racists, somehow promote racism because it was painted by a white woman? You’d have to twist your logic pretty far to conclude that. In fact, demonstrations to prevent people from seeing or reading things just create the “Streisand effect,” making people want to see them all the more, and arouse hostility towards the censors.

I can’t think of a single instance when the censorship of literature or art that doesn’t violate the law (e.g., blatant child pornography) has helped society progress. On the other hand, I can think of plenty of cases in which attempted censorship has been an impediment, as in the unsuccessful case to ban Ulysses. And it goes on. Here’s just a small list of works of literature that schools or libraries have tried to ban in the last hundred years (see more here):

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Beloved
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
The Grapes of Wrath
Invisible Man
The Jungle
Our Bodies, Ourselves
The Words of Cesar Chavez

If you know anything about these books, most of them are actually about oppressed people and explicitly sympathetic to them. It’s insane that people try to keep them out of the hands of others.

Remember three things about censorship.  First, it doesn’t work to suppress art or words that you don’t like. Second, trying to censor something just arouses interest in it, as well as resentment towards those who try to tell others what they can or cannot see. Third, exhibiting art or recommending that students read a book does not mean an endorsement of the image or contents.

But don’t expect Pecksniffery to abate any time soon, at least in America. It goes hand in hand with Authoritarian Leftism (why do you think they call it “authoritarian”?), and Authoritarian Leftism shows no signs of abating. But if we all stand up against those who try to censor things by playing on our guilt—on our liberal sympathies for underdogs—that ideology will eventually wane.

Guilt is the great weapon of the Authoritarian Left, and we must resist it when it comes to endorsing free expression.

h/t: cesar

Caturday felids: Leonardo’s cat studies, traveling cat chronicles, world’s bravest kitty

December 9, 2017 • 9:00 am

Stephen Barnard wrote me this: “I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci, so your Caturday post prompted me to google Leonardo’s cat drawings. (As far as I know he never painted cats, or if he did they don’t survive.) I found this image of his cat studies:”

and here [“Study of cat movements and positions” 1517-1518]:

 

He added this: “As they’re studies, there’s little attempt at realism. The most realistic ones, to my eye, are the sleeping cats. The dynamism and anatomical accuracy of the action studies contrast with the grotesque cats we’re used to seeing in early Renaissance paintings.” Indeed! I’ve long pondered why artists of all ages have been unable to accurately portray cats. This is a welcome exception, but of course it’s Leonardo!

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The Guardian calls our attention to a book that might be worth a look: The Traveling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa (click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon page, where you can read an excerpt):

Here’s the Guardian‘s plot summary:

Nana is the protagonist. A stray cat in Tokyo with a strong survival instinct, he is taken in by a young man named Satoru after being hit by a car. Nana finds he has fallen on his feet. Satoru is a cat lover from youth; gentle and intuitive, he still mourns his first cat Hachi, from whom he was traumatically separated as a child. The name “Nana” derives from na, the Japanese word for seven – the shape of Nana’s tail; Hachi was named after the number eight because of markings on his head. Nana is scornful of Satoru’s literal-mindedness when it comes to naming cats, but he has the usual feline instinct for knowing which side his crispy chicken is battered, and decides to stick around.

Five happy years of cohabitation pass in a single sentence, and then Satoru tells the cat that they must make a journey. They will visit Satoru’s childhood friend Kosuke, with the purpose of rehoming Nana. Satoru is not forthcoming about the reason. “We just can’t live together any more,” he says. I wrote “Oh no, is Satoru ill?” in the margin, but that’s me; I’ve seen a lot of films. At this stage, Satoru’s motives are officially unclear. The reunited Kosuke and Satoru reminisce about the number-eight cat, and we learn about Satoru’s talent for friendship and the shock of his parents’ death. But does Nana stay with Kosuke?

The structure of The Travelling Cat Chronicles is deceptively simple. With alternating sections of third-person and Nana-the-cat narration, it consists of three journeys to friends, followed by a pilgrimage across a beautifully evoked landscape. There is then a heart-breaking last journey that left me in bits. I’ve rarely changed my mind so much about a book in the course of reading it. I started out quibbling with the translation (would a cat that exclaims “Good lord” also say “yada yada”?), but before long, I had surrendered to Arikawa’s powerful emotional agenda, according to which a human’s love for his cat is not delusional but self-fulfilling, just as all loving sacrifice is its own reward.

The reviewer, Lynne Truss, gives two thumbs up, as do nearly all the reviewers weighing in at Amazon:

What Nana observes and experiences through their journeys is Satoru’s huge, lifelong capacity for quiet consideration, which is moving enough in itself. But when the cat responds to his love – well, you ought to laugh, but I couldn’t. “Cats are not so heartless,” declares Nana. “How could I ever leave him?” I know, I know. What a sap I am. But anyone who has ever unashamedly loved an animal will read this book with gratitude, for its understanding of an emotion that ennobles us as human beings, whether we value it or not.

Has anybody read this? This is one cat book I’d consider reading!

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And here’s a brave moggie playing with a huge rhinoceros and her baby. I’m surprised they let it in the room with those beasts!

 

h/t: Snowy Owl

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 9, 2017 • 7:45 am

Just a reminder to send in your photos. Today’s come from reader Mark Richardson’s decade-old trip to Alaska. His notes are indented:

These are a mixture of wildlife and landscape photos from a 2006 fishing trip in Alaska. We flew into Anchorage and drove south toward the Kenai peninsula. We met our fishing guides at the Soldatna airport and took a small airplane up the Cook inlet to a secluded fishing cabin. We were fishing for Coho (silver) salmon as they were heading towards fresh water rivers to spawn. Since they were still in the ocean, they were feeding (salmon stop feeding once they hit fresh water). We were catching them using lightweight fly rods. It was a hoot!
The first three are photos of wildlife, two of which are common animals seen on WEIT. The rest are landscapes- the first six were taken from the plane.
A red fox (Vulpes vulpes) that hung around our camp looking for scraps.  One of the fishing guides fed it pieces of steak, so no wonder it liked to loiter.
 
A juvenile Grizzly bear, Ursus arctos, combing the beach for noms. Grizzly bears were a common sight and this fact kept us all alert.

The ubiquitous (at least in Alaska) bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus.
Soldatna seen from the plane shortly after take-off.

A colorful landscape from the plane of an alpine lake.
Big country up in Alaska- there is a glacier in the background.
A beautiful braided river.
A steaming volcano in the far background.
The runway at our fishing camp- not cool!
Low tide, big sky and two fishermen.
Not wildlife…just some essentials for the perfect fishing trip!

Saturday: Hili dialogue

December 9, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s the weekend: Saturday, December 9, 2017, and a week before I arrive in India. It’s also Nation Pastry Day and, according to the UN, International Anti-Corruption Day. I’m at work early as I have to do shopping later for India (my friends want some stuff not available there), and I’m waking up with a homemade giant latte in my favorite cup:

On this day in, 1531, The Virgin of Guadalupe made her first appearance: to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in Mexico City.  On December 9, 1793, the first daily newspaper in America, the American Minerva, was established by Noah Webster.  In 1897, Parisian activist Marguerite Durand founded the feminist daily newspaper La Fronde.  Exactly seven years later, France passed the law separating church and state.  On this date in 1946, the Indian Assembly met to begin writing the Constitution of India.  And on December 9, 1960, the first episode of Coronation Street—the world’s longest-running t.v. soap opera (it’s still on), was broadcast in the UK.  And it’s a banner day in science and medicine: on this day in 1979, the World Health organization certified that the smallpox virus had been completely eradicated from the planet—still the only human disease driven to extinction. Here’s the last person to get it: two-year-old Rahima Banu from Bangladesh, who contracted the disease in 1975. She survived, and now has four children of her own:

But we’ve also driven an animal disease to extinction; do you know what it is? Finally, on this day in 1987, the first Intifada began in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Notables born on this day include John MIlton (1608), Peter Kropotkin (1842), Fritz Haber (1868), Joseph Pilates (1883; yes the inventor of the racist discipline of Pilates), Tip O’Neill (1912), Kirk Douglas (1916), Judi Dench (1934), and Donny Osmond (1957). Those who fell asleep on this day include Anthony van Dyck (1641), Edith Sitwell (1964), Branch Rickey (1965), Ralph Bunche (1971), and Mary Leakey (1996).

Here’s a lovely van Dyck:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s dialogue is subject to interpretation (she’s not telling), but I’m pretty sure I know what it means.

Hili: Which invention was more important: a bed or a wheel?
A: It depends on time of the day.
Hili: I’m not sure.
In Polish:
Hili: Który wynalazek był ważniejszy – łóżko czy koło?
Ja: To zależy od pory dnia.
Hili: Nie jestem pewna.

Here is a tweet from Grania: Roy Moore accuses evolution of corrupting children.

https://twitter.com/chrismassie/status/938833735893561350

Tweets from Matthew Cobb:

Red kites (Milvus milvus) in the snow (play video):

And the most perfect cat ball:

https://twitter.com/LuvKittensDaily/status/938906162736623621

Another cat from reader Charleen:

https://twitter.com/CUTEFUNNYANIMAL/status/939169580668346368

And a video of a kitten that appeared yesterday. LIVING THE DREAM!

https://twitter.com/CuteEmergency/status/939319991668797440

Should a Christian baker be able to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding?

December 8, 2017 • 1:30 pm

In 2012, a Christian baker and self-proclaimed “cake artist” in Colorado, Jack Phillips, decided he wasn’t going to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, because the request violated his religious beliefs. The couple sued for violation of the state’s anti-discrimination lawsuit, and won. The case was appealed, and now it’s been argued at the Supreme Court, as it has never been decided whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion, color, sex, or national origin, also applies to sexual orientation. Phillips claims that, at least in this case, his First Amendment rights were being violated: that he should be able “to use his artistic talents to promote only messages that align with his religious beliefs.” The court will probably rule in a few months.

Remember, while it may be illegal to not make a cake requested by a gay customer or a Jewish customer, this case is about baking a wedding cake for a gay marriage, which could be construed as discrimination not against a person, but an act that violates the baker’s religion, so there are First Amendment considerations here.

Nevertheless, my own view is that the gay couple should prevail, for one could use one’s religion to discriminate against other things that seem wrong, like a Christian baker choosing not to make a Bar Mitzvah cake for a Jewish family, which comes close to discriminating against religion itself. (Remember, again, this is discrimination not against sexual orientation, but against an act that violates one’s religious beliefs.). Further, it gives weight to acts like Catholic doctors refusing to perform abortions when the pregnancy is due to rape or incest since such an act violates the doctor’s religion. While I believe that’s illegal in the U.S. (I’m not sure), but it’s still legal in Ireland, where abortion can be performed only to save the life of the mother. Given our new Supreme Court, all kinds of acts that seem discriminatory or dangerous could be approved because they privilege one’s religious belief over secular notions of equality. (I still, of course, believe that religious beliefs should be accommodated in public when they are not overly onerous to society.)

Andrew Sullivan is also conflicted (he’s a Catholic but also gay), but comes down on the side of the baker. In New York Magazine, he writes this:

Which is why I think it was a prudential mistake to sue the baker. Live and let live would have been a far better response. The baker’s religious convictions are not trivial or obviously in bad faith, which means to say he is not just suddenly citing them solely when it comes to catering to gays. His fundamentalism makes him refuse to make even Halloween cakes, for Pete’s sake. More to the point, he has said he would provide any form of custom-designed cakes for gay couples — a birthday cake, for example — except for one designed for a specific celebration that he has religious objections to. And those religious convictions cannot be dismissed as arbitrary (even if you find them absurd). Opposition to same-sex marriage has been an uncontested pillar of every major world religion for aeons.

And so, if there are alternative solutions, like finding another baker, why force the point? Why take up arms to coerce someone when you can easily let him be — and still celebrate your wedding? That is particularly the case when much of the argument for marriage equality was that it would not force anyone outside that marriage to approve or disapprove of it. One reason we won that debate is because many straight people simply said to themselves, “How does someone else’s marriage affect me?” and decided on those grounds to support or acquiesce to such a deep social change. It seems grotesquely disingenuous now for the marriage-equality movement to bait and switch on that core “live and let live” argument. And it seems deeply insensitive and intolerant to force the clear losers in a culture war into not just defeat but personal humiliation.

Nonetheless, here we are. And it is a hard case constitutionally. It pits religious and artistic freedom against civil equality and nondiscrimination. Anyone on either side who claims this is an easy call are fanatics of one kind or other. I’m deeply conflicted. I worry that a decision that endorses religious freedom could effectively nullify a large swathe of antidiscrimination legislation — and have a feeling that Scalia, for example, would have backed the gays in this case on those grounds alone. Equally, I worry that a ruling that backs the right of the state to coerce someone into doing something that violates their religious conscience will also have terrible consequences. A law that controls an individual’s conscience violates a core liberal idea. It smacks of authoritarianism and of a contempt for religious faith. It feels downright anti-American to me.

I sympathize with Sullivan, and feel a bit conflicted as well, as we have two “rights” competing with each other, but in the end I think the “freedom of speech” defense is weaker than the anti-discrimination principles that underlie our society.

The Supreme Court, which recently heard arguments on the case, seemed from their questions to be divided—largely along ideological lines. The case isn’t completely straightforward because baker considers himself an artist who can choose for whom to practice his art, and he has a First Amendment (constitutional) defense for his actions. Justice Anthony Kennedy may again be the swing vote.

So let’s take two polls here: one on how you feel and the other on how you think the Supreme Court (which has a conservative majority) will rule. As always, this is just my attempt to gauge opinion; I’m not pretending that this is a scientific result, or representative of anything beyond a sample of WEIT readers. And please take a few seconds to vote!

and your prediction:

 

h/t: Simon

 

Here’s the organism (well, sort of. . . .)!

December 8, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Did you guess what organism made the pattern below, found on a recent dive around the hydrothermal vents off Tonga?

Here’s the answer in the second tweet:

How big is that thing? The laser beam images are 10 cm (about 4 inches apart): The paper from which this comes (below) adds, “Note the shield-shaped elevation, marginal elevated rim and mote, and color (pale pink) of the area of the pattern compared with the surrounding veneer of gray calcareous lutite (image courtesy The Stephen Low Company).” You can find thousands of these things on the wall of the mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The pattern is similar to that described in a 2009 paper in Deep Sea Research (click on screenshot to go there):

It’s called a “living fossil” because the patterns are nearly identical to those found in ocean sediment cores from about 50 million years ago. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the organism that made (or left) this pattern is the same as the ancient one, for it may be not a fossil but a burrow.

But what IS the organism involved? The paper above doesn’t say, because they haven’t recovered an organism from whatever makes this pattern. DNA sequencing of material recovered from the holes shows genetic material from foraminiferans, protists that probably settled in the holes rather than making them.

When the holes are injected with resin underwater, and then the cast recovered, it looks like this (caption from paper):

Fig. 8. Photo of plasticine reconstruction (3-D) of the modern P. nodosum pattern based on observation of the hexagonal pattern of holes at the sediment–water interface and vertical shafts connecting with an underlying horizontal hexagonal network of tunnels or tubes (model and photo by Hans Luginsland).

The raised nature of the pattern as well as the rim can, according to the authors’ models, enhance water flow over the openings, suggesting that either this is a burrow of some sort or the 3-D remains of an organism that filtered microbes out of the water.  The authors suggest this could be a remnant of one of two types of organisms:

1.) Xenophyophores: Giant single-celled foraminifera that have multiple nuclei and form a “test”, a hard skeleton made from minerals extracted from seawater.

2.) The remains of a sponge. As the authors say:

Alternatively, the modern form is the compressed body of a hexactinellid sponge adapted to an unconsolidated sedimentary substrate (Rona and Merrill, 1978). If this interpretation is correct, then the fossil form is a body rather than trace fossil.

These sponges have hard parts as they contain spicules (small bits of the body) made of silicon.

Alternatively, it could be something else. The authors don’t consider that it might be burrows of a worm, but this site suggests that:

The short answer is, “We have no fricking idea.” There are many mysteries on the ocean floor.