The mad, bad war on ‘cultural appropriation’

It’s usually best to ignore the indignant fury of the 21st-century young. We’re used to them now, these snowflakes, posing as victims (though they’re mostly middle-class), demanding ‘safe spaces’, banning books and speakers. Best to rise above them, deadhead the camellias. Attention, especially from the press, acts on entitled millennials like water on gremlins — they start proliferating and develop a taste for blood.

But then sometimes they go too far.

Ten days ago, the Whitney museum, on the New York bank of the Hudson, opened its biennial exhibition of contemporary American art. It’s an exciting show, full of vim and diversity. Half the artists represented are black, and the exhibition’s stated aim is to confront racism and poverty in the States.

One of the white Whitney artists is a woman called Dana Schutz, and one of her paintings is of a famous photograph of a dead black boy, Emmett Till. Till was tortured and beaten to death in the mid-1950s by redneck bigots and Schutz’s painting is called ‘Open Casket’ because his brave mother chose to display his ruined face so that the world could see what had happened. The photograph, published in Jet magazine, helped change America. Schutz made the work, she says, because America still needs to change — as witnessed by the shooting of unarmed young black men by police.

So far, so unobjectionable — admirable even, right? Wrong. Since the Whitney opened its doors, there has been a non-stop wailing from twentysomethings on both sides of the Atlantic for the painting to be destroyed. Schutz is guilty of ‘cultural appropriation’. Because she’s white and a member of the oppressor class, she shouldn’t have been allowed to depict black suffering. One young Brit, a writer called Hannah Black, wrote an open letter to the curators explaining that even if Schutz meant well, her painting is an abomination: ‘This painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun… The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.