RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/sniffing-out-racism-and-white-supremacy-at-the-ballet

The New York Times has published the latest installment in its running tally of alleged racism in the high arts: the Staatsballett Berlin (Berlin State Ballet) treated a black ballerina differently because of the color of her skin. Oh, wait! That was yesterday’s template. Today’s is that a black ballerina was treated the same as white ballerinas. The search for racism requires just such rhetorical nimbleness.

Since the nineteenth century, dancers in a corps de ballet often applied white body paint in works, such as Giselle or Les Sylphides, that feature a supernatural element. The intent was to create an impression of ghostly creatures from beyond the grave who might doom any red-blooded prince who crosses them. The use of white makeup was not a statement about white supremacy: there were virtually no black dancers in Russian or Parisian ballet troupes at the time against which a statement about skin color might be made. If one is looking for slurs, the body paint could be seen as anti-white, in its association of whiteness with death.

In 2018, the Staatsballett Berlin mounted Swan Lake, another ballet where white body paint has traditionally been used, in this case to increase the illusion that the dancers were swans. One of the company’s ballet mistresses told the company’s one black dancer, Chloé Lopes Gomes, to use the paint as well. Gomes says she told the ballet mistress, “I’ll never look white,” to which the mistress responded: “well, you will have to put on more than the other girls.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/monumental-misdirection-at-the-mellon-foundation/

Hundreds of millions for woke public art aimed to stoke victimologies.

M ost monuments are boringly bad, aesthetically mediocre, and engaging mostly when pigeons, unimpressed by great causes or men, do what pigeons do to outdoor art. Their judgments are ecumenical and evacuational.

Pigeons also would probably disagree with me on one point. We have too many monuments. You’d think the tortured, 20-year path of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington would put people off monuments for a while. It’s not as ugly as it might have been. Oddly, it’s best seen at night, when the big mesh screen makes sense, though who’s walking around the Washington Mall these days after dark?

The Mellon Foundation thinks we need new and improved monuments. Lost in the COVID catastrophe is last month’s big news that the Mellon Foundation has committed $250 million over five years to pay for new monuments or historic storytelling spaces, freshen existing ones with context relevant to today, and remove monuments no one wants because they are bad art or they no longer edify.

That’s a huge amount of money and the primary commitment of the country’s biggest arts and humanities foundation. It’s to be taken seriously and followed closely. This is the foundation’s first step in implementing a strategic shift announced in June. For years, it supported blue-chip arts-and-humanities projects. Now, it’s in the social-justice business. It’s focusing its money on “building just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/pregnant-emily-ratajkowski-fears-giving-birth-to-a-white-male-unaware-of-his-privilege/

In her recent Vogue essay, model Emily Ratajkowski signals her most progressive beliefs, only to find herself wrestling with the pesky reality that is biology.

Model, actress, and radical feminist Emily Ratajkowski announced her pregnancy in this month’s Vogue Magazine, writing an essay reflecting on the sex of her child.

As is the case with many far-left causes and feminists, Ratajkowski signals her most progressive beliefs, only to find herself wrestling with the pesky reality that is biology. Like Tampax claiming men can have periods, or school districts ruling it fair for boys to compete in girls’ sports, leftist causes often come down to arguments over semantics rather than science.

Ratajkowski finds herself in a similar trap, claiming to not really know her child’s sex until he is 18, and assuring readers she wants to avoid gender stereotypes, only to admit that finding out the sex of her child in utero is “the first real opportunity to glimpse who they might be.”

“I’m terrified of inadvertently cultivating the carelessness and the lack of awareness that are so convenient for men. It feels much more daunting to create an understanding of privilege in a child than to teach simple black-and-white morality. How do I raise a child who learns to like themself while also teaching them about their position of power in the world?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/conservatives_need_to_defend_high_culture.html

It is no secret that art, sacred art, and beauty more generally, are under assault. New “multicultural” guidelines are dictating how art is to be constructed and rewarded. Artistic talent is shunned in favor of diversity quotas. The way to be an artist and art critic, nowadays, is to cry racism or sexism.

Theogonis of Megara divided mankind into two classes of people, the base and the noble. As he said, living through a revolutionary period in ancient Greek society during the rise of democracy, “The deckhands are in control, and the base have the upper hand over the noble.” The outlook of Theogonis is inherently conflictual and violent, not to mention truly classist.

While it is true that much of Theogonis’ poetry reflects his own concerns about Greek societal transformation, his general attitude is often attacked by critics of high culture for its supposed “whiteness,” inegalitarianism, and gendered supremacism. Such assaults on high culture fail to appreciate the real defense of high culture—the belief that all should strive for excellence, nobility, and beauty (even if not all will come to imitate and inculcate that excellence, nobility, and beauty in their own lives).

This emphasis on excellence, indeed, perfection, is what Matthew Arnold understood as the defining characteristic of high culture in “Culture and Anarchy.” Arnold even stated that the emphasis and promotion of high culture was something universal: high culture “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” The point of high culture is to lift everyone to the good things the heavens hold.

The constant attack on high culture, however, is part of the broader rejection of tradition, hierarchy, and heritage that necessarily accompanies high culture. High culture is the product of tradition as much as it is individual genius, one cannot marvel at Michelangelo’s “David” and be so blind to its blending of classical humanist and biblical traditions some two millennia after the fact. The genius of Michelangelo, likewise, would be impossible if not for the Catholic and Platonic traditions which informed his spirit. But one need not be Catholic or Platonic to look in awe and wonder at Michelangelo’s handiwork.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/leftists_are_now_rampaging_against_beethovens_and_mozarts_last_names.html

The latest racist screed from the angry left is that it’s a major insult to refer to classical composers by their last names (e.g., Beethoven, not Ludwig von Beethoven). To wokesters desperate for new psychic injuries, the failure to “fullname” classical composers is yet another despicable sign of white privilege.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: We refer to well-known composers, all of whom happen to be dead white men, by using only their last names. However, when we speak of works by modern composers who are new on the scene, many of whom are women or minorities, we use their full names (aka “fullnaming”). According to the new political correctness, fullnaming new composers, but not the old, is a sign of inequality.

I felt like an idiot just writing the above words, but that’s the theory that Chris White puts forth in a Slate article entitled “Beethoven Has a First Name: It’s time to ‘fullname’ all composers in classical music”:

[Conductors introducing a program] might talk about Beethoven, Schumann, and Bartók. And they might talk about Alma Mahler, Florence Price, Henry Burleigh, and Caroline Shaw. Many of us, used to the conventions of classical performance, will hardly notice the difference: “traditional” white male composers being introduced with only surnames, full names for everyone else, especially women and composers of color.

The habitual, two-tiered way we talk about classical composers is ubiquitous. For instance, coverage of an early October livestream by the Louisville Orchestra praised the ensemble’s performance of a “Beethoven” symphony, and the debut of a composition memorializing Breonna Taylor by “Davóne Tines” and “Igee Dieudonné.” But ubiquity doesn’t make something right. It’s time we paid attention to the inequity inherent in how we talk about composers, and it’s time for the divided naming convention to change.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/10/14/merriam-webster-changes-definition-of-sexual-preference-seemingly-overnight-n1051219

On Tuesday, Judge Amy Coney Barrett told Senator Dianne Feinstein that she “never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.” Senator Mazie Hirono, in addition to asking Judge Barrett if she’s sexually assaulted anyone before, harped on Barrett’s use of the phrase, claiming it to be outdated and offensive.

The liberal media quickly pounced on Barrett’s use of the allegedly offensive term. As of this writing, there are now over 20,000 news stories about it.

While we expect Democrats and the liberal media to accuse Barrett of bigotry for using this longstanding innocent term (while also ignoring Democrats’ repeated use of it in the recent past) what is actually quite disappointing is to see the way Merriam-Webster, which has been publishing dictionaries since the 1800s, sprung to action to give credence to these attacks by literally redefining the term, seemingly overnight.

If you visit their website and search for the definition of “preference,” at the very bottom of the definition it reads “5. offensive, see usage paragraph below : ORIENTATION sense 2b // sexual preference,” and claims “The term preference as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to.”