RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2018/12/30/the-avant-gardes-

Many adherents to the aesthetics of the avant-garde in tenured positions at American art schools and universities are still enthusiastic supporters of the ideas and strategies that won them the culture wars of the late twentieth century. They steadfastly cleave to the doctrinal ideas that brought them into their positions of power and authority and have entrenched themselves in defense of an exclusively Euro-centric cult of avant-garde art. But as Western culture has changed around them, they have been outflanked by sentiment and technology.

The foundations of the avant-garde were built upon the opposition of true and fake art. The avant-garde provided true, ethical art, while its opposite pole was fake, sentimental kitsch. The Frankfurt School writer Norbert Elias was first to identify sentiment as the enemy, followed by Herman Broch, who provided doctrinal writings describing kitsch as evil, and tying true art to the exposure of social reality. The young Marxist Clement Greenberg came to the game late, famously bringing their ideas to an American audience with avant-garde doctrines that despised kitsch and favored an elitist intellectualism. Regardless of the importance of emotion in human relationships, a fundamentalist rejection of sentiment in art coupled with an embrace of ethical confrontation became doctrinal to the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century.

Representational artists—painters and sculptors who make images of people who look like people and things that look like things—were their favorite targets, partly because this was the dominant art of the West’s Soviet enemies. The Soviets used representational Socialist Realism to propagandize their ideology, and made use of sentiment as a manipulative tool. American Communism had fallen into disarray after the Stalin / Hitler pact in 1939, and after the war revelations about Stalin’s gulags turned many communists anti-Soviet. The US government courted their allegiance, enthusiastic to present America as the open-armed home of free thought – even if that thought was opposed to the government – in contrast to the straight-jacket of totalitarian doctrine. This created the paradox of American Marxist avant-gardists being set against Soviet Socialist Realism. Offering avant-gardism as a liberating alternative to the constrictions of Communism was essential to America’s strategy for winning the cultural Cold War. If the enemy restricted and controlled art in the East, in the West artists were encouraged to provide political commentary and to transgress. The avant-garde was fresh, seductive, and appealing. If sentiment and representation were the tools of our lying enemies, we must offer the opposite—concept and abstraction.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/deconstructing-and-de-composing-the-politically-correct-songbook/

In a world where Baby, It’s Cold Outside is banned from the PC airwaves, the decidely un-woke Cole Porter’s lyrics need and get a radical update:
You’re the top,
You’re tidal power
You’re the top,
A trans-sex bridal shower …

The recent furore surrounding the lyrics of Baby, It’s Cold Outside caused me to revisit some classics from the Great American Songbook and I realised just how offensive and traumatising they might be to sensitive and coddled millennials … and that was before I even got to the lyrics.

Concern over Irving Berlin’s White Christmas needs no explaining. So too, George and Ira Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me and the Rodgers and Hammerstein favourite You’ll Never Walk Alone have ‘stalker!’ written all over them. Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You surely evokes domestic violence while Rodgers and Hart contributed disturbing titles like The Lady Is a Tramp (slut shaming) and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (gun violence). Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Ol’ Man River smacks of cultural appropriation , while Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg were clearly insulting the intelligence-challenged with If I Only Had a Brain. Perhaps most distressing of all is the gender-enforcing I Enjoy Being a Girl – Rodgers and Hammerstein again!

But, as in the case of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, it’s the lyrics that will have some listeners retreating to their nearest safe space. Who knew that what has long been revered as the canon of influential popular American songs of the first half of the 20th century is nothing more than sexist, racist, patriarchal propaganda? Consider these shocking sexist examples:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-national-gallery-of-identity-politics-11545179349

‘Every thing is what it is and not another thing,” observed the 18th-century British philosopher Joseph Butler. If that seems obvious, you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in the culture. Once upon a time (and it wasn’t that long ago), universities were what they claimed to be, institutions dedicated to the preservation and transmission of civilization’s highest values. Now they are bastions of political correctness, “intersectionality” and identity politics.

Something similar can be said of art museums. Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art. Today, many art museums serve as fronts in battles that have little or nothing to do with art: entertainment, yes; snobbery and money, of course; and politics, politics, politics.

The latest example of this trend is particularly egregious because it involves one of America’s premier institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Established and endowed by Andrew Mellon in 1937, the National Gallery quickly became one of the nation’s two or three most exquisite art museums. In terms of the breadth, depth and excellence of its collection, its only real rival is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And because of its place in the nation’s capital (and its claim on the taxpayer’s purse—about $140 million of its $190 million budget comes from the U.S. Treasury), the National Gallery occupies a singular place in the metabolism of America’s cultural life.

Obituarists looking to write the epitaph of the American art museum could do worse than ponder the elevation of Kaywin Feldman, currently director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to take the helm of the National Gallery in March when Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director since 1993, retires.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-jihad-against-baby-its-cold-outside-11545090565

The #MeToo movement has caught up with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The 1940s fugue between a woman, who has dropped by a man’s home but says she wants to leave, and the man, who persuades her to stay, has become a Christmas-season staple. But “to some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape,” as one recent news story puts it. Some radio stations have yielded to the demand that they banish it from the airwaves.

That demand rings a bell. In the 1940s, an Egyptian writer and Education Ministry employee harshly criticized the government under King Farouk as insufficiently Islamic. That writer, Sayyid Qutb, was rewarded with a traveling fellowship, apparently to get him out of the country.

Qutb arrived at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in 1948. He didn’t much like it. “I stayed there six months and never did I see a person or a family actually enjoying themselves,” he wrote. Even gardening drew his contempt: “There is nothing behind this activity in the way of beauty or artistic taste. It is the machinery of organization and arrangement, devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enjoyment.”

https://www.steynonline.com/9074/baby-it-cold-in-the-far-east-without-a-sheep

Things you can no longer say:

I was in the big city earlier this week, and so saw for the first time in ages a physical copy of The New York Times. It contained an interview with James Dyson, the brilliant re-inventor of vacuum cleaners and much else. The Times felt obliged to preface Sir James’ words with a health warning for the easily triggered:

In this interview, Mr. Dyson expressed antiquated and at times offensive views on “racial differences” and Japanese culture. He also referred to growth markets in Asia as the “Far East.”

He used the term “Far East”!!! What the hell was he thinking?????? Good thing he has no plans to run for public office or host a cable show. The old British Foreign Office joke about the “Near East” (which is more generally referred to as the Middle East) is that they call it the Near East because it’s always nearer than you think. But start referring to the Far East and the instant vaporization of your entire career is a lot nearer than you think.

“Far East” is, I suppose, literally Eurocentric. But then so is “Midwest”. Perhaps the Times now finds any point of view or perspective “offensive”. Perhaps it is time to ban such “antiquated” concepts as north, south, east and west – and indeed the very compass. The abolition of instruments of navigation would seem a necessary condition for the future we’re sailing to.

~In American schools, they take the “separation of church and state” so seriously they ban candy canes, reindeer and red-and-green color combinations. By contrast, in Scotland the state schools still perform nativity plays before Christmas, and little Alfie Cox found himself cast as a shepherd. So his mum ordered the excited five-year-old a costume from Amazon, and was delighted upon its arrival to find that Jeff Bezos had been generous enough to throw in a free blow-up sheep:

But the mom of two was puzzled when a teacher told Alfie to take the sheep home — until she blew it up and found it had a huge hole in its bottom as well as red lips and eyelashes.

Cox, 46, found the exact same sheep was on sale as a “stag night bonkin’ sheep” and is now devising a way to steal it away from unaware Alfie.

Is Jeff Bezos sending free blow-up sheep to all Amazon’s customers this Christmas? Or only five-year-old Scottish boys?

On the other hand, perhaps Jennifer Sinclair, the principal at Elkhorn Elementary School in Nebraska so worried about “cultural sensitivity” that she bans reindeer, might find it more inclusive simply to mandate the reindeer has to have red lips and “a huge hole in its bottom”.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/transgender-men-announce-theyre-raising-a-gender-neutral-child/

“When asked if Zo is a boy or a girl, Zo’s parents reply, “We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for Zo to tell us.”

Zo is an adorable 22-month-old baby whose gender is a mystery. Well, not a mystery exactly. Zo’s parents know what sex Zo is (meaning, what genitalia he/she has) but they refuse to reveal it. This is because they have chosen to raise Zo “gender neutral.” Zo is referred to as “they” and, when asked if Zo is a boy or a girl, Zo’s parents reply, “We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for Zo to tell us.”

Zo’s parents are both transgender men, meaning they were born women but identify as men. So it seems fairly clear (to me at least) that their decision stems from their own feelings of being “assigned” the wrong gender. But with fewer than one percent of the American population identifying as transgender, the likelihood that Zo will face the same issues his/her parents did is highly unlikely. Assuming that Zo will grow up to identify with the gender that matches his/her genitalia, surely raising her “gender-neutral” is just as damaging or confusing for Zo as being raised as the “wrong” gender was for his/her parents.

In a video for TicToc by Bloomberg, Nathan Levitt, one of Zo’s parents, explains his decision to raise Zo “gender-neutral” by saying, “We felt like there are so many gender stereotypes that get put on kids… and then so many decisions are made from that.” Levitt and his husband are waiting for Zo “to identify as whatever gender they want to whenever they feel that’s right for them” and they are open to the idea that “that might change at some point.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272146/shuhada-sadaqat-sinead-oconnor-finds-white-people-hugh-fitzgerald

Shuhada’ Sadaqat (formerly Shuhada Davitt, who was formerly known as Magda Davitt, who was formerly known as Sinead O’Connor) has publicly, and rather noisily, announced to the world that she has now converted to Islam. Much of the Western press seemed to think this example of adult-onset Islam worthy of their attention. It’s unclear why, as Sinead O’Connor has been exhibiting signs of dementia for many years, long before she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul on Saturday Night Live to express her disagreement with him on the question of abortion.

Now she tells us that not only is she a Muslim, but that she hates all white people. Apparently she is not herself white. Was she ever? Here is her latest crazed tweet:

“I’m terribly sorry. What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that’s what non-muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting.” — Shuhada’ Davitt (@MagdaDavitt77) November 6, 2018

But who made her “say” anything “so racist”? Why does she insist on inflicting on the world her remarkably unedifying spiritual journey from Catholic to hater of Catholicism to ordained priest in a Catholic Church not in communion with Rome, and then to Islam, and finally, as a Muslim convert, to being a hater of all “white people (if that’s what non-muslims are called),” whom she finds “disgusting”? Why must she tell the world urbi et orbi, just like one of those Popes she so deplores, the putative “feelings” of her very likely non-existent “soul”? She could just have quietly abandoned all the “white people” she knew, no fuss, no muss. One wonders if, among those “white people” who are “disgusting,” she includes all her musical collaborators, former friends, family members. Will it be possible for them to cease to be white, and thus no longer “disgusting,” if they convert to Islam? And what about her father? Is he “disgusting”? We know that Sinead was delighted, as she let the whole world know, when her mother died. Sinead was 19 at the time, and hated her mother because, she claimed, her mother Marie ran a “torture chamber” at home. That might help explain why Sinead — Shuhada — has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and has been, as it is formulaically put, “struggling with mental health issues” her whole life. I’ll say.