We live in interesting times. As tiresome as the phrase is, hardly a day passes when some story doesn’t put the mind on pause, stuck in wonder at how strange things have become.
Almost a month ago, a prestigious art house presented a bizarre “work” of modern art at a Miami exhibition. It was a banana taped to a wall. There was no accompanying literature to explain why it was a banana, as opposed to say a kumquat or a watermelon, or for that matter something, anything non-citrus. Personally, I was at a loss to understand what duct tape and a piece of fruit contributed to the esthetic sense, or why people would travel to an art show to see it, when any five-year-old with some tape, access to a fruit bowl, and a sense of mischief could aspire to the same heights of inspiration and creativity.
It also struck me that Art, capital A, has wandered a long way downhill since Michelangelo blessed the world with his Pietà, or closer to our time, Turner crafted the explosive wonder of The Slave Ship. Time was, art required executive skills, unique imagination, deep study and practice, and in many cases extreme, self-devouring dedication.
Now, given a banana and a roll of duct tape, all that’s really required is for the right people to say it’s art. What a magical world we have when, if someone wants something to be a something else, all he or she has to do is simply say so. Unqualified self-declaration is a most curious route to truth or reality. This magical thinking has its impact in other areas.
Outside the art world (I presume it’s outside the art world, but in these times one can never be sure) there’s a group that calls itself “antifa” — by its own declaration a foreshortened version of anti-fascist. This group’s routine is to dress up in black, head-to-toe, and beat up people its members disagree with. The vicious assault on the reporter, brave Andy Ngo, will serve as a potent example of its practice. But because it calls itself antifa, some even in our always hyper-scrutinizing and vigilant media are willing to fall in line with the group’s own self-description, ignore its members’ actions, and compare them — dear Lord — with the heroes who stormed Normandy beaches nearly 75 years ago!
One doesn’t need to look up Politics and the English Language to understand that if merely asserting something is what it plainly isn’t — in many cases its exact opposite, in fact — unhinging words from their meaning, becomes acceptable, the world will fairly quickly become a crazed and unbearable jumble. Living in such would feel like being chained to a chair, trapped, watching endless cycles of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar on The View.
We had our own banana taped to a wall here in Canada this year, when a litigious person in British Columbia hassled and harassed 16 women. Despite Jessica Yaniv’s unquestionable biological status as a male (scrotum/penis was the giveaway), Yaniv was granted a hearing at a human rights tribunal because Yaniv was denied a female waxing treatment. It was enough in this matter for Yaniv to insist on womanhood to put this whole affair in motion. I cannot see, in logic, why if self-declaration is the only and unquestionable standard, a person could not declare himself to be an umbrella and then launch a lawsuit against the Weather Channel because he got wet when it rained.
An even more outré exhibition of this new logic has embroiled perhaps the world’s most famous author, J.K. Rowling. Rowling tweeted support for a researcher who lost her job at a British think-tank (and subsequently lost a case before the Central London Employment Tribunal) over tweets that were described by some as “discriminating and offensive.” And what brought on the researcher’s tribulations? At their very core was her statement that: “There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.”
Rowling stood by the researcher and was instantly torched and scorched on the anger-grill of Twitter, people furiously denouncing her and her Potter books, asserting they were wounded and hurt, and that she was a “transphobe.” Amidst all the bile, one at least was clever: “When I’m dead I want JK Rowling to lower my coffin into the ground so she can let me down one last time.”
Rowling, in the fabricated world of newspeak, is a modern heretic. Doubtless if it wasn’t for the carbon emissions — which considering how many she’s sold would be massive — they’d burn her books.
All this over “Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female.”
Now, outside of art galleries that sell fruit and cultural-studies laboratories, these are extremely unexceptional assertions, and have been so since the Earth cooled and our poor, shivering ancestors came down from the trees. But in our not-so-brave new world (and exclusively in the pampered, navel-gazing portion of it we call the West) people shudder in fear of being called a bigot or worse for maintaining a truth nearly as old as time.
It’s the banana on the wall syndrome. For those who haven’t read about that you should know (a) that someone actually bought the “piece” and spent $120,000 to do so, and (b) that another “artist” ate the masterwork (only the banana part, the duct tape stayed on the wall). More hilarious or weirder still, the banana having been digested and presumably some time later excreted, the curators (without a blush) taped a second banana and said no damage done.
In words that deserve their own tape and a place in a gallery they reported: (Datuna, the masticator vandal) did not destroy the art work. The banana is the idea.”
There you have it. The banana is the idea. I’ll say it is.
Merry Christmas.
Source: Rex Murphy | National Post
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