Totally Irrelevant

Art is always political

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From The Bookseller:

On Tuesday, Arts Council of England (ACE) released a statement about the organisation’s funding policy. You have all probably read it by now. The statement warned creatives and organisations against “reputational risk” which ACE defined as any “activity that might be considered overtly political and activist and goes beyond your company’s core purpose and partnerships with organisations that might be perceived as being in conflict with the purposes of public funding of culture”. This was not limited to activities directly funded by ACE.

Is any form of art unpolitical? I write from several places of marginality. Author Bell Hooks calls this marginality a place of resistance. I too see this place of otherness not as a place of deprivation but as a place of opportunity and possibility. Anything and everything I write is political. It has to be. My lived experience, much like any other marginalised writer, is a space of refusal to accept what is laid out for us, the boundaries that are set around our existence, the spaces we are not allowed to inhabit. We learn to oppose these norms that limit our existence, and opposition becomes a necessity, not a choice. Writing is a way of writing ourselves into the mainstream, telling stories that are not necessarily heard, challenging the colonisers and oppressors, and imagining a radical new world where these boundaries and hierarchies do not exist anymore. Writing is a way of finding a counter-language, that hooks calls a “space of refusal” where we say no to the language of the colonisers and oppressors and find a language to name the repression. Once we silence these counter-narratives then we silence the language of resistance.

While I am writing this ACE has released an update, a sort of pushed-into-a-corner, we-are-not-really-bad but only-thinking-of-your-own-good statement; a faux-benevolent backtracking. It mentions “freedom of expression” and “artistic freedom” a few times to allay concerns and outrage expressed widely by artists on social media and elsewhere. Nevertheless, it refers once again to reputational risk, to polarisation and puts the onus on the organisations to make sure “that if they, or people associated with them, are planning activity that might be viewed as controversial, they have thought through, and so far as possible mitigated, the risk to themselves and crucially to their staff and to the communities they serve”.

There are larger questions at stake here as to what the public funds are for if not to fund art that resists the artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems

Perhaps the timing is merely a coincidence as we are witnessing a artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems among artists against the genocide happening in Palestine. If this is silencing and censorship, then of course it isn’t anything new, but to couch it within a concern for “reputational risk” seems disingenuous. There are larger questions at stake here as to what the public funds are for if not to fund art that resists the artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems. If not this, then culture can never evolve beyond the limits of our current imaginations. Preventing creatives from challenging dominant norms, questioning, speaking their truth will only result in a monolith ossified culture, stagnant and festering with dissent and paralysed with fear.

Marginalised writers have lived with these fears for so long. Reputational risk is not something to be taken lightly. For anyone who is an “other” it is an anxiety that lies heavy on their shoulders, something that lurks silently at all times intent on pushing them away further into the margins. The warning against “reputational risk” feels like bullying, and intimidation. And the whole purpose of bullying is to create self-doubt, uncertainty and unease. As we face even more cuts to arts funding and public funding becomes even more scarce, creating a culture of fear is counter-productive to encouraging and supporting innovative art. The ACE stance is silencing of those who have been marginalised, and those who speak up against oppressive forces, telling artists to stay within their boxes, quiet, unchallenging, unresistant, fearful of the repercussions. When people are silenced, it creates hopelessness and despair.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

  1. PG doesn’t agree with more than a bit of the OP. Don’t ask him to identify the bit.
  2. “[fill in the blank] is political!’ is a now ancient technique used by all sorts of people, right, left and center, to shut down argument.
  3. Marginalised, silencing, bullying, intimidation, self-doubt, uncertainty, unease, paralysed with fear, speaking their truth, challenging dominant norms, oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems are in the eye of the beholder. If these conditions are so widespread, horrible and heavy, why doesn’t everyone notice them?
  4. PG’s favorite horror was “faux-benevolent.” Heaven forfend!
  5. “What the public funds are for if not to fund art that resists the artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems.”
    • Does anybody think to ask the public how their taxes should be used? Whether they do or don’t want to fund the creation of things they find abhorrent.”
  6. “outrage expressed widely by artists on social media and elsewhere.” Oooh! Outrage! On Social Media! Who would have imagined there was outrage of any sort on social media? How could we possibly miss outraged artists on social media amid so much reasoned, quiet, calm, and polite conversation with never a hint of anger everywhere we look on social media?
  7. And finally, genocide, the all-purpose horror, not to be missed in any tirade.

Pseudoprofundity

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From Psychology Today:

Around the globe, audiences sit at the feet of marketing experts, life-style consultants, mystics, cult-leaders and other “gurus” waiting for the next deep and profound insight. People often pay a great deal of money to hear these words of wisdom. So how do these elevated individuals come by their penetrating insights? What is the secret of their profundity? Unfortunately, in some cases, the audience is duped by the dark arts of pseudo-profundity.

The art of sounding profound is fairly easily mastered. You too can make deep- and meaningful-sounding pronouncements if you are prepared to follow a few simple rules.

First, try stating the incredibly obvious. Only do it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, with a sort of knowing nod. This works particularly well if your remark has something to do with one of the big themes of life, love, death and money. Here are some examples:

Death comes to us all
We all want to be loved
Money is used to buy things

Try it yourself. If you state the obvious with sufficient gravitas, following up with a pregnant pause, you may soon find others start to nod in agreement, perhaps muttering “How true that is”.

Now that you have warmed up, let’s move on to a different technique – the use of jargon. A few big, not fully understood words can easily enhance the illusion of profundity. All that’s required is a little imagination.

To begin with, try making up some words that have similar meanings to certain familiar terms, but that differ from them in some subtle and never-fully-explained way. For example, don’t talk about people being happy or sad, but about people having “positive or negative attitudinal orientations”. That sounds far more impressive and scientific-sounding, doesn’t it?

Now try translating some dull truisms into your newly invented language. For, example, the obvious fact that happy people tend to make other people happier can be expressed as “positive attitudinal orientations have high transferability”.

Also, whether you are a business guru, cult-leader or a mystic, it always helps to talk of “energies” and “balances”. This makes it sound as if you have discovered some deep mechanism or power that could potentially be harnessed and used by others. That will make it much easier to convince people that if they don’t buy into your advice, they will really be missing out. For example, publish an article entitled “Harnessing positive attitudinal energies within the retail environment”, and Lo! another modern business guru is born.

. . . .

Finally, if someone does get up the courage to ask exactly what a “positive attitudinal energy” is, you can always give a definition using other bits of your newly-invented jargon, leaving your questioner none the wiser. If all your jargon is defined using other jargon, no one will ever be able to figure out exactly what you mean (though your devotees may think they know). And the fact that buried within your pseudo-profundities are one or true truisms will give your audience the impression that you must really be on to something, even if they don’t quite understand what it is. So they will be eager to hear more.

. . . .

Another secret of pseudo-profundity is to pick two words that have opposite or incompatible meanings, and combine them cryptically, like so:

Sanity is just another kind of madness
Life is often a form of death
The ordinary is extraordinary

Link to the rest at Psychology Today

The 2023 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year shortlist sees publishers from the USA claim all six spots.

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From The Bookseller:

Tuck into some grits, crank up the Lynyrd Skynyrd and set yo’self down on the verandah with a mint julep, y’all, as the Southern US of A is the major story of the 45th Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Five of the six books on the 2023 shortlist were released by firms hailing from Dixie, including two from Diagram powerhouse, North Carolina-based academic publisher McFarland & Co.

McFarland has risen from obscurity to claim its Manchester City-like grip on the Diagram, winning the last two crowns on the trot with 2021’s Is Superman Circumcised? and last year’s RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning With RuPaul’s Drag Race. McFarland’s back-to-back Diagrams were a first, as were its record three shortlistings on the 2022 list. Alas, it is a “mere” two titles this time round for McFarland, though it becomes the only publisher to have hit the shortlist for three successive years. First up is a festive outing with The 12 Days of Christmas: The Outlaw Carol that Wouldn’t Die, Harry Rand’s look at the scabrous origins of that interminable song.

McFarland’s, ahem, number two title is I Fart in your General Direction: Flatulence in Popular Culture which has a good chance of the trophy if it gets a following wind. I regretfully admit there is a Diagram tradition for books referencing body functions doing well (shame on you, voters!), stretching back to the 10th winner, 1989’s How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, to recent champions such as A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in Eastern Indonesian Society (2020) and Cooking with Poo (2011). I feel obliged to say, as I do whenever mentioning the 2011 gong, that “Poo” is author Saiyuud Diwong’s nickname, and is Thai for “crab”.

McFarland’s two shortlistings are matched by a brace from University of Virginia Press. Jeremy Chow’s The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century considers canonical texts such as Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein through an environmental and queer studies lens. Matthew F Jordan’s Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History, meanwhile, charts the “meteoric rise and eventual fall” of the Klaxon automobile horn. You know, the old fashioned one that goes “ah-wooo-ga”.

Our last Southern belle is the University of Georgia Press-published Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau which perhaps mines the same outdoorsy/slightly naughty seam as 2019’s winner, Charles L Dobbins’ hunting guide The Dirt Hole and its Variations.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

PG couldn’t resist including a couple of earlier Diagram Prize winners: