Lost in conversations about the ethics or propriety of this kind of “borrowing” is another, simpler question: Why is this art always so bad? The debate over “Open Casket” followed in a long line of such controversies, including a public reading by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, in which he performed, as a poem, the autopsy report of Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. An essay by Zadie Smith (which proved contentious in its own right) distilled the furor down to the question: “Who owns black pain?” It is “not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” read an open letter by the artist Hannah Black. There were calls for the painting to be removed from the Whitney Biennial - even destroyed. In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes and debates about cultural appropriation.Ī recent, very long round was set off by “Open Casket,” a painting by Dana Schutz, which portrayed, in an abstract swirl, the body of Emmett Till, the black teenager tortured and lynched in 1955.
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