San Francisco school board votes to destroy murals by Victor Arnautoff
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Movie catalogues, books and destroy them too? We used to make fun of authoritarian regimes and how they were week for trying to stamp out art and thought they didn’t like, but it’s like we’ve become them.
I’m a bit surprised they haven’t revived Gore’s PMRC to ensure music lyrics represent correct orthodoxy.
I mean, I can understand renaming streets. Streets are renamed for various reasons, and some commemorate dubious people, but the street remains. I wonder...
...Will one day all the Mission cities get renamed because they were named by Evangelizing Spanish Missionaries. Is that where we’re headed? We can name them after tribes or chiefs, perhaps. I propose Ohlone for San Francisco.
I'm not accusing you (mc32) of being hypocritical since I haven't seen you make any comments saying that we should rip out old confederate statues because they represent slavery.
However, (let me reiterate that this isn't an attack on you, mc32), I think we as a collective internet need to rethink how we feel about removing artwork if it represents something bad. It is not okay for us to be okay with ripping out some untasteful art but not others, simply because some bad art is "left" and other bad art is "right."
Before you go jumping on me about how slavery is different than communism, remember that communism is responsible for nearly a hundred million deaths, which puts it near the level of slavery in terms of harm it has done to humanity (even if they aren't directly comparable).
One reason that purging of the past is so intrinsically tied to authoritarian regimes is because authoritarian regimes do not want people to think for themselves. They want to enforce their views and only their views with no possible ambiguity or counterpoint. This is the danger of flirting with authoritarianism, as I feel we have been doing in trying to purge the past. Once the momentum for 'cultural purification' grows, you may find that where you draw your personal line in the sand is not where the rest of those pursuing such ends choose to.
The U.S. freedom loving founding fathers participated in not only the legalization of slavery but also the genocide of native americans. Should we lay those sins at the feet of democracy and capitalism as a whole?
Why would it be hypocritical to go be against another user of the tool?
Are politicians hypocritical to have opposing ideas?
They tried to do the same to the Statue of Cecil Roads which I believe is in Oxford University.
There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.
If someone wants to put up a statue of a confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway, that’s also different. And would say more about southern culture than the worship of Lee or a monster like Forrest.
The content of your politics doesn’t change whether folks are assholes or not. People pushing for eliminating challenging art are feeding their ego first.
And that's precisely why those generals were being honored; to proactively show that, despite them being on the losing side, we would not be regarding them as traitors! This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today even as cultural divides within the country are widening to the point where they might essentially split it apart all over again. (Not on racial or ethnic lines however, but, loosely speaking, on ones pitting "elite intellectualism" against the "common man's good sense". And I say this while fully acknowledging that the latter is at least as flawed as the former.)
> ...the ideals... That is, black people need to know their place.
Not so. The Civil War was indeed "about" slavery in many ways, but the "confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway" you mention above would be able to tell you plenty of reasons why he was going to fight the Yankees with full conviction no matter what.
Slavery and "keeping black people in their place" were important to the opportunistic elite of the South; but in the common man's view, what was being threatened to the point of wholly justifying their sacrifice was their culture and way of life. And this viewpoint is still one way that the war is understood in many parts of the South.
Except the South reneged on the deal almost as soon as the war ended, violently suppressing and oppressing the formerly-enslaved.
[1] Well, not quite; the "Radical Reconstruction" was a bit of a later development. But then, the truly nasty politics on the other side, with a "Redeemer" movement working together with violent, paramilitary organizations (including the 1st 'Klan') to ensure that white Southern democrats would dominate the South and impose overt white supremacy, was itself enabled and triggered by a backlash to the Radical Reconstruction.
Many of them were put up in the 60s, as a reaction to the civil rights era. Most of them were put up in the 1910s, for similar reasons.
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/08/18/southern-poverty...
They were erected to rewrite the history exactly as you are presenting it.
The 1910s were also within living memory of people who were born as chattel, property of someone else. What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them? This was put up with because the political machinery of the south was incredibly powerful, and northerners, particularly immigrants weren’t exactly woke to the troubles of former slaves either.
The new South era was unique in many ways, including the end of open racial oppression and blacks voting in numbers. LBJ broke the back of the solid south for a few years.
Actually, I've consistently been trying to make the point that the things being honored in this way do NOT include slavery itself. Yes, it's a weird point of view which involves a whole lot of willful cognitive dissonance on the part of those white southerners who celebrate their heritage today. Yes, it is entirely fair to criticize it on that basis. But it's not any more inherently weird than celebrating Washington despite him being a slaveowner, or celebrating the U.S. itself even though its expansion was accomplished by killing Natives. It's just not fair to be in denial about these nuances, and insist that "Southerners who respect their own heritage are celebrating slavery" in a way that others are not. (Note that one can fairly object to the Confederate flag on other grounds - it has always been an overt symbol of illegal secession, and a secession that was explicitly motivated by slavery - that don't quite apply to the statues of defeated generals.)
> What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them?
I'm sure that they had plenty of other things to worry about. And that, by and large, they wouldn't have wanted a South that failed altogether to reconcile with the North. Failed reconciliation after a defeat in war can be very dangerous - and if the "Redeemers" were willing to use paramilitary violence in our timeline as a reaction to a comparatively mild "Radical Reconstruction", can we even imagine how Southerners would have reacted to extreme levels of festering resentment? It would have gotten quite ugly, to say the least.
A lot of people now dream about such a thing, they have not perhaps read what that actually means. US let South get away with this crap because it WAS beaten and peace and unity of the country was worth a lot more.
The “traitors” things is somewhat silly, since even men who served with them Before the war did not consider them such. Most considered their state to supersede the union that is all. If Virginia did not secede Lee would have been happily helping Union put down rest of the states.
Lincoln movie has a great moment at the end of president talking to Grant, they were wise men and luckily for all involved did not turn the aftermath of the war into bloodbath that would span decades and turn US into police state.
To be clear about it, the US let the South get away with plenty of terrible things that they shouldn't have. But yes, the monuments thing that people are objecting to nowadays was a lot milder and more positive in its goals than many people assume. The reality is that at some point, by all appearances, many people in the North did not so much care about the plight of the formerly-enslaved; they mostly wanted to punish the South, no matter how counterproductive this would have been. The 'Radical Reconstruction' was in no small part a result of this attitude, and had the North objected to the Confederate monuments, this too would've been seen as such.
It's interesting to note that Lincoln himself did not make this mistake; it may be fair to blame the comparative chaos following his assassination by a radical slavery supporter (which, it should be noted, was immediately condemned in no uncertain terms by the saner voices in the Southern states, including Lee himself) for the sudden change in attitudes. At the very least, the fact that Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, was thereafter made President (leaving him free to sabotage even that remarkably mild approach to Reconstruction, and to antagonize Congress over the issue to a perhaps unprecedented extent) did not exactly help matters.
Last week:
"In partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, UC Santa Cruz will be removing the mission bell that is located on campus. The bell was originally donated to the campus by a local women’s club many years ago ..."
"Mission bells, which were installed across the state to memorialize the California Missions, are viewed by many populations as a symbol of racism and dehumanization of their ancestors."
These are public murals. They're on giant walls hundreds or thousands of community members must walk by daily (the kids don't even have a choice). I don't think it's too much to demand that public art not be... y'know, wildly racist.
It's not like we're outlawing private galleries or burning books here. This stuff really is offensive, and "historical context" only goes so far.
"No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign [these books] to the flames..." That was spoken by Joseph Goebbels to raucous applause in a crowd of tens of thousands as they celebrated the new and improved morality of the German State, in 1933.
In America we've started down the exact same path, but people accept it because think they believe that banning and burning flags, destroying statues, banning books (see: e.g. Mark Twain), and now destroying art are part of some grand effort to bring about a new morality and new vision for the nation. Instead we just continue down paths that have been tread many a time before yet ever refusing to consider the parallels because, after all, this time it will be different.
Good grief. It's not a library, it's a mural. This isn't an archive of historically important but plausibly controversial artwork being purged for thought crimes, it's a fucking school wall. Kids and staff have to walk by this thing every day. And there's a dead indian on it front and center, and a bunch of slaves working in a field. It's... it's just not appropriate artwork for a public space.
And all this hand wringing is completely insincere anyway. If some random school in Arkansas had decided to repaint a mural with similar content, no one would care. But this is San Francisco, so of course Bari Weiss gets to write about it int The Times and pretend it's some kind of liberal disease.
I mean, it's not like they don't teach the history of slavery or indigenous peoples in California schools. They don't need to celebrate it on the corridor walls if they don't want to, do they?
Let. Them. Decorate. Their. School. Why must everything be a moral lesson with you people? You don't apply that level of finger wagging to anyone else, but Good God if liberals do something then it must be evil.
It's their school, not yours. Why do you think you should get veto power over what they are allowed to change and what they must keep? And why on earth, of all things, do you think they should be required to keep this thing?
If it were merely about choosing what kind of art to show on the wall, they could simply paint over it for $1k.
That's $599,000 that could be used to pay teachers instead being spent to ensure this mural is never seen again.
Of course it is. You've got a bunch of hysterical people saying the mural is in support of slavery and genocide. How can you say that the meaning of the art isn't relevant? The beliefs the mob have about the meaning of the mural are central to the story, you cannot abstract them away.
With no one to challenge the framing (which, yes, includes accusing people of being conservatives) topics like this become echo chambers. I don't want that, and am willing to tolerate some flamage as the price.
But yeah, it's not my forum. Like I said I'll delete the responses here.
It's not my forum either! We're just trying to preserve it.
We're do our best to demand good faith equally from everyone, or rather to cajole them into it. Outrage—feigned or otherwise—seems pretty evenly distributed as far as I can tell.
This would be appalling even if it were free to remove the mural. With all the literal and figurative shit San Francisco has to deal with, it’s borderline criminal to waste more than half a million dollars.
I, personally, have the exact same questions as you. Come on, 600 G's?
I'll fly out and paint it for half that if you guys really want it done.
off the subject...
intersectionalism, safe spaces, and more, and some wonder why independents are more horrified by one side of the aisle than the other? once thought, speech, and expression, are neutered nothing else much matters.
Shockingly, the rest of the state hasn’t seen quite as much.
It’s almost as if it’s how the public allows politics to work in general.
https://reason.com/2019/06/20/george-washington-mural-san-fr...
"Painting over the mural would cost at least $600,000, with the majority of the cost in producing an environmental impact report. In addition, supporters of the mural have vowed to sue if the board voted to destroy it and legal costs could add to the cost, district officials said."
It's a little hard to square this with their other numbers, though:
"Other options included covering the mural with panels, which would cost up to $825,000, or obscuring it with curtains, which would have cost up to $375,000."
Maybe there is still small tiny amount of sanity left in San Francisco, and adding curtains doesn't require a full environmental impact statement? Otherwise it means that 1600 sf of paint costs the city at least $225,000. But if no EIS is required, it's hard to imagine spending that much on curtains --- or twice that on panels, for that matter.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-sc...
There are plenty of us who identified the problem at the heart of this movement ages ago: many interpret the movement to change the way we engage with history as filtered through their own, nuance-capable minds, in which case there are good points to be made about glorifying parts of history that we no longer agree with. But in reality, when movements hit any semblance of popularity, they need to be interpreted through the way most people approach issues: it's entirely unsurprising to me that the reaction to this mural is based on gut aesthetic reactions instead of an attempt to engage any brain cells in understanding the mural's intent.
I think is the same with the Columbus statue removal there[2]. Art is a product of its time and if the times were racist/violent/whatever, the art will be so also. Indeed it would be a good way to learn History.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indiana_state_historic...
[2] https://remezcla.com/lists/culture/columbus-grand-park-statu...
As in, if you think free speech trumps censoring all possible offensive communication, you are a free speech extremist.
Man, I remember the days when being PC was basically “don’t be a d*”, and censorship was the Right’s shtick.
That’s why so many people supported (and still support) Trump. Removal of the second amendment (guns), fourth amendment (FISA court), first amendment (all the political correctness), etc. The “right” feels persecuted and IMO justly so.
Personally, I fall on the libertarian side so I think both are pretty poor for liberty. But I have watched this scary shift and it kinda mimics the decent into Nazisim... “share my ideals or else we will erase you”.
That's why extreme left is more scary to me, like a wolf in sheeps clothing. Historical death counts also show that extreme left can be quite devastating.
If we have this on the left and the "alt-right" on the right, I'm a bit afraid of what the next round will bring. How much crazier can it get? I'm sure top minds on both sides are working tirelessly on things even dumber, meaner, and crazier than anything we've seen so far.
Look at this article from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...
Firstly I take some issue with the scope of the study being limited only to North America and Western Europe.....and completely ignoring the Asian democracies which largely skew more to the right. But scroll down to the third graphic (the line graph). The Republicans are slightly more-right-wing than they were 2000-2008. The Democrat's platform, however, has sharply gone off the deep end of the Left since 2008.
But most PEOPLE are fairly centrist. Even if they are slightly-left-of-center, the Democratic party's extremism is pushing normal to abandon them. But they long-standing Democrat power structures have an outsized influence on media and information channels, hence the non-stop bombardment of outrage culture at how everyone is a "Nazi". Ever notice that almost no-one uses "Communist" as an epithet anymore, despite the world's two major historical Communist governments having by FAR the largest domestic bodycounts of the modern age?
They promote gab and confederate statues but I don't ever see them fighting against intellectual property laws, or fighting for legalizing sympathetic striking, or fighting to allow pornography on youtube. Instead it seems to be fighting for a very specific kind of free speech.
A society, that can't criticize itself is a weak society.
Art has pretty much always been subjected to a pretty ruthless collaborative editing process. In San Francisco's alleys, art is continually being put up and painted over. The good pieces last longer than the random squiggles, but very few reach the level where somebody like Precita Eyes [1] will preserve it past its natural lifespan. For something to survive across generations, it has to fit the standards of multiple generations, and that's how it always has been.
Predictably, Bari Weiss isn't upset about that ongoing loss of San Francisco art. Gosh golly, why is losing this specific set of unexceptional murals important to her?
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/95xxn2fm978025...
Just because an interpretation no longer fits with today's view doesn't mean people should forget the history behind it nor the mentality surrounding it at a particular time. Erasing remnants of a past you disagree with doesn't erase the facts, but it makes people less inclined to remember or learn about a not so glorious history.
It raises questions about the exact motives at stake here.
If I recall correctly, back in the 90's, when the Taliban decided to destroy those giant Buddhas, the BM pleaded to be allowed to dismantle them and take them to Britain instead, at its own expense. The Taliban refused.
This art doesn't seem nearly as important, but, I wonder if they could do the same in this case. The PR alone may be worth it. This sort of thing is the best conterargument they can possibly have against contestation of their legitimacy to hold foreign art.
Remember, any right-thinking leftwing supporters of social justice wouldn't be caught dead reading or believing an article by right-winger Bari Weiss. Doing so would instantly mark them out as a supporter of the enemy. As far as they're concerned (or at least can admit to in public), it will be the people who think this artwork means what the artist created to mean who are ignoring reality.
Truly Orwellian.
I wouldn't be too surprised though if SF turns out to be the first place to burn books this century.
It's unpleasant to teach your children that the US forefathers were people to be admired when they have seen him with his slaves walking over dead Indians every day.
It's' about making history criminal.
???
The (correct) narrative promoted by the left is that the US was founded by terrible slave-owning racists, and this art promotes that viewpoint.
Also, no one is making anything illegal here.
One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”
These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”
I wonder what they can do for the homeless population with that money. With the numbers they have, probably not much, but it's also not nothing either.
> For impressionable young people who attend school to have any representation that diminishes people, specifically students from communities that have already been diminished, it’s an aggressive thing. It’s hurtful and I don’t think our students need to bear that burden.”
Thinking back at being an impressionable young person, seeing homeless people on the streets, in pain, yelling at passers by, or defecating in the streets would have been a lot more "hurtful" than seeing a mural.
There is nothing wrong to worry about the message a mural sends, but it signals that they've solved all the other problems, and now, with nothing else left to do, to keep busy, they are taking care of repainting murals. It just doesn't make them look very competent.
(Isn't high-school curriculum full of literature that could be more disturbing anyway?)
It all sounds like a stupid exercise in virtue signalling at the cost of $600k to taxpayers + loss of a historical artifact + setting a dangerous precedent.
God knows why it costs $600k to destroy one though; this job should actually cost $100 or less, paint and labor all-in.
> And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal.
And we can do that for all art. Given that digital storage verges on free, there's little reason not to preserve every bit of art, from a kid's refrigerator drawings on up. It'd be fascinating to see Picasso's work from his first scribble, for example. And who knows what future generations will make of it.
To take oil painting for example: a painting is usually composed of layer upon layer of translucent paint. The way it alters light cannot be captured in a 2D scan, it is a very complex, 3D laminar object, before you even get to impasto technique. To see a Picasso in real life (or any painting) is vastly more rewarding than just seeing a picture of it.
And incidentally you can see almost every scribble Picasso ever made, there's a museum in Barcelona containing much of his early work, including sketchbooks.
Even if does have to be removed, it's also clear that moving and preserving it in a museum is both cheaper and far better than spending more to destroy it completely. Erasing history like this is no win for anyone.
Of course you wouldn’t. This mural doesn’t glorify and we can add context around it to make it into a teachable situation instead of trying to erase history.
> And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal.
I mean, these are the only people who's opinion on the school exterior should actually count.
And there I was, a naive idiot who thinks that schools are about learning. I guess we have given up that concept completely now as a nation and embrace schools simply as glorified babysitters. It sure shows in our nation's stupidity and hate of anything intellectual. And we still have ambitions to colonize the moon or even Mars while most of our citizens can barely afford food and shelter and the country is quickly turning from developed to developing. Of course we are a nation of dumbasses if the people teaching our kids are this dumb and anti-intellectual. Let's arm these idiots while we're at it so we can get a glimpse of the amazing future America has with this kind of "education."
Was this a poor choice of words from a hastily written article, or does the author think that erasing art is uniquely American? Changing history, destroying art, etc., have existed since time immemorial. Anyone who honestly thinks that America invented evil is delusional.
FTA: Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”
The Bayeux tapestry is one of the most recognizable artworks in the world (yes, it's not a mural in the tube or even in the UK but it doesn't need to be). Norman castles, Norman cathedrals...
Of course, why shouldn't there be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_William_the_Conquero...
Perhaps the French could gift a statue of William to the UK; they could put it next to the statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square.
Edit: The French are not known for their tactlessness. In truth, William the Conqueror is simply not offensive to the modern British people. William is even more distant to the modern British than George Washington, and you don't have the British crying themselves to sleep over that great whupper of Britons having a statue in London.
https://archive.org/details/communitymuralsp00barnrich/page/...
- Rivera, his work and his pupils like the mentioned painter were left wingers actively denouncing white privilege, slavery etc.
- The work is meant to be critical and through being uncomfortable evoke discussion and reflection
- Destroying art because “it doesn’t fit what we think is right” has many really bad examples in history.
I really can’t believe this is happening. Totally sickening and it makes me despair for the education of the kids under this school board.
Or its forbears in this case.
I guess this sucks. I wish the mural went to a museum instead. There are more important things to care about.
In any case, here’s a piece which seems to stick to the facts. Form your own opinion.
https://richmondsfblog.com/2019/04/09/historic-wpa-murals-at...
I wrote about another situation in which public art created a stir in the community. This mural wasn't on the wall of a building, so it's removal was cheap. What's interesting to me is two things: it's initial anonymity (nobody recognized it for what it is until recently), and how it forces a consideration of collective traumatic memory.
Are we doing a good service to the youth removing any kind of potentially disturbing imagery? I don’t think so. Reality can be disturbing at times, and still needs to be known.
Couldnt they just paint over the offending parts of the mural? Sounds more conciliatory
There's enough horror in American history, and depictions of them, to keep these committees busy for a long time. Washington, Jefferson, the confederacy, westward expansion, and slavery were not very controversial historical topics just 60 years ago.
Think about all of the events/figures likely to offend at least one vocal group maybe not now, but in the future:
- Andrew Jackson (purveyor of genocide)
- Theorore Roosevelt (bloodthirsty militarist)
- WWI (unjust war)
- Transcontinental railroad (genocide's superhighway)
- Texas war of independence (slavery)
- Moon landing (cold war publicity stunt)
- The Manhattan Project (America's WMD program)
- Albert Einstein and FDR (for kickstarting the world's nuclear nightmare)
- Lyndon Johnson (genocidal maniac)
- George W Bush (bloodthirsty militarist and torturer)
- Barack Obama (architect of America's robotic warfare system)
- Donald Trump (basically everything he ever did)
- The Republican Party (for supporting Donald Trump)
Some of these events/figures seem like a stretch. Maybe they are, but a lot can change in 60 years. The point is that we now have ample evidence for very vocal groups calling for, and getting action on, suppression of vast swaths of American history in the form of artwork and symbols.
This criticism of US was created as communists in USSR were in process of murdering millions. He did not have much to say about that. In fact he went back to USSR in 1960s
If he was in any way useful he would have been recruited in 30s, but I guess NKVD did not think him to be of any consequence.
It is absolutely hilarious that his ideological descendants are now destroying his work. He would get it quite well, after all Soviets wiped as much culture as they could that preceded them. Blew up churches and all that good stuff. I wonder when SF will get to that stage, they are basically there now, just couple more steps.
San Francisco not even once.
Almost 15 years ago I saw a similar situation unfold in Dover PA. I know at least some of the kids in that school district learned from the dumb shit those adults were up to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...
Why is this appropriate for a high school mural?
“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”
In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.
I mean, gosh, the horror of young people confronting history.
I think there's a lot of public art in America that seems to lionise slave owners but I posted too soon.
Edit: maxerickson's reply is much better.
Think about it; how would you feel going to work every day if your office had murals of holocaust victims being sent into gas chambers? There's as valid a lesson to be learned from such a mural, but it's unnecessarily disturbing because it's out of context.
So no, the actual motive of San Francisco officials aside, I don't think it's appropriate for a high school mural.