White People

I'm always extremely skeptical of any measure advocating a positivistic "whiteness"—a distinct racial class featuring identifiable tribal practices and a cogent cultural history in order to match the tightness of some American minority communities. While I wouldn't call white people a cancer per se, I'm skeptical of the political motivations behind any effort to rehabilitate the race that already owns everything.

Reading about critic-curator Maurice Berger's "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" at the National Institute of Photography, my alarms were tripped from the other direction: Whose work will be coopted into the service of whitey-must-pay? But Berger's clever introduction reassures. At the risk of reading too much into his words, he holds to a Stanley Fish-ian conception of race. (Fish wrote "You Can Only Fight Discrimination With Discrimination," an essay that condemns the liberal vision of a post-racial world as naive and the conservative conception of meritocracy as in itself a racial construct, favoring instead an aggressive egalitarianism.)

So now I'm left only with my skepticism over the show itself, which does coerce a lot of work into serving Berger's thesis. The works he selected all apply, certainly, but in such a superficial sense that the works seem diminished to the single concept. Sometimes I think it would be nice to see more heavy-handed, European-style curators working in America, and then a show like this makes me sympathize with the artists, who have been forced to join a coalition that they didn't necessarily entertain. Then again, art shows aren't for the artists, and this is a show that will resonate with a lot of people in a basic way. The observation is certainly valid that contemporary art, with its vast textual appreciation for diversity, is overrun by white people—that's a concern for a curator to tackle.

UPDATE: . . . it's not lost on me that as a blogger and an active admirer of contemporary art, my skin color is something approaching glare. So these things go.