Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 5, 1994 TAG: 9401260005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEN RINGLE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In Toronto, fist-shaking protesters turn out at the premiere of a Broadway- bound revival of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical ``Show Boat,'' denouncing the show's melodious portrayal of blacks and whites in the 1880s as ``racist hate propaganda.''
As visitors enter the Biennial exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, they must don a button that says ``I can't imagine ever wanting to be white.''
Welcome to the arts world of the '90s, where aesthetics and creativity too often take a back seat to political posturing, and the only people we're not afraid of offending are straight white guys.
If all this isn't ``political correctness'' - that self-righteous, ruler-rapping sensitivity referee of the otherwise irrelevant left - then what is?
In Hollywood, writers adapting a nonfiction book about white cops and black criminals for the TV series ``Homicide: Life on the Street'' decide the first thing they have to do is throw out one of the book's central premises. Regardless of what happens in real life, all inner-city criminals can't be portrayed as black.
Once upon a time we couldn't even mention homosexuality on the stage. Now we're lucky to find a play about anything else. But the gay characters tend to be either cuddly and domestic (``Twilight of the Golds''), lovably bitchy (``Falsettos'') or noble victims (``As Is''). Heterosexual men and women can be portrayed as violent, but not homosexuals, though emergency rooms - and morgues - are regularly peopled with gay men and lesbians who courted ``rough trade'' once too often.
When HBO filmed the novel ``And the Band Played On,'' all references in the book to San Francisco's notorious S&M parlors were erased. And when gay-rights groups discovered that Sharon Stone's lesbian lover in ``Basic Instinct'' had a murderous side, they staged noisy protests during and after filming in San Francisco, denouncing the film as gay-bashing. Why a lesbian can't be shown as even a hundredth as crazy as Jeffrey Dahmer isn't clear.
It's true, of course, that for too long the arts community ignored or stereotyped ethnic or cultural minorities. But today, the forces of PC try to remedy that not by avoiding stereotypes altogether - Southern sheriffs, fundamentalist ministers and Catholic nuns, for example, are acceptable grist for one-dimensional ridicule - but by treating the arts like a Marin County group-therapy session, where all problems will be solved if we just shout at the always predictable ``oppressive establishment'' and give everyone else a hug.
Granted, any artist's view of reality is necessarily selective, and times and tastes change. But what distinguishes the particular force presently tainting the arts from those that went before is its intellectual cowardice.
There have always been pressures for conformity and restriction in the arts - but in the past these have come almost entirely from the outside, and have been resisted. Today, the former freedom fighters are all too often the very voices of repression. Rarely, if ever, has the arts community been so earnestly acquiescent in its own censorship and corruption as it is today.
What's so maddening about the PC groupthink is its implication (if not insistence) that there's some sort of conflict between nurturing genuine cultural diversity - who doesn't favor that? - and maintaining the classic aesthetic criteria that have produced and recognized great art through the ages. No such conflict exists.
If motion pictures in the past, for example, misrepresented Indians and blacks, it was because, blinded by naivete or prejudice, filmmakers resisted treating them as individuals. Political correctness, in its insistence on defining and promoting - and, just as often, denouncing or altering - art according to the race or gender or ethnicity or circumstance of the artist or performer, merely extends the same dehumanizing mentality in a different context.
Nothing underlined the fallacy of that approach more than the ``Circa 1492'' exhibit last year at the National Gallery of Art - perhaps the most culturally diverse and inclusive show ever mounted. ``Circa 1492'' made stunningly irrelevant any argument about cultural imperialism or bias by measuring every major culture in the world at the time of Columbus' voyage by the greatest art from each that has survived. Shining forth from the riches of that exhibit - the heartbreaking Taino mask with its tears of rain, the exquisitely ornamented drinking cups and silver ship from Nuremburg, the fabulous carved heads from Benin - was the reaffirmation of the once-revered, now nearly forgotten concept called universality.
Does the great and significant art of every culture meet some test beyond the age, sex, race, ethnicity or politics of its creator? Does it transcend the barriers of time and language to speak to some universal concept of truth and beauty mysteriously linking all humankind?
The obvious answer is yes. But there was another message in the show - one that speaks to the very heart of the debate over political correctness.
The dawn of the 16th century was a time of war and prejudice and suspicion and terror, as well as learning. The Spanish Inquisition was in full bloom, and tribal and religious wars embroiled most of Europe, Africa and the Americas. Yet one looked in vain in ``Circa 1492'' for great art inspired by hatred, anger or fear. While there was plenty prompted by fearful visions of the supernatural, great art about almost everything else springs not from hatred, fear and groupthink but from wonder, hope and the compelling vision of an individual artist. The Renaissance was about discovery, and so is all great art.
Anger and fear, on the other hand, are what political correctness is all about: anger at the inequities of life and society, fear of images and language and differences - and of one's own artistic inadequacy as well.
Anger and fear only rarely produce great art - Picasso's ``Guernica'' and the biting satires of George Grosz come to mind. What they do produce, history tells us - and the 16th century, once again, is highly instructive - is the destruction of great art, from the Spanish sacking of Aztec temples to the English looting of New Spain.
\ Ken Ringle is a feature writer for the Styles section of The Washington Post.
The Washington Post
by CNB