Last week a kind of Emperor’s New Clothes situation unfolded re the comedian Hannah Gadsby. Gadsby has essentially made a career out of pointing at things and saying “that’s problematic!” during the years when this was a very, very easy way to wrangle a career of some kind in the cultural sector. Their latest endeavour is a show at the Brooklyn Museum called “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” which consists of a small group of unnoteworthy Picasso paintings, annotated with crude jokes “calling out” Picasso’s misogyny, with reference to elements of the paintings.
The New York Times and ArtNews both ran articles criticising the show in unsparing terms (I think the NYT one is better). They pointed out that the show didn’t engage seriously with the work of female modernists or theorists; that the “jokes” annotating each work were juvenile, anti-intellectual and unfunny; and that the project was facile and reductive. As Jason Farago put it in the NYT: “Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time.”
I don’t have anything to add about this particular show. I haven’t seen it. And I wouldn’t have seen it even if it was being held in the basement of the building where I live. I wouldn’t have gone to see it even to write something negative about it (which is not to criticise anyone who does do this, there is great value to these pieces). I find Gadsby’s ilk of work so depressing that I hate to even be around it (Or is it work? That word does not seem right to me. And I search fruitlessly for a better one. “Entertainment” perhaps? Or “performance”? Actually perhaps best to simply call it “Gadsby’s product”, to best foreground the clear commercial and careerist imperatives to do what they have been doing over the past decade or so).
Anyway, as I said, I don’t have much to add about this particular show. But I wanted to write about the “that’s problematic” form of product and career, and what it says about our culture more generally. Gadsby is, to my mind, fundamentally an opportunist rather than an innovator; they are not the only person who has built a reputation hawking a product such as this. This is not to excuse Gadsby as simply “playing their part in a rotten system”. They bear full responsibility for the dreadful, Sackler-funded “It’s Pablo-matic”. But it is to say that the problem is not just Gadsby.
When the NYT piece came, out social media was full of people announcing their glee that they no longer had to pretend to like and support such a product. To pretend that they think a collection of Picasso paintings annotated with “jokes” saying things like “#hispenis, am I right?” is a fresh and interesting feminist statement. But actually, nobody was ever forced to pretend to like this stuff or agree with it; pretending not to find it depressing and stupid was always a choice. Personally, I haven’t been pretending not to hate it.
So why did some people choose to pretend? Because, for a good while now, to do so was an easy way to advertise to everyone what a good, progressive person you are. And to not do so was to potentially expose yourself to accusations of being the dreaded “problematic”.
I find this depressing for many reasons. For a start I do not think that anyone who pretends to consider a product which plainly does not treat women seriously (either as artists or as humans) to be a strident feminist statement can have thought in any depth, or really at all, about what feminism is or what it means. I wonder if a person who does this even considers women to be capable of the level of sophistication, in terms of an inner life, which they would afford a man. (I’m talking here about women who go along with this too, for the record, not just men.)
This kind of pretence speaks to a method of operating (which I think is widespread currently) in which looking like a feminist (and in the wider sense, a progressive) is foregrounded at the expense of really thinking about what it would mean to actually be one. That is, to consider women as fully realised human beings.
I think it’s true to say, as Farago did in the NYT, that some of the appeal of a product like Gadsby’s is that it reduces the complexity of articulating a response to avant-garde painting to what is essentially a “thumbs down” emoji. But I wonder if the bigger appeal is that it reduces the complexity of engaging seriously with the reality of the limits that a patriarchal society imposes on women to a simple “thumbs down” emoji too. Take your son to “it’s Pablo-matic”, tweet “believe women” and then sit back, content to have engaged sufficiently with feminism, when what you have really done is force women into a new, subhuman box labelled “progressive”. Actually maybe the box is pink and labelled “Fabby queen!”
And really, I’m not sure that the average person needs a shortcut to, or a way out of thinking about, serious art. It’s true that we live in a time of dumbed down culture and poptimism. But I (and I have said this before in this space) believe that the average person has far more sophisticated taste than our culture currently gives them credit for, and hence tries to sell to them. In our poptimist era, it can be easy to forget that work like Picasso’s, while complex, is still very mainstream and widely enjoyed.
I wonder if the “that’s problematic” product was always really selling, not an easy way of telling yourself you didn’t have to pay attention to, or try to understand, "fancy" art, but a way out of seriously thinking about how best to contextualise this art.
Because really, to me, the most depressing facet of the “that’s problematic” product is that it seems to argue against better representation. Take even the “problematic” denouncement. Do people, in general, go to look at art or read novels because they think whoever made it/them is un-problematic? This would suggest that what we look for in art, and sophisticated writing and music, is a sense of moral simplicity and righteousness.
I can’t describe exactly what it is I am looking for when I go to a gallery to see a brilliant painting or photograph or read a novel or an essay by a writer I love. The closest I can get is to say that, in the best case, they will have articulated a feeling or a sense I had about something that I could not articulate myself, and I will feel that there is a mysterious shared essence between all of us, even those of us who ostensibly have nothing in common.
Often what they will have articulated is not a positive feeling or sense, but something unsettling. Yet there is, I think, enormous comfort to be found in the fact that they sense it too, the thing which unsettles me. And that they have managed to articulate it. Then I will think about the time and effort they spent trying to get to what it was they ended up making, which is such an act of generosity, whatever else they did in their life. I’ll leave the museum thinking: Yep, this is what it’s all about. This is what we’re all doing here.
If this doesn’t make sense to you that doesn’t matter. There is no prescribed, valid way to appreciate art. You might like it for a different reason. But I am guessing it’s not because you like looking at the work of someone unproblematic. Foregrounding a quality which does not relate to why people like art as an argument for better representation in art does not strike me really as an argument for better representation, as much as against it.
And really. Is that all we have to offer as women, that we aren’t problematic? I mean, is it even true that women are not problematic? I don’t think you should read my writing because I’m not problematic. I think you should read it because it's excellent. One exhausting aspect of living as a woman in a patriarchal society is that you must constantly prove your humanity to people who do not want to acknowledge it. Pretending that women are uniformly saintly and virtuous is nothing more than another means of denying our humanity, and I refuse to participate in it. We can be idealised saints or real people. Not both. (This is true for other marginalised groups too.)
The best argument for representation has never been at the moral level, but rather at the aesthetic one. When we forget that, we end up with a representation culture that permits work which portrays a narrow version of the experience of the marginalised identity only: one which will make an audience feel benevolent for engaging with the work. Because when we frame art as something worthy of engaging with for the easy sense of moral righteousness it will grant us, we are not really framing it as art, and rather as an object of charity.
One of the most insidious elements of the Gadsby “that’s problematic” product has always been the underlying assumption that better representation wouldn’t make art in general more interesting, more complicated, stranger, and more beautiful. No. It would make everything hyper-simplistic, stupid, and aesthetically banal or ugly.
It is an argument which essentially says: Better representation is when we take away all the Picassos and replace them with hashtags and bad, snarky jokes written on primary colour placards. I don’t want that. Who would want that? And I don’t think that is a step towards anything better either.
I can’t draw a line between “Pablo-matic” and a culture which would engage seriously and fully with the work of female artists, or any other marginalised identity. My view is that the “that’s problematic” product has taken us even further away from that than we would otherwise be.
I saw some people on social media saying that the backlash to this risked throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and forgetting that misogyny is bad at all. But we are talking here about two very different sets of baths and babies. Gadsby never really made an argument against misogyny in the art world, as far as I can see. The entire “that’s problematic” bath deserves to be emptied out of the window and into the street, baby and all.
One of the most insidious elements of living as a woman in a deeply patriarchal society is being patronised and condescended to, and thus dehumanised, constantly. That a product like Gadsby’s, much like a Dove advert, does this under the guise of empowerment is especially grotesque. And then, more grotesque still, to have this framed as something that women in general see as a positive, something which is doing any of us a favour. Many of us don’t see it this way and never have. The likes of Gadsby directly profit from the 'that's problematic' product, it doesn't do anything positive for the rest of us.
Till next time xxxxx
I did this fun “afterthoughts” thing for Tank Magazine which is up now, where you watch a film with a friend and talk about it after. Featuring my very beautiful and glamorous actor friend Lewis.
Here is the pre-order link for Lazy City for various places in the UK and US. It’s a bit problematic in places but you should read it anyway 😉.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
This exhibition at the Ulster Museum by Hannah Starkey celebrating some of the women who have worked to build peace in the North of Ireland is so brilliant and treats women so seriously and with such respect. I am writing about it in more detail elsewhere but go see if you’re in Belfast.
At The Edge of the Woods by Kathryn Bromwich. A novel out this week which I’ve liked a lot. I tend not to write too much about the novels I am reading on here because it’s usually old stuff so it doesn’t feel like it fits the category of “recent” and because I like to let my thoughts settle for a while. But this is out now and really great and I haven’t seen loads of publishing hype around it so why not mention it!
I’ve been out looking for nice flowers a lot recently, I think they’re looking very good this year. Can’t figure out if I’m imagining it or not. But here are some good ones.
I think one thing this misses though is that there just aren't that if you're visibly queer or nonwhite or a woman there aren't many ways to achieve mainstream artistic success that don't involve somehow making a political critique of the mainstream. It is much easier for a white guy to be recognized as an esthete than it is for other kinds of people. In my experience if you're someone like Gadsby and you maintain your integrity and don't practice some kind of its problematic reduction, qyou just get ignored. And on the other side, the culture is always willing to find and elevate (and then tear down) Gadsbys. The point of selling, praising, and consuming this kind of facile product was precisely the fact that it was so easy to dismiss.
In this case, we have completely lost the idea that, you know, there is a moral obligation to treat people well, and Picasso ignored that obligation. It's fine to like his art, but it's not fine to argue that his genius excuses him mistreating people, because that is precisely the attitude that allowed him during his life to mistreat people (my view of him is influenced by reading the memoir of his second wife, whose career he destroyed, by threatening the galleries that showed her work, after she left him), People are flawed, but they should aspire to live better than he did. And it is precisely in evaluating our culture heroes that we ought to really interrogate their behavior. It's that aporia (his is really not behavior that we ought to extol, even if we like his work) that makes the misogynists so uncomfortable, and dismissing any critique of his life (or conflating his life with his work) is key to their ongoing progress of rolling back women's equality.
Really enjoyed this piece, as always. And I agree with most of it.
But I do think the line “Gadsby has essentially made a career out of pointing at things and saying “that’s problematic!” is a bit unfair. Maybe I’m just being protective of a fellow Australian, but Nanette is much more thoughtful than just “that’s problematic”. I saw Gadsby’s next stand up show after Nanette (‘Douglas’) live in Melbourne, and it was excellent. Full of depth, lots of soul.
Sadly, they seem to have jumped the shark a bit with this exhibit. But if you haven’t already, I really would recommend watching Nanette - I think it’s a great piece of art.