Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest Over Art and Culture in America
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Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest over Art and Culture in America STEVEN J. TEPPER The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London INTRODUCTION The Social Nature of Offense and Public Protest over Art and Culture In spring 2006 a Vanderbilt University fraternity hosted a themed party, "Pimps and Hos." Women were encouraged to attend dressed like prosti tutes, and male students were told to come decked out in gold chains, felted gangster hats, sunglasses, and wide-lapel velvet suits. Posters advertising the party were tacked up on and off campus, even on trees and telephone poles near my home. The event offended me. For one thing, I didn't like having to explain to my seven-year-old daughter the meaning of "ho," nor did I think much of the overtly sexual posters that hyped the party. I was also offended by what I considered the demeaning, misogynistic, and probably racist character of the event. I was upset that many of my own students uncritically embraced the theme, attended the party, and never seemed to realize that it endorsed a culture that was antithetical to the university's core principals. In fact, when I expressed my views, several women in my class politely told me to "lighten up." Think about the last time you were offended. Some readers may have to dig deep to come up with an incident. Others might feel routinely sur rounded by offensive material, perhaps Sex and the City on television, the Dixie Chicks on the radio, Victoria's Secret displays at the mall, billboards featuring emaciated models in Ralph Lauren underwear, or books about sex on the shelves of the public library. When it comes to taking offense, we all seem to have different threshold levels or tipping points. This fact was driven home in a graduate school seminar at Harvard years ago. We were discussing a chapter by political philosopher Joel Feinberg called "A Rise on the Bus" (1985). Feinberg presents a series of thirty-one possible scenarios. You are riding a bus and can't get off. Passengers get on, sit near you, and start acting out in ways that might be upsetting, beginning 2 / Introduction The Social Nature of pffense / 3 with the banal, such as singing off-key, belching, or scratching on a metal to stop what they considered to be sexually provocative dance moves and lic surface, and escalating to the more shocking, such as farting, copulating practice outfits worn by girls on the school's drill team. In Tampa, school in the adjacent seat, or even eating feces out of a bag. The tipping point at board officials banned the government report by Kenneth Starr, U.S. special which an action was so offensive as to be prohibited was different for every prosecutor, that described the details of President Clinton's sexual relations student. In fact, one—a marine fresh from six months at sea—claimed that with a White House intern. In Miami, several hundred Haitians gathered in none of the actions would bother him; he'd seen it all! Most students in the front of city hall to protest the Hollywood film How Stella Got Her Groove seminar had different tipping points at which they felt that the activity was Back because a scene in the film associates them with the AIDS virus. In so offensive it should not be allowed. Denver, a Christian group demanded that gargoyles be removed from a Offense is clearly personal and idiosyncratic; but offense can also be public library because the winged creatures were satanic and evil. In Salt the shared property of a community. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court has Lake City, a Jewish family sued the school district because their tenth-grade defined obscenity as an act of expression that merits government regulation daughter was forced to sing "The Lord Bless You and Keep You" in a Christ because it is considered patently offensive based on "community standards." mas choir concert. Whether or not such standards can, in practice, be ascertained is an open While many of these incidents seem to reflect individual judgments question. Nonetheless, our legal system tells us that the "community"— about taste and propriety, I will argue that they are fundamentally social in rather than just individuals—represents the appropriate level of analysis nature. Claims against cultural expression are social because grievances arise at which to determine levels of offensiveness. Steven Dubin, who has writ out of particular social contexts; get articulated through conversation with ten about arts conflicts in the 1980s, has described this as the "social con others; mobilized by organizations or groups; reported on by the press; and struction of acceptability," the notion that "offense" is a property of social defended, attacked, amplified, or deflected by fellow citizens. life and collective definitions—not just individual tastes and preferences My premise is straightforward. I believe conttoversies over art and ex (1992). This communal, social aspect to offense emerges clearly when there pression are symptomatic of deeper community struggles. Artworks often is public conflict over words and images. serve as lightning rods, bringing forward and giving voice to underlying Throughout America personal offense spills out into the public square tension caused by social change. When communities experience an influx when citizens object to some form of expression—books, songs, sculpture, of new populations, new institutions, new types of families, new patterns holiday displays, and flags. This book explores the social nature of offense of leisure, and new technologies, community members fight over symbols and the conditions that give rise to public controversies over cultural expres such as art and culture as a way to assert themselves. When everything feels sion. What is it about where we live, how we relate to our neighbors, our "up for grabs," people grab on to symbols as a way to make sense of change collective hopes and fears, and our local politics that combine to foment and affirm their identity and place in the world. A protest against a Hal disagreement and protest over art? By examining hundreds of disputes in loween party at a local bookstore in Denver may, on the surface, reflect dozens of U.S. cities, I argue that cultural conflict has a distinctive local concerns about paganism and blasphemy. But it most likely also expresses profile. Cities exhibit different profiles of contention based, in part, on the deeper anxieties about whether Denver is becoming more or less Christian; demographic, institutional, and political makeup Of the city. Fights over art whether traditionalists in the community feel like they are losing ground to and culture are not just the result of clashing personalities or contending newcomers who hold different beliefs. values; they also represent the democratic outcome of citizens negotiating Speaking out or joining in a protest over art is determined, in part, by the the consequences of social change within their communities. prevailing political, institutional, and public opinion climate. You are more In Boston, festival organizers canceled a play—Shakespeare's Dogs—by a likely to make a public claim against an artwork if you feel there is sufficient local theater group because it featured people, dressed as dogs, pretending support for your opinion among your neighbors, colleagues, and public to urinate on trees. In Oklahoma City, citizens demanded the resignation officials. And the political culture of a community—the nature of civic ac of a city librarian for knowingly making available the Academy Award- tivism, the history of protest, and the style of politics—helps determine the winning film The Tin Drum, which features a scene of a nine-year-old boy intensity and frequency of conflict. In some communities protest activity is having sex with a teenage girl. In Kansas City, students organized a petition routine; in others it is rare. 4 1 Introduction The Social Nature of Offense / 5 So while every conflict is unique and every offense is rooted in personal sades, abortion, and disputes over art and entertainment. Sociologist Lewis reactions, the public expression of grievances against art and culture, in the Coser recognized early on that symbolic and economic conflicts are cut aggregate, reflects patterns influenced by social change, political culture, from the same cloth; both, in his words, are "struggles overvalues or claims and the institutional makeup of a community. These patterns are what I to status, power, and scarce resources, in which the aims of the conflicting refer to as the structure of cultural conflict. groups are not only to gain the desired values, but also to neutralize, injure, or eliminate rivals" (in Oberschall 1978, 291). Like fights over land and jobs, symbolic conflicts over such things as clothing, music, food and drink, Theories of Conflict books, and visual art have significant repercussions for power and social This book is about public disagreements over music, parades, visual art, inequality. Nicola Beisel (1997), for example, writes that moral politics, books, and other forms of expressive life. These cultural objects function especially campaigns to protect children from obscenity and other harmful as powerful symbols—images, words, and sounds—evoking approbation, culture, constitute "real politics" (202). They are "real politics" because, as bewilderment, indifference, or antagonism. I am interested in the latter, and in the case of anti-vice campaigns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more specifically the conditions that give rise to overt