The Citizen's anonymous editorial, and our reply

Posted on March 7, 2010 at 11:22 a.m.

Maltreating Mayer
Ottawa Citizen March 6, 2010

Silly debates about the intersection of art and identity politics seem so 1990s. Those years were the heyday of protests against curriculums and canons that were over-represented by DWM -- Dead White Males.

In fairness to the activists, they did provide a service by showing that many neglected artists were unjustly neglected. The canon of great American literature, for example, was expanded, rightfully so, to include many African-American writers who were every bit as significant as Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

But in some cases the concern for diversity mutated into a fetish. This was the age, remember, of deconstruction and postmodernism, when scholars and students were discouraged from making objective aesthetic judgments. In the interest of diversity, professors should teach rap songs alongside Shakespeare because, after all, who's to say that one is better than the other?

We certainly hope that this old-style identity politics is not behind the attempt to intimidate Marc Mayer, the new director of the National Gallery.

As the Citizen reported this week, Mayer is "getting flack" from the arts community because, in a television interview, he dared suggest that as an art lover he is interested more in the "excellence" of the art than the skin colour of the artist. Mayer has now been forced to reassure angry multiculturalists that the gallery is "not a racist institution."

The National Gallery, and indeed most Canadian cultural institutions, bend over backwards to showcase the country's diversity, and Mayer has never suggested that the gallery do otherwise.

He was, however, suggesting in that brief interview that it's possible and maybe even desirable to judge art according to its objective merits. It's sad if in some quarters that remains a controversial idea.

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View the editorial at its source by clicking here: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/travel/Maltreating+Mayer/2648924/story.html

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Letter to the Editor, Ottaw Citizen
Submitted Sunday, March 7, 2010

Identity centered political struggles during the 1990s did not give rise to a perfect society in which all people are treated equally regardless of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Indeed, the Ottawa Citizen reminds us of this daily with articles on issues such as Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s removal of any reference to gay rights in a new study guide for immigrants. As such, the concerns we have raised through our open letter are not fads or fetishes, but real, contemporary social justice problems, and they affect us all.

With regard to the ongoing debate concerning cultural diversity at the National Gallery of Canada, this is not a case of “angry multiculturalists” picking on a defenseless person. It is a matter of holding an individual in a position of public trust to account. Our open letter, co-signed by numerous highly respected artists, arts professionals and academics, was prompted by our concern that the mandate of the National Gallery of Canada was, in the eyes of its director, focused on an uncritical and outmoded notion of “excellence,” one that has been used in the past to exclude people of diverse cultural backgrounds, therein perpetuating a dominant monoculture.

Canada is an ethnically and regionally diverse nation. We believe that this should be stated in the Mandate of NGC, just as it is for the Canada Council for the Arts. To suggest that challenging a Eurocentric worldview is an effort to "intimidate” a public official is absurd. Let’s try to focus on facts. We welcome NGC to issue a report outlining how it is “showcasing the country’s diversity” as part of an open and ongoing discussion in the public sphere about its role as a national institution.

Signed,
Emily Falvey (Montréal) and Milena Placentile (Winnipeg)