On Tuesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the latest artist on the “Cancel Culture” chopping block, Paul Gauguin. Video and partial transcript below:
Paul Gauguin died in 1903, age 54, and it wasn’t like people haven’t known that he was kind of a scumbag for a really long time. His personal life was in shambles, he treated people horribly — but I was not aware that we are now going to be in the business of going back into history and determining when people did bad stuff and then canceling them.
There’s literally a piece in The New York Times called, “Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?”
Museums are reassessing the legacy of an artist who had sex with teenage girls and called the Polynesian people he painted “savages.”
Okay, so that’s bad stuff. [But] also, is his art good? I’m highly irritated by this notion that we can’t separate the art from the artist in terms of appreciating art. Now, it may give you a better understanding of their motivations when they were painting to understand what they were thinking, but that does not change the actual art. It doesn’t change the art itself, right.
If the art itself is good, then the art itself ought to be seen as good. It should not be based purely on the sort of deconstructionist narrative that people in the past did bad stuff, therefore, we can’t look at their art anymore. This is stupid. So according to The New York Times:
“Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?”
That’s the startling question visitors hear on the audio guide as they walk through the “Gauguin Portraits” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The show, which runs through Jan. 26, focuses on Paul Gauguin’s depictions of himself, his friends and fellow artists, and of the children he fathered and the young girls he lived with in Tahiti.
The standout portrait in the exhibition is “Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893). It pictures Gauguin’s teenage lover, holding a fan.
The artist “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, ‘marrying’ two of them and fathering children,” reads the wall text. “Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.”
In other words, he was a douchebag. But everybody knows he was a douchebag. I’m fine with examining Paul Gaugin’s life. That’s fine, we should always understand the dark sides of history. But this attempt to quote unquote “cancel” a dude 120 years after his death is fairly ridiculous, is it not? Can’t we just appreciate the art for what it is — understand that it came from a bad place, this was a bad man — and then also recognize that the art is interesting and has something to say.
If we are now going to get into the business of examining the sins, great or small, of any person who creates art, there’s not gonna be a lot of art. Turns out that a huge number of artists were horrible, horrible people. As my friend Andrew Klavan likes to say, “talent falls on the smart and the dumb, on the good and the evil alike.” But according to The New York Times, it’s time to cancel Gauguin.
Born in Paris, the son of a radical journalist, Gauguin spent his early years in Peru before returning to France. He took up painting in his 20s, while working as a stockbroker, a profession he would soon give up — along with his wife and children — to make art full time. He set sail for Tahiti in 1891, searching for the exotic surroundings he had known as a boy in Peru. Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, cohabiting with adolescent girls, fathering more children, and producing his best-known paintings.
In the international museum world, Gauguin is a box-office hit. There have been a half-dozen exhibitions of his work in the last few years alone, including important shows in Paris, Chicago and San Francisco. Yet in an age of heightened public sensitivity to issues of gender, race and colonialism, museums are having to reassess his legacy.
A couple of decades ago, an exhibition on the same theme “would have been a great deal more about formal innovation,” said Christopher Riopelle, a co-curator of the National Gallery show. Now, everything must be viewed “in a much more nuanced context,” he added.
So in other words, it used to focus on his art, [but] now it’s going to focus on the fact we don’t like him anymore. By the way, for a long time, the Left was very much in vogue with Paul Gauguin because Paul Gauguin had abandoned his wife and kids and was seen as a political radical. So only now are they beginning to realize, “Oh, you mean that the political radicalism went along with him mistreating young girls and treating native peoples horribly?”
…The show was co-produced with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and opened in Ottawa in late May. A few days before the opening, the museum’s newly appointed director, Sasha Suda, and the exhibition’s curators decided to edit some of the wall texts after touring the show. Nine labels were changed to avoid culturally insensitive language, according to the museum’s press office.
In Ottawa, the title “Head of a Savage, Mask” was shown with an extended label explaining that the words ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian,’ “considered offensive today, reflect attitudes common to Gauguin’s time and place.” Elsewhere, his “relationship with a young Tahitian woman” was changed to “his relationship with a 13- or 14-year-old Tahitian girl.”
By the way, those changes are fine. I don’t see any real problem with being more specific in your description of Gauguin, but as far as quote unquote, “canceling” him, I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.
To other museum professionals, re-examining the lives of past artists from a 21st-century perspective is risky, because it could lead to the boycott of great art.
“The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” said Vicente Todolí, who was Tate Modern’s director when it staged a major Gauguin exhibition in 2010, and is now the artistic director of the Pirelli HangarBicocca art foundation in Milan.”
“Once an artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world,” he said. Otherwise, he cautioned, we would stop reading the anti-Semitic author Louis-Ferdinand Céline, or shun Cervantes and Shakespeare if we found something unsavory about them.
That, of course, is correct. But because he was a bad guy, apparently we’re now supposed to cancel him. … The notion that we are going to quote unquote, “cancel” people 120 years after the death because they were bad when they lived — there’s no limit, there’s no limiting principle here. It turns out that by historic standards, most people were bad. It turns out in a hundred years, most people will think we’re bad. So if you like what is being done with Paul Gauguin, then by all means, recognise that in 100 years it will be done to you.
That is not to justify Gaugin’s behavior, [he] was, again, for the war for the fourth time, a douchebag when he was alive. But the attempt to cancel artist and say we can’t show their exhibitions anymore because they’re very bad people, that is not going to end well for the artistic community above all.
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