PAmong the reasons for Donald Trump's triumph, there is the machismo of the champion, and then, in reverse, the cultural “wokism”, alive on American campuses or in art, which has just taken a big uppercut. The white but also Latino electorate may have been put off by ideas, works or practices aimed at essentializing minorities while valorizing them. This “woke” avant-garde, viewed with leniency by the base of the Democratic camp, has cut itself off from a real, popular and right-wing America.
“We have gone too far. » This formula, in the form of a mea culpa, was heard on November 6 from the mouths of American figures from the art world, present at the Paris Photo show, at the Grand Palais. These are in no way aimed at the fight against discrimination or the #metoo movement, of course, but at the way in which race and gender have vampirized creation as well as research in the social sciences.
Uncle Sam took leadership over a cultural tribalism, which the writer Philip Roth prophesied in The Spot (Gallimard, 2002). In 2017, as Donald Trump begins his first term, the notion of cultural appropriation becomes a very popular accusation. Two white and committed female filmmakers, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow, are attacked because their respective films, The Prey et Detroitdeal a little or a lot with the black question. Another illegitimacy trial is brought against the painter Dana Schutz, on the grounds that her painting Open Casketdenouncing the 1955 assassination of a black teenager by white supremacists, depicts black suffering. The same year, after a huge controversy, heterosexual actress Scarlett Johansson gave up playing a transgender icon on screen.
Since then, it is better for the artist in the United States not to venture outside of his culture, especially if he is White; before we praised its universalism, today we denounce its creative colonialism. This is how in 2020 three American museums postponed and reduced an exhibition by the white American artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), on the grounds that his paintings denouncing the Ku Klux Klan would be an appropriation of black pain.
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It is in this same country that no prestigious publisher wanted to publish Seth Greenland's sixth novel, American plan (ed. Liana Levi, 2023), on the grounds that he is White and that his main character is a black actress. It is only in the United States that we ask ourselves a question unthinkable elsewhere: can a white artist photograph black people? We could multiply the examples. The actor Tom Hanks endorsed this jurisprudence in 2022 by saying that he would today refuse the role of the homosexual suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993), which won him an Oscar, due to “the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy”. Terrified, actor Vincent Dedienne then retorted, on France Inter, that if Tom Hanks is not gay, Denzel Washington, his lawyer in the film, is not a lawyer in life.
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