Against Morality, Rosanna McLaughlin, Floating Opera Press, pp. 88, softcover $17.00
Art lovers of a certain age will remember the old joke about painters: the Impressionists paint what they see, the Expressionist paint what they feel, the Socialist Realists paint what they hear. Socialist Realism was, of course, the style of art exclusive to the Soviet Union, dictated by the Politburo in the last century: relentlessly upbeat, utopia attainted, man’s love for his tractor the height of romance, all the dead died heroically in the service of the state—or Party. Mao once criticized a painter because his birds looked unhappy; in a Communist state even the birds must be shown happy.
In her little book Against Morality Rosanna McLaughlin parallels that historical image of Socialist Realism with its contemporary manifestation that she calls “Liberal Realism,” which “over the past decade” has made ”a concerted attempt to make art communicate clear and approvable messages, to clean up the canon, to preach a sanctioned set of tenets, ironing out any of the ambivalences that make art more. Morality has become … the bar by which we measure whether something is good or bad”—morality, of course, used ironically here, as in the book’s title. “We now live in a world where artworks are rubber-stamped by people sitting in Teams meetings, cross-checking applications against a ten-point plan for morally upstanding art.” Good art, certainly great, on the other hand, she argues, must be allowed ambiguity and ambivalence, a variety of interpretation, multiplicity of meaning, shock value and sometimes transgressiveness, the ability to astound.
McLaughlin’s monograph has something of the manifesto about it, but has more of the personal essay. Systematic organization is not her forte: she jumps from idea to idea in an impressionistic, rather random way; more gets touched on than settled, unevenly. But in the end she comes to the conclusion that I think matters most: “The logic that drives Liberal Realism is the same as that which underpins contemporary identity politics more broadly.” Exactly: Liberal Realism is not so much about art, aesthetics, as it is about politics.
Because it is about politics, there are no aesthetic characteristics common to the works of Liberal Realism, as, to a degree, there were for Socialist Realism. As a political phenomenon, Liberal Realism is new, and has formed no “school,” but it includes the practice of re-evaluating past works by its new criteria—in ways that foreclose ambiguous interpretations.
Let’s take for example two paintings of Velazquez, his two greatest portraits: one, Juan de Pareja, his servant, the other Pope Innocent X. If we were to try to decide which is the greater painting, by aesthetic standards, we might debate endlessly; if we were to apply the standards of Liberal Realism, there would be no question: Juan de Pareja, of course, who was both a slave and an African, while the Pope was—well, only the Pope. Our contemporary concerns with class and race would elevate such a figure of long marginalized groups, as a matter of aesthetic reparations: although, of course, it would not be aesthetics at all, but politics.
This distinction becomes even clearer in the furor surrounding Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, a painting depicting the body of the young black boy, Emmett Till, murdered by racists in Mississippi. Till’s mother had insisted that her son be buried in an open casket so that the damage done to his badly beaten body would be evident to all, and it was this body in this casket that Schutz chose to paint. Her painting was included in the Whitney Biennale in 2017—and created a scandal. A group of young black artists began a protest and signed a letter written by Hannah Black demanding that the painting be removed, in fact destroyed (although it was only on loan.) I will quote a little more of the letter than McLaughlin does: “the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about black people [,] because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun.” The vulgar flippancy of the last phrase reveals sufficiently the level of Black’s sensibility, but her letter did set off an uproar, to which I added a little.
The title of my essay—”Open Casket and Cultural Appropriation” (Antioch Review, 2017)—indicates the issue here, that cultural appropriation is the identity groups’ claim that any material about their group is their exclusive intellectual property to the exclusion of treatment by any outsider: here, specifically, a white woman has no right to paint a black child. But note that this is a purely political decision, in no way an aesthetic one. There is no indication that Hannah Black or any of the 30 other signers of her letter had even seen the picture—or that it would have mattered if they had. McLaughlin cites Zadie Smith’s response: “I turned from the painting, not offended, not especially shocked or moved, not even terribly engaged by it,” and moved on. Fair enough, a more or less aesthetic response, no reason whatever to burn Open Casket. Nevertheless, McLaughlin notes, this protest and others like it have rendered the art establishment ever more eager to do nothing to offend the identity cohorts.
In other less blatant but more extensive ways Liberal Realism follows the path of identity politics—for instance, in viewing certain groups as having been, historically, unjustly overlooked and in need of contemporary rehabilitation, women artists in particular. McLaughlin adduces a number of such figures, of whom Artemisia Gentileschi is the most well-known. Artemisia was raped, sued her rapist, and won, but that is hardly the reason for her renown. “Despite being wildly successful during her lifetime,” McLaughlin writes, “and working as a court painter at the highest level, she has latterly been transformed into a cipher for Me Too feminism and the paradigmatic example of the ‘overlooked woman artist.’” Viewed so, her most famous painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes is viewed biographically, her revenge against the patriarchy, with a message, perhaps, for the ages on how overbearing men ought be treated.
But, of course, the slaying of Holofernes was a standard subject among Renaissance painters, depicted by Botticelli, Mantegna, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio and many other male painters. So close in style is Artemisia’s to Caravaggio’s that his may have served as her model. “The obsession with moral and biographical narratives is so totalizing, so compelling and so flattening, that it compromises our ability to focus on Artemisia’s art…. In the name of ‘saving’ her legacy, the very thing to which she dedicated her life is at risk of being compromised.” Other contemporary women artists with whom I must confess no familiarity, McLaughlin cites as victims of their own biographies, so compelling are the events of their lives as to overshadow their art: one was murdered, perhaps by her husband. One remembers how crucial victimhood figures in identity politics.
McLaughlin’s personal experiences play an important role in her book, but none matches the final one that concludes it, a visit in 2020 to Documenta 15 in Kassel Germany. Documenta, a quinquennial affair, was a bringing together of the world’s artistic literati by the Germans in atonement for its crimes against art under the Nazis and an attempt in greater understanding and fellowship.
But this year’s Documenta was different. Administration had been handed over to a Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupta who in turn delegated responsibility to other collectives until finally the number reached 1,500. Emphasis would thus be on the marginalized of the world, particularly the Global South, and traditional European art was relegated to a back seat, way back. Ruangrupa’s exhibition guidebook declaimed, “Make friends, not art!” Fifteen venues sprang up and the opening session was a S&M fetish party, pandemonium in the House of Babel. McLaughlin saw this Documenta as an inevitable consequence of Liberal Realism gone worldwide. It had an unusually ignoble ending, however: one of its posters was found to include anti-Semitic images, including an Orthodox Jewish man with fangs and a bowler hat with the letters SS. Newspapers ran the picture; Israel and Germany protested; artists began removing their work. Covering the poster failed to quell the outrage. “The director of Documenta stood down, and the entire project fell to pieces as the world watched on.”
The subject of Against Morality is art, but art to the degree that it has been captured by the tribalism of identity politics. In this sense, it constitutes a smaller part of a greater whole. McLaughlin sees the impulses of the left-wing identity politics as helping to generate the mirror image of the right-wing version, triumphant in Trumpism, that uses the same sort of tribalist arguments. In any event, I would place her book as part of this larger argument and encourage its reading in conjunction with some of the more recent works on the identity issue that I have found most useful: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind; Rethinking Identity (2018); Robert Boyers’ The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies (2019); Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke (2023); and Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (2023).
Gorman Beauchamp is the author of a book on Jack London and essays on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to science fiction; gormanb@umich.edu. Beauchamp is also an associate professor emeritus of humanities at the University of Michigan. He last appeared in these pages in the fall of 2025 with “Acting White in Black Literature.”
Photo by Martin Martz on Unsplash