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Our national madness is spreading. Following in a track most famously laid down by the French Revolution, the devouring has begun.
The mob comes for the art world
On “purity spirals” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The New Criterion · Roger Kimball introduces the September issue
When we left you in June to enter our annual state of aestivation, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the principal author of The New York Times’s malignant fantasy known as “The 1619 Project,” had just won a Pulitzer Prize. The world was looking forward to the end of the shutdown caused by the Chinese virus—remember “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread”?—and the return of normality.
We are still waiting. As we write, many cities across the country are engulfed by riots, which many in the media persist in describing as “peaceful protests.” Our favorite example of this gambit was provided in late May by msnbc’s Ali Velshi, who stood in front of a burning police station and assured viewers that the “protesters” were “not, generally speaking, unruly.” For her part, Hannah-Jones was more candid. “It would be a honor,” she said, were the 2020 riots to be called “the 1619 riots.”
According to the Narrative, the riots/protests were in response to the death of George Floyd at the end of May. In fact, the death of Floyd was at most the pretext for the orgy of politically correct racialist grandstanding that continued and indeed accelerated throughout the summer. The cause was anti-civilization animus, stoked by the same fires of anti-American hatred that made the 1960s and early 1970s so cataclysmic. In their columns below, James Bowman and James Panero have more to say on the sociology and larger civilizational implications of this phenomenon.
Here, we would like to minute how the union of racialist hysteria and obeisance to the dictates of “woke” identity politics has plunged the art world, and, by extension, the world of culture generally into a destructive purity spiral. . . .
The mob comes for the art world
On “purity spirals” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The New Criterion · Roger Kimball introduces the September issue
When we left you in June to enter our annual state of aestivation, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the principal author of The New York Times’s malignant fantasy known as “The 1619 Project,” had just won a Pulitzer Prize. The world was looking forward to the end of the shutdown caused by the Chinese virus—remember “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread”?—and the return of normality.
We are still waiting. As we write, many cities across the country are engulfed by riots, which many in the media persist in describing as “peaceful protests.” Our favorite example of this gambit was provided in late May by msnbc’s Ali Velshi, who stood in front of a burning police station and assured viewers that the “protesters” were “not, generally speaking, unruly.” For her part, Hannah-Jones was more candid. “It would be a honor,” she said, were the 2020 riots to be called “the 1619 riots.”
According to the Narrative, the riots/protests were in response to the death of George Floyd at the end of May. In fact, the death of Floyd was at most the pretext for the orgy of politically correct racialist grandstanding that continued and indeed accelerated throughout the summer. The cause was anti-civilization animus, stoked by the same fires of anti-American hatred that made the 1960s and early 1970s so cataclysmic. In their columns below, James Bowman and James Panero have more to say on the sociology and larger civilizational implications of this phenomenon.
Here, we would like to minute how the union of racialist hysteria and obeisance to the dictates of “woke” identity politics has plunged the art world, and, by extension, the world of culture generally into a destructive purity spiral. . . .
