Fiddling while London burns

You think Hillary cries like a girl? Brit dhimmi transvestite Grayson Perry (above) -- AKA Claire -- best known for his ceramics and cross-dressing, runs and hides when the going gets tough (see below for details). Perry won the UKs Turner Prize in 2003 "Not for what she/he calls the 'banal violence' depicted on his vases - which up the ante in the 'taboo factor' stakes - but for the pink genital bows of his/Claire'€™s dress," according to BBC London.

"For me, dressing up when I go out is a political act," prattles transvestite potter Grayson Perry in "Why Men Wear Frocks," a "witty yet frank and revealing [UK Channel 4] look at what drives the compulsion many men feel to wear women's clothing." Perry is one of those "groundbreaking" artists who has been "heralded for his controversial explorations of religious imagery, which include a vase entitled 'Transvestite Brides of Christ,'" writes PJM editor David J. Rusin. But there is a black hole in the heart of the rarefied world of contemporary British art, explains Rusin, who names Perry "the ideal poster boy -- or perhaps poster girl" for "the preemptive surrender of public freedoms in the name of appeasing the continent’s restive Muslim underclass." Let's set the scene with a few exerpts from that Channel 4 interview:

There's still the basic misconceptions about trannies, that they're gay or freaks or whatever. And there probably are gays, and freaks, among trannies, but no more than any other section of the male population' . . .

I'm not expecting everyone to dress up like me, because I adopt quite an extreme style. But I'm kind of saying that if I can do this, it's okay to do what you want to do.

But I think transvestism is a symptom of sexism and lack of tolerance. If the intolerance disappears, and there wasn't this sexism that insisted that men behave in a certain 'male' way, then transvestism would dry up, to an extent. It would still be around, but it would be a lot less common, I think.

"Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth" by JMW Turner, exhibited 1842. (Oil on canvas. Tate Collection) "It is famously said that Turner conceived this image while lashed to the mast of a ship during an actual storm at sea. This seems to be nothing more than fiction, but the story has endured as a way of demonstrating Turner’s full-blooded engagement with the world around him" according to the Tate, an ironic contrast with the weak-kneed disengagement from the world around them on the part of contemporary Turner Prize winners like Grayson Perry (top photo), the self-absorbed "tranny" iconoclast whose iconoclasm bows down in dhimmitude to Islamicist threats.

Even as he postures for his peers with protests of persecution by traditional British society [Do they still have that? --ed], the artist knowingly avoids confronting the real source of sexism and lack of tolerance in his own backyard. PJMs Rusin explains:

“I’ve censored myself,” Perry told the Times, admitting that he treads lightly around radical Islam. “With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time.” Self-censorship thus boils down to self-preservation. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Dr. Sanity might diagnose displacement, the "separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening." And yet, if the Times is to be believed, artists like Perry "are fêted around the world for their willingness to shock." We're shocked, all right, at the dhimmitudinous cowering of self-proclaimed seekers of wisdom and truth. The "regurgitating regurgitations" of the Whitney Biennial on this side of the pond come to mind. How did a proud tradition of artistic engagement with the world come down to this? PajamasXpress blogger Roger Kimball of Roger's Rules has some thoughts. Struck by "the prominence of the word 'change' in the [current presidential] campaign, he ponders the "liberal obsession with change":

One important progenitor is the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill was an extraordinary and multifaceted figure, but for the catechism of modern liberalism the Mill that matters is the Mill of On Liberty (1859) . . . a masterpiece of liberal polemic. Its core ideas are as the air we breathe: unnoticed because ubiquitous.

Mill’s arguments and pronouncements about man as a “progressive being,” the extent of individual autonomy, the limits of acceptable moral and legal censure, the importance of innovation and (perhaps his most famous phrase) “experiments in living” are all familiar to the point of invisibility. Likewise his corollary insistence on the poverty of custom, prejudice, and tradition . . .

Throughout history, Mill argues, the authors of such innovations have been objects of ridicule, persecution, and oppression; they have been ignored, silenced, exiled, imprisoned, even killed. But (Mill continues) we owe every step of progress, intellectual as well as moral, to the daring of innovators.

"But the success of Mill’s teaching in the court of public sentiment says nothing about the cogency of his arguments," notes Kimball, quoting the philosopher David Stone:

In the intellectual and moral dissolution of the West in the twentieth century, every step has depended on conservatives being disarmed, at some critical point, by the [They all laughed at Christopher] Columbus argument; by revolutionaries claiming that any resistance made to them is only another instance of that undeserved hostility which beneficial innovators have so regularly met with in the past.

Artists like Grayson Perry are the effete heirs of that liberal polemic, grown intellectually soft and lazy in the absence of any serious challenge to their comfortable echo chamber of anti-establishment preening, fiddling while London burns.

Update: Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insantities, now open for business, is the perfect antidote to intellectual softness and laziness.

Comments

[goomp]

Fanatic Bush hatred by "Liberals"is a prime example of the displacement Dr. Sanity describes.

[Gayle Miller]

None of these idiotic preening nincompoops seems to grasp that THEIR HEADS would reach the chopping block FIRST, should radical Islam ever gain sufficient traction!

Talk about dumb bunnies!

[HNAV]

such a fascinating read...

Turner's work is a perfect metaphor for today.

in the stormy world, the liberal denial is busy digging holes into the refuge, the ship that keeps them from drowning in the Jihadist waters...

the self loathing of the left, the mantra which has brought so many to popular 'artistic' notoriety, is not only juvenile and ignorant, it is truly self destructive.

would Turner see it as 'art', or be embarrassed.