Moving on from Alex Ross
Don's latest in City Journal
This evening, I’m pleased to share my latest published in City Journal, on the fall from grace of New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. Enjoy!
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Thank you,
DB
To Whom It May Concern:
If a white conductor is the artist and the orchestra his instrument why isn't it culture appropriation to play a black composer's music?
There was a white establishment modern artist named Dana Schutz (a woman) who exhibited an expressionist-type painting of Emmet Till at a Whitney Biennial a few years ago. (You could only tell it was Emmet Till by the title.) She was accused of appropriating the victim status of Till and I think the Whitney took the painting down, or did something else contrite.
If a horribly oppressed white woman (one of her paintings went for $1.4M at auction) cannot get away with something like that how on earth can a member of the ultimate oppressor group do it? Surely, the next step is to demand that conductors must be black in order to interpret the lived black experience.
– Confused, lonely and freaked out