I was prompted to write this in response to Anwyn Crawford’s excellent article on Overland regarding the trajectory of Nick Cave’s own brand of misogyny, and his elevation to the Australian Royal Court of Artistic Genius.
For those who don’t know, Cave personally selected the cover photograph for the Australian release of his new novel The Death of Bunny Munro (which he has claimed was written in two months and on his iPhone). Whereas other releases feature this or this on the cover, the delightful image Australian consumers are treated to is this:
A debate is raging at Overland over the subject matter of Crawford’s article; however, very few opponents are actually responding to any of her arguments. Instead, she has been branded with the same pedestrian insults used whenever anyone (especially a woman) finds offence in something pounced upon by a section of the community insistent upon loving it. The difference in this case is that Overland’s audience are generally intelligent, articulate folk with, I would argue, liberal values. That some would reduce themselves to the same kind of sexist, tired arguments employed by the slavering masses who regularly misspell things in the news.com forums is depressing beyond belief. As commentor Kalinda says:
When will people learn to respond to polemical, engaged intelligent women without reducing them to sexless stereotypes?... It’s unacceptable for people who consider themselves radicals or left-wingers to conduct themselves in such a sexist way, completely reinforcing all the dominant modes the right uses to silence and dismiss women.
Indeed, Crawford’s original article was not the offended spoutings of an hysterical wowser unfamiliar with her subject matter. She demonstrates a very intimate familiarity with Cave’s career, and even confesses to a conflicted love for his earlier work. I can’t help but suspect that what Cave’s proponents are really taking offence to is not Crawford’s accusations of Cave’s misogyny but of his laziness and ultimately a neogothic pomp and circumstance whose ostentatiousness disguises his desire for admiration and artistic plaudits.
It’s his transformation into an antipodean Elvis Costello – growing old, mild and respectably bourgeois along with his audience – that really makes me mad. Not because I believe that Cave has sold out or betrayed his musical talent – he had precious little to begin with – but because the deference paid to him and to his work grows in inverse proportion to its increasing mediocrity, to its juvenile silliness and self-parody.
Crawford highlights what so often goes unmentioned within cultural circles (who at times seem as incapable of rational debate as the fiercely anti-art philistines they presume are incapable of recognizing genius) – that very frequently, cultural cringe leads us to not only ignore the Emporer’s New Clothes, but declare them avante-garde, pre-emptive and ultimately a fine reflection of our own cutting edge artistic values.
Ultimately, even if you disagree with Crawford’s analysis it is undoubtedly a well thought out and articulate one. It exemplifies the kind of interesting writing featured on Overland (which, incidentally, is holding its Subscriberthon this week - $39 concession for the year, go on I dare you..) and doesn’t deserve to be sneeringly dismissed, as reader Fotis Kapetorpoulos did today, as “pure undergraduate feminist critique from the 80s – worse, it smacks of Anglo puritanical, sexless debasement of the art.”
Kapetorpoulos goes on to say:
Ms Crawford writes, 'like many women, I have troubled relationship with the sexism and, yes, misogyny that continues to shape pop music'- she must mean like the very few sexless Anglo middle class women I represent - as most of the Greek, Spanish, African and Italian women I know love Cave’s sexually dark malaise, his overture to death and lust.
Sexless. Anglo. Puritanical. Pearl clutching. Sensationalist. Hysterical. Frigid.
In addition to these (expected) accusations is another one: that of inferiority. For all his embrace of Spanish culture (which he documents in detail), Kapetorpoulos is exhibiting cultural bigotry that oppresses not only Anglo women but also the Latin women he’s seeking to define as hot-blooded, up for it, feisty, dark sex machines. The orientalism of Asian women is very well documented in Australia, but less so is that of Latinas and the ‘Jungle Goddesses’. Greek, Spanish, African and Italian women are not inherently more accepting of (read: able to appreciate because they don’t let their frigid white Anglo chastity belts get in the way) radically confronting sexuality in art. To make such a blanket statement is about as stupid as saying that most of the white men I know ride bicycles, vote Green and hate sexism and therefore all white men must be like that. I mean, if only, right?
But perhaps most infuriating is the refusal to engage with any of Crawford’s arguments. What she is essentially doing is questioning whether or not those with a feminist philosophy or a concern for equality can ignore blatant misogyny when it comes to art – and if they can, is that even a bad thing?
Instead of labeling her prudish and puritanical (YOU INSULTED THE KING! YOU DON’T GET IT, HE’S DARK AND SHIT AND YOU CAN’T HANDLE SEX, PRUDEY PRUDE, WHY DON’T YOU GO AND CLUTCH SOME PEARLS!) why not respond rationally to her arguments? If Nick Cave (or any artist under criticism for capitalizing on oppression to sell their work) is indeed so good and so subversive and so clever, it should be extremely easy to mount an argument based on why that is the case.
I suspect, however, that the majority of people criticizing Crawford (and note, I’m not suggesting a defence of misogyny in art is impossible) are either actually incapable of articulating convincingly what it is they find so exceptional about Cave’s work and WHY it isn’t misogynistic in nature – or they're incapable of articulating convincingly why it’s exceptional IN SPITE OF its misogyny and indeed why it’s possible for the twain to coexist.
It’s frustrating that what could be the basis for a fascinating conversation on the how far should be the limits of morality when it comes to art has descended instead into something so superficially defensive. As Karen points out, it wasn’t until Roman Polanski’s arrest that she sincerely started questioning the morality of loving his films. Crawford’s article should have been the starting point for a conversation about the truly confrontational nature of art – loving it in spite of what it draws upon and refuses to apologise for.
I, for one, am not particularly familiar with Nick Cave’s ouevre. I read the first chapter of The Death of Bunny Munro and found it to be as predictably cock-focused as lots of other inane texts dressed up as deeply confronting explorations of masculinity (more on that in a follow up post).
But the image chosen for the Australian edition of TDOBM (which is vaguely where all this started from) is offensive to me. I think it’s just another example of a disembodied female body part being used to sell something while pretending to be ‘high art’. It offends me as a writer, as a woman and as human who thinks we can all be a little bit better than that, a little bit more imaginative.
I find the defence of blatant sexism in art to be more infuriating than the defence of it in marketing and pop culture. It’s a calculated attempt to excuse laziness and titillation as irony. It is no different to the educated men I attended university with – men who were well versed in gender studies, media, liberalism and social justice – talking about going out to ‘find some sluts’ and claiming that their innate left wing goodness meant that their sentiment couldn’t possibly be aggressive or violent.
But ultimately, I’m offended that should I, or Crawford, or any other woman from any other part of the world, express the opinion that we are offended by imagery used specifically to disembody women and turn them into nothing more than a passive sexual object to project frustrations onto, that we are by turns ‘sexless’, ‘frigid’, ‘too ugly to fuck anyway’, ‘jealous’, ‘angry’, ‘humourless’, ‘uncultured’, ‘not getting it’ or, my favourite, ‘missing the point’.
What, pray, is the point of a crotch shot of a girl of undetermined aged lying spread eagled on a bed? Explain that to me - I'll listen, I really will, but not if you call me a frigid bitch who just doesn't get it. Because I'll be forced to believe what is probably the truth - that you like looking at disembodied female parts because you find them sexy, and you don't want to have to defend that to anyone so you'll pretend its culturally advanced in some way to sidestep the fact that what you're actually doing is getting off on misogyny. Frankly, I'd have a lot more respect for people if they just put it like that rather than trying to pretend that what they're doing is challenging the masses.
As Crawford writes:
Cave is both a rampant misogynist and an arch-snob but it’s actually his snobbery that bothers me more – or rather, the way that his snobbery, amplified and encouraged by others, lends to his misogyny an air of respectability, as if it were something to be admired.
Well, call me a frigid, sexless, Anglo, jealous bitch – but I’m more inclined to find it dull, predictable and tiresome rather than admirable.
I guess I’m just not as cultured as a lot of other people. Or sexual.
What do you think? Can we separate art from misogyny or racism or oppression in general? Can something be specifically glorifying these things and still be good? Would we not accept it from racist art but excuse it when it comes to sexism?
Next post: A consideration of the misogyny and subsequent celebration of 'high art' literature.