PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
AS AN AMERICAN born in the early 1980s, I feel lucky to have grown up in Miami, where our national homophobia and transphobia seemingly were buried under the sandy shores of South Beach. The Miami of my adolescence was the Miami of The Birdcage, Versace, and Madonna, and at the time, the city felt like ground zero of a post-AIDS renaissance of unabashedly—though conspicuously white—queer culture. But Miami also has a shameful history as the origin of the national campaign against gay rights that emerged thanks to Anita Bryant in the late ’70s, and now Florida has become ground zero for a renaissance of American bigotry. In March 2022, the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed into law the Parental Rights in Education Act, more commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which putatively enshrines “the fundamental rights of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children,” but which effectively opens the door to the censorship of conversations about LGBTQ+ identities in classrooms. (For example, the law directs that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3”—later expanded through grade 12, though a 2024 lawsuit carved out the right to discuss LGBTQ+ identities outside of “instruction.”) Perhaps most damagingly, the act allows parents to sue school districts that they feel have violated its policies, creating a threat of litigation that forces schools to err on the side of caution, beyond even the letter of the law.
In March 2023, a school principal in Tallahassee—Florida’s capital—was forced to resign by her school’s board after her administration failed to send the annual email notice that sixth-grade students would be shown photos of Michelangelo’s David and complaints were brought forward by parents, including one who called the work “pornographic.” The fact that the spokesperson for Florida’s Department of Education subsequently affirmed the historical and artistic merit of “classical art”—which is once again being mobilized by white-supremacist rhetoric in both the US and Europe—only proves that the law has created an oppressive system in which there is confusion over what is permissible, and consequences can be meted out without cause, or over the most minor of bureaucratic mistakes: a fascist’s dream.
In May 2023, DeSantis signed another education bill into law, HB 1069, which legislates that schools teach that “reproductive roles are binary, stable and unchangeable,” and allows anyone in a school district to request the removal of any books or other materials that contain any mention or depiction of “sexual conduct,” even if not pornographic. According to the law, the offensive materials must be pulled from classrooms and libraries “for review” within five days of a complaint being lodged, though the review period itself is indefinite. By the end of the year, Florida’s Escambia school district (to cite a much-publicized example) had a list of over 1,600 books that had been “pulled for further review to ensure compliance with the new legislation,” according to the district’s spokesperson—in other words, banned. Among these were Jane Bingham’s Classical Myth: A Treasury of Greek and Roman Legends, Art, and History; Liselotte Andersen’s Baroque and Rococo Art; Louise E. Jefferson’s The Decorative Arts of Africa; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther comics; and even Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary.
DeSantis’s weaponization of “freedom” to undermine education and curtail rights (which includes the racist 2022 Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act,” or the “Stop WOKE Act”) is obviously chilling. But with Donald Trump returned to the presidency, liberals and leftists are now once again debating the political costs of a focus on “identity politics,” which is being critiqued for emphasizing cultural over economic concerns, or symbolic over material gains. These debates are reflected in recent contemporary art discourse that reductively pits a concern with identity against a concern with aesthetics (as if these were mutually exclusive)—an inherently conservative framing that has intensified in the wake of a weakened art market and Trump’s re-election.
So that we are not doomed to repeat history, we should remember that this framing is not new. In fact, it eerily echoes the rhetoric that surfaced during a similar turn to identity in the early ’90s. In one of Artforum’s reviews of the landmark 1993 Whitney Biennial, Bruce W. Ferguson described a polarization that is all too familiar: “If you dis the show, you’re a racist or a woman-hater; while if you’re for the vision it champions, you’re a pluralist liberal pussy.”
Admittedly, centering identity in art is not unproblematic; consider, for example, the dangers of tokenization and the “soft bigotry of low expectations” (a phrase with its own problematic history, as it was first deployed by President George W. Bush to signal the purported compassion of conservatives in a 2000 speech). But the same skepticism being aimed at performative diversity initiatives in the arts should also be aimed at revanchist attempts to set identity aside, which only renders privileged markers such as whiteness and maleness the “default” subject position, as if they were not also racialized and gendered. Given the prevailing tendency to oversimplify (especially on social media), we must remain committed to thinking critically about both “identity” and “aesthetics” as multidimensional, shifting, and mutually constitutive terms. After all, there is no model of “aesthetics” that exists outside of a specific cultural formation.
Continuing the work we have been doing this season to provide some historical perspective and nuance to this debate (as in our September coverage of the Venice Biennale), in this issue, we present several texts that not only foreground queer identities but, more specifically, contend with attempts to limit the forms or expressions of queerness, whether through outright censorship or more subtle methods of policing. On our cover, we highlight the recent installation of Andy Warhol’s homoerotic photo of The Wrestlers in the exhibition “Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty” at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie; in his feature essay, Richard Meyer cites the show’s curator, Klaus Biesenbach, as hypothesizing that the US would not be “open” to an exhibition “like this.” (Certainly, it is not hard to imagine this photo—and by extension, this issue of Artforum—being targeted by the private citizens who now hold the power to censor classroom materials in Florida.) Jeremy Lybarger’s feature on the beloved and controversial artist and teacher Barbara DeGenevieve, who was the subject of a recent retrospective at the SAIC Galleries in Chicago, also tackles her queerness, which we can understand not only through her sexual orientation, but also through her relationship to censorious moralizing from across the political spectrum, epitomized by her rebellious embrace of pornography. The issue also includes two remembrances of the superlative writer Gary Indiana, who in his very body refused to conform to both the heteronormative and gay cis-male aesthetics of his time, as David Rimanelli observes.
Together, these articles paint a picture of a conservatism and puritanism that threatens our freedom to produce, experience, and think about art. Predictably, in June 2024, DeSantis eliminated Florida’s entire state funding for the arts—$32 million—from this year’s annual budget. As we continue to debate the relationship between identity and aesthetics, we would do well to remember that both marginalized communities and art are under coordinated attack by larger forces at play beyond the borders of the art world, led by those in power who are actively trying to settle the debate for us, on their terms.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
