Cannibals at the Gate

By Michael J. Ellis | Monday, May 9, 2005

This past Saturday, Review President Kevin Hudak and I had lunch with Mark Nuckols Tu '06, founder and CEO of Hufu, Inc., a brand-new company claiming to produce tofu designed to look and taste like human flesh. While human sacrifice may have gone out of style with the Aztecs, Nuckols and his creative team are quite serious about their product and if all goes according to plan, faux-cannibalism could be the new black.

Comical value aside, Hufu bears some similarities to Krista Oopik '05's ill-conceived art display, "The Butcher's Bargain," (see TDR, "Risk Management," 3/11/05). For those who missed the stench of decay in the Hop last term, Oopik's display was a refrigerator filled with pieces of epoxy-coated meat and wrapped in animal fur, ostensibly to "emphasize the outrageousness of American consumerism in a visceral and immediate way." Nuckols probably would not think of his product as art, but both his fake human meat and Oopik's all-too-real animal meat are callow attempts to shock the viewer without much substantive thought behind them. Both display physical flesh, but lack figurative meat.

More troubling, though, is that both the tofu for cannibals and the furry meat are taken seriously. In today's culture of multiculturalism and moral relativism, we are increasingly reluctant to make judgments about ideas, practices, or pieces of art. Sure, they say, cannibalism might seem wrong to your hetero-normative, Judeo-Christian culture, but who are we to judge the Aztecs or the indigenous cultures of Papua New Guinea? According to them, head-hunting "savages" really aren't any worse than American settlers pushing westward across the Great Plains, British civil servants subjugating the Indian subcontinent, or any other relic of bygone imperialistic eras.

And when there are no universal values, there's nothing left to say what's right or wrong, good art or bad art, tasteful or vulgar. All that remains are crass attempts to challenge and shock, and it becomes rather difficult to find new ways to shock after cultural norms have been subverted countless times. What's needed is better judgment and discrimination on the part of the guardians of culture. This is not to say that all modern or folk art is worthless, not by any stretch of the imagination. There are countless excellent pieces of postmodern and tribal folk art, just as there are countless pieces of mediocre and pedestrian art from past centuries. Art that intends to challenge and subvert is certainly valuable—but crass attempts to shock are far too often confused for it.

The Hood Museum of Art here at Dartmouth, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, has recently acquired several such confusions. Its new exhibit of watercolors and drawings, "Marks of Distinction," contains many excellent works by Copley, Whistler, Sargent, and Pollock, just to name a few; but as Kale Bongers notes in his article on pages six and seven, it also includes several new acquisitions that are insipid at best.

One, "House with Figures and Animals" by Bill Traylor, appears to be a series of stick figures and incomprehensible colored-pencil scrawlings. Traylor may have an inspiring life story—a former slave who took up drawing at age 85, he drew the work on cardboard as a homeless man in Montgomery, Alabama � but the piece lacks artistic value. Perhaps not surprisingly, nobody considered Traylor's story of the "goose catches boys [sic] penis" to be art until it was "discovered" by a black folk art exhibition in the 1980's.

Another, an untitled work by Joan Mitchell, appears as if it may have been the result of a kindergarten finger-painting project gone hideously wrong. We are told that the "beginning of terror" is seen in the watercolor. Maybe I just need to look at it in a different light. While hard figures are hard to come by, it is clear that the Hood spent a considerable deal of money on these new acquisitions, and that this is not the first time large sums have been spent on questionable works.

At the same time though, the Hovey Murals, a comical depiction of Eleazer Wheelock's founding of the College, remain boarded over, on account of their politically incorrect representation of Indians. Traylor and Mitchell's works are the most extreme examples of lowered standards, but it is ironic that political correctness has now become the only acceptable reason for judging artwork. These artists have every right to display their work, but the Hood (and Dartmouth) should not subsidize their mediocrity. The Hovey Murals are not being granted that opportunity.

Art is not the only arena, though, which has been recently permeated by a lack of standards and judgment. As Kevin Parkman shows in his review of the numerous weblogs (or "blogs" for the technologically adroit) that have sprouted at Dartmouth in recent months, the Internet's lack of barriers to entry produces a similar situation: there are no longer any editors, any arbiters of what content is good and what is bad.

Instead, we are left with a mélange of ideas and musings that ranges from trite commentary on national events to crude descriptions of students' personal lives that give entirely too much information. The next Wonkette may think she's among us with acerbic wit and insight, but far too often we are left with something closer to the raunchy diaries of Washingtonienne. A thousand flowers of thought may be blooming, but there's no one left to pick the roses out from among the weeds.

Still, though, the future may be brighter. While discretion and maturity may be the only cures for the ills of the blog-o-sphere, there remains more hope for the Hood. Its new director, Brian Kennedy, comes to us from the National Galley of Australia. He made his share of enemies there by refusing to show the infamous Sensation collection that features an elephant dung Virgin Mary, and drew criticism that he did not display enough works by indigenous Australian artists (while the motives behind Kennedy's refusal to show Hirst's work are unclear, one hopes it was for reasons of taste). Dartmouth is lucky to have attracted someone of his stature, and hopefully he will bring the Hood's collection to a higher level. Once a more discriminating sense of judgment is at the head of the Hood, Dartmouth's student artists might begin to produce work more meaningful than the "Butcher's Bargain" of rotting meat. Or at the very least, find a tofu substitute for it.

Cannibals at the Gate

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