But to argue that Till, whose mother wanted the world to see his state after he was killed by Mississippi racists, should only be rendered by black artists, and that the offense is so grave that Open Casket<\/em> should be destroyed, is just nuts. And it’s not the sole incidence of a censorious and intolerant side of the cultural left — a place where I dwell most of the time — which is manna from the heavens for the Fox New crowd.<\/p>\n One angle on this I’d not considered was that this was also a kind of war on abstraction. As Coco Fusco’s Hyperallergic piece argues:<\/p>\n \u201cThe most perplexing criticism that\u2019s been bandied about regarding Schutz\u2019s painting, both on social media and in discussions I\u2019ve had, is that some great harm has been inflicted by the act of abstraction, as if the only \u2018responsible\u2019 treatment of racial trauma is mimetic realism<\/a> \u2026<\/p>\n
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<\/a>There\u2019s a fundamental misunderstanding at work in damning abstraction by associating it with erasure and irresponsibility. Abstraction, like mimeticism, is an aesthetic language that can be interpreted and used politically in a range of ways. It doesn\u2019t necessarily mean erasure, but it does complicate the connection between perception and intellection\u2014something that deeply thoughtful painters like\u00a0Gerhard Richter\u00a0have taken advantage of in order to make us reflect on how photographic images represent history and structure memory.\u00a0Jacob Lawrence\u00a0\u2018abstracted\u2019 his black figures, not to obscure their humanity but to explore new ways of evoking ethnic identity and communal purpose through color and dynamism.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n