Against Morality is not against morality. But it is against moralising. Which is a start. Anti-cancel culture, anti-identity politics, Rosanna McLaughlin’s small book of essays is the first insider-artworld publication to condemn the Savonarolan turn within culture. A cause for celebration, you might think.
Her argument is perfectly sound. ‘Morality has become the central pillar, the justification for art, the bar by which we measure whether something is good or bad’, and it’s been a disaster. Forcing art to ‘communicate clear and approvable messages’, cleansing the canon of bad behaviour, conscripting artists as ‘empathetic social workers’, has impoverished art, flattened it to such an extent that the work of the past has become meaningless, the work of the living ‘timid, defensive and rule-bound’.
She calls all this ‘liberal realism’. Like Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism and Soviet social realism before it, the aim of liberal realism is to shut down alternative ways of interpreting the world:
Thus, the viewer is told what to think and why, artworks become illustrations for the meta-narrative of biography, and artists and their subjects ciphers for social-justice narratives… to better meet the needs of the present.
She ridicules the ‘moralistic glow-ups’ of dead artists – how Andy Warhol was comically recast as a queer role model by Tate Modern, his Factory a ‘safe space’. Warhol’s exploitative nature was one of the most fascinating things about him, McLaughlin rightly argues. She winces at how victimhood has been fetishised. How artists ‘perform their ethnic or gender identities’ for a global elite in an ‘identity-political reboot of the National Geographic’. The book reads like one long sigh.
And well may you sigh, too – that art is better when it doesn’t reiterate what we already know; that it’s a bad idea to assess a work of art according to its social usefulness or the moral worth of its creator. There’s nothing here to disagree with. But honestly, what a state the arts are in that commonplaces like these need to be aired, argued for, repeated again and again.
It was progress of sorts that the pamphlet’s launch last month was able to be held at the ICA at all (an enemy stronghold) to a capacity crowd. But on Instagram the gallery was accused of hosting fascists. So we’re not out of the woods yet. Much worse, the audience – young and eager to overhaul the status quo as they were – appeared as aesthetically illiterate as the people they’re trying to oust.
What Against Morality is really against – the enemy that unites the puritans, anti-puritans, McLaughlin, everyone – is form. And yet form is the only way out. The only way to judge whether an artwork has succeeded or failed is not to force it to undertake any kind of moral MOT, but to look at it, look at it long and hard, and examine what’s happening formally. Inspect what the artist is doing aesthetically with the materials at hand and the quality of the work will instantly become clear. But form is treacherous, difficult to write about and liable to make you sound unforgivably pretentious. Far safer, more socially acceptable, less work, to retreat into sixth-form debating over Moral Maze-type quandaries.
McLaughlin rebukes this tendency, too – then does it herself. She counters salaciously moralising biographical facts about Ana Mendieta and Artemisia Gentileschi not with an aesthetic defence of their work but with her own, more sophisticated biographical facts. She eulogises the film Tár. A giveaway. Tár – a formal nullity, a New Yorker long-read masquerading as a work of art that will disappear as quickly as the discourse that birthed it – could only be confused for a fine film by someone who thinks artworks are ethical puzzles rather than aesthetic objects.
It’s why McLaughlin retains a crucial role for morality: it can be a useful yardstick for measuring artistic quality, she admits, as long as you privilege the knotty over the simplistic. But I can think of many simple-minded marvels: constructivism’s geometric first-fights on behalf of communism; the Byzantine masterpieces that shout their worship of Christ Pantocrator as obnoxiously as any TfL poster. And I can think of many more artworks that remain resolutely amoral.
Ignoring form, she neglects the most interesting – and ironic – aspect of the progressive chokehold of the past decade. Namely that it has ushered in one of the most formally conservative periods of art for 200 years. Look at the revival of craft at the last Venice Biennale. Note the way, under the cover of identity, the canon has been reactivated – the black Manets, female Manets, gay Manets, black Rauschenbergs, female Rauschenbergs, even gayer Rauschenbergs, etc. Observe the explosion of bad figurative painting. As the Soviets learnt, the most effective propaganda was not formally experimental but crisply real. The result has been a decade of what Dean Kissick coined, in these pages, ‘zombie figuration’.
Cultural paleoconservatives – the ‘RETVRN’ lot on Twitter who swoon over Poundshop Berninis – owe the woke movement an apology. So does anyone who has prayed for the decorative and illustrative to retvrn. Forget liberal realism, GCSE realism is the triumphant style du jour. And identity politics is the midwife to it all.
The real problem with McLaughlin’s publication is timing. The shows where she first sensed things going badly wrong date from 2016 and 2017. It’s now 2025. The whole point of a critic is to say things before anyone else, not once a consensus has formed. Against Morality might seem startlingly fresh within the cossetted world of art. But to the rest of us, it will feel at best hopelessly late, at worst opportunistic.
