Professor of musicology? You’d better be a minority
NewsThe University of Southern California is hiring:
The University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music invites applications for two positions of Assistant Professor of Musicology, Tenure Track. The appointment begins August 15, 2022. Areas of expertise may include music of African American, African Diasporic, Latin American, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities. Other areas of expertise could include film and theater music, popular music, or other modern traditions.
Combining the benefits of a world-class conservatory and a leading research university, the USC Thornton School of Music offers students the opportunity to pursue a thorough music education in a real-world context. The new educational model, launched in Fall 2019 for undergraduates in the Classical Performance & Composition Division, renews Thornton’s commitment to a virtuosic education and asks students to reimagine what it means to be a classical musician in the 21st century.
Thornton offers students a full range of musical disciplines across a demanding, innovative curriculum, and the opportunity to work with a faculty of national and international renown.
The student body at USC is extraordinarily diverse; it is racially and ethnically a majority/minority population with a full range of expressions of gender, ability, and sexual identities that we embrace as a source of institutional strength and community pride. The University’s commitment to building an academic environment hospitable to this wide range of diversity is full and complete. To that end, we are seeking to create as diverse a pool of candidates as possible, one that reflects the broad diversity of identities and experiences that comprise the country as well as the field of musicology. …
We encourage candidates from traditionally under-represented communities, those with significant experience in supporting cultural diversity and amplifying marginalized voices, and scholar-performers with a performance or creative background.
Mr Lebrecht, why are you so afraid of properly-qualified people from under-represented groups being given a chance?
What if the most qualified person is not a person from a so-called “under-represented group”?
That isn’t the point at all. They describe something that has nothing to do with Western classical music, so it should be called ‘non-classical musicology’, or ‘non-western musicology’, or simply ‘minority musicology’. It is obviously for people who don’t know classical music, who don’t like it beforehand because it is supposed to be white suprematist, they would feel unsafe if they hear Beethoven or Bach, etc. etc. – so they will be much more comfortable with the music they know already and the level of sophistication that goes with it.
The job is in the Classical Performance and Composition department, though.
That’s what makes the announcement fraudulent.
Thats why it’s so stupid. All things to no one. As soon as you criticise it, you get hammered.
You are very stupidly assuming that an expert in Latin American music, for example, is not prepared or knowledgeable in the more canonical classical music, that it doesn’t have thorough training in “regular musicology”, if that term really could have any sense whatsoever, and that there isn’t a classical Latin American music, that is intrinsically related to the Western world to the point of been considered Western by most people of those cultures. What they want is a professor who has other intersting stuff to teach in addition to a regular musicology class or that can complement the education already provided by other faculty. Nobody thinks they would be white supremacists otherwise and nobody who wants to work in a music department of a university is unsafe to hear Bach or Beethoven. Some other people, on the other hand, seem unsafe to complement their knowledge of the canon or are too tired to try something new…
Of course there is Latin American classical music. But that is CLASSICAL music, based upon Western, European classical music. There is even, you wouldn’t believe it, classical music being written today in the USA, also based upon European classical music: Cavaterra, Moravec, Danielpour, etc. etc. and classical music based on European classical music written in China, Japan, even in Holland, which would offer an overwhelming wealth of fascinating, fresh music to be farmed by all those musicology departments in such burning need to find something new and to get away from Mozart, Beethoven etc. But it is obviously not THAT what they want – they want things that are NOT classical. That’s OK but then they should not call it classical music musicology. They have everything they need on their doorstep but, blind and deaf as they are, they jump on the minority bandwagon.
It makes one think of a primitive well-meaning tribe somewhere in the jungle who are given a number of paintings from the Louvre but then they use them as mats to sleep upon. And then, they are excused, but the minoriticologists should know better.
PS:
Western classical music as a genre is something like a spiritual IC unit in the midst of a disruptive modernity. To burden it with all kinds of absurd associations is like the antivaxers denying covid.
What if it had asked for an expert musicologist in Irish or Scottish traditional music?
They are less interested in music by indigenous European composers.
In spite of them being the best, overall.
There is little to teach in non-classical music that is significant enough to be anything but a minor elective.
I think we are increasingly finding that it is not a “minority” interest. That’s the problem. The majority are filling stadia for Ariana Grande and theatres for Mamma Mia!, not Bruckner and Rossini.
@Zelda Macnamara
That’s right.
What these institutions are really trying to do is simply to move away from business as usual (as it has manifested over several centuries), which is: ‘jobs for the boys…and the boys’.
It doesn’t mean that a boy won’t get this gig: it just means that it will no longer be a shoo-in.
Suck it up, Gentlemen!
Sadly, African drumming is the most popular music ensemble nationwide, I’ve been told, in music departments that are at least formerly classical, as they must also accommodate jazz and other interests…
Nobody is “afraid” of anything. You must have brains to understand that people’s CULTURES ARE DIFFERENT.
We are not the same. And Mr. Lebrecht seems to know and understand that, while you do not!
Like me, he knows talent has little to nothing to do with this.
What’s wrong with that?
Cf Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and modern Venezuela and China. They wanted to be “fair” but they ran out of body bags. In Venezuela it’s now illegal to record on a death certificate “starvation” as the cause of death.
Just so you know the consequence of ‘fairness’ and the Left.
I was wondering that as well. All this excitement! merely about some education!
Sally
It’s very carefully worded — a lot more literate than most of these statements. Just clever enough to avoid getting nailed for breaking some laws about discriminatory hiring.
I have no objection to a School of Music offering a wide range of musics for study, and staffing accordingly. But I am concerned about this: “…asks students to reimagine what it means to be a classical musician in the 21st century.”
By all means educate students in “music of African American, African Diasporic, Latin American, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities. Other areas of expertise could include film and theater [sic] music, popular music, or other modern traditions.”
But let’s not pretend that hip-hop is classical, or that jazz, rock, R&B, Cuban son, jukebox or garage are. Sure, study them, explore their role in contemporary culture and society, along with film music, etc. But leave classical to be classical.
I don’t care if those in the hip-hop and other streams demand that their forms be treated with as much respect as classical. Why not? Chacun à and all that, or, as Miss Brodie would have had it, “For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.” Just do not try to conflate classical and that which is not.
I would prefer that classical music remained in the concert halls and other forms remained in their natural venues, from clubs to stadia. But given the economics of classical music, there is bound to be increasing pressure upon their venues to open up to a wider repertoire. That will involve programming carefully, and openly. Venue rentals will increasingly bankroll classical music unless I miss my guess. It will be up to classical and opera managers to ensure that the core audience for the real thing are made clearly aware what they are endorsing and what they are permitting, and that they know and recognise the difference.
Thank you, V Lind, for a beautifully written response of rare civility, good sense, and sensitivity. I couldn’t agree more.
+1,000
This is such an odd statement:
“But let’s not pretend that hip-hop is classical, or that jazz, rock, R&B, Cuban son, jukebox or garage are. Sure, study them, explore their role in contemporary culture and society, along with film music, etc. But leave classical to be classical.”
There are plenty of composers who have combined classical with these various genres, and more, such as Gershwin, Bernstein, Mason Bates, Michael Daugherty, H.K. Gruber, etc.
Classical music is thankfully not as monolithic as you think it is.
Bartok and Kodaly also present precedents, where their incorporation of ancient folk music as essential components of their art was not welcomed by most of the classical-music establishment and listening public. Many thought that such “raw” and “unlearned” elements were inherently contradictory to the spirit and methods of classical composition.
While Kodaly confined himself to the study and incorporation of Hungarian elements, Bartok went much farther afield, incorporating non-European motifs (e.g., a North African Arabic motif in his Dance Suite) — for which he was subjected to even more opprobrium.
I’m not suggesting that these faculty members do not cooperate and even intermingle to the point of making a little crossover (not in the usual mash-up sense) education part of the curriculum: classical students being encouraged to take a minor half-course here and there in other forms, for instance, and pop music students being introduced to the basics of classical music — at least to the extent of being able to read it. If there is one thing that I am sick of hearing, it is popular musicians saying “I don’t read music.”
I neither think nor encourage the notion that classical music is monolithic. And anyone who has read me here before would know that I have a very open musical ear, and a very open attitude to the education of all in the widest possible range of musics, for which I carry great respect. I am personally partial to Cuban and Brazilian music, having heard much of both in visits to those countries, as well as to several others in particular. I also have my dislikes, but I do not hold them in any disrespect — just do not share the taste. But I think anyone coming out of a conservatoire or a music school carrying credentials should have at least a nodding acquaintance with a wide range of musics. It’s all about communication, and it all clearly communicates something to somebody.
But last time I looked absolutely none of them had a metaphorical gun held to their heads.
Of course it is not. You forgot Ravel by the way, in his two brilliant and moving piano concertos. But as classical music these composers only produced works which answer the requirements of classical music. If not, it is something else.
That you can lump the masters Gershwin and Bernstein with such tasteless composers as Daugherty or, say, Muhly, Kernis and the like, is appalling.
THANK YOU! This is simply making me laugh, the whole tennis match going back and forth:
THIS is classical music, THAT isn’t.
You can’t say re-imagine classical music in the 21st century when classical music was around before that..
WOW! I’ll go get a time machine now to make sure I”m not fraudulent about Classical Music, but after being indoctrinated by those now who know better than those back then what they did, maybe that’s not such a good idea….
Which WOULD be interesting, such a time machine in existence, and the great ones hearing how they are worshiped and heralded in these times, deciding oh F@#$)@(* and going to a monastery instead, and the whole problem being solved by default when it disappears….
A whole OTHER “LEFT BEHIND.”
MERCY!
Just to be logical, and sane.
Given the time machine, once the founder of the movement that caused monasteries gets a gist of his own idolators, they might also disappear….
There’s always places no man knows of, or believes could exist, then….
Sarcasm to the side.
I really don’t think that those who make such an demonstraty (demonstration) out of their love for classical music… I think that it becomes a cult, not even even know what it is as little as so many fundamentalists going on about Jesus, and it might as well be something beyond the whole physical experience of it, because that’s all that really remains, despite the “meritocracy” they put on whoever has the best “technique” or is the most beautiful, the most spiritual, or the most pure, or ameliorates their refined control tactics in the most rewarding way.
I think music is something more personal than that, and I don’t believe that turning it into political agendas is necessarily what brings out it’s nature, either.
A “meritocracy” becomes something akin to saying that medicine should only be given those who herald its effect to create “beauty” rather than it heals the sick; and we end up with something akin to drugs that enhance sports performances or who knows what in the field of physical activity, or beauty treatments and surgeries.
My fly on the wall tells me that the lecturer who had to write-out this statement, was held at gunpoint by a social justice warrior in an attempt to finally bringing peace, and civilised inclusion to the institution.
The irony is, this is USC, where most composition students are aiming at film-type careers, which do require knowledge of all kinds of pop and even folk music.
Why would a sane person want to study in such a university?
Who needs sanity if one has wealthy parents? The University of Spoilt Children.
“…The University of Spoilt Children (USC?)…” (LOL!) And your epithet is only one of many I’ve heard about USC-albeit from someone who attended their cross-town rival, U.C.L.A. Seriously though, both universities have excellent schools of music and one can only hope whoever is hired will contribute to continuing and perhaps enriching the education received at USC/Thornton.
Yes and, of course, this is predicated on putting quotas on ‘unspoilt’ Asian children – who perform spectacularly across all metrics. They’re just brighter, or are they disciplined and from committed family structures?
Somehow, I think that “disciplines” who stand on great composers, whose music they don’t really understand other than analyzing it akin to taking a fish out of water to kill it and dissect it, that their further understanding of minorities, let alone the indigenous nature such minorities might come from, a culture that’s already being lost: somehow I don’t think that they are truly helping as much as they make out they are. Emblems afire as it may be.
There’s a difference between diversity and assimilation….
And there’s a difference between what music is to fulfill a political agenda to fulfill an image of caring, and…
what is has been the whole time despite all of that….
That new kind of ‘diversity’ musicology is to classical music what a fish is to a bicycle.
The most revealing passage:
“Combining the benefits of a world-class conservatory and a leading research university, the USC Thornton School of Music offers students the opportunity to pursue a thorough music education in a real-world context. The new educational model, launched in Fall 2019 for undergraduates in the Classical Performance & Composition Division, renews Thornton’s commitment to a virtuosic education and asks students to reimagine what it means to be a classical musician in the 21st century.”
What it means to be a CLASSICAL MUSICIAN in the 21st century, is that the entire repertoire of classical music from Medieval times onwards has no meaning. In other words, it is creating an entirely new field without roots into what is called ‘classical music’. So, this institution is appropriating a label that is very clearly wrong and should be illegal – in other words, it is fraudulent.
Never heard the term “classic rock”? or “classical jazz”?
These musics are legitimate. The history of hip-hop — which I prefer to think of as urban poetry, though I personally do not much care for it — is a key strand to understanding some aspects of contemporary society. I’m not sure how it should be integrated into the academy, but through musicology might be an appropriate angle of entry.
The history of jazz is also fascinating, and if you want an easy and palatable angle of entry, you could do worse than check out Ken Burns’ series on it. I tend to like New Orleans jazz more than contemporary, but consider Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert one of the jewels of my CD collection.
And as a frequent traveller to Latin America and the Caribbean, I love how street corners as well as parks throb with a music that is genuinely felt in these societies, not just saved up for expensive, planned-to-the-nines, dressed-to-the-nines nights “out”. We were particularly moved in Cuba during a very trying time in their economic progress that still everyone was playing music and dancing — these were parts of their language and every day existence, as necessary as the increasingly scarce rice and beans. When I am there I always feel I have a soundtrack to my peregrinations, not a sensation I tend to feel in my travels in Europe.
But among the music I brought back from Colombia many years ago — fairly accidentally — was some from their clearly healthy “classical” strand. And I like Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla and many other musicians who have made it into the concert halls of the wider world without forsaking their roots.
No wonder younger people, minorities and foreigners are inclined to think of classical music as “exclusive.” It is locked away until evening, when you have to make a production number out of going to it, and the soundtrack to a walk down the streets of Canada or the US or the UK or parts of Europe is muzak, the junk you hear in shops and in lifts.
The most vibrant thing I ever saw in our society, aside from some wonderful outdoor, free concerts here and in various cities, was a long queue of people outside a church, and then another outside some other small venue, from a taxi in Ottawa some years ago. Inquiring, I discovered that it was the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, which became the biggest of its kind in the world. It held dozens of events over its fortnight, a very few in the concert hall of the National Arts Centre but most in churches and other small spaces, or outside. Many only sold tickets at the door — a very few events were free, as teasers to the uninitiated, but what was in play was a genuine and healthy enthusiasm for real classical music in a less formal environment than the subscription concert series of the city’s orchestras. Friends of mine, who worked for the Regina Symphony, planned their summer holidays to coincide with the festival and came from Saskatchewan determined to pack in as much as they could. I managed to score entry to a Sandra Radvanovsky concert in a beautiful church with beautiful acoustics and large enough to accommodate the very substantial demand.
The city also holds successful jazz, blues and folk festivals, but it was heartening to know that adopting their thriving formats drew out such a large and enthusiastic audience for classical music.
There is much we can learn from one another, and perhaps we could consider starting in the academies.
‘Classic rock’ is something like ‘vegetarian pork’.
That’s not what it means at all–you’ve invented that entire definition.
With your definition, each forthcoming century from whenever “classical” music started, which I think was way before “medieval” times: but from where it started each subsequent century would have been snipped in the bud, because it was “fraudulent” to re-imagine any of it, fraudulent that one could use one’s imagination to allow it to grow further. Fraudulent for Debussy to use the whole tone scale, fraudulent for Mozart to introduce the clarinet along with his criminal friend Anton Stadler, fraudulent fraudulent. GOOD LUCK with your court case.
The only thing legal that remains is to be devoid of an imagination or to write whatever that’s approved of, found formulaic enough to not be not found “formalistic,” which I think had been going on already, hadn’t it?
Though shalt not re-imagine it!
In other words, no one actually qualified need apply.
No need to be qualified to speak about “music” not worth talking about!
That is exactly the sort of attitude that makes people hate classical music and those who are attached to it.
“…traditionally under-represented communities”
Read: We’ve already filled more than our quota of Asians and Jews, so please, not another Asian or Jewish PhD from Harvard and Juiliard.
It makes sense that areas of expertise should include African American, African Diasporic, Latin American, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities. These are underserved and under-taught.
What makes no sense is including film and theater music, popular music, or other modern traditions. Students may find pop scholarship appealing, but it’s only a distraction away from the globally underserved works and composers.
Your disdain for film music is silly, especially at a school like USC which is situated near the heart of the cinema world in Hollywood. Los Angeles became a magnet for émigré composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Korngold as well as local composers like John Williams, and the film industry may even be said to have kept alive the romantic symphonic tradition during the decades where most academic composition and attention focused on more abstruse styles. USC is wise to develop serious musicological depth in this area.
It always makes sense to learn something. The archives of Rolling Stone may tell future historians more about our times than those of the New Yorker (and I speak as someone who has subscribed to the latter since student days).
Asians are underserved in classical music? Um, ok.
No, because there is very little to be learned from “Native American” music, which is mostly chanting and simple rhythms. There is no way these other musics are underserved, either. They belong exclusively in Ethnomusicology, the apparently forgotten field where all this belonged.
What is “a virtuosic education”? Do the kids learn how to be virtuosi? Is the curriculum so dazzling it should be called “virtuosi”? Are the faculty especially virtuous?
Ludicrous stuff.
America for you!
This sounds more like an Ethnomusicology position than a Historical Musicology one…
You people are loud and angry when minorities are given the spotlight, but deadly silent when a majority group is in the spotlight. Coincidence? Nah. You just hate to see different types of people thrive. It’s the 21st century! Grow up and celebrate equality and diversity.
No
I’m pretty sure when you say “minorities”, you’re not talking about Asian-Americans here…just a guess.
Just like the Bolsheviks did, bless them!!
And WHO will decide who is EQUAL and who is DIVERSE?
The list of great classical musicians developed under the Bolshevik’s rule is stunning.
Equality has no place in a meritocracy, which is what all art is. Diversity is irrelevant to talent. Leveling everything down to a low common denominator is total destruction. Stop being dishonest.
Yes indeed.
The point is, that functioning in the field of art, any art, should be accessible to any gifted person. One of the barriers is racism and social/economic injustice, but they have nothing to do with the art.
Why did they not just advertise for a Critical Race Theorist who is an authority on hip hop and indoctrination of students?
They know that it is safer to smuggle them in under the cover of ‘normal’ musicology. Critical race theorists draw a lot of attention from SD. But in the end, it did not quite save them from SD’s all-seeing eye.
USC’s current musicology department looks pretty white…
https://music.usc.edu/faculty/musicology-faculty/
#musicologysowhite
Competence, not skin color, should determine who is hired.
There’s a lot of coded information in that announcement.
It’s an orchestra of dog whistles, a form of political Klangkunst.
Or overt, not coded. As if being “white” is a crime. Many “white” people are not white. Italians, Jews, Spaniards, Greeks, Arabs, etc.
Philip Ewell gaslighted the Society for Music Theory. see How a CRT Adherent Gaslighted a Scholarly Organization: A Lesson for Legal Education. https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2021/09/how-a-crt-adherent-gaslighted-a-scholary-organization-a-lesson-for-legal-education.html
Who needs to study this crap anyway?!? This has hardly to do with MUSICOLOGY!
This is emblematic of a larger trend toward the study of the social position of music at the expense of the study of the music itself. When it’s possible to graduate from a musicology program without ever learning Schenkerian analysis but a bunch of classes that are essentially sociology with a musical theme, we lose a pretty important body of knowledge. Musicology is certainly losing the music.
More about politics than performance & seeking to hide a vicious anti-Caucasian-American racism.
“music education in a real-world context.”
Dread phrase!
It’s called ethnomusicology. And it is a standard field within academic music in the USA.
USC is a top 10 school for music in the US and it should have a great ethno program to be a top 10 school.
Bravo for them to fill these positions, I just hope that the scholarship of the candidates is up to the level of the school.
“You’d better be….”.
That tells us everything we need to know.
Is there any reason why music, with its tremendous world history and world-wide cultural influence, which naturally makes it diverse, should not be treated with the same subset of specialists we do the medical field? Everyone is getting their sphincters tight about this. We don’t make a doctor know the ins and outs of every single possible specialty there is. If I have a skin problem, I’m not going to go to a cardiac surgeon. The same goes with musicology. It’s far too broad a topic with far too many subgenres to say “You have to know and teach and learn all of these subgenres or you’re an insensitive racist.”
We can have specialists who have a broad understanding of the physics and notation of music, then who specialize in certain areas. Then, those who want to learn more about opera can. Those who want to learn more about hip-hop can. Those who want to learn more about film scoring can. Those who want to learn more about Tanzanian mouth harps can.
Quit reading posts like this and get back in the practice room.
There are plenty of teachers of Ethnomusicology who are white, and are also well versed in western music musicology. Whether one or two of them get hired at U.S.C. or not, who knows! We’ll find out when we find out. It’s not going to bother me if someone who’s non-white gets hired – I don’t view that as a threat. I find it strange that someone in London would worry over who gets hired at a prestigious California university. Should I be worried if a Pakistani got hired for the Royal Academy of Music?
There’s a story that in 2014 a Pakistani was appointed at the RAM to serve minorities interests but was fired after a week when staff discovered he enthusiastically applied Schenkerian analysis on works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner’s Liebestod without any reference to the Indian, Pakistani, Carrabian, African and Chinese communities.
“Areas of expertise may include music of African American, African Diasporic, Latin American, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities. Other areas of expertise could include film and theater music, popular music, or other modern traditions.”
I guess Messrs. Bach, Brahms, Monteverdi, Schoenberg, or Lully, if they were around today, need not apply.
Professor of Musicology? Students will be in for a rude a-woke-ening.
This is nothing new. Most of the jobs in composition are directed towards women or minorities. The problem is there are relatively few women and almost no minorities they want. (Asians don’t count as minorities.) This problem has really picked up in the last 5 or so years. I know of specific searches at several of the major schools where the committee was told directly “you need to hire a woman.” The amazing thing is that everyone talks about this quietly and says it’s not right, but in public there can be no push-back, because that would instantly end one’s career. A very big problem!
ANYONE properly qualified should have the same opportunities as ANYONE else. In baseball this would mean qualified as a hitter, fielder, thrower, runner. It would not mean qualified by your ethnicity or sexual orientation or ANYTHING OTHER THAN qualified in the skills of playing baseball. Why should music, or anything else, be different? When Martn Luther King said he hoped one day his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, I don’t remember him saying that such only applies to caucasians and not to those of color; I did not think he meant that if you are a person of color, your other qualifications (content of character) do not matter. This extreme focus in the country on skin color seems to be very out of step with Dr. King’s words UNLESS he intended it to mean that focusing primarily on skin color is OK, if it allows one to hold less important other qualifications (content of character) so long as the color is not caucasian.
They want someone different, from historical untouchables. What’s wrong with that?
Conductor? You better be a woman or a minority under 35.
May I diffidently suggest that this fascinating series of comments has essentially omitted any mention of what to my mind constitutes the fundamental difference between “classical” music and all the other categories under discussion? T>hat is the difference between deferred gratification and instant gratification. Being a grown-up, I tend to be more interested and satisfied by the deferred kind.
There are, however, any number of qualifications and exceptions that throw light on the oversimplified distinction I am putting forward, and lend interest to the question of what may be usefully studied, where, and by whom. Some of the exceptions subsist in the musical materials themselves. Most of Elgar’s often highly complex music belongs unmistakably to the “classical” tradition: but his “Pomp and Circumstance” marches furnish a no less unmistakable example of instant musical gratification. For Western listeners, where does the work of such Indian musicians as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan belong on the classical-to-ethnic continuum? And then there are exceptions to be acknowledged in most individual listeners responses, and certainly in mine: I derive much more sophisticated artistic satisfaction – and much more pleasure – from sources ranging all the way from some jazz to the music of the Beatles and that of Senegalese drummer-composers as Doudou N’Diaye Rose, than I do from such corners of the “classical” tradition as the more Expressionistic products of the Second Viennese School.
I don’t lay claim to any certainty about how these thoughts relate to the issues raised by the Thornton School job description that provoked this whole discussion; but it would seem reasonable to assume that such considerations might well bring illumination to the questions of what may usefully be studied and taught, and where, and by whom.
There’s high art, and there’s low art. Nothing wrong with this distinction, but when the low is presented as high, or the other way around, immediately problems arise. There is a reason why there exist concepts like ‘genre’, simply to differentiate between different levels of sophistication. That there are grey zones where the two overlap, or where the two combine, does not diminish the need to have distinctions. To deny the existence of distinction, which is the result of an entirely misunderstood idea of democracy, is primitive and destructive. Distinction does not mean suppression or exclusion of people.
When anti racism leads to racism….