An inspiring story has surfaced about the re-emergence of more than 400 erotic drawings by the late Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant, who lived most of his life as a criminalised gay man.
The drawings, thought to be destroyed, have been offered to the Charleston Trust, which manages Grant’s former East Sussex retreat. And what images they are: defiantly subversive and explicit multiracial homoerotica, bursting with passion, flesh, joy, love, freedom and everything else gay people were legally barred from experiencing and expressing at the time. The underlying message of Grant’s paintings is still uplifting in 2020: art will always find a way, whatever the obstacles, hardships and dangers.
This seemed timely in a week when artists of all ilks felt misunderstood after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, appeared to instruct them to find other work to sustain themselves. The fury and scorn poured forth. Weren’t many creatives already juggling jobs? Didn’t politicians realise how valuable the British music and art scenes were? Once again, it seemed, creatives had been dismissed by philistine politicians. However, what if artists aren’t misunderstood, what if the truth is darker, and the very qualities that make someone an artist – passion, grit, endurance - are being deployed against them?
Increasingly, the creative impulse is being exploited by a government which knows that, however hard, soul-destroying and almost impossible they make it, people across the arts will struggle on regardless. Why? Because they’re artists and that’s how the creative impulse works. It doesn’t stop when it’s tough, when society criminalises your sexuality or a government orders you to find “proper” work. It’s an impulse so powerful that it pushes working-class creatives onwards, even though it’s obvious they’re being priced out of the arts. It’s an urge so strong it overrides being stripped of grants, benefits and everything else that used to help creative people just about get by.
This is what people are up against, not political dunderheads who don’t understandbut bloodless cynics who have noticed artists are so driven that they’ll keep struggling on regardless, who think all the art, music, performance and writing will magically keep coming, because it always has. It won’t, it can’t, the situation is unsustainable. Whereas before people at least had the hope of an artistic life, now it’s more like an artistic phase, the end of which gets couched in insulting, infantilising, Disneyfied “giving up their dreams” terms or Sunak’s “adjusting to the new reality”. As if artists of any stripe are merely immature fantasists who need to grow up and realise their true vocation as Amazon warehouse workers.
Whatever happens, let’s stop subscribing to the notion that lack of support for creatives and the culture of arts underfunding is caused by politicians misunderstanding the artistic temperament. My guess is that they understand plenty. This isn’t about misunderstood artists. It’s about certain powers understanding artists only too well and using that knowledge against them.
Some cheating men are easy to spot, but what of the others?
Always trust science, even when it comes to spotting a sexual cheat. According to a Chinese study, male cheats are very obvious. They have resoundingly deep voices (displaying the highly sexed testosterone that makes them cheat).
The man-cheat is also very clever, with a strongly defined jawline. Wait, there’s more! The man-cheat works in finance in some capacity (his massive salary increasing his sense of sexual entitlement). He will enjoy playing in team sports such as rugby, all the better to enjoy the company of other men, all of whom are engaged in the “culture of cheating”.
The research included some guff about blond women being more likely to cheat, but my personal confirmation-bias settings were only interested in the wild generalisations about men.
I just have a couple of small queries. How about the cheats who don’t play rugby, don’t have strong jawlines, deep voices or jobs in finance? You know, the cheats who don’t have the good manners to walk around holding up the equivalent of a flashing neon sign, reading: “Warning: I’m a big, fat cheat.” How do you spot those guys? Come on, science, we need answers.
Please don’t censor this French film. Watch it
Netflix has been indicted by a jury in Texas over the French film Cuties, by writer-director Maïmouna Doucouré, which is about an 11-year-old Senegalese girl in Paris, who joins a group of other young girls to enter a competition with a lewd dance routine. Cuties is charged with being “prurient”, with “promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child” and of having “no serious, artistic, political or scientific value”.
This is absurd. I’ve seen Cuties and while the film isn’t perfect, and was let down by a promotion campaign lacking nuance, it doesn’t condone the sexualisation of children; on the contrary, it attempts to examine it honestly. In some scenes, the girls wear skimpy outfits and execute obscene dances, copying moves from explicit (but standard) rap/hip-hop music videos. It’s disturbing to see children behaving in this way, with such painfully low awareness of what their suggestive poses and “sexy” facial expressions mean or how their actions will be received in the outside world. However, this discomfort isn’t incidental, it’s the whole point of the film.
Cuties is a brave study of not only the sexualisation of children but also where it comes from: a big mess of peer pressure, youthful curiosity and the normalisation of pornographic imagery in popular culture. Parents (in Texas or anywhere else) are dangerously naive if they don’t realise that their children, both girls and boys, are constantly wading around in such images and messages. In 2019, in England and Wales alone, more than 500 children were victims of “revenge porn” (the distribution of sexually explicit images with the intent to cause harm). Netflix is right to stand by Doucouré: films such as Cuties are not the problem, they are a torch illuminating a problem.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
