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Sweden's N***er cake
Art and raising awareness? Or phuckery?
As I sideeye all things in this direction that northern Europeans do (you all know how I feel about the whole Black Pete/Santa's slave celebration nonsense) I'm going to go with my gut and call it phuckery. And they do too much other foolishness up there for me to give the "art pass" even if the artist was Black.
The link has video.
For the record, I don't think most of these people are racist so much as mad ignorant. I've argued with so many people over here about so many things racial...just mad ignorant.
STOCKHOLM (FRIA TIDER). A macabre scene with racist undertones took place on Saturday when Swedish minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth attended a tax funded party for the Stockholm cultural elite. The self-proclaimed "anti-racist" Liljeroth declared the party officially started by slicing a piece of a cake depicting a stereotypical African woman.
Photos from the party at World Art Day have already been released on Facebook and are now going viral in social media.
The shocking photos show several established left-wing members of the Stockholm cultural elite watching and laughing as Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth slices a cake depicting a black African woman with minstrel-esque face.
Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was invited to open the festivities by performing a clitoridectomy on the cake, which she did by slicing off the part of the cake depicting female genitalia. She then proceeded to feed that part of the cake to a performance artist, done up in blackface, his head protruding through the table.
The events that unfolded at the party stand in stark contrast to Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth?s official political posititions. Publicly she advocates a strict hard-line approach against racism. When in 2010 the Swedish nationalist newspaper Nationell Idag managed to acquire enough subscribers to qualify for state-funded press subsidies she immediately took action to change the country?s press subsidy laws.
- It is distasteful to support extremist newspapers, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was quoted as saying in the government publication Riksdag & Departement, promising measures to deprive newspapers with ?racist? content of press subsidies.
- Although this is a question of freedom of expression, we dont want taxpayers? money to support this form of media, she further noted.
Why government funds should be used to pay for cakes such as the one served last weekend, has yet to be explained by Liljeroth.
Re: Sweden's N***er cake
I do actually believe the artist wasn't intending to be racist and was intending to make a statement using art.
That being said, and it could just be because I'm an american, I find this sort of thing to be really ignorant and tasteless regardless of intention. It's really hard for me to not view this as being intentionally provocative and a sort of "shock value" production and that really bothers me. Racism is not a dead thing, there are millions and millions of people who are still alive and active and lived through things like segregation in the United States, apartheid in South Africa, and such. It just really doesn't sit well at all with me for it to be approached with such a blase attitude.
If you watch the video you will see it screams out in mock pain as well.
Not for nothing, if I had seen all this in person, I likely would have lost it on everyone in there, regardless of intent of the artist. It's just.... well IMO like I said ...phuckery.
I wonder if, outside of the artist, there were any other Black people in attendance.
I know right?? OMG so hilarious!!!!
No, just...no.
<a href="http://www.thenest.com/?utm_source=ticker&utm_medium=HTML&utm_campaign=tickers" title="Home DThe thing that regularly drives me bananas is that people over here so often say they didn't mean something to be offensive, so therefore it is not. And when I tell them that it may be taken as such, they say I'm wrong. And when I asked which other people of color they have consulted with on the issue, they haven't. They often don't know any other people of color really. This issue really gets me when they talk about Muslims or Turks, but that's a whole other thread.
Or they bring up their "black friend" (or insert minority if your choice) who is totally okay with whatever bigoted phuckery they just spouted off. I call it the rule of "I don't mean to sound." I hate that people think that prefacing the total shii!t they're about to spout with "I don't mean to sound like..." negates that they do in fact sound racist, sexist, bigoted, etc etc.
I guess it depends on how you define "art". If arts purpose is to make you feel something, to make you understand or shake you up, then this piece works simply by how much I and others here seem to hate it.
Something can still be art even if you dont like it, and maybe its even "better" art if it manages to illicit such a response.
But I think whether this cake is art or not is the wrong question. The question is, was it appropriate art for this occasion? I think if this was in an art exhibit about black exploitation, for example, it would be fine. But as it is? Wrong wrong wrong.
ITA. I was just telling someone it could be art in another context, but here? No.