After the successful campaign by a group of black writers to secure the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, it should not have come as any surprise that the National Book Awards would be made the target of a similar political takeover. Indeed, given the momentum that such affirmative-action campaigns have lately achieved in virtually every sphere of American cultural life, the wonder is that it has taken as long as it has for the National Book Awards to be added to the roster of prizes and preferments that have now been so completely politicized that they have been rendered meaningless, even as pro forma guides to literary quality. With the awarding of the 1990 National Book Award for fiction to Charles Johnson, the black author of a novel called The Middle Passage, this prestigious literary prize has gone the way of the Pulitzer and so many others.

Whatever literary qualities Mr. Johnson’s book may possess, it is clear that it came to the jury’s attention primarily for what we might call its author’s ethnic credentials. The whole sordid story was told in an unusually candid account of the fiction jury’s deliberations in The New York Times for November 27, the day the jury was to meet over lunch to select a prize-winner. Under the headline, “Ideology Said to Split Book-Award Jurors,” the story by Roger Cohen reported that the jury, which consisted of five writers, was split “by what one juror called ‘deep ideological divisions,’” and went on to provide the following details:

And further:

From the list of five books that ended up as finalists for the prize, we were put on notice even in advance of the official decision that novels by white male non-minority authors were to be programmatically excluded from consideration. As Mr. Cohen reported in the Times, of the five books that made the final list, two were written by “Spanish-bom“ authors, one by a writer bom in the Philippines, one by a white woman, and one by a black male. In other words, the customary considerations of race, gender, and ethnicity were rigorously in force, and questions of literary excellence discarded by the majority on the jury as irrelevant.

Blatant political assaults of this kind have long been standard practice in American academic life, where they have succeeded in making a mockery of intellectual standards—and indeed, in driving many gifted students out of the humanistic disciplines that have been so adversely affected by the new ideological imperatives. Now our major literary prizes have succumbed to the same political pressures, and we can be certain that this destructive process will meet with no resistance from the literary establishment. Silence and acquiescence will be the order of the day.

Yet now that the politics of affirmative action has finally destroyed the integrity of the National Book Awards, isn’t it time for the literary world to acknowledge that this whole prize-giving system has simply degenerated into a program that “minority” writers and excludes other writers on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity? Simple honesty would seem to require an admission that ideology has supplanted literary excellence as the basis for these prizes. Yet simple honesty in these matters is not nowadays to be found in our literary establishment.

A Message from the Editors

At The New Criterion we will always call things by
their real names.

As a reader of our efforts, you have stood with us on the front lines in the battle for culture. Learn how your support contributes to our continued defense of truth.

Yes, I Will Support Your Endeavors

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 5, on page 1
Copyright © 2021 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1991/1/affirmative-action-book-prizes

Whatever else may be said about the state of contemporary art as the new year begins, it looks very much as if the role played by the auction houses in overinflating the value of some already wildly overrated artistic reputations is going to be significantly diminished. As Judd Tully reported in a recent issue of The Journal of Art, “The bad news began at Sotheby’s evening sale of November 6 . . . with 43 of the 77 lots failing to find buyers. The shocking buy-in rate of 56%, and a sales total that was exactly half of the lowest pre-sale estimate, constituted an outright disaster.” At Christie’s there was a similar collapse in the contemporary-art market.

Included among the casualties at these auctions were works by such celebrated figures as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, Joel Shapiro, Robert Rauschenberg, Eric Fischl, Howard Hodgkin, Jennifer Bartlett, Elizabeth Murray, and Richard Tuttle. Not even the heretofore sacrosanct reputation of Andy Warhol escaped what one dealer called the “carnage” and a contemporary-art expert at Sotheby’s described as “quicksand.” What had looked like a sure thing only a couple of years ago turned out, as so many sure things in the art world of the 1980s have, to be a chimera.

This was bad news indeed for the traders in these hyped-up reputations. For the rest of us, however, the really bad news had begun much earlier on, when it had become standard practice for the auction houses—and not for them alone, of course—to promote the work of these artists as if they had already passed in the class of established old masters. This represented something more than an inflated market for a certain kind of art-world chic. It represented a fundamental distortion of artistic value. The wonder is not that the boom in these artificial reputations began to collapse at the first sign of a downturn in the economy but that it lasted for as long as it did at the absurd levels of money and adulation that had been reached.

It is far too soon, to be sure, to declare a definitive end to this runaway boom. What we are more likely to be seeing is the beginning of the end. An auction season that saw a work by Robert Rauschenberg bring S3.08 million, despite the other Rauschenbergs that bombed, and a work by Cy Twombly bring $4.84 million, a painting by Willem de Kooning $8.8 million, and even a Philip Guston abstraction $1.1 million, cannot be said to have fully returned to sanity. But what can be said with confidence is that something more than a few price levels has collapsed. What we have also seen beginning to unravel are some of the illusions that were spawned by the art scene of the Eighties. Whether this market “correction,” as it has been called, brings in its wake a real correction of taste remains to be seen. It would be nice, anyway, to think that it might.

A Message from the Editors

At The New Criterion we will always call things by
their real names.

As a reader of our efforts, you have stood with us on the front lines in the battle for culture. Learn how your support contributes to our continued defense of truth.

Yes, I Will Support Your Endeavors

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 5, on page 2
Copyright © 2021 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1991/1/the-auction-disasters