Jimmy Carr Destroys Art is another useless entry into the ‘cancel culture’ debate 💬 The Channel 4 stunt spoke to our laziness, our refusal even, to engage with anything difficult, writes emilyrbakes
There’s the rub. These artworks, in the grand scheme of things, were insignificant. Expensive, sure, but not great works of art. Those that sparked interesting debate — Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley made up of children’s handprints, for example — were simply prints of the original. There was very little jeopardy, rendering the apparent debate entirely asinine.was yet another useless entry into the ongoing conversation about cancel culture.
Similarly, destroying one of Hitler’s watercolours doesn’t effectively “cancel” one of history’s most evil men. Before the show aired, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust condemnedas “trivialising the horrors of Nazism”. Equating something as doltish and simplistic as cancel culture with one of the biggest atrocities in history is unforgivable.
The show also fell into the trap so many of these debates fall foul to: ignoring context. The removal of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from Bristol town centre was given equal weight to the potential destruction of a Picasso piece. That one is a piece celebrating a hateful person, and one the product of a hateful person, was irrelevant.Whether art can be separated from the artist is a philosophical question humanity has grappled with for decades.
Let’s be honest, a BBC Four debate with critics and artists wouldn’t get nearly as much attention as Jimmy Carr with a chainsaw.I’d imagine Channel 4 bosses would say that at least the show got people talking, but it hasn’t. It’s got people sighing and eye rolling. If the purpose ofwas to open debate, it failed. The only thing I came away with was an overwhelming sense of nihilism. Should we destroy art? Who cares.