In 2014, at the request of an art adviser, the artist Richard Prince agreed to select an image from Ivanka Trump’s Instagram feed and turn it into an art work. At the time, Prince’s Instagram "paintings," inkjet prints based on unauthorized screenshots of images from people’s feeds, were generating publicity as well as controversy; his print of Ivanka—clad in a white terrycloth robe, with rollers in her hair, holding her cell phone out for a selfie as she is primped by stylists for a photo shoot—was unusual in that it was done on commission. Last week, as a gesture of opposition to Trump’s father on the eve of his Presidential Inauguration, Prince disowned the work and returned the thirty-six thousand dollars he had received for it. (It’s unclear whether it belonged to Trump herself or to another member of her family.) “This is not my work,” Prince wrote on Twitter. “I did not make it. I deny. I denounce. This fake art.” His action was reported on the front page of the Times’ arts section. Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York, could hardly contain his excitement. “A teeny thing felt deeply resonant,” he wrote in an impassioned exegesis of the artist’s words and deed. “Prince’s act of disownership opens up an incredible window of resistance to artists.”
As the reality of Trump’s Inauguration has sunk in, and the sense of emergency on the cultural left has deepened, artists, actors, writers, and musicians have engaged in increasingly vehement expressions of dissent, forming an outpouring of protest unlike any in modern Presidential history. In late November, a coalition of artists and curators held a candlelight vigil outside the Puck building, in downtown Manhattan, where Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, own an apartment. The group’s goal, according to its Web site, was to appeal to Ivanka, a keen collector of contemporary art, as “the voice of reason” in her father’s inner circle. By early January, this gesture had come to seem almost quaint. High-profile musicians, including Elton John, Céline Dion, and Garth Brooks, were declining invitations to perform at Trump’s Inauguration, or backing out after pressure from their fans. (Even the B Street Band, a Bruce Springsteen cover band that was slated to perform at the Garden State Inaugural Gala, cancelled, out of “respect and gratitude” for the Boss.) Meryl Streep used the stage at the Golden Globes to eloquently denounce Trump’s lack of empathy. And more than a hundred and thirty artists and their allies (including this magazine’s theatre critic) signed a petition calling for an “art strike” by museums, galleries, concert halls, and other cultural institutions on Inauguration Day, in order to “combat the normalization of Trumpism—a toxic mix of white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, militarism, and oligarchic rule.”
Along with these gestures has come anguished debate: Can rejection by the creative class—the “cultural élite” that Trump’s supporters have rallied against—constitute effective resistance? The proposed art strike caused particular consternation. By depriving cultural institutions of audiences, including potential collectors, wouldn’t a strike just end up punishing artists? Shouldn’t art spaces serve as refuges for dismayed citizens instead? “Anything that gives aid & comfort to the adversary is a poor idea,” the author Joyce Carol Oates tweeted. “Rather, cultural institutions should compete (& win) w/ inauguration.” In response, the online art magazine _Hyperallergic _offered a series of vigorous rebuttals. Hrag Vartanian, the site’s editor, cited as a precedent the “Moratorium of Art to End the Vietnam War,” organized by the Arts Workers Coalition, in 1969, during which major museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, closed their doors. Cultural institutions tend to be disproportionately frequented by society’s most privileged members, he pointed out; going dark for a day would send a message of unity in opposition in a way that staying open could not. “We may think of strikes as calls to halt production in order to protest wages and working conditions, but they are, in a deeper sense, a powerful way of saying NO,” the artist Coco Fusco wrote. “Art making doesn’t stop, but it is withheld from the art market’s system of commodification and display.” As of Friday morning, more than fifty galleries and nonprofit spaces had said that they would participate in the strike.
Collectively, these gestures possess a compelling appeal. Saying no to Trump has attained an unusual power; it’s the gambit most likely to get his attention. It plays to Trump’s thin skin, his infantile rage, his impulsivity, his insatiable desire for approval. He can’t help but take the bait, striking back via Twitter, which is always within arm’s reach. Much has been made of Trump’s use of tweets to distract from embarrassing stories about his transition, but the opposite is also true: by responding to his detractors, he ends up amplifying their messages of dissent—his is the loudest megaphone around. While the State of California gears up to leave the union, or at least to begin functioning as a semi-autonomous nation, Trump is berating Meryl Streep. (“One of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood,” he tweeted.) Rarely has the simple act of refusal yielded such immediate returns.
Can an accumulation of “no”s have the makings of a political movement—what the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “the Great Refusal”? This was his term to denote the first step toward social transformation: “the protest,” as he grandly put it, “against that which is.” Marcuse, a Marxist refugee from Nazi Germany who became a Bernie Sanders-like guru to the New Left, in the nineteen-sixties, never abandoned the dream of a working-class revolution, and his work has long since fallen out of favor. But his support for students, women, minorities, and artists—what he called “the substratum of outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and the persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable”—was ahead of its time. These marginalized groups, he believed, would be the catalysts of change, their members more likely than most to recognize that the social order they inhabited was not designed with their fulfillment in mind. “Their existence is an elementary force, which violates the rules of the game,” he wrote, “and in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game.” He remains one of few contemporary thinkers to have articulated a political theory of refusal. (In a timely coincidence, next week Temple University Press is publishing a collection of essays reëxamining Marcuse’s conceit in light of recent social movements around the world.)
Still, it’s not always clear what Marcuse meant by the Great Refusal—what one scholar referred to as “the scream.” Is it an end in itself? A purely reactive negative stance? Or does its rejection of the status quo entail a demand for something else? “Marcuse constantly advocated the ‘Great Refusal’ as the proper political response to any form of irrational repression,” Douglas Kellner, a professor at U.C.L.A. and a leading Marcuse scholar, has written. “And indeed this seems to be at least the starting point for political activism in the contemporary era.”
Marcuse might have been heartened by the scale of protest expected in Washington, D.C., this weekend, where reportedly three times as many bus permits have been issued for the Women’s March as for the Inauguration. On Wednesday night, several hundred demonstrators sang and shimmied their way through the D.C. neighborhood where Vice-President-elect Mike Pence is temporarily residing, as part of a travelling “queer dance party” to protest Pence’s lack of support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights. It remains to be seen what these cumulative refusals will amount to, whether Trump, a billionaire who styles himself as an anti-establishment crusader, has irreparably hijacked Marcuse’s rhetoric—and not only that of the “rigged game”—for his own gain. As Tom Huhn, the chair of the departments of art history and visual and critical studies at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, put it, “Part of what makes Trump attractive to many is that he practices a kind of great refusal himself, saying no to just about everything, and thereby appearing to be on the side of human beings liberating themselves from restrictions and hierarchies.”
And the stakes are only likely to get higher. On Thursday, The Hill reported that the blueprint for the federal budget being circulated by Trump’s transition team calls for the wholesale elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and for the privatization of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The challenge for artists will be to remain vigilant against each new threat, and, where warranted, to meet it with a refusal as energetic as the last. At a writers’ protest organized by the PEN America Center, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum last Sunday, Andrew Solomon, the organization’s president, decrying Trump’s apparent disregard for free speech, quoted a South African friend who had lived through apartheid: “ ‘What is most shocking is not how shocked you are right now, what is most shocking is how unshocked you will be in six months time.’ ” Solomon went on, “When I heard him, I took it as an occasion to declare that I will remain shocked. That we will remain shocked.”
