Art as HR

A reflection on arts gatekeepers and their cultural duties.

Pull up any call for literary submissions these days and you’ll find a stale expression of a general dedication to inclusivity. At first blush, it seems harmless. Inclusivity is good. Diversity is good. It only makes logical and moral sense to advertise your commitment to these ideas. Such statements endear the journal to progressive submitters, and help ensure that aggrieved rejects won’t chalk up their rejection to their membership in a protected class.

What lies beneath these diversity statements, however, is the declaration of fealty to a stranger cause. Art, here, now, is the battleground, the stage on which we seek to redress historical wrongs. Through the mechanism of representation, we are told that art can correct the harms of racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, and the like. If we uplift the work and voices of the oppressed then everything else will fall into place. Justice and empathy will flow from this new age of understanding that arises once our creative world is properly diverse.

It’s a nice sentiment. The allure is evident. One can see how this kind of thinking proliferates, but beneath the charm and often sincere righteousness there is narcissism, and, worse, a general degradation of the arts as a whole. In this race toward a promise of justice, many editors, artists, critics, and readers are turning art into what can better be seen as a Human Resources department. It is a way of looking at the world and the creative process which elevates the who over the what. Worse, it champions its perverted sense of justice as a raison d’etre more important than both artist and art. This ‘Art as HR’ paradigm, at its core, is a realignment of values away from art as personal expression and towards art as a tool for social justice. When such a mindset captures the totality of the arts, it consumes itself. It destroys the purity of the act of creation. It poisons the well.

This is not to say that art cannot or is not a powerful tool for justice. Patently, it is. Look at all the works and artists who have challenged society, who have held up a mirror, who have cried out against wrongdoing. But this function is individual, not collective and meted out by mandate. That’s what these practitioners of art as HR are getting wrong. Lucille Clifton would not have reached so many were she one of a hundred Lucille Cliftons. Artists cannot be injection molded and formed to spec—but that’s essentially what this HR trend is seeking to do. It celebrates not the voice of the artist but the existence of the voice of a type of artist. The individual is reduced to identity; and this identity is extolled as part of the greater cultural project. The work itself, the very form and content of the expression, becomes largely irrelevant.

It is not just an overcorrection in reaction to the past; it is a perversion of the very purpose of art. Whether these editors and artists are aware of it or not, they’re creating a world (or at least a dominant scene) where the primacy of any given piece of media is the intersectional identity of its creator and their content. The theme of ‘who’ is its constant refrain, not in the sense of a unique human soul but a quantifiable rubric of oppression. “Are we showcasing the right kinds of people and the right kinds of work?” This is the underlying question guiding the editorial process.

Identity, in this case, is not purely a matter of intersectional identification but also allegiance to the cause. Are you doing the work? Have you been observed doing the work? It is who in the sense of the ideological pedigree of the creator and his or her art. If a given piece stumbles, if through nuance or iconoclasm it appears less than stalwart on these shifting moral grounds, then that work is unworthy and unfit for consumption.^[1] Beyond that, it is radioactive, capable of causing tangible harm through its lack of visible piety.

Through this lens, the choice for any editor, gallery director, or producer in a position of power is made clear. Unsuitable works must be barred at the door, and tools like the talismanic diversity statement must be used to keep them out. If the work doesn’t tick the right boxes, or even ticks the wrong boxes without shame, then they’re justified and empowered to reject it. In this moral climate, it’s not just the sensible thing to do. It is the right thing to do.

A recent journal I encountered featured the boilerplate diversity statement, with an added caveat that it would not consider any piece that “depicted” racism, sexism, or violence of any kind. I can respect that some people want spaces and works that are breezy and untroubling. That’s their prerogative. But what happens when this sentiment is duplicated over and over again? This was not a journal for children, mind you, but one for educated adults. As such a mindset becomes widespread and ingrained, it’s not hard to see where we’re headed—a creative landscape devoid of anything that doesn’t pass this prudish muster.

If this purity doctrine succeeds, the totality of creative output will drift into mundane fantasy. Art will not reflect the world but rather an imagined world of insipid justice, and will ironically lose its power for change altogether. We will confront a sea of faceless artists and their formless works and be told that this is both good and necessary. If you disagree, your own work will never see the light of day, and for your troubles you might be labeled a heretic as well.

I am not against diversity. I am against mediocrity. I am against making creativity easy and welcoming for supplicant voices, and impossible for all others. I am against turning a crucible of expression into a Disney park. We’re already seeing the consequences of this regime, and it’s not good. It produces bland and unchallenging work catering to smaller and smaller micro-identities, all of it marketed as such. The sales numbers for literature reflect the dismal failure of this doctrine, and still somehow the cultural gatekeepers press forward into disaster.

I admit that I, like others, can see the appeal of ‘identity’ art. Art that speaks to my own experience, after all, can find an elevated place in my own heart. Ultimately, however, that’s not really what I’m looking for. I’m not constantly seeking validation and flattery. I want something that will defy my expectations, not meet them. I want work that spits in my face. I want to read a book that will hold a knife to my throat. I want to watch a movie that will make me puke. I want to have a panic attack by just looking at a painting. That’s what’s at stake here—the loss of most anything meaningful and universal in favor of the hypertargeted, hypersanitized, and hyperpartisan.

            Whether this trend will continue or fizzle, I’m really not sure. Likely, it will go the way of any other trend in publishing, which is to say the public will eventually tire of it—and the tastemakers will glom onto the next thing with similar abandon. Regardless, we would do well to consider the wages of HR think and what it means for art.

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^[1] Thus, the growing preoccupation with the personal probity of artists. But what if the artist’s monstrosity and the artist’s work are inseparable?

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H. Kunstlerr is an American academic and author. For more work like this, consider subscribing to Futurist Letters and lending us your support with a patron membership.