Multiculturalism, Universality, and Audiences: Part 2

The ironic cultural imperialism of some concerns about appropriation

Encyclopedic museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art have long had a mission of collecting important works across many cultures. In a previous era, that curatorial process was underpinned, implicitly or explicitly, by a belief in western cultural superiority. That confidence is no longer tenable, and is indeed somewhat embarrassing in retrospect. In a previous piece, we explored some of the implications of a multicultural world without any obvious universal basis for assessing quality or merit. In this piece, we consider a possible framework for understanding cultural production in a multicultural world, focusing first on the idea of audiences.

Audiences

Something can be valuable or appealing to one audience while it is worthless or downright repellent to a different audience. Audiences are distributed in complex ways across the population, and individuals may drift over time into or out of a particular audience. An audience may initially seem similar to the marketing concept of a segment, but segmentation is about partitioning a population: in contrast, audiences may overlap. Put differently, we expect that in a market segmentation a particular individual winds up in a single segment, but in an analysis of audiences that same person might be a member of multiple audiences.

In the cultural universe, there are multiple plausible goals with respect to audiences. One (and the most basic) is to satisfy an existing audience, particularly a known audience that is already familiar in some way. Even in its simplest form (satisfying an existing audience) this basic goal can be hard. One has to produce something that is both appealing to that audience and yet not predictable, cliché, or pandering – all hazards that can arise from excessive familiarity or excessive concern with a particular audience.

Another common goal is to grow one’s audience. If we distinguish between the theoretically-reachable audience and the actually-reached audience, then part of growing one’s audience is to get the actually-reached audience closer to the theoretical maximum. (It’s not immediately obvious how one reliably identifies the reachable-but-unreached; we defer that concern for the moment. A crude mechanism would be to distinguish between the number of subscribers who theoretically could watch a show and the number who did watch the show, but the concept of audiences is more widely applicable than this example).

A contrasting approach is to add audiences that were not previously reachable. When this addition of a new audience involves a non-adjacent audience, it is sometimes referred to as a crossover — especially if the new audience is large.

A paradox about the culture business is that pursuing the largest possible audience often contains the seeds of its own failure. People seem to like novelty (but not too much) and that preference leads to waves of change and disruption. Even the most capable and competent trend-surfers eventually miss or lose their touch, and ones that are seen as having “sold out” or “lost their soul” seem to be treated particularly harshly. Artists seem to be well-advised to simply focus on their art and on what moves them. An awareness of career and industry issues can inform their choices, but must not determine their actions.

Within this framework of audiences, we have abandoned the idea of universals. We admit that there is nothing that is universally appealing. This absence is partly related to the existence of multiple cultures: everything is valued with respect to some kind of cultural background, and lacking that cultural background either eliminates or greatly diminishes one’s appreciation for any particular item. One can, of course, learn to like something from another culture – but one has to have both the motivation and the opportunity to do so; it doesn’t just come along for free.

Cultural dominance

Although curatorial thought has turned away from treating Western culture as the universal standard of artistic merit, it would be incorrect to regard all cultures in all settings as being peers. Instead, in any given place there is typically a dominant culture that has a mutually reinforcing relationship with the state. Members of a dominant culture are likely to misunderstand their local culture’s items as being of universal appeal. People from a dominant culture are typically unaware of the deliberate effort required by people from a non-dominant culture so as to understand and appreciate the dominant culture. Dominance inherently means that it is “natural” for the person from a non-dominant culture to want to learn more about the dominant culture, so as to better appreciate it and better fit into discussions about it. Meanwhile, it is an “achievement” for a person from the dominant culture to learn anything about a non-dominant culture. Implicit in that judgment is the understanding that the dominant culture potentially offers access to rewards and power, whereas any non-dominant culture doesn’t.

Cultural appropriation

It’s now appropriate (heh heh) to take up the question of cultural appropriation: what is it, when is it happening, and what should be done about it. We should first discard some lazy or sloppy definitions of cultural appropriation. It's not as simple as saying that when one culture uses elements of another culture, that's appropriation. It's not even as simple as saying that when a dominant culture takes elements of a non-dominant culture, that is appropriation.

We can take a concrete example of myself, a white person raised in upper middle class America, wearing a Vietnamese aó dài. (The literal translation here is “long shirt,” and it’s an elegant elongated tunic, typically silk, worn over trousers).

If I'm doing that in the context of a Vietnamese ceremony or celebration, and I'm doing it in order to conform to expectations, that is not appropriation – indeed, it's the opposite. Although I am a member of the dominant culture in the US, I'm choosing to participate within the norms of a non-dominant culture of the US. But it's also not as simple as just saying that I'm allowed to wear that garment any time I want: the context is crucial. For example, if I were to take the exact same garment and wear it to a Halloween party, all of a sudden it does start to feel like appropriation. That situation would feel like I'm taking a piece of Vietnamese culture and transplanting it elsewhere to do something for myself, instead of doing something within the culture it came from.

This example suggests, first, that there can be such a thing as inappropriately taking another culture’s artifacts for one's own selfish purposes. Second, it's not as simple as saying that white people do cultural appropriation. In particular, any non-Vietnamese person, of any race, could be doing the respectful form of wearing. Equally, any non-Vietnamese person could be doing the disrespectful thing of wearing the aó dài at a Halloween party.

(There's a subtle question of whether a Vietnamese person can be guilty of cultural appropriation of Vietnamese culture by wearing an aó dài at a Halloween party, but I'm going to steer clear of that concern – it seems like a second- or third-order issue at worst.)

Intellectual property

It’s also noteworthy that the entire concept of cultural appropriation is in certain respects very western-centric. Even a modest understanding of cultural changes through history leads to a realization that borrowing and mixing is simply the way that culture works. It is profoundly silly to argue that all forms of borrowing and mixing of cultures are cultural appropriation. (Indeed, the history of the aó dài involves Chinese and French influences; in the absence of such borrowing and mixing, the garment in its current form simply wouldn’t exist). To make sense of the concept of cultural appropriation, one has to have the idea of intellectual property: the idea that an individual or a group can have some kind of ownership claim on something that is intangible.

Such a concern with intellectual property is far from universal. Instead, within at least some cultures, the only interesting question about me wearing an aó dài is the question of whether or not it is my property or whether it belongs to someone else, and whether I have their permission if it is not mine. That is a relatively straightforward, concrete framing of the situation. It contrasts vividly with the question of whether or not I am somehow guilty of “stealing culture” even in a situation where I clearly own the garment that I'm wearing.

It is easy for westerners to be unaware of just how unusual intellectual property is as a concept. We are prepared to construct elaborate systems of trademarks, copyrights, patents, and the like, and we enforce these rules with courts, injunctions, and fines. Mercifully, we don't put people in jail for intellectual property violations, but we do pretty much everything short of that. Those who believe themselves to be sensitive in this area need to be aware of the extent to which their analytic framework is incredibly biased toward western culture, and literally makes no sense if applied in a culture that doesn’t have a similar emphasis on concepts of intellectual property. In the same way that we lack universal standards for artistic merit, we likewise lack universal standards for theft of intellectual property. Westerners with concerns about intellectual property are at risk of an oddly ironic paternalism when they argue against cultural appropriation on behalf of cultures that may not actually share the concern.

Conclusion

For better or worse, we live in a multicultural world. Any given artifact of interest makes sense within some particular culture and is difficult or impossible to judge outside that culture. In spite of that, there is merit to the mission of the encyclopedic museum, even if its universalist mission is both hard to justify and hard to achieve.

Instead of thinking about universal judgments, we can more productively think about partially-overlapping audiences for art. Within that framing, it becomes apparent that “cultural appropriation” is sometimes a western-biased way of thinking about items that have been displaced from one cultural context to another.