Cultural Appropriation and the Arts by young, james o.

Abstract

James O. Young, professor and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Victoria, has given us a clear, concise, and overwhelmingly informative introduction to the complex subject of the ethics of cultural appropriation. This book could only have come about through many years of travel and scholarly investigation. It is a valuable introduction for those not familiar with the literature on this interesting subject. Young—whose writing voice is always confident, displaying an authoritative grasp on the relevant issues—manages to bring to the work a fastidious clarity of thought and the ability to lead the reader by the hand through his arguments. In five chapters, Young lays out what is at stake in the various kinds of cultural appropriation of artworks, his own views about what should and should not be considered morally wrong about cultural appropriation, and his recommendations for what part public policy should play in this area. His motivation for writing this book is clearly to defeat as many arguments against cultural appropriation of artistic elements as possible. In this, he is mostly successful. In chapter 1, Young introduces the topic and stresses his position that the understanding of what constitutes culture need not be too precise for the views he presents to have value. There are two main types of appropriation he is interested in here: They can be roughly thought of in terms of content (the taking of an idea or a style) and object (the taking of an artwork itself). He further breaks cultural appropriation into five different, more specific types, namely: tangible objects, content, style, motif (influenced by the art of a culture), and subject. He also discusses various objections to cultural appropriation that different writers have offered, objections that have tended to become the orthodoxy in scholarly debates. For example, one might say that cultural appropriation is wrong because a culture is harmed, or that a work or a style or an idea has been stolen from it, or that an artwork in a culture's style by an outsider is profoundly offensive to members of that culture, or that appropriation is wrong not for ethical reasons, but because there are aesthetic flaws when outsiders take something from insiders. The rest of the book is organized according to these different possible aesthetic and ethical wrongs. Chapter 2 addresses the question of whether culturally appropriated artworks always suffer aesthetically. There are two versions of what he calls the aesthetic handicap thesis: The first maintains that outsiders will always necessarily employ aesthetic content ineffectively; the second says that the mere fact that the content has been appropriated from another culture constitutes an aesthetic flaw. Some have argued that an artist must be a member of a culture in order to produce aesthetically valuable artworks distinctive of that culture. This he calls the cultural experience argument. Young's answer to this argument is that many cultural outsiders in fact have produced such artworks. For instance, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and others have played blues music so well that they have won awards and praise from African American cultural insiders. Working in a given style is like learning a language, Young tells us, so that the language can be learned by anyone, even outsiders (p. 41). It is here that I encounter my first difficulty with Young's arguments. While it is certainly true that someone with enough talent can master most any style, even one that arose from outside of one's own culture, I do not think Young does the cultural experience argument justice. I think he mischaracterizes the claims made by proponents of the view. For instance, Young quotes Charlie Parker as having said, “If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn” (p. 35). This statement does not sound as strong to me as it apparently does to Young. I would paraphrase it something like this: The manner in which you perform music is crucially formed, in part, by the unique life experiences you have had, and so if you try to perform music as if it were coming from someone who had different experiences, you will be in some way unsuccessful. But Young takes this quote and others like it as saying that if one has not had a particular cultural experience, one will necessarily produce works of poor quality in that style. This seems an overly simplistic interpretation of the view. One with a non‐African American background can certainly produce music in the blues style, especially if one has had oppressive cultural experiences of one's own (which is often the subtext of much of the blues), and the resulting music can in fact be very good. Young mentions several examples of white blues musicians who have even been praised by black blues musicians (as if this is any kind of proof that there is no difference!). But what white blues musicians cannot produce is blues music that reflects the oppressive cultural heritage of African Americans. This is the point, I think, that all of Young's quotes on this topic make. In chapter 3, the large topic of cultural appropriation as theft is discussed. Two types of theft structure the discussion: (1) theft of objects and (2) theft of styles, motifs, and subjects. Young leans heavily on the issue of who (a culture or an individual) can own an object or a style and why. Here as elsewhere in the book, Young is a strong advocate for the maximum freedom of artists to appropriate subject matter, as he finds the idea of a culture's owning subject matter—by inheritance, traditional law, or as have being given it by gods, for instance—to be unfounded. Young argues that only individuals can own things, and only concrete things at that. This Eurocentric position is evident in many of his arguments against any moral obligation to regard property (intellectual or artistic) as collective. While I tend to agree with the outcome of his argument here, his argument itself seems to rest on assumptions that not everyone would accept. Chapters 4 and 5 cover cases where cultural appropriation could be wrong due to the harm and the profound offense it does to the culture's members, respectively. With regard to harm, misrepresenting the style of a culture can do that culture harm; however, that harm can be done by both insiders and outsiders. With regard to offense, even though it is prima facie wrong to engage in activities that are profoundly offensive, Young argues that, nevertheless, appropriation that causes profound offense is not always wrong. Borrowing from Joel Feinberg's works in philosophy of law, Young holds that two considerations are important for determining whether causing offense is a moral wrong: the availability of alternative arrangements and the reasonableness of the offense. I think there are a pair of dichotomies implicitly lurking beneath the surface of this book. The first is an observable–unobservable dichotomy about aesthetic properties; the second is a consequentialist–deontological dichotomy about morality. With regard to the first, there are those who hold that only observable properties are relevant in evaluating an artwork on the one hand and those who hold that much of what is unobserved about an artwork is relevant for aesthetic evaluation on the other. All Young's aesthetic arguments lean toward countenancing only strictly observable aesthetic properties, which may explain why he so often comes down in favor of free and open cultural taking (though there are exceptions). In other words, if an outsider can make a work that appears to be aesthetically equivalent to an artwork made by a cultural insider, then that work is just as aesthetically authentic and valuable as a work made by an insider. While this may seem initially plausible, after further and deeper thought, it seems that many works do in fact have unobservable, aesthetically significant properties. With regard to the second dichotomy, Young appears to give a largely (though again, there are one or two exceptions) utilitarian evaluation of the ethics of cultural appropriation. This theoretical position leads to what feels, to a westerner, like an agreeably simple formulation in which pleasure and freedom are maximized. This is a laudable outcome in most cases. But this hidden orientation also allows Young to too quickly claim unargued‐for ethical priorities; he merely takes them for granted. For instance, when he discusses the idea that some cultures believe that they have been given artworks or property as gifts from their gods or ancestor beings, he suddenly says that “claims to have been given something by the gods or ancestor beings are false” (p. 78). Of course, Young is entitled to his beliefs, but especially in a book of philosophy, whose grounds are presumably always open to question, this seems particularly abrupt. No argument for this is even attempted. All in all, however, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts is a commendable achievement. I had fun arguing with this book, and it must always be appreciated that it is only in clearly written works that one can find positions presented lucidly enough to argue with. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts will become the standard work in this field for many years to come, and undergraduates could gain every bit as much from its interesting examples and clear arguments as graduate students and professionals can. In the current world political climate, with national boundaries becoming ever more amorphous, we should be having lively debate on the ethics and aesthetics of the cultural borrowing and stealing of artworks. Young's book serves as a sterling contribution toward this important goal.