Turn A Blind Eye

by Babs Rappleye (aka Tucker Neel)

Artillery Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2021.

Dear Babs, I’m a young artist a few years out of grad school. Recently my dad’s close friend asked if he could buy a painting I made about America’s racist prison industrial complex. In the spirit of transparency, he told me he planned to give it as a gift to an old business partner. The problem is, the dude in question was a racist governor who helped engineer the horrors my work is about. I really need the money, but I don’t want my art to go to a person I detest. What should I do?

—Skeptical Sell Out

Dear Skeptical,

Think of this as a chance to test the power of your art and the strength of your convictions.

You could sell the piece and bet on its transformative power. Who knows, maybe one day the new owner might look at it, see the error of his ways, and become a prison abolitionist. But that’s pretty unlikely.

You could pull a Hans Haacke and create a contract to accompany the work in perpetuity. Put anything you want in it: make the owner donate future sales from the work to The Innocence Project, require an explanatory text accompany its installation, insist it be loaned to any non-profit art space that wants to show it. While your dad’s gubernatorial chum probably won’t honor the contract, at least its existence might deflect efforts to obscure the message behind your work.

If it makes you feel any better (and it probably won’t), many well-respected and successful artists who make work with clear progressive agendas find their art owned by truly reprehensible people. Rich assholes want the same art as their rich friends, even when it contradicts their vomitous politics—and they’ll do anything to get it. But in this instance, you get to choose, and that’s quite an opportunity to stand by your convictions.

If, in the end, you decide not to sell, at least you’ll have a good story for years to come. You stood firm when times were tough and did what you thought was right for you and your work. And that, in the end, is priceless.