Against Morality opens with the author, British cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin, determining if she’s having a stroke. She checks her limbs for numbness, assures that she can focus on a tree in the distance, and reads some text aloud in case she was waxing aphasiac. What brought this on was an art review.
McLaughlin is a fan of the painter Chaim Soutine, having marveled at his work in an exhibition at Somerset House in 2017. Soutine was an extraordinary French painter who developed a profound and influential style of expressionism. A Soutine portrait is both consummately sympathetic and aggressively corporeal. McLaughlin notes that “it is as if his brush is caressing and beating his subjects at the same time.” While looking at works by and writings about Soutine on the web, she came across a review of the Somerset House exhibition. McLaughlin was too polite to name the reviewer and, as a courtesy, I won’t either. But she was correct that he shoehorned the painter into a progressive political stance. “An outsider who identified with the underdog,” he wrote, “Soutine’s eye sympathetically drifted to the underclass beneath this moneyed illusion” of the French belle époque.
The whole interest of Soutine is his defiance of such polemics. His paintings combined irreconcilable emotions into dissident chords. The portraits relay love, disgust, and sadness at once. They do not reduce to a comfortable liberal message. Some of them are hard to look at. “Finding myself utterly unable to marry the interpretation to the artworks,” McLaughlin recalls, “I began to worry that something had gone terribly wrong. Am I having a stroke? I wondered, clutching my blanket.” I replied in my imagination: No, my dear colleague. You’re experiencing what the rest of us have been putting up with in art writing for the last quarter century.
Against Morality is the cri de coeur of a cultural critic who realizes that the presentation of art and its adjacent pursuits, including much art itself, have become the subsidiaries of progressive politics. The results are often reductive, misleading, and repellent to moral complexity.
Of course, reactionaries or authors mistaken for them have been saying as much for forty years. “On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct,” wrote Jacques Barzun in 1989, in a book with the telling title of The Culture We Deserve. “And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.” But when Barzun, Hilton Kramer, or Robert Hughes argued for the primacy of taste over politics, it was possible to dismiss them as straight white men and continue beating the audience over the head with progressive moralizing.
Not so McLaughlin. In writing of her advocacy for the complications of Hieronymus Bosch’s panel depicting hell, she clarified that it’s not “because I myself long to be spit-roasted by devils or tenderized by a kindly sadist, as promising as those scenarios may sound.” She mentions her wife at one point, and described Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Tár in the film of that name as “mesmerically attractive.” One would think that with McLaughlin, unabashedly gay and familiar with kink, inveighing against “flattening culture,” her fellow political travelers would be obliged to deal with the argument: that art worth looking at does not kowtow to sociopolitical programs.
That is, one would think it if we hadn’t watched Jed Perl proclaim the same argument a decade ago, the point at which McLaughlin marks the beginning of “a concerted attempt to make art communicate clear and approvable messages, to clean up the canon, to preach a sanctioned set of tenets, ironing out any of the ambivalences that make art move.” Perl too is a straight white man. But he was and is no kind of conservative, though he was suspected of becoming one in 2014, when he wrote for The New Republic, “The trouble with the reasonableness of the liberal imagination is that it threatens to explain away what it cannot explain.” In that article he lamented, “The erosion of art’s imaginative ground, often blamed on demagogues of the left and the right, is taking place in the very heart of the liberal, educated, cultivated audience—the audience that arts professionals always imagined they could count on.”
The problems hardly started a mere decade ago. Rather, the tendency of progressive politics to shame people into compliance had so intensified by the middle-20-teens that Donald Trump’s coarse disregard of social norms looked like liberation itself in comparison. The Biden presidency promised a return to decency and normalcy but delivered neither. In early fall of 2024, California sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild produced a book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, describing how Trump was leveraging progressive shaming to climb back to power. Even with the strategy laid bare, it worked. Having destroyed their presidential aspirations twice, progressives cling to the possibilities of shame, with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in the September 2025 Boston Review extolling shame as a function that “reminds us of who we want to be when we fall short, a goalpost that is necessarily anchored to the lofty height that our conduct fell beneath.” While admitting that we could learn to “shame better,” he described shame as “a robustly liberal alternative to… political violence,” as if there was no alternative to shame but assassinations.
But while McLaughlin is a sufficiently independent thinker to recognize the intellectual and political failures of a progressive milieu from the inside, at times she seems unable to think beyond it. Case in point is her discussion of Documenta 15. The 2022 art fair in Kassel relinquished curatorial control to a network of arts collectives. In the ensuing chaos, Indonesian collective Taring Padi displayed a mural-sized banner depicting, as McLaughlin recounts, “a Mossad agent with a pig’s snout, and an Orthodox Jewish man with fangs wearing a bowler hat emblazoned with the letters SS.” In the ensuing fury, “There was certainly no room… for a discussion of global politics, of how the oppressed can, and frequently do, also act as oppressors, of the aftereffects of Israel’s history of warmongering.” She decries the “deplatforming and defunding” of Palestinian artists and their supporters for “their stated objection to the killing of Palestinian civilians.” This is having noted the “many Ukrainian flags hoisted above Western art institutions after the Russian invasion,” in contrast to the “absence of Palestinian flags raised in the wake of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, following the Hamas-led armed incursion of October 7, 2023.”
She attributes this to the tendency of the shaming regime to employ the “language of social justice and solidarity” as “a costume that can dress up any issue,” but this is skipping steps. After the October 7 atrocities, but before the Israeli military response, institutions had the opportunity to fly the flag of Israel just as they had flown the Ukrainian colors. They did not. Art writer Katya Kazakina, in an October 20, 2023 essay for Tablet, observed with betrayal that no major gallery, no museum, and no art magazine expressed support for Israel or the Jews more broadly. “Those who remain silent are the same businesses and institutions that issued almost instant (and correct) support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion last year, for Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s murder; that telegraph their support for LGBT rights and minority rights through exhibitions, policies, and statements,” she wrote.
One could argue that even those statements should have been withheld, on the grounds laid out by McLaughlin that morality is deleterious to both creation and appreciation. But once made, the art world painted itself into a corner. The silence described by Kazakina was tacit admission that Jews were not under protection of the ethos of so-called “anti-racism” that had been advocated, with incidents of violence, property destruction, and professional and social annihilation, for the prior three years. It was also tacit admission that progressives regard Israel as part of the Western order that many of them want to overthrow. To then raise the flag of Palestine over the museums, or advocate for artists who reveled in the October 7 pogrom and called for global Intifada, would have made those volatile admissions obvious.
McLaughlin blames the lack of commitment to the Palestinian cause on expediency. But, in the end, museums, galleries, and art magazines are bourgeois operations that can’t promulgate the rhetoric of progressive radicalism. And they should be chided for pretending they could. The public seems to sense this. Putting aside questions of legality and civics in regards to Trump’s targeting of the Smithsonian institutions and the National Endowment for the Arts, it’s notable how little protest it elicited from anyone besides their direct beneficiaries. Galleries are closing left and right, and anyone with a serious financial stake in fine art will tell you that collectors have largely stopped reading art criticism.
Against Morality, despite its presentism and blind spots, has a trenchant and original chapter titled “Liberal Realism.” This is her term for the aforementioned shaming regime. “Liberal Realism is the product of a culture that demands its ideology be unambiguously reflected in its art.” It is the contemporary analogue of Soviet Realism, the superficially joyous portrayals of Stalinism that served as implicit instructions on how to feel about the regime. So it is with Liberal Realism, except that it’s not joyous and the threatened gulag is social. “Liberal Realism,” in McLaughlin’s condemnation, “is the art of those who sit in the educated rubble of civilization, among the structures and narratives we have so expertly disassembled, unable and afraid to countenance building something new, of risking putting something out in the world – unless its meaning and politics have already been assessed, confirmed, and approved – because we all know all too well how easy it is to tear a thing to shreds.”
Liberal Realism is not just a style of art, but a curatorial ethos. “Thus, the viewer is told what to think and why, artworks become illustrations for the meta-narrative of biography, and artists and their subjects ciphers for social-justice narratives, their work simplified to better meet the needs of the moment.” In 2020, four museum directors associated with the exhibition “Philip Guston Now” canceled its 2021 due to concerns regarding his depictions of Klansmen from the late ’60s and first half of the ’70s. They announced a delay, possibly for three years, “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted,” as they put it in a statement. When McLaughlin viewed the iteration of the show at the Tate Modern, it was less condescending than the one I reviewed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. But she notes that “pains were taken to convince the audience of Guston’s good politics, framing his work as anti-racist.”
McLaughlin may be the first progressive to recognize aloud that this episode of abject cowardice on the part of the museums caused long-term damage to institutional credibility and the perception of art in general:
One of the calling cards of Liberal Realism is the propensity to dress up self-serving tendencies as moral superiority, she writes. “The reframing of Guston as anti-racist primarily served the institutions that had agreed to show his work…. It did not serve the viewers, who were patronized by the dubious revisionism, and who were faced with the prospect of viewing Guston’s work in environments hostile to taking the artworks on their own terms.
Furthermore, “in its triumphalist attitude of having ‘solved’ the problem of racism his paintings, it relieved audiences from having to contend with the uncomfortable notion that racism is a part of everyday life, as quotidian as cigarettes and cars, and part of their own psychological makeup.” This last bit is off the mark, as the whole idea of the shaming regime at the time was to make white audiences experience their racism as ubiquitous and irredeemable. The last thing that the Boston leg of “Philip Guston Now” wanted was to oblige black viewers to confront the racism lurking in their psyches. On the contrary, the exhibition encouraged them and their sympathizers—really more the latter than the former—to engage in acts of self-care that challenging art museum shows do not actually call for. They too were deprived of an opportunity for aesthetic contemplation, but from the other direction.
Returning to Soutine, McLaughlin concludes that worthy art “pushes the viewer to go beyond what they think they ought to feel, what they think they already know, and to experience a fundamental irresolution that contains with it something of the beauty and horror of being alive.” It certainly can; McLaughlin’s admiration of Bosch’s hell panel accompanies a too-swift dismissal of the Eden panel. But to clarify further, the imposition of morality on art is an assault upon a realm of private experience that we cherish, firstly because we have nothing else, and secondly because we presume all others to have one of their own regardless of their identity. Paradoxically, this intensely personal phenomenon binds us to our fellow creatures. Key to what McLaughlin is calling Liberal Realism is the presumption that our inner lives belong to the shaming regime, to reorder according to its will. McLaughlin is correct that art is becoming a gigantic drag under Liberal Realism, but she is only scratching the surface on a profound danger.
That said, at least she is scratching the surface. The question is who will receive her message, between non-progressives already apprised and progressives reluctant to hear her.
