Kimono Protests at Boston MFA (the messiness of cultural engagement)

         counterprotesting with the protest

When is wearing a kimono in a art museum a racist gesture versus just a silly one?  A great and complex question raised by an exhibit, protest, and counterprotest regarding the tangled history of artistic appropriation, experimentation, image exports, and poorly framed attempts at interactivity in an American museum with one of the best Japanese art and artifact collections in the world outside of Japan.

This article in Hyperallergic by Seph Rodney last week gives a thoughtful run-down on the issues at play when the museum tried to run a little promo event where museum-goers were invited to pose kimono-clad in front of Monet's painting “La Japonaise” (1876).  Non-Japanese posing in a kimono...but in front of a painting that is itself a non-Japanese posing in a kimono. Was the MFA Boston's promo event a incident or Orientialism/orientalizing in the worse possible sense, or perhaps  just bad taste of upper-crust museum administrators?

The last paragraph of Rodney's article sums up some of the key issues we've been wrestling with in this course and the necessity of cultural engagement:

"For me, the worst aspect of this debacle is that it feeds the notion that culture is a kind of precious object that may only be doled out to those outside the specific culture by those designated as appropriate cultural handlers. I do believe that culture is a precious resource. However in the view propagated by the Boston protesters, the emphasis for non-Westerners should be on guarding and regulating the representation of culture, instead of making it available in ways that are productive to a more profound understanding. I do not want to be cultural cop. That’s not work I need to be doing. We would benefit more from critical thinkers rather than gatekeepers. We are merely opportunistic and short-sighted when we close down conversations on the basis of sloppy thinking fueled by indignation."