Get Your Grubby Complexes Off My Art – The American Spectator

Since lately haters insult me a little less than usual, I am about to sign an elitist and classist article. Is Itxu Díaz really elitist? Very much so. From the moment I wake until lunchtime, and then for the rest of the day. I am disgustingly elitist, and I am radically against anyone with the same brain perimeter as a dwarf flea undertaking intellectual and moral projects for which they are not qualified. Museums are not for everyone. Neither are universities. Neither is art, nor cinema, nor literature. Knowing how to read and write without making too many spelling mistakes is a commendable advance with respect to the illiterate, but it is not enough to venture to cancel passages of Don Quixote, even if you are a minority, or belong to a leftist group, or even managed to stumble into some political position out of the blue.

Yesterday’s art, the cultural baggage of Western civilization, is somewhat above average. What I mean to say is that an idiot cannot enjoy a work of art. A fool who contemplates a painting or reads a book from four centuries ago through contemporary lenses will be wrong about everything, but above all they will be wrong in believing that this cultural heritage belongs to them. No. If that work of art had fallen into the hands of that fool, then, in all likelihood, it would not have been preserved intact in a museum to this day. So the first thing we must do to continue preserving the artistic heritage of the West is to ask idiots to stay away from it.

People attack sculptures or paintings because they believe they are capable of understanding them and talking about them without making fools of themselves, something they would never dare to do with the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, or with the works of Martin Heidegger; somehow they leave these aside because they assume they are incapable of tackling something of the like without their brains bursting. And therein lies the flaw. No, those who have forced several museums to install panels explaining why ancient sculptures were so white and to include anti-racist slogans next to art works are not qualified to contemplate the masterpieces of Greece and Rome. They are qualified to go on television programs to talk nonsense, to give talks to their cult followers, or to try to put a hashtag on Twitter, but they lack the minimal basic training, the intellectual decency, and the ability to absorb beauty that is needed to sit before a classical masterpiece and form a value judgment about it.

Not long ago, an illustrious idiot from a high school in Massachusetts said that she was very proud to have eliminated The Odyssey from the curriculum because, according to her decayed criteria, it is racist and sexist. With the number of circuses in the world, when I see these things, I can’t help but wonder why these people insist on not staying in their rightful place: Keep the clowns out of the classrooms! (READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: The Slowing of Earth’s Inner Core Does Not Mean That We’re All Going to Die)

It is not a new example, but it confirms my thesis. Someone who cancels a work by Homer because it doesn’t fit into her tiny 2023 mindset is an idiot, and this is not an insult but a definition. In other words, her face could illustrate the term “stupidity” in an illustrated dictionary, and no one sensible would think twice about it. But in the event that you feel so empowered as to attack and cancel Homer, the least you can do is be on the same intellectual level. And no, having organized inclusive workshops where the young ladies draw girls in pants and the lads draw and cut out boys in skirts is not, I’m sorry, on the intellectual level of The Odyssey — more like the level of a screaming TikToker for teenagers not yet too hooked on cocaine.

And if, even then, something were to suggest to you that you’re intellectually strong enough to trash a museum with your disposable slogans fresh out of a futuristic New York Times editorial, at least do us a favor: Don’t take it out on the classics. There are plenty of modern-art museums full of crap that I, personally, won’t cry over if some abducted leftist decides to immolate his woke principles there.

Be that as it may, conservatives should give intransigence a damn chance in these cases when it comes to defending the cultural heritage of the West. In the past, people took up arms and gave their lives for much less. The idiots who try to turn our classical-art museums into woke discotheques must be met with a single declaration: Get your self-conscious hands off my art. Because art does not belong to everyone; it belongs to those who defend it, save it, and preserve it.

Translated by Joel Dalmau.