This week in the arts
The PC bowdlerising of Roald Dahl, dangerous fridges and morphing swastikas
In the latest act of cultural vandalism, the publisher Puffin has used ‘sensitivity readers’ to make hundreds of changes to Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s stories. The changes come in an attempt to make the stories less offensive for a new generation of young readers. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Augustus Gloop is now ‘enormous’ rather than ‘fat’. In Matilda, references to Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling have been strangely softened to the more historically acceptable figures of Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. There has, thankfully, been much backlash on social media, with Salman Rushdie calling the changes ‘absurd’. The CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossell, also condemned this worrying political whitewashing: ‘The problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle. You start out wanting to replace a word here and a word there, and end up inserting entirely new ideas (as has been done to Dahl’s work)’.
Just as Puffin is wanting to keep kids ‘safe’ from damaging norms of the past, safety also justified the parodic alteration of Banksy’s latest artwork in Margate. The mural, Valentine’s Day Mascara, depicts a caricature of a 1950s housewife whose missing teeth, swollen eye, and bruised cheek indicate that she is a victim of domestic abuse. Her rubber-gloved raised hands push a man (presumably her abusive husband) into a chest freezer that sits before the wall, with only his lower legs and shoes poking out. The mural made the headlines after Thanet district council removed the chest freezer which Banksy had incorporated into the artwork. They cited ‘safety concerns’ to justify its removal, before returning it just hours later. Then, it was removed again and kept in storage by a gallery under instructions from the property owners (note that its £2 million top valuation specifically includes the freezer). Gosh, after all this to-ing and fro-ing, the message of the mural seems perfectly diluted — but at least we can rest easy knowing that the freezer poses no danger to the good people of Margate.
Lastly, another form of public art has caused controversy for different, and far more reasonable, reasons. Last Monday, a swastika appeared on a fence outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It was designed so that when you walk past it, the image morphed into the emblem of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Security officers removed it immediately, and a LACMA spokesperson announced that ‘LACMA strongly condemns all forms of hate, racism, and antisemitism’. The mystery artwork is now under investigation as a hate crime.