A challenge for culture warriors is keeping the community engaged

American broadcaster NBC has said it won’t screen the Golden Globes Awards for a while because of underrepresentation of minorities in the voting panel. This comes on the back of revelations that the number of people watching the Oscars had halved in the last year. Just as Netflix had started to capture a quantity of gongs commensurate with its reach, people had started to abandon awards nights, and even traditional allies had turned sour.

This reflects a wider problem with awards of all kinds. I’ve written before elsewhere about how, in literature, there’s a too-small pool of talent choosing who wins prizes. Everyone knows everyone else and no-one’s honest so the same people keep getting accolades. We need to make sure the pool of talent used is as wide as possible, but we should be careful not to be complacent and just award prizes to the products that tick all the right ideological boxes but that are otherwise ordinary.

When Elon Musk came out with his “Aspergers” revelation we saw the community respond mostly with positive comments. Some people were not happy but most people said nice things about the billionaire, and whatever you might think about moneybags like Musk taking credit for being a little different the episode showed us how important identity is for the way that people value cultural products. 

If Musk is anything, he’s part of popular culture. If Andy Warhol were alive the artist would make a screenprint of Musk’s face for use on T-shirts. Responses from RW culture warriors to the NBC story, however, show that a backlash has already started – even before the project has fully worked itself out. Many people are unhappy with the “woke” factory that parts of the industry have become. This path is still unrolling itself along time’s bright axis so it’s too early, now, to give a definitive answer based on evidence, but I predict that the two sides will continue to bicker online until someone sets up a “Just Art” award committee somewhere that has as its overt focus the ignoring of ideology as a criterion for valuing such things as books or movies. 

“The Purelys” might be given each year to TV shows that are good despite the use of a wide range of gender-identifying types from many ethnic backgrounds, but who will be on the panel of judges? A random cohort of Twitter users, chosen on the basis of their visibility on the Netflix hashtag, perhaps. Or else a committee of university academics, following the Nobel’s methodology. Who gets to choose what is “good” and what is merely pedestrian? Do we allocate value on the basis of dollars alone, or do we wait, like patient children, until posterity tells us what is worth caring about?