Joshua Lieberman

Nothing heightens the sense of the unpalatable better than a dinner scene. Think of the violence meted out at the dining table in Pasolini’s Salò (1975). Think of André Gregory lecturing Wallace Shawn on his solipsism – much to our discomfort – in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981). CBC's documentary Deconstructing Karen accidentally borrows from the form. Eight white women are chided ceaselessly at dinner by two activists – failed Congressional candidate Saira Rao (who is Indian-American) and hitherto unknown Regina Jackson (who is African-American) – until the white women admit that they are racist.

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he is too uncontroversial, his appeal too broad, his approach altogether too winsome. None of that stopped the team behind Philip Guston Now – a travelling mega-survey of his work, which will reach Tate Modern in 2023 – from announcing otherwise. In 2020, the year the show was due to open, the curators announced that in light of the ‘racial justice movement’, the artist’s works might now legitimately be read as racist, and the show could not go forward as planned. This was and is quite obviously nonsense. The works in question are marshmallow-like renderings of Klansmen in absurd, mundane scenes.