The mad, bad crusade against ‘cultural appropriation’

It’s usually best to ignore the indignant fury of the 21st-century young. We’re used to them now, these snowflakes, posing as victims (though they’re mostly middle-class), demanding ‘safe spaces’, banning books and speakers. Best to rise above them, deadhead the camellias. Attention, especially from the press, acts on entitled millennials like water on gremlins — they start proliferating and develop a taste for blood.

But then sometimes they go too far.

Ten days ago, the Whitney museum, on the New York bank of the Hudson, opened its biennial exhibition of contemporary American art. It’s an exciting show, full of vim and diversity. Half the artists represented are black, and the exhibition’s stated aim is to confront racism and poverty in the States.

One of the white Whitney artists is a woman called Dana Schutz, and one of her paintings is of a famous photograph of a dead black boy, Emmett Till. Till was tortured and beaten to death in the mid-1950s by redneck bigots and Schutz’s painting is called ‘Open Casket’ because his brave mother chose to display his ruined face so that the world could see what had happened.