Monday, August 8, 2016

Abigail Rockwell's Petition

Deborah Solomon's execrable book American Mirror is sold at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, and includes an adulatory blurb from Museum director Laurie Norton Moffatt on the back cover.

This is absurd.  It's like a Catholic bookstore selling the works of Maria Monk.  Solomon's book is just complete bunk--and obviously deliberately dishonest and intentionally inflammatory bunk at that.  (See, for example, here and here and here.)

As a philosopher, I'm deeply committed to reasoned debate, respectful disagreement, and the pursuit of truth.  I'm not interested in silencing such people as Deborah Solomon.  (Though as Abigail Rockwell points out, if Rockwell were alive, the book would likely be actionable.)  However, a museum devoted to preserving the work and legacy of Norman Rockwell should be clearly and insistently speaking out against this book.  Not blurbing it and selling it in the gift shop.

Abigail Rockwell has put together a petition asking the Museum to remove the book from its shelves, and to stop promoting it.  I've signed the petition, and encourage my vast legion of readers to consider doing the same.

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