Way of theworld Michael Deacon

It would be easy to scoff at reports that the National Theatre of Scotland wants to ban the word “spooky”, on the supposed grounds that it’s racist. Apparently, this belief is based on a claim that during the Second World War, white American servicemen would for some reason refer to their black colleagues as “spooks”.

On the face of it, it may seem unlikely that the word would cause offence in the year 2021, given that it hasn’t been used in this obscure manner for more than three quarters of a century, and even then, only by people from a country 4,000 miles away. Still, I for one commend the National Theatre of Scotland.

After all, Hallowe’en is in less than two weeks. And in my view, anything we can do to discredit this needless orgy of tedium is to be vigorously encouraged.

For parents, Hallowe’en is an unmitigated nuisance. The chore of producing costumes for your children. The boredom of escorting them door to door throughout the neighbourhood on a cold autumn night. The impossibility of getting them to sleep afterwards, as a result of all the sweets they’ve scoffed.

It’s a pain in the neck. So this attempt to ban the word “spooky” should give us at least a glimmer of hope that, one day, the whole rotten business can be abandoned altogether. There must be other problematic aspects of Hallowe’en to which we could draw attention. For example, why do we always depict ghosts as being white? Perhaps we could persuade the National Theatre of Scotland, or some other organisation committed to the cause of social justice, that the use of white bedsheets as ghost costumes fails to reflect the true diversity of the spirit community. Worse still, some members of the public may mistake children wearing white bedsheets for junior members of the Ku Klux Klan. Again, the potential for causing offence is considerable. Meanwhile, we should do all we can to discourage trick-or-treating. It’s little wonder our crime rate is so high, when, from earliest youth, we inculcate in our children the belief that extortion is acceptable, and that if their prey refuses to yield to their threats, they are entitled to punish him.

Incidentally, I gather that – like the racist use of the word “spooky” – the phrase “trick-or-treating” originated in America. And the custom itself didn’t really take off in Britain until the 1980s, when it was popularised by the Hollywood film ET.

This means that British children who go trick-or-treating are surely guilty of cultural appropriation. I urge the National Theatre of Scotland to condemn them at once.

When it comes to policing their users’ behaviour, the approach of social media companies can be puzzling. Sometimes, they’re absurdly lax – and at other times, absurdly strict.

Instagram, for example, has been known to remove photos of paintings by Old Masters – because it considers all nudes to be pornography. In 2019, it ruled that its community standards on nudity had been violated by a masterpiece by Rubens, painted approximately 400 years earlier.

This technological prudishness has had peculiar consequences. According to a report at the weekend, the tourist board of Vienna has been reduced to promoting the city’s art galleries and museums on Onlyfans, as this is the only major social media network that permits nudity.

As a result, Rubens and his fellow artistic greats now find themselves in unexpected company. This is because Onlyfans is largely used by porn stars and sex workers, who charge Onlyfans’ patrons to see photos of them with no clothes on.

Whether these patrons will be satisfied by Venus in Front of the Mirror (1615), or The Education of Marie de Medici (1624), I couldn’t say for sure. Tastes change, and it’s possible that Leda and the Swan (1601) does not meet the needs of Onlyfans’ clientele.

All the same, I suspect that Rubens himself would have welcomed the advent of Onlyfans. Artists are always grateful for any means of making money.

We often deplore the coarseness and vulgarity of the modern age, but there’s no denying that for young people, technology has in many ways made life much easier. In Rubens’s day, after all, young people didn’t have cameraphones, so if they wanted to send nudes to a prospective lover, they would have to commission an artist to paint one, or even a sculptor to carve one. This work could take months or even years to complete. By which time, the prospective lover might well have lost interest and moved on.

It must have been dreadfully frustrating for them.