I’ve recently visited several art galleries in America and Europe and find that the hectoring obsession with race that blights us over here is also gaining ground over there.
The European Left vacuously parrots modish American slogans, as when anti-racism protesters in London in 2020 shouted, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” at unarmed British bobbies. You expect that on the streets. But in fine repositories of great culture?
THE BIDEN VS. TRUMP, INFLATION VS. ABORTION MIDTERM ELECTION
Sadly, they, too, are prone to this scourge and bespatter their treasures with ideological ordure just as environmental activists do who throw soup at van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum festoons its walls with lectures on slavery irrelevant to the art. It taints patrons’ enjoyment of works that the museum exists to honor.
One example is a still life depicting a salt seller. Absurdly, the legend reminds patrons that salt was mined by slaves. Another, arguably more gratuitous, is the legend on a portrait of William of Orange, the first leader of the independent Netherlands. A generation after his death in 1584, the Dutch began slaving. I learned that from the legend. But why attach a note referencing Dutch slavery to the picture of a prince who had nothing to do with slavery, died before it became legal, and freed the Dutch from subjugation to imperial Spain?
Propaganda is now as important to curators as the works they care for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the desk in the Rijksmuseum lobby couldn’t locate any of its customer complaint forms when asked for one. Even if one does not agree with Paul Gauguin that pictures should be looked at without accompanying commentary, surely it is best that commentary doesn’t make the art merely a platform for political posturing.
Sometimes, emphasis on race seems defensive, insurance against vandalism or cancellation, not a wholehearted embrace of the Left’s deracinating fury. In Boston’s wonderful Museum of Fine Arts, Kehinde Wiley’s rather good portrait of former President Barack Obama, and Amy Sherald’s rather bad one of former first lady Michelle Obama, hang among some of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. Wiley’s works, especially John, 1st Baron Byron, depicting a black man in street clothes posing like an 18th century aristocrat for Thomas Gainsborough, implicitly lampoon Sargent — it’s sad that Sargent curators would want to do that — and supposedly disrupt racial prejudice. Thus, a museum that treasures its cultural patrimony also feels the need to undercut it to inoculate itself against race warriors.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Wokeness at Washington’s National Gallery of Art is as dopey as in Amsterdam. An exhibition of Sargent’s work in Spain is peppered with vapid commentary about marginalized people. The grandest, most sympathetic paintings in the exhibition are of flamenco dancers. The painter celebrated his subjects a century ago, and they are hung in one of the world’s finest collections. Yet the bleating text hopes that “one day we can get to the point where we can be inspired by the long tradition of Roma music and dance…” Sargent got there 132 years ago.
This dross perfectly encapsulates the Left’s tendentious claim that racial respect is a remote goal rather than, in reality, something people not blinded by ideology accepted long before our shallow era.
