Look again through your decolonised lens

Has the Vibe Shift come to art galleries and museums?

‘Museum fatigue’ is said to be a state of mental exhaustion caused by information overload, one that afflicts visitors to exhibitions. I started to suffer my own particular version of it in 2022 after visiting the Hogarth exhibition at the Tate, where I was slightly puzzled by the gallery notes. They looked like they had been written by the staff of Teen Vogue magazine, featuring bizarrely irrelevant monologues about immigration and racism, and filled with the terminology of the Young Scold Left.

It turned out that this style was now widespread, and since then, I’ve collected a number of these museum and art gallery notes for my own special ‘exhibition’, presented here.

Hogarth’s The Tête à Tête part of a series called Marriage A-la-Mode, which satirises 18^th century society and points to the downsides of marrying for status, featured the following caption:

‘Dissolute White people correspond with shiny white objects in this scene of domestic disarray…. In his pocket, the booklet “Regeneration” references a sermon by the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, who preached moral purity in North America and Britain while helping legalise slavery in colonial Georgia in 1751. However indirectly, in this painting the atrocities of Atlantic investments are invoked in relation to the outsized expenditure on Asian luxury gods – overall, a picture of White degeneracy.’

By The Artist Painting the Comic Muse, we were informed that ‘The curvaceous chair literally supports him and exemplifies his view on beauty. The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people. Could the chair also stand-in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?’

Most bizarre of all was the note by The Toilette, which featured a bizarre first-person narrative:

‘My name is Oumar and I am a butler-cum-manservant from Mali. However, my main function is to make this unimportant aristocratic household look exceptionally wealthy. The Countess treats me with disdain almost all of the time, but she loves the way I can be a delightful African Gentleman when she needs me to take that role. To her I am simply a Black body rippling with exotic otherness. My adorable little compatriot, who is pretending to sit quietly, is actually the cleverest person in this room. We work together and spend an inordinate amount of time laughing. We know however, that this family is doomed, ruined by boredom and greed. But we will fall before they do and we can never hope to recover.’

There were also various detours about diversity in London, Amsterdam and Paris, most of which were largely irrelevant to the paintings, but the running theme of the exhibition was the running theme of the Great Awokening: white racial sin and the unpayable debt owed for the crime of slavery. Hogarth was even tarnished by the fact that slave-owners bought his paintings.

The year 2022 was the thick of the Peak Woke period which began on May 25, 2020, although it’s debatable whether Britain has passed out of it; even while the ruling class await helplessly the country’s takeover by the populist Right, organs of the state continue to push racial discrimination. The same rituals are still played out throughout the year, now far more pronounced among late-adopter provincials. Britain’s institutions, emptied of conservatives, continue to divert from their original purpose and push politicisation in every sphere. But 2022 was bad.

That year I wrote about the Wellcome Collection as an example of an organisation which has been captured by ideologues at odds with its original remit. The Wellcome Trust had spent £1m on implicit bias training, a process largely considered to be useless, proclaimed itself to be institutionally racist, and denounced its own founder, declaring that ‘Henry Wellcome’s collection was a vast personal project, the privilege of a wealthy white man in the Victorian era.’

That year the Wellcome Collection featured a new caption beside a fragment of Jeremy Bentham’s skin, stating: ‘Bentham died while contesting the immediate emancipation of enslaved people.

‘Written on the skin is a reference to him bequeathing his body for dissection. The 84-year-old’s fantasy was that “every man might be his own statue” and the 1832 Anatomy Act ushered in the new scientific era or “race” science. Decentre Bentham. Decentre Henry Wellcome’s Bentham.

‘After emancipation how could supremacy be justified? Through culture; museums recentered the white cis-male body. Written on the skin is whiteness. “Bought at Stevens Auction Rooms in 1925.”

‘Times up. Just rewriting labels isn’t enough. Let’s face up to all the human remains that Henry Wellcome collected. Dismantle Wellcome’s enduring colonialism, its white infrastructure.’

Photograph by Phoebe Arslanagić-Little