“To her I am simply a Black body rippling with exotic otherness” as with all lib kitsch, this stuff is writhing with a barely repressed quasi-sexual desire to revel in being downtrodden, restrained, dominated etc. It’s so gross and inappropriate for a public space
The man behind the labels in the Wellcome Trust exhibition is also in charge of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, which is pretty much the platonic ideal of the Victorian gentleman-collector’s cabinet of curiosities and, I believe, has very strict provisions regarding any alterations to the way things are displayed.
I cannot begin to fathom why somebody who clearly detests it and all it stands for would want to occupy that role.
I don't know much about the world of art history or museum curacy, but I suspect it looks good on your CV if you can show that you did something "groundbreaking" and "exciting" with some stuffy old exhibits. Groundbreaking in a woke direction, of course. Like those opera directors who make a point of inserting snogging lesbians into a 'Barber of Seville' aria, or whatever it may be. "Look how avant garde I am!"
Should public art and artefacts be neutral. Do they exist as a celebration of our culture and our past, presented in the hope that what is good about it can be passed on. That being so, we have here the subversion of that. The use of these works to generate revulsion and rejection of our culture and history - combined with the perverse celebration of anything but us. Progressives may be toning that down for now, temporarily chastened, but only because they seek complete victory longer term. In this instance, that will be the removal of these objects from public sight and possibly their destruction too.
Yes that's the museum that in 2020 hid the shrunken heads in their basement because we can't have that sort of thing on display. There's no label long enough to explain those away.
Does it pay well? TIL that the median salary in the UK is £26k and £41k puts you in the top quarter, so while museum salaries are hardly stellar, they're likely to be better (for more status and less effort) than anything else most graduates are likely to get. Perhaps this sort of job should be awarded to meritorious scholars. The fact that such scholars may have found other jobs should be no barrier. Writing labels for a museum hardly seems like full time work. Of course, who is judged a meritorious scholar is subject to change.
What frustrates me personally is that my children are at an age where I can start showing them their heritage. I want to take them to these places but wading through all this stuff is exhausting if nothing else
I could share dozens of similar examples from my time as an art historian (late medieval/Renaissance) and curator. I resigned a curatorial position after senior woke librarians objected to the placement of a magnificent contemporary bronze statue of an angel-like figure in a theological library. They claimed it might possibly be interpreted as male, thus representing a “phallic penetration of the sacred void at the heart” of the institution.
It is a fantastically trite thing to say but I will say it anyway, these say so much more about the writers of the captions than about the works themselves. I did see one work in The Hague where there is a lump of sugar on the table and the writer made great play of the plantations in the West Indies from which it came etc. I still find myself wondering if this was in fact quite a good point to make!
Maybe. The consumers of farmed sugar had got along without it for millennia - plenty of fruits already have sugars in them, ripe pears especially - an indigenous English summer fruit that doesn’t store or travel well. Like tobacco, sugar was farmed in exploitative conditions and a market for it created elsewhere in order to enrich the Tate family etc - I sound like a Marxist but as far as fags and sugar go, it’s true.
We'd "got along without" a lot of things though. Proper heating in winter, potable water (why the English drank so much alcohol), shoes. Thing is, we've evolved to enjoy resting and to do it as often as possible precisely because our ancestors had little choice, and we've evolved to enjoy sweet things and getting calories as fast as we can. The Tate family didn't invent this, any more than the family of Ibn Saud invented the demand for oil. They just happened to be placed to meet the demand. And if they hadn't, someone else would.
No, I don’t think that is true for farmed sugar or tobacco, or for a lot of spices too. Pepper, yes, as a real flavour enhancer. Few people have ever really liked tobacco, it was pushed by the growers and consumption rocketed during the world wars as a direct result of government policy, and quickly fell away when it went out of fashion. My point with sugar was that we already had sugars in fruit and in honey. I personally think sugar is more of an Eastern Mediterranean thing, with “candy” the form in the US (yuk!). PS Oil wasn’t necessary really in Europe, IMO, except for aircraft (and tanks). We had loads of coal and could have made the leap to nuclear in the 1950s. Different in the US of course. Churchill led the way with oil in Britain, converting warships where possible to oil - one of his many unhelpful acts.
I am often awestruck by this graph by Zach Goldberg showing how even as late as the early 2010s, white liberals were MORE tolerant of "racist speech" than white conservatives or white moderates.
One of the joys of living in China is the total absence of this nonsense from museums and galleries. Of course, when there are works or exhibitions lauding the Party and its achievements they succumb to their own kind of curatorial madness. But I've visited several excellent exhibitions of artists from the Western canonical tradition here, accompanied by informative and insightful curatorial comment. My impression is that China has a great deal more admiration and respect for the greats of Western art than most Western critics and commentators do. Perhaps in the future we will have to visit Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou to fully appreciate great Western art.
A point I'd make is that it has lately become fashionable for museum curators to treat their permanent collections as if they are temporary exhibitions. Thus, sober chronological displays of the significant works of art they hold are replaced by imaginative thematic juxtapositions of selected works. This has two consequences. Firstly, the actual number of pieces on display tends to be dramatically reduced, so that a wall on which five or six paintings used to hang suddenly supports only two, with a dramatic white expanse in between. Secondly and relatedly, it provides an excuse for curators to censor works that they don't approve of without ever having to admit that this is what is being done - "We're not putting The Resurrection at Cookham in storage because we have anxieties about its representation of people of colour! It just doesn't fit into the story we're trying to tell at the moment about British art."
This is particularly infuriating, of course, because many visitors to art galleries are foreigners, who may never again have occasion to be in a particular city; it's now impossible to visit the major art galleries of Europe with confidence that the canonical pieces will be on display. I happened to be in Finland last winter and found in Turku that only a small part of its substantial collection of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Finnish art was visible, confined to two walls on the landing and a couple of upstairs rooms; the lion's share of the gallery was occupied by temporary exhibitions of modern art. In Helsinki's Ateneum, a recent rearrangement had done away with chronology and with rooms dedicated to named artists in favour of organising the collection via fashionable themes, while a placard soberly informed me that the display had been in need of modernisation because it was last adjusted in 2016. That far-off year!
Many of the examples you cite are indeed ridiculous and infuriating. However, I am going to offer a defence of the National Gallery re. the St Francis show. I don't think the claim that St Francis provided inspiration to certain socialists and ecologists is particularly controversial, and the write-up you picture (unlike your comment on it!) doesn't actually mention the LGBTQ+ community at all, though I guess you could read it into the "and others" at the end. Moreover, as your Twitter source acknowledges, most of the descriptions of the individual paintings in that show were pretty conservative. I was rather startled, in this day and age, that even the panel next to Caravaggio's depiction of the saint in ecstasy in the arms of a boyish angel managed to avoid remarking on the picture's fairly obvious homoeroticism.
One of the worst traits of the ruling class today is the lack of custodian mentality, something David Brooks has written about a lot. And you're right about the imbalance between what a local elite wants and what international visitors want; our cultural elites think that Britain's art scene is represented by Stormzy or whatever which just leaves visitors from India and China totally baffled. They want the England which the art elites hate!
And maybe a good point about St Francis, although I took 'ally' to be anachronistic. I have to admit that if St Francis lived today, I would find him insufferable. (Although at least he did actually walk the walk by giving his possessions away).
"I have to admit that if St Francis lived today, I would find him insufferable."
Maybe not. It's one thing to imagine how you would feel if you met a person whom you are imagining. It's something else to actually know a real person in your real life.
Watching posh white liberals pretend to enjoy Grime or whatever is a joy to behold! An episode from the 1980s which has stayed with me: Hermione Lee was hosting a book programme on the telly; a youngish Michael Rosen read out a slightly amusing poem for kids about a crocodile written by someone from Ghana I think (in a rubbish African accent, no less 🤷🏾♂️👊🏾) and everyone fell about laughing - except A N. Wilson, who sat there stony faced, clearly unimpressed.
The Guggenheim in NYC, not a huge museum in the first place, gifted most of its space to an obscure modern artist, whose demographic qualities would not surprise you, cramming its amazing permanent collection (Gaugin, Klee etc) into a couple of walls.
Ed is right to highlight these historically illiterate captions. To be a serious historian, you have to be prepared to go on researching, with no pre-conceptions; because they may be overturned, or at least modified, by new evidence. A person with a preconceived (often political or PC) agenda or a pet theory is not a proper historian; it is the mark of an unsound scholar. Nor should he/she be afraid to say "there is no consensus on this" or "further research is necessary". An arrogant, would-be didactic approach is inappropriate and may cause the theorist to fall flat on his/her face.
A brilliant and necessary catalogue of the rot that has eaten into the cultural institutions. Thank you, Ed, for enduring the process of examining something so cravenly naff, so we don’t have to.
I found the interprtation of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian very amusing. The 'arrows' piercing the body of Sebastian are just like the 'pricks' of negative comments on the lifestyle of LGBT+ people, the latter thereby achieving a kind of identity of sainthood. Quite a lot of modern wokeness seems to derive from some Gnostic texts (e.g. The Gospel of Thomas"), There is a religious aspect to this which is rarely if ever admitted to by these movements in discussions.
And for the record, St Sebastian did not get martyred on that particular occasion. None of the arrows struck him in a vital place. He was rescued by Irene of Rome and was able later to confront the Emperor Diocletian, who was shocked and horrified to see a 'dead man walking'. Once he had recovered his nerve, he had Sebastian clubbed to death. It is undoubtedly the case that depicting St Sebastian as an archery target has been seen as an occasion for artists to depict the male nude; and this has indeed excited the interest of gay viewers.
Perhaps they should focus on current ills. Inexpensive consumer goods from China supported by slave labor. Electric cars dependent on exploitive child labor. It’s always easy to criticize the past but tough to critique your own sins.
We visited the maritime museum on a trip to London in 2022. We were dismayed, as Ed points out, by the obsession with "enslaved people". Worse than that though was an attempt to make the museum "accessible to children". It is difficult task to make a serious museum kid friendly without rendering it boring and stupid for adults. Alas, they failed.
“To her I am simply a Black body rippling with exotic otherness” as with all lib kitsch, this stuff is writhing with a barely repressed quasi-sexual desire to revel in being downtrodden, restrained, dominated etc. It’s so gross and inappropriate for a public space
The man behind the labels in the Wellcome Trust exhibition is also in charge of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, which is pretty much the platonic ideal of the Victorian gentleman-collector’s cabinet of curiosities and, I believe, has very strict provisions regarding any alterations to the way things are displayed.
I cannot begin to fathom why somebody who clearly detests it and all it stands for would want to occupy that role.
I don't know much about the world of art history or museum curacy, but I suspect it looks good on your CV if you can show that you did something "groundbreaking" and "exciting" with some stuffy old exhibits. Groundbreaking in a woke direction, of course. Like those opera directors who make a point of inserting snogging lesbians into a 'Barber of Seville' aria, or whatever it may be. "Look how avant garde I am!"
Should public art and artefacts be neutral. Do they exist as a celebration of our culture and our past, presented in the hope that what is good about it can be passed on. That being so, we have here the subversion of that. The use of these works to generate revulsion and rejection of our culture and history - combined with the perverse celebration of anything but us. Progressives may be toning that down for now, temporarily chastened, but only because they seek complete victory longer term. In this instance, that will be the removal of these objects from public sight and possibly their destruction too.
Perferct description of modern art in public buildings, i.o.w cultural marxism.
Yes that's the museum that in 2020 hid the shrunken heads in their basement because we can't have that sort of thing on display. There's no label long enough to explain those away.
To destroy it, as all good Frankfurt School following cultural marxists strive to.
That man's magnum opus, "The Brutish Museums," is very dishonest.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-cultural-property/article/distorting-history-in-the-restitution-debate-dan-hickss-the-brutish-museums-and-fact-and-fiction-in-benin-historiography/A4FB2790941499DCA15795835A8737DA
https://nigelbiggar.uk/2021/04/08/calling-for-rigour-and-honesty/
Does it pay well? TIL that the median salary in the UK is £26k and £41k puts you in the top quarter, so while museum salaries are hardly stellar, they're likely to be better (for more status and less effort) than anything else most graduates are likely to get. Perhaps this sort of job should be awarded to meritorious scholars. The fact that such scholars may have found other jobs should be no barrier. Writing labels for a museum hardly seems like full time work. Of course, who is judged a meritorious scholar is subject to change.
Having said that, I think this post probably encapsulates most of what is discussed on this Substack:
https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/735467109979848709?lang=en-GB
Great article Ed.
What frustrates me personally is that my children are at an age where I can start showing them their heritage. I want to take them to these places but wading through all this stuff is exhausting if nothing else
Thanks! I went to the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago and the notes were indeed normal looking, so hopefully this will provide a precedent.
You can easily explain all this bile with that Joe Sobran quote
A painfully funny article, Ed.
I could share dozens of similar examples from my time as an art historian (late medieval/Renaissance) and curator. I resigned a curatorial position after senior woke librarians objected to the placement of a magnificent contemporary bronze statue of an angel-like figure in a theological library. They claimed it might possibly be interpreted as male, thus representing a “phallic penetration of the sacred void at the heart” of the institution.
I'm sorry to hear that. It is sort of bleakly funny.
“A phallic penetration of the sacred void” - was one of the librarians named Dan Brown?
I never thought I needed to read Dan Brown. Probably I was correct.
Well, I guess it’s a small mercy that in none of the examples shown they aren’t using BCE/CE instead of BC/AD.
It is a fantastically trite thing to say but I will say it anyway, these say so much more about the writers of the captions than about the works themselves. I did see one work in The Hague where there is a lump of sugar on the table and the writer made great play of the plantations in the West Indies from which it came etc. I still find myself wondering if this was in fact quite a good point to make!
Maybe. The consumers of farmed sugar had got along without it for millennia - plenty of fruits already have sugars in them, ripe pears especially - an indigenous English summer fruit that doesn’t store or travel well. Like tobacco, sugar was farmed in exploitative conditions and a market for it created elsewhere in order to enrich the Tate family etc - I sound like a Marxist but as far as fags and sugar go, it’s true.
We'd "got along without" a lot of things though. Proper heating in winter, potable water (why the English drank so much alcohol), shoes. Thing is, we've evolved to enjoy resting and to do it as often as possible precisely because our ancestors had little choice, and we've evolved to enjoy sweet things and getting calories as fast as we can. The Tate family didn't invent this, any more than the family of Ibn Saud invented the demand for oil. They just happened to be placed to meet the demand. And if they hadn't, someone else would.
No, I don’t think that is true for farmed sugar or tobacco, or for a lot of spices too. Pepper, yes, as a real flavour enhancer. Few people have ever really liked tobacco, it was pushed by the growers and consumption rocketed during the world wars as a direct result of government policy, and quickly fell away when it went out of fashion. My point with sugar was that we already had sugars in fruit and in honey. I personally think sugar is more of an Eastern Mediterranean thing, with “candy” the form in the US (yuk!). PS Oil wasn’t necessary really in Europe, IMO, except for aircraft (and tanks). We had loads of coal and could have made the leap to nuclear in the 1950s. Different in the US of course. Churchill led the way with oil in Britain, converting warships where possible to oil - one of his many unhelpful acts.
What about sugar beets?
I am often awestruck by this graph by Zach Goldberg showing how even as late as the early 2010s, white liberals were MORE tolerant of "racist speech" than white conservatives or white moderates.
https://x.com/ZachG932/status/1455961393597980677
One of the joys of living in China is the total absence of this nonsense from museums and galleries. Of course, when there are works or exhibitions lauding the Party and its achievements they succumb to their own kind of curatorial madness. But I've visited several excellent exhibitions of artists from the Western canonical tradition here, accompanied by informative and insightful curatorial comment. My impression is that China has a great deal more admiration and respect for the greats of Western art than most Western critics and commentators do. Perhaps in the future we will have to visit Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou to fully appreciate great Western art.
Excellent and true piece.
A point I'd make is that it has lately become fashionable for museum curators to treat their permanent collections as if they are temporary exhibitions. Thus, sober chronological displays of the significant works of art they hold are replaced by imaginative thematic juxtapositions of selected works. This has two consequences. Firstly, the actual number of pieces on display tends to be dramatically reduced, so that a wall on which five or six paintings used to hang suddenly supports only two, with a dramatic white expanse in between. Secondly and relatedly, it provides an excuse for curators to censor works that they don't approve of without ever having to admit that this is what is being done - "We're not putting The Resurrection at Cookham in storage because we have anxieties about its representation of people of colour! It just doesn't fit into the story we're trying to tell at the moment about British art."
This is particularly infuriating, of course, because many visitors to art galleries are foreigners, who may never again have occasion to be in a particular city; it's now impossible to visit the major art galleries of Europe with confidence that the canonical pieces will be on display. I happened to be in Finland last winter and found in Turku that only a small part of its substantial collection of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Finnish art was visible, confined to two walls on the landing and a couple of upstairs rooms; the lion's share of the gallery was occupied by temporary exhibitions of modern art. In Helsinki's Ateneum, a recent rearrangement had done away with chronology and with rooms dedicated to named artists in favour of organising the collection via fashionable themes, while a placard soberly informed me that the display had been in need of modernisation because it was last adjusted in 2016. That far-off year!
Many of the examples you cite are indeed ridiculous and infuriating. However, I am going to offer a defence of the National Gallery re. the St Francis show. I don't think the claim that St Francis provided inspiration to certain socialists and ecologists is particularly controversial, and the write-up you picture (unlike your comment on it!) doesn't actually mention the LGBTQ+ community at all, though I guess you could read it into the "and others" at the end. Moreover, as your Twitter source acknowledges, most of the descriptions of the individual paintings in that show were pretty conservative. I was rather startled, in this day and age, that even the panel next to Caravaggio's depiction of the saint in ecstasy in the arms of a boyish angel managed to avoid remarking on the picture's fairly obvious homoeroticism.
One of the worst traits of the ruling class today is the lack of custodian mentality, something David Brooks has written about a lot. And you're right about the imbalance between what a local elite wants and what international visitors want; our cultural elites think that Britain's art scene is represented by Stormzy or whatever which just leaves visitors from India and China totally baffled. They want the England which the art elites hate!
And maybe a good point about St Francis, although I took 'ally' to be anachronistic. I have to admit that if St Francis lived today, I would find him insufferable. (Although at least he did actually walk the walk by giving his possessions away).
"I have to admit that if St Francis lived today, I would find him insufferable."
Maybe not. It's one thing to imagine how you would feel if you met a person whom you are imagining. It's something else to actually know a real person in your real life.
Watching posh white liberals pretend to enjoy Grime or whatever is a joy to behold! An episode from the 1980s which has stayed with me: Hermione Lee was hosting a book programme on the telly; a youngish Michael Rosen read out a slightly amusing poem for kids about a crocodile written by someone from Ghana I think (in a rubbish African accent, no less 🤷🏾♂️👊🏾) and everyone fell about laughing - except A N. Wilson, who sat there stony faced, clearly unimpressed.
The Guggenheim in NYC, not a huge museum in the first place, gifted most of its space to an obscure modern artist, whose demographic qualities would not surprise you, cramming its amazing permanent collection (Gaugin, Klee etc) into a couple of walls.
Ed is right to highlight these historically illiterate captions. To be a serious historian, you have to be prepared to go on researching, with no pre-conceptions; because they may be overturned, or at least modified, by new evidence. A person with a preconceived (often political or PC) agenda or a pet theory is not a proper historian; it is the mark of an unsound scholar. Nor should he/she be afraid to say "there is no consensus on this" or "further research is necessary". An arrogant, would-be didactic approach is inappropriate and may cause the theorist to fall flat on his/her face.
A brilliant and necessary catalogue of the rot that has eaten into the cultural institutions. Thank you, Ed, for enduring the process of examining something so cravenly naff, so we don’t have to.
It seems that the cancer is now terminal.
I found the interprtation of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian very amusing. The 'arrows' piercing the body of Sebastian are just like the 'pricks' of negative comments on the lifestyle of LGBT+ people, the latter thereby achieving a kind of identity of sainthood. Quite a lot of modern wokeness seems to derive from some Gnostic texts (e.g. The Gospel of Thomas"), There is a religious aspect to this which is rarely if ever admitted to by these movements in discussions.
And for the record, St Sebastian did not get martyred on that particular occasion. None of the arrows struck him in a vital place. He was rescued by Irene of Rome and was able later to confront the Emperor Diocletian, who was shocked and horrified to see a 'dead man walking'. Once he had recovered his nerve, he had Sebastian clubbed to death. It is undoubtedly the case that depicting St Sebastian as an archery target has been seen as an occasion for artists to depict the male nude; and this has indeed excited the interest of gay viewers.
Christ, those captions all read like parody.
Somehow out of all of these the “beautiful male youth appealing to gay culture” is my favourite.
They present it like it’s some profound statement rather than just akin to gawping at Sam Fox’s knockers.
Truly high culture.
The sign of a good painting is, if the eyes follow you around the room.
Perhaps they should focus on current ills. Inexpensive consumer goods from China supported by slave labor. Electric cars dependent on exploitive child labor. It’s always easy to criticize the past but tough to critique your own sins.
Curators now seem worse than dumb.
We visited the maritime museum on a trip to London in 2022. We were dismayed, as Ed points out, by the obsession with "enslaved people". Worse than that though was an attempt to make the museum "accessible to children". It is difficult task to make a serious museum kid friendly without rendering it boring and stupid for adults. Alas, they failed.