Woke Art Criticism and Exhibition

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Hogarth framed - Michael Mosbacher, The Spectator, 24 January 2022
https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/hogarth-framed/

Great artists like Hogarth are getting the trigger-warning treatment

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Distort the present, rewrite the past - Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, 13 February 2022
https://www.city-journal.org/metropolit ... -of-change

Following the lead of other major cultural institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art redefines its purpose as overcoming the racism of Western civilization.

[Apollonius]

Sick with guilt - The New Criterion, March 2022
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/3/sick-with-guilt

On the loss of purpose in cultural institutions.


... As the commentator Rod Dreher noted in a stinging essay called “Hateful Whitey Binds Her Feet” at The American Conservative, Princeton’s ballet class shows “how the American elites are being indoctrinated to think about art, race, their country, and themselves. This is not,” Dreher adds, a passing phase. These people will move into the directorship of institutions that will have a major effect on life in this country. They hate ballet. They hate art. They hate beauty. They hate their predecessors in the dance tradition. They hate freedom of thought. They hate white people (including . . . themselves). They hate America, and they hate the West. Above all, they hate.

Strange to say, there is a bit of good, or at least promising, news in all this. The friend who sent us the repellent letter from the Morgan has been a generous donor to that institution for years. She was, in fact, planning to visit the museum recently when she was in New York. Then she received Colin Bailey’s communication. She canceled her visit and she plans to stop giving to the museum. We suspect that many people feel similarly. Why should they go to a museum or concert hall or support a university only to be hectored by politically correct harridans? If they want lectures on “social justice,” they can read The New York Times or tune into cnn. The tide, we suspect, may be turning against this round-the-clock, racially infused wokeness. The ubiquity of the phenomenon has led to widespread nausea. In the academy and in the world of culture, the disciples of diversity have overplayed their hand, as such fanatics are wont to do. A reaction has been forming for some time, and we expect it to repudiate this cloying, moralistic tyranny in a manner at once subtle and definitive: by going elsewhere.

[Apollonius]

As Douglas Murray explains, why wait for protestors to trash museums? Curators are doing it themselves:


The new vandals: how museums turned on their own collections - Douglas Murray, The Spectator, 3 December 2022
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the ... llections/

This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.

What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities.

Today the collection is still there, although the heads are not. But after a recent refurb the place has transformed into a shrine to a different time: our own. For the museum is now dominated by signs telling you that the collection is a terrible thing. Huge billboards tell the visitor that the museum is ‘a footprint of colonialism’, is ‘not a neutral space’ and yet ‘can be an instrument of resistance’. Throughout the collection we are repeatedly hectored about ‘imperialism and colonialism’, naturally, but also colonial attitudes towards ‘race, class, culture, gender and sexuality’. The signs by the exhibits repeatedly parrot the mantras of our day about ‘hierarchies’ and ‘Eurocentric ideas’.

You might imagine the Pitt Rivers is something of an anomaly. But it is not. In today’s Britain it is to be expected that our cultural institutions are run by people who hate the collection in their care as well as our culture and our history more broadly. Lest we forget, all this has happened under a Conservative government.

Take Tate Britain, perched gloriously on the banks of the Thames. It is the home of one of the great collections of these islands. Yet today the trustees of the Tate do not seem to think that they should simply conserve the collection. They do not even think that their job is to explain it. They appear to believe their task is to condemn it – to stand as judge, juror and executioner over it.

[Apollonius]

Canada's National Gallery has become a woke national disgrace - Andrew Cohen, National Post, 26 December 2022
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canada ... l-disgrace

Days after Sasha Suda abruptly resigned as director of the National Gallery of Canada last July, 16 prominent Canadians wrote Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez detailing the qualifications they felt were required of the next director. The implication was that Suda had few of them.

Astonishingly, Cassie is acting as if her position were permanent. She fired four senior managers, including the long-serving senior curator of Indigenous art and the deputy director hired by Suda. Cassie won’t discuss those dismissals, calling the details “private.” She insists she is implementing the strategic plan, supported by the gallery’s board of trustees.

Cassie is artlessly confident, “a proven leader, motivator and mentor … effective in leading people through change,” as her LinkedIn profile states. To her, the strategic plan is the holy grail. To the outsider, it’s a tableau of platitude and confection shaped in seminars and seances. Its theme is advancing justice, equity, diversity and accessibility, all essential goals in a changing society. Now everything — people, programs, art — must be seen through an “anti-racist” and “anti-oppression” lens. ...


... Our eight national museums are uninspiring beyond the National Gallery, the War Museum, the Canadian Museum of Immigration and the Canadian Museum of History (which was superbly renewed under its former president, Mark O’Neill).

For Cassie, the strategic plan is rationale for cleaning house, which explains so many vacancies. Defending her approach, she reliably mentions the endorsement of the board and its chair, Françoise Lyon, who is the other problem.

Unlike her immediate three predecessors, Lyon has no background in art. She was invited to apply to join the board in 2017 and soon she was leading it. Lyon runs a private-equity firm, her biography says, “with extensive experience working with ultra-high net worth and high net worth individuals.” Her world is business and finance, not arts and culture.

So, here we are. A thinly qualified former director issues a manifesto called a strategic plan and decamps. An interim director, with fewer credentials, implements radical changes that will bind her successor. A board chair, with no qualifications, insists the trustees cannot interfere.

Canada’s National Gallery has fallen into the hands of amateurs in thrall to dogma and in love with mantra, with more confidence than credibility. Feckless and reckless, they march us to cultural mediocrity — or worse.

[Apollonius]

We get the sculpture we deserve - Mary Harrington, UnHerd, 19 January 2023
https://unherd.com/2023/01/we-get-the-s ... e-deserve/

Martin Luther King has been decapitated for the 'swarm'


... Swarmism is power without a head, which is to say without accountability. It operates instead via “overlapping partnerships and networks”, as the foundation which funded The Embrace describes itself. And it is power without a heart: in place of fallible, capricious human feeling, including human mercy or relationships, it offers bureaucratic compassion via algorithmic taxonomies of “intersecting” victimhood.

For the swarmist vision of human flourishing has no shared meanings. Instead, all we really have in common is individual freedom, our technologies, and our physical bodies. And if this is true, and if it is also true that all hierarchies of values are exclusionary, there is nothing to aspire to beyond this life. There is nothing admirable about humans. The best we can aspire to is probably to re-engineer ourselves into something superior.

This bleak vision, combined with the most vigorous possible negation of Christian humanism, overlaid with anxious posturing about “marginalised groups”, forms the backbone of the swarmist aesthetic — and nothing could be more swarmist than the unaccountable committees who now commission public art. The Embrace, for example, was commissioned by a nonprofit (one swarm) with support from a foundation (another swarm). It is indeed fitting that Martin Luther King, a man fired by a Christian belief in universal human dignity, should have his legacy reworked for the headless, heartless, swarmist order, by representing his moment of triumph in an embrace without either a head, or a heart.

After close to a century of careful, antiseptic abstraction, then, the swarmist monumental style has arrived. It memorialises its moral taxonomies in deliberately beautiful deathworks, and deliberately ugly, posthuman artworks. In sculptural form, it produces something akin to a deification of nihilism, that alternates between feasting on the carcass of the previous regime and creating swarm-approved monuments to a posthuman future. It is a queasy mix of genuflection to any visual tradition save the Western one, combined with a Cylon-laboratory celebration of distorted, protean flesh.

[Apollonius]

Oh what a tangled weave we weld - David Cole, Taki's Magazine, 24 January 2023
https://www.takimag.com/article/oh-what ... e-we-weld/

Autumn 1986 I attended an exhibit at the California Institute of the Arts. I wasn’t there for the “art”; CalArts exhibits were (and are) for the pretentious hipster crowd, not for guys like me who love mocking the pretentious hipster crowd. But a former high school friend invited me, and I kinda fancied one of his female pals, so I made the trek to Valencia.

The exhibit was as ghastly as I’d anticipated. One piece of “art” (I’m not making this up) was a Hostess Fruit Pie nailed to a wall. There was also a pile of bricks, a precursor, I assume, to the infamous “bricks and a light bulb” exhibit that was mistaken for trash by an immigrant cleaning woman (credit where it’s due; Third Worlders don’t know art, but they sure know basura).

The highlight of the CalArts exhibit was a chair. A brown-colored wooden chair. Old, but not antique. Well-worn, the color faded on one leg, chips of paint on the back.

The artsy-farters were obsessed with this one. Surrounding it, they tried to one-up each other with insightful interpretations. “Obviously, the chipping paint symbolizes the decline of leisure time for the working class.” “Yes, but from a theme of race. The fading brown color shows how the black man is being erased from leisure entirely.” “From a Marxist analysis, the chair, perfectly chosen by the artist, represents the proletariat. The chair doesn’t earn the respect of being antique, nor the desirability of being newly made. Like the working man, used and abused, and eventually replaced.”

And just at that moment, a large-framed black man in uniform appeared in the gallery. He grabbed the chair and began dragging it away.

“Sir, do not be so rough with such a delicate work,” one of the bespectacled cretins cautioned. “Cease or I shall call a docent.”

“Man,” the black guy responded, “this is mine.”

“Oh, you are the artist? How wonderful! The finest piece in the gallery crafted by a man of color!”

“I knew it! I knew the themes were racial,” joyfully chirped another of the patrons.

“No,” the black guy said, “it’s mine. My chair. It’s what I sit on. I’m the security guard, and I’m movin’ it to da lobby for my shift.”

[Apollonius]

Barometer of hate - Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Winter 2023
https://www.city-journal.org/fictions-o ... resentment

A major Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit rejects beauty and cultivates racial resentment.


... Fictions of Emancipation is a barometer of hate. Only hate toward Western civilization could drive the repudiation of art-historical knowledge required to arrive at the show’s analyses. Only hate could drive so casual a disregard for consistency in the application of aesthetic and moral standards. The curators started with their conclusion: the West is unremittingly white supremacist, even (or especially) when it appears to be fighting white supremacy. They then manufactured evidence to support that conclusion, evidence provided solely by parroting the tired nostrums of academic theory. Give the Met credit for aiming high: if it can portray abolitionist art as a smoke screen for slavery, it can portray anything in Western history as a pretext for oppression—and it will do so.

This hate is a betrayal of the Met’s civilizational responsibilities. For a century and a half, donors gave it art that responds to our yearning for sublimity and that teaches us to see beauty in the everyday. Now the museum wants to expose the alleged racist subtexts of those works. The hate that it spreads within its walls reinforces the hate spreading throughout society.

[Doc]

Barometer of hate - Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Winter 2023
https://www.city-journal.org/fictions-o ... resentment

A major Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit rejects beauty and cultivates racial resentment.


... Fictions of Emancipation is a barometer of hate. Only hate toward Western civilization could drive the repudiation of art-historical knowledge required to arrive at the show’s analyses. Only hate could drive so casual a disregard for consistency in the application of aesthetic and moral standards. The curators started with their conclusion: the West is unremittingly white supremacist, even (or especially) when it appears to be fighting white supremacy. They then manufactured evidence to support that conclusion, evidence provided solely by parroting the tired nostrums of academic theory. Give the Met credit for aiming high: if it can portray abolitionist art as a smoke screen for slavery, it can portray anything in Western history as a pretext for oppression—and it will do so.

This hate is a betrayal of the Met’s civilizational responsibilities. For a century and a half, donors gave it art that responds to our yearning for sublimity and that teaches us to see beauty in the everyday. Now the museum wants to expose the alleged racist subtexts of those works. The hate that it spreads within its walls reinforces the hate spreading throughout society.

https://southpark.cc.com/episodes/3ne66 ... on-26-ep-2