by Mark Tapson
The dark design behind a Cambridge museum overhaul.
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When you observe renowned landscape artist John Constable’s bucolic painting “Hampstead Heath” above, what feelings does it inspire? Calm? Nostalgia? Spiritual uplift? A surge of white supremacist pride and jingoistic fervor?
For some reason – my guess is a toxic mix of colonialist guilt, multiculturalist self-loathing, and pressure from neo-Marxist donors and administrators determined to “deconstruct” Western civilization – England’s Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, recently overhauled its collections with new signage warning sensitive visitors that landscape paintings of the British countryside can evoke dark “nationalist feelings.”
Paintings at the Fitzwilliam have been reshuffled into new categories that are deemed more “inclusive and representative.” The names alone of these new categories – Men Looking at Women, Identity, Migration and Movement, and Nature – reek of a politically woke perspective.
Signage for the Nature gallery, for example, which includes landscape paintings by such notable English and French artists as Constable, Gainsborough, Renoir, and Cézanne, states,
Landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity. The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation. Paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland. The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.
Translation: lovely European landscapes = white supremacy. This is the conclusion of a report recently submitted to Parliament by the charity umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link which denounces the British countryside as a “racist colonial” white space. You read that right.
The report claims that “racist colonial legacies” have created a rural Britain “dominated by white people.” For those of you not keeping up with the latest targets on the Social Justice Warrior hit list: anything in which white people predominate must be racist, and that includes the landscape, especially if it is beautiful and makes whites feel a bond with their homeland. Ergo, paintings of said landscapes are also racist. And they inspire an unhealthy patriotism, which threatens the globalist worldview of open-borders elites.
The report complains that Britain’s green spaces were influenced by “white British cultural values” which somehow prevent people of other ethnic backgrounds from enjoying the outdoors. It adds that “the assertion of white, Western values and knowledge” comes “at the expense of other values and knowledges” – the multiculturalist suggestion being that voodoo and shamanism are just as valid “knowledges” as Western rationalism and the scientific method. The report further argues that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of – gasp! – “pride towards a homeland.” One wonders whether the authors of the report would equally condemn the pride inspired in Zimbabweans or Peruvians by pictures of the African veldt or Andean peaks.
In response, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman felt compelled to state the obvious: “No, the countryside is not racist.” This is what defenders of our civilization have been reduced to – defending the landscape against charges of white supremacy.
Other signage at the Fitzwilliam reportedly informs visitors that portraits of uniformed and/or wealthy sitters were “vital tools in reinforcing the social order of a white ruling class, leaving very little room for representations of people of colour, the working classes or other marginalised people.” And predictably, such portraits “were often entangled, in complex ways, with British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery.”
One of the portraits is of Richard Fitzwilliam, who bequeathed £100,000 to fund the Museum. Labeling for the portrait notes that his wealth “came from his grandfather, Sir Matthew Decker, who had amassed it in part through the transatlantic trade of enslaved African people.” Well, let’s just burn down the whole museum, then.
Here’s a suggestion: to be more inclusive and representative, perhaps the Fitzwilliam should also feature portraits of the black Africans who captured and sold their fellow people of color into the slavery that was a universal practice before white Christian Europeans ended it in the West.
Museum Director Luke Syson dismissed concerns that wokeness had infected the museum: “I would love to think that there’s a way of telling these larger, more inclusive histories that doesn’t feel as if it requires a push-back from those who try to suggest that any interest at all in [this work is] what would now be called ‘woke’.”
His very use of the term “inclusive histories” is the giveaway and confirmation that wokeness definitely has captured the 200-year-old institution. And indeed, the museum’s “About Us” page is bursting with virtue-signaling reassurances about pledging “to champion equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism and accessibility” and to make visitors and staff of all “lived experiences” feel “safe and respected,” so it’s no wonder that the Fitzwilliam would run its collections through the woke ringer to bleed them dry of anything that celebrates English character, aesthetic excellence, and national pride.
Syson previously told The Guardian, “Being inclusive and representative shouldn’t be controversial; it should be enriching. We should all welcome the opportunities to understand each other better through the eyes of great makers and artists.”
Yes, we should, but that’s not what is happening here. Woke radicals do not want us to understand each other better through art, but to pit us against each other by reducing all human experience, including art appreciation, to power struggles among competing identity groups. Politicizing every meaningful arena of our lives and then deconstructing it out of existence is the Marxist way.
The true concern of the Marxist Progressive (but I repeat myself) about museum spaces is not to ensure inclusion and representation, but to ensure that no one is stirred by beautiful art. It is to ensure that no one experiences that sense of transcendence which draws the human soul toward its origin and destiny in the divine.
This is why Progressives loathe beauty – because magnificent art elevates us to a realm above politics and points us toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the source of which is God. And Progressives reject God. Their religion is politics – or more specifically, the revolution is their religion.
Beauty in all its forms threatens the State. It stirs in us passions that cannot be governed by totalitarians fearful of ungovernable citizens – passions for truth, for freedom, for greatness, for spiritual revelation. Beauty frees and enlarges us. Our response to art is simultaneously personal and collective – collective not in the communist sense but in the sense of unifying us through our common humanity. This is not the kind of unity that the State can control, and that is why no art under totalitarianism is acceptable other than propaganda which exalts the State.
The overhaul of the Fitzwilliam Museum is not simply an innocuous, “welcoming” gesture; it is part of the Progressive mission to politicize and subvert the power of art and dismantle the greatness of Western civilization.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, focusing
on popular culture. He is also the host of an original podcast on
Frontpage, “The Right Take With Mark Tapson”. Follow him on Substack.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-progressives-hate-beauty/
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