The Met jumps on the “even abolitionist anti-slavery artists were actually celebrating slavery” bandwagon
Heather Mac Donald describes the latest art-world insanity, this time at the Met. You may have to concentrate very very hard to follow it:
Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.
It’s the old “black bodies” fixation of the woke.
More:
It turns out that if a white artist depicts a black slave, he participates in subjugation himself. Such a depiction suggests, according to the Met, that slavery is the primordial condition of blacks. Elyse Nelson and Wendy Walters explain in their catalog introduction: the “enduring visual culture of abolition and emancipation” posits that “Black persons must first have been enslaved in order to be free.” A wall label in Fictions of Emancipation notes disapprovingly that Carpeaux’s interpretation of the “injustice of enslavement remains embodied in a bound woman.”
I can’t quote the entire article here, but it’s worth reading the whole thing to get the flavor of the “logic” by which the Met’s curators operate. Apparently, white people cannot possible have anything to say or to create about the horrors of slavery that does not implicate them in perpetuating those very horrors, even as they condemn them. White people, and certainly white artists, cannot absolve themselves of their guilt and sin, which consists of being white. And black people must constantly act as though every black person today continues to be a slavery victim in a way that also cannot be healed and cannot be ignored.
Curiously, all three Met officials responsible for this exhibit are themselves white: Sarah Lawrence (in this case a person, not a college), Elyse Nelson, and Max Hollein. Probably they are protecting their own jobs this way, because the art world apparently requires this sort of thing and in particular the destruction of any veneration or reverence for art of the past. In addition, they hired the help of a writer named Wendy Walters to assist them. Walters is apparently black or mixed race (it’s not totally clear; on this page her photo bears a slight resemblance to me when I was younger, but my assumption is that she is black). From an interview with Walters:
As a virtuosic display of artistic achievement, this bust [featured in the exhibit] is probably the best-known 19th-century sculpture of an enslaved Black figure. The composition was modeled after an unidentified woman whose features Carpeaux recorded in exquisite detail. But it is not a portrait of an individual person; rather, it depicts the Black figure as an eroticized and racialized “type.”
In the eye of the beholder…
From the Mac Donald article:
Walters’s closest involvement with art museums at that point had been limited to an obsession with white paint. White paint irritates Walters, especially on the “walls of educational spaces,” so she is writing a book on its “social and cultural implications,” as she put it in an interview.
That’s a fascinating pet peeve. I can’t quite imagine there’s a full-length book in it, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
More:
The Met’s next critique of Why Born Enslaved! erases in one stroke a foundational component of Western art: the nude. The garment of Carpeaux’s captive has fallen below one of her breasts. This partial nudity turns the work into racist soft porn, according to the Met. Assistant curator Nelson describes Why Born Enslaved! as “an eroticized object for visual consumption” that gives form to “colonialist fantasies about the physical possession and containment of black women’s bodies.” A wall text echoes Nelson’s outrage at what she calls “so much flesh.” Carpeaux’s bust allows us to accept that the “Black female body can still be collected and consumed, be gazed at, desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all.”
The curators’ willful ignorance is breathtaking. Since ancient Greece, the West’s greatest artists have portrayed the unclothed human body. This artistic lineage includes Lucas Cranach the Elder, Dürer, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Watteau, Boucher, Ingres, David, Géricault, Goya, Courbet, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Rodin, Klimt, Picasso, and Henry Moore, among thousands of other artists. Cancel the nude, and you cancel art itself. Nearly 100 percent of those nudes have been white. Their state of undress has been far more revealing, and often far more “eroticized,” than the single unsheathed breast in Why Born Enslaved!. If that one black breast teaches us that the black female body can still be “desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all,” those thousands of white breasts should carry that meaning, too. In fact, far from being a mark of contempt, the solo naked breast in Why Born Enslaved! places the work in the tradition of heroic rebellion, recalling, as it does, the naked double breasts of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
A wall text claims that the Carpeaux bust is part of the nineteenth century’s “representation, commodification, and fetishization of Black females and the disproportionate amount of attention aimed at their bodies.” This verbiage is pure black-studies boilerplate, unmoored from historical reality. There was actually little representation of “black females” and “their bodies” in the nineteenth or any previous century—unsurprisingly, given the racial demographics of Europe. The art-historical Left can’t get its story straight regarding the black nude. While the Met decries the “disproportionate” attention directed against the black female body, a feminist art historian blames racism for the “paucity of images of the black female nude in the history of Western ‘high’ art.” In reality, the representation of black females that did exist employed the opposite “binary” (to use academic jargon) more than the one lambasted by the Met: it was the white female who was nude and paired with a clothed black female, as in Manet’s Olympia or Félix Vallotton’s enigmatic La Blanche et la Noire.
It’s a rather long article; I’ve excerpted only a tiny part of it. It makes for depressing reading, but it’s well worth reading nonetheless.
But. In Greek statuary the men were naked and the women were tastefully clothed.
Lately, the opposite is true.
Of course it can’t be mentioned it was the Jews who were fixated on black bodies (still are) and bought and sold them. Lots of Moshe’s on the slave trader list. Just like lots of Rebekkah’s in these dumb modern organizations going on and on about black bodies.
This sort of insanity/inanity, a pandemic in its own right, is really not worth rebutting.
When my offspring were children, I occasionally found myself reminding them that “anyone who argues with a fool, is one.”
These art-ninnies are not worth rebutting or analyzing or intellectually dissecting.
I assume Neo will be here soon. Goodness.
You will be made to care
The proper response to these poltroons is STFU, and GTFO.
End of discussion.
JWM
dave snope:
I think I will leave your content-less, truth-free, anti-Semitic droppings up there, just to show how extremely versatile is the anti-Semite and how adaptable to all topics and all occasions is his sickening bile.
You are an excellent exemplar of the vicious and destructive genre and its Big Lies.
Thank you, Neo.
The sculpture in question, Why born Enslaved!, is evocative art. The awful thing allegedly honoring Dr. and Mrs. King in Boston is hideous junk.
I’ve come to the conclusion that pieces of this sort are their own category of click-bait, and are simply an experiment to flesh out the numbers on what people will consume, hence put up with. I don’t explore these pieces anymore – I just assume the progenitors are mentally ill, or borderline personalities of some kind, and that it might be catching – so I move on without comment or acknowledgment that they even exist.
My mother was, nearly 60 years ago, a volunteer curator at a historic house museum. The museum was the crown jewel of the local historical society. The museum is now closed, a regrettable thing in that case, less regrettable in other cases.*
Museums are part of the drapery of civic life in an order regulated by bourgeois dignity. They’re decorative, they employ few people (there are 11,000 curators coast to coast), and they are expendable. The people who work in them need to understand they are expendable. They also need an authentic vocation to teach the casual visitor about the material culture they are seeing. These three people are disgusting onanists and deserve to be tossed out on the curb. And I mean the curators and everyone north of them in the organization implicated in this travesty.
*(The historical society was compelled due to declining attendance to sell the house to a private owner who is now stuck with an inner city property in a town which has suffered a catastrophic decline in public order in recent years consequent, as elsewhere to a co-operative venture of the local political class, the local hoodlum class, and okupiers).
From what little I’ve seen, the art department at a typical college is a locus of stupidity. A conscientious board (which institutions never have) would shut it down. (Other targets would be the DEI staff scattered among the HR office, the Dean of Student’s office, and the Admissions office; all the victimology programs, and the teacher training program).
They really have lost their minds
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/online-features/metcollects/why-born-enslaved
Some people eat this stuff up with a spoon and feel superior for having done so. Most people stop paying attention, and quit attending.
Screw the Met, its administrators and exhibition planners. The Met better come to grips with the fact it is in a declining city with an increasing population fraction of lower income people who do not got to museums, do not pay entry fees, who eat what Adams and Hochul feed them. Its megabuck donors had better get realistic also; there is no profit in supporting Marxists.
I used to go to NYC from time to time to see the Met’s special exhibits back when Philippe de Montebello was the museum’s director. He retired in 2008, and I haven’t been back since. You couldn’t pay me to visit the Met today.
neo (7:46 pm) said . . .
“I think I will leave your content-less, truth-free, anti-Semitic droppings up there, just to show how extremely versatile is the anti-Semite and how adaptable to all topics and all occasions is his sickening bile”
. . . I (for one) wholeheartedly second that motion. Thank you, neo.
The classic leftist explanation for art:
___________________________________
In “Ways of Seeing,” published in 1972, critic John Berger argues that throughout history, the way we see art has been manipulated by a privileged minority to preserve their social and economic dominance.
https://www.shortform.com/summary/ways-of-seeing-summary-john-berger
___________________________________
The more things change, the more they stay the same. One way I look at the current state of affairs is that the privileged have figured out how to cloak themselves in leftism for their benefit. Sneaky bastards.
Quelle ironie.
BTW “Ways of Seeing” is a great book.
The Met is not the only art museum to condemn itself to irrelevancy in the name of wokery. In October 2021, the Art Institute of Chicago fired its 82 docents (highly trained unpaid volunteers), who published catalogs, research projects, and art history papers as well as offering specialized lectures and tours of the museum to student groups and other visitors. The problem was, of course, that most of the docents were middle-aged white women (with an average of 15 years of training and experience), and this lack of “diversity” will never do. The museum replaced the docents with part-time employees to be paid $25 per hour to allow “community members of all income levels to participate” in the museum’s programs.
Details of the Art Institute’s purge of its docents here:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/15/chicago-art-institute-tells-white-docents-we-dont-want-your-kind-volunteering-around-here/
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@dave snope
Got any evidence that “the Jews” were specifically fixated on “Black Bodies”, especially at the time of the Atlantic Slave Trade? Because I have studied, researched, and wargamed on the matter for about a quarter of a century and have not seen much.
Moreover, to the extent there was a “fixation” on “black bodies” in the Transatlantic Trade it primarily originated with the Arab, Berber, and Turkic Muslim slave traders, and particularly their later Portuguese and Castilian/Aragonese or Spanish Catholic rivals. And while there were Jews integrated in to the former societies by the latter the “Catholic Monarchs” had heavily exiled them.
The reason for the “fixation” was fairly simple. Tropical diseases. Because it turns out that in eras before antimalarial medicine and modern science the vast majority of the people on planet Earth would keel over very quickly indeed in tropical, yellow fever and malaria infested hellscapes like the jungles of Cuba and Florida and Brazil. This is especially true of “Whites” from Europe, Iran, and to a much lesser extent North Africa. One of the major exceptions to that were people who had adapted heavily to living in such tropical climates, including – *drumroll* – African Blacks. Helped by the massive slave trade ongoing in Africa and the relative fragility and Balkanization of the societies and civilizations on the continent, as well as the technological backwardness of most (with Morocco conquering Songhai with clever tactics, gunpowder, and a relatively small army of never do wells).
The Spanish and Portuguese happily enslaved the locals in the Americas but had most of them die off quickly in places like Cuba, so they tried to import a steady supply of new blood to feed the grist mills, a practice imitating the Muslim trades in Mesopotamia and which was imitated by their Western/Northern rivals like the British, French, Dutch, and so forth.
Sure, but that’s because there is a huge amount of everybody’s name on those lists. Why you are surprised about this and try to make it a Jewish thing is beyond me.
Especially given how I am mostly Dutch-Italian in ancestry and I can attest how the countrymen of my forebearers took to slavery like fish to water.
And this is before how I get into the fact that while almost no region or people were really innocent, the Jews of Eastern Europe were largely uninvolved in the trade in spite of it being a center of the slave trade (and indeed the place from which we get the word “Slave”) and indeed were often enslaved themselves. Thank the Ottomans and Mongols for that.
So, if I read a book by a black author, watch black entertainers and listen to black musicians I’m participating in black slavery? The best answer I can offer is, “Ooo, you are obviously mentally ill”.
Well, it’s a Farrakhan thing, you know…
(One of his favorites, in fact…)
I find it helpful to view it this way: historically, this is what thoroughly corrupt institutions do while in their death throes – they scream, they rant, the push the envelope of sanity, all while desperately trying to hold on to their ever-dwindling power. The template our dying institutions are using now is “race”.
@ JFM > “So, if I read a book by a black author, watch black entertainers and listen to black musicians I’m participating in black slavery? The best answer I can offer is, …”
… okay, I will stop doing all of that!
Of course, I can still read Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas because they are officially The Black Faces of White Supremacy.
@ PA Cat > “He retired in 2008, and I haven’t been back since. You couldn’t pay me to visit the Met today.”
I had the great pleasure of seeing at least a small part of the Met Museum back in 2004, when I went to NYC to watch the youngest AesopSon’s high school orchestra play at Carnegie Hall (practice, practice, practice!).
Looks like we made it just in time.
We’ve known this for some while, but now it’s official:
Lysenkoism has taken over mainstream Western “science”…this because Stalin’s ghost (otherwise known as the Narrative(TM)) MUST BE PROTECTED at ALL costs (just like “Biden”)…
…and those costs, as we have been seeing, are ENORMOUS.
“The Shameless Attack on a Climate Change Dissenter;
“We couldn’t find any negative review of physicist Steven Koonin’s ‘Unsettled’ that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately.”—
https://reason.com/video/2023/02/13/the-shameless-attack-on-a-climate-change-dissenter/?utm_medium=email
Opening grafs (RTWT):
‘In 2021, the physicist and New York University professor Steven E. Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, published the best-selling “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters”.
‘The book attracted extremely negative reviews filled with ad hominem attacks, such as a short statement appearing in Scientific American and signed by 12 academics that, instead of substantively rebutting Koonin’s arguments, calls him “a crank who’s only taken seriously by far-right disinformation peddlers hungry for anything they can use to score political points” and “just another denier trying to sell a book.”
‘We couldn’t find a single negative review of ‘Unsettled’ that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately. Many of the reviewers seem to have stopped reading after the first few pages. Others were forced to concede that many of Koonin’s facts were correct but objected that they were used in the service of challenging official dogma. True statements were downplayed as trivial or as things everyone knows, despite the extensive parts of “Unsettled” that document precisely the opposite: that the facts were widely denied in major media coverage and misrepresentations were cited as the basis for major policy initiatives….
‘…When dissenting scientists are implicitly compared to Holocaust deniers, or their ideas are considered too dangerous to be carefully considered, it undermines public respect for the field and can lead to catastrophic policy mistakes…. [F]or science to advance, it’s essential that moral certainty does not override objective discussion and that personal attacks not replace rational consideration of empirical evidence.
‘In a review of “Unsettled” in Scientific American, Gary Yohe, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, gives the impression that he didn’t read past the first few pages. The book has nine chapters filled with examples of exaggerations and outright falsehoods in both scientific and popular accounts. Yohe mentions just four claims taken from the first two pages, plus one from a chapter subtitle, and manages to refute none of them….’ [All emphasis mine; Barry M.]
Extremely chilling.
The French writer Andre Maurois observed that people who are *intelligent*, but not *creative*, tend to latch onto intellectual systems created by others and hold to those systems fiercely, even more fiercely than the creators of those systems themselves.
‘Intelligent but not creative’ is probably a good description for a high % of the people in the academic and ‘nonprofit’ worlds, and race-based classifications & explanations for all phenomena is the intellectual system they have latched onto.
This thread is a great example of how toxic the woke insanity can be. What is the natural reaction to being attacked on the basis of race? Launching a counter-attack on the basis of race. (I.e, “No, your racial group is actually worse than mine.”)
To be clear, I’m not defending or apologizing for the racist comment above in any way. It is abhorent. I’m just noting that racism tends to beget racism. Once the cycle starts, it tends to take on a life of its own.
These woke fools are tapping into a very dark aspect of human nature.
We are at Salem witch trials level of hysteria
I used to say that American Art is what people hang up in their own house as decorations. What do your friends hang in their walls? Nature scenes? Religious themes? Little cutie sayings? Portraits and photos? Would be interesting to stop and note this.
‘Intelligent but not creative’ is probably a good description for a high % of the people in the academic and ‘nonprofit’ worlds, and race-based classifications & explanations for all phenomena is the intellectual system they have latched onto.
==
Good point.
PA CAT, you beat me to it. I grew up in Chicago and still visit family. For years I was a member of the Art Institute and would visit every time I was in the city. Recently, crime has become out of control and we no longer go downtown or visit the Art Institute. I suspect the decision to fire the white (and educated) docents may have been an attempted defense to threats from the black gangs that now run Chicago.
“The Met” people are talking a lot of baloney.
By using the same reasoning you can say: “The Waltz is a dance that was invented by Caucasian people. …And ONLY Caucasian people can learn how to do the Waltz the right way, because- THEY invented it, and only THEY can properly understand it…since it was just the Caucasian people’s experience, alone.
NO other people can physically learn how to do the Waltz, + only Caucasian people can 100% understand it.”
This is total nonsense.
The Met’s people are a smart, and educated, people.
The Met’s people know better than to act in this way.
TR–
The waltz was considered scandalous when it first became popular in the nineteenth century: The waltz (“a ballroom dance in ³/? time with strong accent on the first beat and a basic pattern of step-step-close”) was imported from Germany and Austria, and became popular in North America and Britain in the early 19th century. The new dance craze hit England before America, and the London Times in 1816 observed its arrival with disapproval: “We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced at the English Court on Friday last.” The newspaper thought that this dance was not worthy of comment, as it was previously “confined to prostitutes and adulteresses”, and with the appropriate degree of Francophobia for the age, they blamed its introduction on “some worthless and ignorant French dancing-master”.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/your-grandparents-dirty-dancing-banned-dances-from-history
Well, I suppose blaming the waltz on the French still leaves it within the sphere of Caucasian culture.
I first encountered disapproval of the waltz in a poem by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) that was in my high school poetry anthology. Here’s the second half of the poem:
Through gallopade I cannot swing
The entangling blooms of Beauty’s spring:
I cannot say the tender thing,
Be’t true or false,
And am beginning to opine
Those girls are only half-divine
Whose waists yon wicked boys entwine
In giddy waltz.
I fear that arm above that shoulder;
I wish them wiser, graver, older,
Sedater, and no harm if colder,
And panting less.
Ah! people were not half so wild
In former days, when, starchly mild,
Upon her high-heeled Essex smiled
The brave Queen Bess.
I was surprised by Landor’s finger-wagging when I first read the poem because the waltz was a standard of Arthur Murray’s ballroom dancing classes in the 1950s. How times change!
Koonin’s book is well worth anyone’s time. His tone is mild, his command of the subject matter is very strong (he wrote the book on early computer modeling of weather systems), he does not overreach and he invites dialogue. The fact that he has been trashed is IMHO compelling evidence that –canary in coal mine– our culture is in fatal decline.
}}} but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
All too few seem to grasp today that, where there’s a will, there needs to be a won’t.
PA Cat, that is especially odd considering that Queen Bess’s time was marked by some pretty loose sexual behavior in general; see the sexual innuendos throughout Shakespeare’s works. The waltz involved one male hand on his partner’s waist and his left hand meeting his partner’s right hand high in the air, with no closer contact.
Kate–
I thought Landor’s wording was odd too, even when I first read it, because Shakespeare was part of my high school’s English lit curriculum, and as you note, he can be pretty bawdy. Landor was a notoriously hotheaded writer who quarreled with a succession of authority figures over the course of his life, and this particular poem was likely written in one of his frequent bad moods.
FWIW, Hitler considered the waltz the most beautiful of all dances, and often bored his dinner guests with long rants about the waltz.
It is beautiful, and I always wanted to dance it in a long gown. An unrealized dream. And I will continue to love watching it, Hitler or no.
I suspect the decision to fire the white (and educated) docents may have been an attempted defense to threats from the black gangs that now run Chicago.
==
Disagree. Remember about 30 years back when George Bush the Elder in a speech from the Oval Office held up a little baggie of some street drug and said it had been purchased by undercover cops in a park right across the street? It turned out the dealer they contacted was unfamiliar with the location and had to be given street directions. I doubt the gangs know jack about the Art Institute or care about it unless they’ve identified the patrons filing out at different times of the day as easy marks for muggings.
Sure, but that’s because there is a huge amount of everybody’s name on those lists. Why you are surprised about this and try to make it a Jewish thing is beyond me.
Because David Klein stole his girlfriend back in ’85 and Hy Goldman gave him a bad performance review twenty years later.
}}} They’re decorative, they employ few people (there are 11,000 curators coast to coast), and they are expendable.
It’s funny, my mother was an appraiser and we were in Lexington KY in 1992 for an annual convention. We (my mother and I and another friend who was an appraiser) went to the nearby “Morgan House” (“Morgan Quarterhorses”, and an ancestor of J.P. Morgan). They gave us a tour, and, as it was cold and rainy, there was just us 3 in the “group”. Things were not roped off or “separate” from the tour groups, and my mother and her friend were both picking stuff up and looking at it with an appraiser’s eye. I noticed the guide was kind of nervous and wanting to request they not touch things, but also that she relaxed as they talked about it, commenting on the marks and such and making it clear that they were both very careful with it but also often knew things she didn’t even know.
The main amusing thing I learned in that was about the knobs at the top of a four-poster bed. They were generally removable, and, in an era when people tended to guest at peoples’ places as opposed to “staying in a motel” (or the antebellum equivalent), the knobs served a purpose. As you stayed, the knobs were removed as an indicator of how much you’d overstayed your welcome. By the time all four were gone, it meant, “get the eph out!”. 😀
}}} From what little I’ve seen, the art department at a typical college is a locus of stupidity.
Face it, Art, this applies to pretty much the entire “liberal arts” wing of almost every single college. Art, English, Poetry, Literature, you name it, it’s populated by massive dunderheads and ultimafools.
“…fatal decline…”
It gets worse:
“University professor who was ‘cancelled’ after being wrongly accused of Islamophobia fears he will be killed by Muslim extremists as he blasts ‘woke’ students for putting the lives of academics at risk”—
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11744423/University-professor-wrongly-cancelled-fears-death-Muslim-extremists-slams-woke-students.html
Would seem to me to be a no-brainer that any person on campus who behaves in such a dishonest and intimdating manner (student or professor) should be kicked out immediately.
And not let back in for any reason.
Face it, Art, this applies to pretty much the entire “liberal arts” wing of almost every single college. Art, English, Poetry, Literature, you name it, it’s populated by massive dunderheads and ultimafools.
Disagree. If my own limited observation is valid, the art department is in a class by itself. Never heard of trouble in the foreign language departments other than a deficit of students majoring in them.
Naked or half-naked Black people gyrating on-stage – NOT erotic or pornographic. Twerking, grabbing one’s genitalia onstage – NOT erotic or pornographic. Grinding one’s crotch into random strangers – why, you dirty-minded thing, how DARE you object!
1 naked bust of an anonymous Black woman – OMG! Send for the Race Police!
The Met’s notes read like a send-up of CRT. It is tedious to think think that intelligent people think this way.
Hi PA+Cat,
Thank you for the information on the waltz. I hadn’t heard those facts, yet.
Cheers. 🙂
Hi Kate,
Thanks for telling us about Queen Bess, + the waltz.
🙂