March 15, 2024 - 10:30am
If you’re an aspirant member of the 21st-century ruling class, you must be scrubbed free of place or history. That’s the message of a recent rehang in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, which re-orders the gallery’s 208-year-old collections thematically.
In place of chronological rooms, new categories will include “Men Looking At Women”, “Migration and Movement”, and “Identity”. The director, Luke Syson, insisted this was “not woke”, arguing that “being inclusive and representative shouldn’t be controversial; it should be enriching.”
There is, of course, a range of views on how prominent a place the identity characteristics of artistic creators or subjects should be given, in assessing their meaning or value. But a more interesting, or at least less-discussed, aspect of the rehang is what it conveys about the elite-approved view of time and place.
The art historian John Berger characterised art as conveying “ways of seeing”, which is to say visual representations of what a culture deems important. Until the latter half of the 18th century, formation in such “ways of seeing” was largely for elites, and reached the masses only in the context of church architecture and paintings. Subsequently, a similar sense of awe and sanctity came to be conveyed by public museums and galleries, often deliberately constructed in styles that mimicked religious spaces, and funded by philanthropists as part of a wider project of public education.
The “ways of seeing” encountered in these spaces were thus accorded an implicit air of holiness by the cultural form of museums as such, not just as individual works but also in the worldview they conveyed in aggregate. More recently, this aspect of museums has been itself the subject of debate; we can assume Syson is intimately familiar with these meta-critiques, and thus that the “ways of seeing” conveyed by the Fitzwilliam rehang have been compiled with minute attention to this dimension.
In this light, two features of the rehang stand out: its abandonment of chronology, and its ambivalence about landscape. In a room displaying a Constable painting of Hampstead Heath, for example, the commentary observes that “pictures of rolling hills” may inspire “pride towards a homeland”, but that this has a “darker” side: “the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong”. This dismissive attitude to the cumulative meaning accorded by time continues in the dissolution of chronological collections in favour of thematic ones.
This makes sense. Like an individual’s place of birth and upbringing, history in general is particularist and exclusionary by definition. What happened to me didn’t necessarily happen to you. Where I happened to be born and grow up is an accident of fate, and so is the landscape and culture in which I feel most at home. Collectively, the history of one people is not that of another.
So it should be obvious why “inclusion” requires downplaying time and place. It is not possible to make the case for equalising “the right to belong” between someone who arrived in a place yesterday and their neighbour who grew up there unless you dismiss the value of affections and meanings accumulated over time. Inclusion, in other words, requires all of us to view our surroundings without the layers of meaning accumulated through habit and familiarity. Equal belonging means, in practice, that no one can belong: we must all survey our surroundings with the detached, consumerist eye of a passing tourist. In turn, this means landscape paintings are problematic in direct proportion to how fully they convey intimate knowledge and love of a place.
It’s easy, then, to see why the Fitzwilliam should need rehanging, when you consider the broader ideology into which elite aspirants are educated in the 21st century: one that distils nations, cultures, and specific histories to costumes and cuisines, and in which all places and peoples are interchangeable. This ideology has already tacitly abolished nation states; its quintessential sacred space is not a church or a gallery but the placeless, transient, maximum-security anomie of an airport departure lounge. The Fitzwilliam rehang serves simply to confirm its “way of seeing” for the young elite aspirants flocking to Cambridge’s colleges today.
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SubscribeIn principle, I’m not averse to these kind of rehangs. I find it quite interesting as an expression of how a society changes over time. Once upon a time we were all encouraged to stare at oil paintings of white blokes in powdered wigs and adventurous stocking and breech arrangements…now we gaze upon someone’s unmade bed, a cow suspended in formaldehyde and a couple of suitcases on the ground. It’s all good.
What I object to, however is when things feel TOO forced. The demonisation of a landscape – Christ, WHY? It’s a LANDSCAPE, people. Forests, rolling hills and a couple of horses. Calm down, we do not have to bring identity politics into everything.
Likewise, words or phrases which are thrown around too often without being properly argued or made plausible put me right off. “Structural racism” is one of these phrases. I’ve been to exhibitions where that phrase has been sprayed over every picture caption without explaining in which society this structural racism was supposed to exist, or how, or why. I was just told “it is exists, because I/we say it does – so there”. No viewer skepticism was welcome.
Art is supposed to make the viewer confront difficult questions, but I think the way it is presented and described has to be more of invitation to reflection rather than a “you must think XYZ” to have any effect.
I always thought art was to provide beauty and elevate us, not confront us with difficult questions. Philosophy does that. When I look at a miraculous Alma Tadema, the only question I’m confronted with is how did a human create such a marvel?
Art, or should i say great art, does both. It encourages us to reflect and question by having earned the right to be looked at, not by being placed in a gallery for didactic purposes, which characterises much of what we see, even in the best galleries.
Just to take one example: a late work by Rothko can be literally breathtakingly beautiful, if we have the capacity to take it in. By thus engaging us, an internal process of recognition and understanding can occur. Rothko truly fulfilled his mission, after a lifetime of searching for the means to do so. That can stand as something about the human spirit that just can’t be conveyed through re-curation.
I love Rothko’s work. Saw one at the Thyssen Bornemisza Collection in Madrid in November and sat in front of it for ages.
Rothko’s art was a search for emptiness not the sublime. His art like his life was a dead end. Spend time in the ludicrously reverential Rothko room at the Tate and feel your soul slowly dying.
Well said. Like all modernism Rothko is a sterile rejection of experience and life. Look at the descent of Mondrian from the accomplished landscapes of the early 1900s to the drab squares of his regrettable “maturity” and you see the process of nauseous negation in detail. Of course, self-obsessed frauds like Rothko and the even worse Hodgkin never had a scintilla of Mondrian’s talent in the first place.
I’m with you.
You look at proper paintings and think, how can anyone DO that?
You look at Rothko and think I could easily do that.
I did last year doing the wood cladding on a cottage…I’ve called it ‘Green on Green… with missed bits’
Yikes! That’s a frighteningly limited view of art.
Not limited, accurate.
So proud to be gay excludes heterosexuals from the pleasures of sex via the artist’s entrance? If pride means exclusion, this should be the logical consequence.
Arguably realising why a piece of art is moving is a valuable insight. But when it is deconstructed for you, and always along the lines of a one-note ‘let me demonstrate how impressive my values are’, then it is indoctrination.
Art is not meant to be just about “confronting difficult questions” or “self-expression” although it can include both. Art should be a bridge to the ineffable, expressed by an individual but taking into account the needs and true aspirations of a culture. Now we are not allowed to have a culture and “it’s art ’cause I say so.”
Art is not meant to be just about “confronting difficult questions” or “self-expression” although it can include both. Art should be a bridge to the ineffable, expressed by an individual but taking into account the needs and true aspirations of a culture. Now we are not allowed to have a culture and “it’s art ’cause I say so.”
On the other hand an elite curated ‘way of seeing’ promotes its opposite. A non curated ‘way of ignoring’.
One of the English national characteristics is said to be stolid indifference to the antics of the great and good. But even that indifference can run out given enough provocation. I don’t think the great and good realise how close to the wind they are sailing.
Actually, I think they do. Hence all their preposterous moral panics about “right wing terror” and Trump. Some of them even point to that hollow buffoon Johnson as some sort of embryo dictator! So they’re hardly stable or confident.
Indeed, I’d say that because today’s left is narcissistic (“Everything is our fault” being the bleat of criminal pride rather than true remorse), it both deeply fears and at the same time deeply yearns for the “backlash” which its policies are designed to provoke.
Remember, pathological narcissism always ends in self-flagellation as a sign of ultimate superiority – the “moral” kind. Hence again, “Darkness at Noon”.
There’s a moment in the old “Henry VIII” series from the BBC where Bishop Gardiner is trying to elicit information from some unfortunate evangelical on the rack. When his assistant tries to question her further, the wily prelate interrupts him, observing that their victim is in an “ecstasy” of self-regard and will say nothing. Such is the mentality of our current left. But this is not the worst.
The worst is that the same devotion to horror in the name of Utopia can take an outwardly directed form, too. Those who are willing to undergo torment are just as willing to inflict it. Today’s “martyrs” are frequently tomorrow’s torturers.
Partner: Babe, wake up there’s been another rehang.
Author: *turns back, rolls into covers*
Partner: Parts of it can be construed as “woke”!
Author: *jumps out of bed* get me my laptop!
That’s a very good description of yourself, Mr. Troll, except you would be in bed alone.
I know you are but what am I?
Witless?
Oh come on – that’s quite droll, not troll.
You know how we criticise the lefties for being overly sensitive to racism or anything exclusionary and how they allow it to dominate their way of seeing? Does anyone think that perhaps we are overly sensitive to wokery etc. and that this hypersensitivity distorts our way of seeing?
Because I keep reading about woke rehangs but then often find in fact the “woke” elements are quite subtle and sparse and probably only really evident to me because of the increased salience placed on it by the right-wing media I consume. I’m concerned that maybe just as they see structural racism and oppression in a landscape we are able to identify wokery in otherwise benign and bland content.
Is this wrongthink? Which part of the anti-woke handbook should I re-read if I’m getting these feelings? I feel as if perhaps the right-wing media have their own agenda to push and misrepresent the reality of these rehangs but is this just an example of the elites getting to me?
I must admit I live in Cambridge (and have been to the Fitz many times over the decades!) and have often suspected the academics of using mind tricks on me. What if it’s all got to me and I am in fact a woke liberal elite living in structural wokism?
Or are we canaries in the coal mine? Sensitive to ‘environmental’ conditions but an early warning rather than an affectation.
You’re right it is confusing. But what am I to make of the National Maritime Museum’s decision to receive 20 million quid from the DCMS and use a chunk of that to pay someone to create a bust of a ‘refugee goddess’ that is then placed next to a bust of admiral Nelson so it can have a ‘dialogue’ with him that undermines his uniform, his medals, his actions and his achievements? Where is the ‘history’ in all of this? How does any of this contextualise or add anything new?
It seems to me that the whole point is to court controversy for its own sake, even if what you are doing lacks meaning or substance.
Negative attention is still attention.
If someone sees landscape paintings as problematic then they are insane. If one is not concerned by this insanity then they too may need to get their head checked.
Are museums around the world going to get rid of their art’s references to their particular time and place? Or is it just us in the West who have to put up with these self hating trash liberal elites and indulge them in what looks pretty much like a reverse racism? MH is too polite.
Agreed except it’s not ‘reverse’ it’s just racism. White people didn’t invent it.
First, it was “ways of knowing”, now it’s “ways of seeing”. I suppose next it’ll be “ways of feeling”, followed by “ways of touching, tasting, and smelling”. Douglas Murray will have loads of new books to write (“ways of laughing”)!
‘It’s easy, then, to see why the Fitzwilliam should need rehanging, when you consider the broader ideology into which elite aspirants are educated in the 21st century: one that distils nations, cultures, and specific histories to costumes and cuisines, and in which all places and peoples are interchangeable.’
Except it’s European nations and cultures that are expected to toe this particular line – if you are Sioux or Maori or Igbo or Han Chinese it’s all tremenduously important.
You beat me to it with your comment. I see the negative treatment of Constable’s landscape painting fitting in perfectly with oikophobia, or a tendency to repudiate one’s own culture in favour of foreign ones that are seen as more valuable, innocent and exotic.
The idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ Every century but this and every country but his own.
“Inclusion, in other words, requires all of us to view our surroundings without the layers of meaning accumulated through habit and familiarity.”
There’s a lot in that sentence. I would maybe edit it like so, “…through habit and familiarity and time.”
‘Public Art’ is cultural taxidermy. The Victorian onithologists attitude to ‘conservation’ – kill it stuff it and study it.
Marinetti had it right.
The elimination of a culture’s history and expression from the public sphere has a name. Cultural genocide. It’s soft cultural genocide by a soft totalitarian elite, but it’s cultural genocide none the less.
The worst example of this move from chronology to themes is in school history curriculums. My daughter’s curriculum is entirely thematic and disconcertingly international.
If we taught British history from the Romans to WW2 in strict date order, it would be difficult not to develop a deep love and knowledge of Britain in the hearts of the pupils. Who can hear the story of Henry V or Nelson or Churchill without a stirring of national pride? But it has to be done chronologically otherwise you don’t see how one led to the next. And crucially, it isn’t clear how all these events led to your life.
If we really had our act together we would teach the Bible in RE and the canon in English Lit in chronological order and tie those lessons into the history curriculum.
That is how you build patriotic citizens. Which is probably why the powers-that-be prefer the thematic approach.
It’s been a bit overdone, but the somewheres/anywheres distinction is relevant here. This is art themed for anywheres, posh nomads, tourists in their own country and culture.
Thanks to Mary Harrington for making us see this petty, narrow-minded, mean-spirited trend. How very, very sad. Love of place and homeland is one of the deepest passions we humans can feel. The poet John Clare expressed it so clearly when the landscape he loved was devastated by enclosure. Another great English writer, Vernon Lee, wrote beautifully of the Genius Loci, the spirit of place, being destroyed by industrialization and mass tourism. Nostalgia for beloved places and the grief of uprooting are a recurring topic of great world literature, not only Western but also Chinese and Arabic. Underlying these emotions is the ethical and political principle that Simone Weil called “The Need for Roots”.
It’s immensely sad that even somebody like the present director of the FitzWilliam — a scholar who wrote on Pisanello and Leonardo — is unable to resist the current woke fashion and its shallow tenets.
“Men looking at women” is a well known meme. I hope it will be printed out and hung right next to the Arnolfini portrait, for the sake of Holy Juxtaposition.
“Other ways of seeing” along with “other ways of knowing” are misnomers. These other ways of seeing and knowing are only admissible if they support a Post-Modern sensibility. If they don’t they’re ignored.
Ironically, the desire to see/know in other ways is just the latest form of “educated” white middle class domination and colonialism. The age old habit of the middle classes to see it as their role to educate the rest of us. And as their wealth diminishes, the desire to see themselves as vital educators of the masses grows,
The driving forces seem to be the importance of being seen to do something and the refusal to take any responsibility for fixing anything that is broken.