March 17, 2024

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum.

The Fitzwilliam Museum has suggested that paintings of the British countryside evoke dark “nationalist feelings”.

The museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, has undertaken an overhaul of its displays, in a move that its director insisted was not “woke”.

Luke Syson said last week: “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’.”

The new signage states that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland”.

“Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist,” David Thompson adds:

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

It’s England, so how long before the spray paint and scimitar crowd has its way with the now double-plus ungood crimethink imagery?

Exit quote:

Posted at 7:30 am by Ed Driscoll