Museum Claims Overhaul of Gallery Is Not Woke, But New Signage Near the Classics Hints There's Been a Big Shift
In another tragic reminder that academia has devolved into a steaming pile of trash, an antiquities museum owned by England’s Cambridge University overhauled its art displays with absurd warnings suggesting landscape paintings are racist.
The Fitzwilliam Museum has added signs to historical paintings of the British countryside, warning anyone who looks at them that depictions of England’s rolling green hills can trigger “dark nationalist feelings” and alienate nonwhite viewers, The Telegraph reported March 10.
The Fitzwilliam also reshuffled its art collections into themed categories to be more “diverse,” “inclusive” and “representative.”
The new categories include “Migration and Movement,” “Identity,” “Men Looking at Women” and “Nature.”
A plaque accompanying the new “Nature” section warns: “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.”
Very disappointed to see this from my former university.
To be completely honest, I am utterly sick and tired of this nonsense.
We all know it’s ludicrous, so how on earth does it keep happening?!
‘Rolling English hills’ aren’t racist, they’re hills.https://t.co/8BmTGUBpLc pic.twitter.com/0FvZu95zHI
— Professor Karol Sikora (@ProfKarolSikora) March 14, 2024
A vacuous sign for the new “Identity” gallery warns visitors that centuries-old portraits of wealthy people reinforced “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.”
The sign added that “portraits were often entangled, in complex ways, with British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery.”
The museum underwent its drastic overhaul shortly after a left-wing activist group, the Wildlife and Countryside Link, sent a report to the British Parliament complaining that the English countryside was a “racist colonial white space.”
Museum director Luke Syson insisted the inane institutional revamping was not “woke.”
“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 pushback from those who try to suggest that any interest at all in [this work is] what would now be called ‘woke,'” Syson said, according to The Telegraph.
“Being inclusive and representative shouldn’t be controversial; it should be enriching,” he added.
The museum director’s claim that changing the entire layout of an antiquities museum and adding critical race theory-inspired signs under landscape paintings from 200 years ago is not woke shows just how stupid left-wing race-baiters think the public is.
The Fitzwilliam is an antiquities museum, which means it’s supposed to display historical artworks from the past.
Like the United States and most countries in Europe, England was — and is — a white-majority nation, so it’s logical that most of the people depicted in artworks from the 1700s and 1800s were white.
That is a historical reality you can’t retroactively change. Moreover, it requires no self-flagellating apologies from Britain’s white natives — past or present.
When you go to art museums in other countries, such as South Korea, they don’t rewrite their history to reflect the nation’s more diverse population of today.
And Korean antiquities museums certainly do not apologize for the fact that ancient paintings primarily depicted Korean people. Their landscapes and portraits from the 1700s don’t revise history to digitally add in white or black people because that would be a lie.
The Fitzwilliam Museum was lampooned on social media for its pitiful self-debasement.
WHAT?! The painting of British land painted by British people feature mainly British people? How could they
— just some dude (@NathanFisheman) March 15, 2024
Landscape paintings are some of the most beautiful pieces of art out there. They don’t evoke “nationalist feelings,” they evoke beauty.
— Sterling Mosley (@sterling_mosley) March 15, 2024
Oh look at me, being racist on the internet again. pic.twitter.com/o9MZ696wlK
— A. R. B. (@Arb472) March 15, 2024
The Fitzwilliam and other museums in Western nations should stop bending the knee to left-wing mobs trying to divide people by race with false claims of “white supremacy” and “racism.”
It’s just so vacuous and tiresome at this point.
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