The Soviet Union, even under the influence of Marxism-Leninism, retained a great affinity for the classics, something that was certainly far from true of some Communist societies. But that meant the classics had to be twisted around to fit the Marxist perspective on everything. What that did to Hamlet you could well imagine.
These days, we’re doing it too, as this excerpt from a larger Tablet essay by Alice Gribbin on art museum wokeness shows. The subject is a Hogarth exhibition. The museum reinterprets everything through the lens of critical race theory, ranting about “black bodies” and slavery no matter what the subject may be.
And then we get to this Hogarth self-portrait in which there’s nothing except the artist himself.
The sublime result could have thrilled any Communist essayist forced to fit a random piece of culture into Marxism-Leninism.
“In a self-portrait of the artist at work, the chair in which Hogarth sits “literally supports him and exemplifies his view on beauty. The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people. Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?”
The chair, my friends, embodies slavery, racism, colonialism, and black people.
No Bolshevik could have topped the absurdity here.
An India Telegraph essay noted the same chair insanity, but also added this entry from the National Gallery.
This week, the National Gallery released a report prepared by University College, London, that warned undiscerning visitors that a section of its collection, including paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and donated by William Wordsworth, was somehow linked to the slave trade. According to The Daily Telegraph report, Gainsborough painted two pictures of families whose wealth derived from the slave trade. Wordsworth, who presented a John Constable painting in 1837, has been included in the offenders’ list “because his sister’s rented cottage was leased by a slave-owner”.
His sister’s rented cottage.
This is your culture. This is your culture on critical race theory.
somehistory says
How far will they go?
Just as mozlums slay other mozlums when there are no infidels left to slay, these idiots, drunk on the wine of forcing others to accept and submit to their twisted point of view, will consume themselves when there is nothing left about the rest of us with which to beat us over our *privileged* heads.
Chairs are racist. Cabins are racist. If they only knew how very stupid how very ignorant, how very mentally twisted they really are.
I recall the ad…”This is your brain”….and frying the egg in hot pan, “this is your brain on drugs.”
This entire racist thing…CA is paying reparations…(to whom?.)…is satanic, demonic and will only lead to destruction for those engaging it; just as heroin and fentanyl are killers, destroying lives, so is this racist dogma.
Rarely says
I’m reminded of a song by the satirist Tom Lehrer where he writes: “Truth, I’m sad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When properly viewed everything is lewd. I could tell you things about Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz–there’s a dirty old man”.
Twist anything any way you want to make a point. It’s particularly irritating when this is done by an academic who should know better. It’s even worse when people actually takes it seriously. Life’s too short — we have to laugh at this insanity.
BTW. I had coffee with a bigot once so I guess that invalidates everything else I may have done (or do) in my lifetime.
gravenimage says
+1
Treereen says
We’re not allowed to point out a certain group is much more dangerous than others because a good number of its members commit terror atrocities, told us they hate us and will make us slaves given half the chance. However, we are now being collectively held responsible for things vast majority of our ancestors didn’t do simply on the grounds that some rich guy’s sister’s cousin’s customer may have been involved in the slave trade.
“…routes which also shipped enslaved people.”
Aren’t these used today for commercial shipping? Is modern-day shipping supportive of slave-holding? The “logic” seems to bear this out, which makes anyone spouting such rubbish and taking advantage of what modern-day, shipped-by-sea civilisation has to offer supportive of slavery as well.
mortimer says
Their woke virtue-signalling grasps at any straw … no matter how small or insignificant the straw is.
Preposterous numskulls!
tim gallagher says
This nonsense is insane. I keep thinking that soon there will be a fightback against the garbage. All people have been formed, to a large degree, by the period in the history of mankind that they lived in. The achievements of people, such as Hogarth and others, should be celebrated in a positive way. All this sniping at all the achievements of western civilisation and white people is moronically stupid and one day most people will surely come to their senses (they probably already have and see all this claptrap as the nonsense that it is) and see this garbage as the pathetic load of bullshit that it is. All this self loathing and self laceration by these wankers has to stop. And they must be the most miserable people, with the darkest vision of things, of any people you could find. Everything is always as terrible and evil in their eyes.
Wellington says
As I am sure it will come as no surprise to you, tim gallagher, I again find us in accord 100%.
Thanks for your post and hope you are doing well in a very unwell age. I am trying to do so in northeastern America as I am certain you are trying to do so in southeastern Australia.
Wish we could share a Guinness someday—-or maybe four or five.
tim gallagher says
Thanks, Wellington, and we do see things in a very similar way. Out here, of course, we are heading into winter which I hate, even more so as I get older. Sydney, where I live, has a very temperate climate but, nevertheless, it gets too cold for me. I often say to my siblings and friends that there is no way in the world that I could endure the sort of cold weather that people in northern Europe and many parts of North America do live in. On all this bullshit these days, I tend to ignore a lot of it, maybe because I consider some of it so brainless and insane, although it does annoy me to quite some degree. I have a conservative friend, Chris, who sees the woke bullshit in the same way as I do, so we get together to solve the world’s problems, and also the commentators on a couple of programs on Sky News out here tear strips off all this leftist nonsense, so they cheer me up. I hope you and your wife are going well. I ditched alcohol about 5 years ago for health reasons. I have to say that I often didn’t handle alcohol well when younger so the civilised people of the world are probably breathing a sigh of relief that i stopped drinking. I never got violent but I did behave pretty badly at times.I only occasionally miss a cold beer at the end of a a hot summer’s day. I keep playing music, singing and writing simple little songs and I might go and record a handful of them soon and get them put on a CD( just for family and a couple of friends). My brother said I should do so because I did the same thing a couple of years back. We are all old and hopeless on technology so we listen to music on CDs. I found a guy locally who says he can do this. Well I listen to music on youtube on my PC. All the best to you. I’m sure you will keep on fighting the culture wars against all this idiocy that’s so prevalent in these very weird times. I mean some of this stuff is so idiotic that I can’t believe that some gullible people do fall for it.
gravenimage says
Tim, I would love to be able to hear more of your music!
tim gallagher says
gravenimage, I could probably send you a CD if I do go and do this recording. I did put the songs, 4 in all,all other people’s songs, on youtube, though I think they all disappeared. I think that that is pointless because hardly anyone listens to them. Then I started to write my own songs. The CD I recorded a couple of years ago sounded good, although I only like 2 or three songs on it these days. One about a summer day at a Sydney beach and another about leaving a bad relationship and heading up to the warmth of Queensland. The beach song has some nice images and is probably based a little bit on a Jesse Winchester song called “Biloxi’. The last verse goes “At midnight a cool wind blows on in/ it makes it easy for for people who are sleeping/ out in the darkness the only sound you hear/ is the hypnotic sound of the waves as they roll on in”. There’s a Jackson Browne song, “Linda paloma” which has the words, “Like a wind that comes up in the night caressing your face as you sleep” and I always liked that so I maybe borrowed that about the cooling wind. I like the songs I have written later on better. I was just talking to my brother and I said I might soon go and get recorded but I was a bit nervous because The guy doing the recoding might love heavy metal or something and hate my songs. My brother said well he’ll probably be happy to take your money. I said that the idea of recording the songs is to get them down in some format because otherwise I just play them at home and pretty much no-one knows how they are meant to sound. Only one of my sisters has heard some of them.I’ll probably do it. I’ll let you know if I do. They are simple little love or heartbreak songs, like little stories, since that’s what I think songs should mostly be about. If I don’t get a cold that wrecks my voice I’ll probably do the recording in the next couple of weeks.
gravenimage says
Sounds great, Tim! Please keep me posted, and let me know how much the CD will be.
gravenimage says
This is Your Culture. This is Your Culture on Critical Race Theory.
“In a self-portrait of the artist at work, the chair in which Hogarth sits “literally supports him and exemplifies his view on beauty. The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people. Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?”
………………….
*Good grief*. How do these fools know that Hogarth’s chair is made from “timbers shipped from the colonies”? It could just as easily be made of English oak.
Then, do these idiots not know that Hogarth was a famous social critic? If he wanted to satirize society, he never would have been so opaque. He satirized marrying for money, social climbing, self-destructive decadence, alcoholism, and cruelty.
He did touch on slavery, but it was never his main topic.
And unlike some artists, Hogarth’s main focus was never on beauty as such. So nattering on about his view of beauty here just shows that this idiot understands little about Hogarth.
More:
The chair, my friends, embodies slavery, racism, colonialism, and black people.
No Bolshevik could have topped the absurdity here.
………………….
Daniel Greenfield is right–this is positively Soviet in its turgidity.
More:
This week, the National Gallery released a report prepared by University College, London, that warned undiscerning visitors that a section of its collection, including paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and donated by William Wordsworth, was somehow linked to the slave trade. According to The Daily Telegraph report, Gainsborough painted two pictures of families whose wealth derived from the slave trade. Wordsworth, who presented a John Constable painting in 1837, has been included in the offenders’ list “because his sister’s rented cottage was leased by a slave-owner”.
His sister’s rented cottage.
This is your culture. This is your culture on critical race theory.
………………….
This isn’t exposing links to slavery–this is dredging for it where it doesn’t exist.
This is like lambasting the Beatles because they were from Liverpool, which had been a center of the slave trade more than a hundred years previously.
Just grotesque.
Wellington says
Excellent post, gravenimage.
john smith says
Seconded
gravenimage says
Thank you, Wellington and Johan.
As some here may know, I have a degree in Art History.
This on the Hogarth show is just appalling ignorance and misguided “political correctness”
And while this is an especially egregious example, sadly it is anything but rare.
gravenimage says
Besides art, I am also a big fan of classic film–but TCM has also been bitten by the “woke” bug, and has to excoriate every other film they show for being racist, sexist, or otherwise “politically incorrect”, often featuring unsmiling ethnic or women’s studies academics alongside their hosts to tell you how terrible these movies are. And I’m not just talking about a few genuinely concerning films like “Birth of a Nation”, but also Westerns, War films, and Charlie Chan movies.
Wellington says
Completely done with TCM, gravenimage, because of what you mentioned. When the recently deceased Robert Osbourne (d. 2017) was host, TCM was still a good outlet, but once Ben Mankiewicz took over it has been ever since obnoxiously PC to the point of unwatchability. Actually, I think the last time I viewed it was back in 2019, perhaps even earlier. Never again.
gravenimage says
Grimly agreed, Wellington.
Just one point: I doubt this is Ben Mankiewicz’s doing–more likely diktats from the top.
gravenimage says
Here’s more on the “curating” of this show:
“Woke curators target Hogarth: Famous cartoonist’s depictions of 18th century Britain now come with notes about their ‘sexual violence and slavery’ in new Tate Britain exhibition”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10155783/Tate-exhibition-highlights-slavery-links-William-Hogarths-paintings.html
From the labels explaining the artwork re “A Midnight Modern Conversation”:
According to The Telegraph, visitors are told in a label alongside the scene that, whilst the picture is meant to be funny, the ‘punch they drink and the tobacco they smoke are material links to a wider world of commerce, exploitation and slavery.’
A catalogue accompanying the painting says the men may be ‘queasily celebrating such manly misdemeanours – what we might today called “laddishness”.’
…
Firstly, now “commerce” is explicitly “slavery”? Maybe this *is* Bolshevist, after all…
Then, not only are they throwing in stuff that doesn’t exist, such as references to slavery, but they are completely missing what Hogarth *actually was saying*. This painting is not a celebration of “laddishness”–Hogarth frequently criticized drunkeness and how it ruined people’s lives. It is very like the scene “The Orgy” from the series “A Rake’s Progress”, where the main character eventually winds up bankrupt and in the madhouse.
But these woke fools seem to have missed all of this.