How the Left-wing elite has politicised Britain’s museums and galleries
From ‘racist’ plants at Kew Gardens to ‘sexist’ medical exhibits, venues are reshaping our view of history, says Tim Stanley
Last November, the Wellcome Collection, in central London, announced that it was closing its Medicine Man gallery after 15 years. The display, said the museum on Twitter, perpetuated “a version of medical history that [was] based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”. A month later, Cambridge University declared that it would be returning more than 100 Benin bronzes to Nigeria as they were “illegitimately acquired artefacts”. Two years prior, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum removed its shrunken heads from display following an “ethical review”.
Today, discussion abounds over whether it is still acceptable to use the word “mummy” to describe an embalmed corpse; the term, say some, is colonial and dehumanising. Meanwhile, Kew Gardens has pledged to acknowledge the exploitative or racist legacies of some of its specimens. Progress has been made towards “queering” Manchester Museum (making the venue more welcoming to members of the LGBTQ+ community). And the assistant director of Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology fears that calling Australian marsupials “weird” risks “othering” them – “this language… is essentially an element of the colonial framework”.
What on Earth is going on?
You might have thought that the museum was a “neutral” space, where beauty and knowledge are collected from around the world and put on display for visitors to interpret as they wish. But many of the people who run our museums see them as political theatres, even “weapons” that can – and must – be used to transform society. They are not just curators, they are activists. Their mission is to shape the future by challenging the way we think about the past.
Sir Trevor Phillips – the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission who now exposes wokery in the arts via the think tank Policy Exchange – told me that the impetus for these cultural edits comes from “a white graduate class… by and large under 30”. The older curators and directors are effectively held hostage by this cohort, he said, because they are terrified that if they don’t play along, they’ll be called racist and put into storage, too.
The word “graduate” is important. Take a look at the online prospectuses for Museum Studies courses and you’ll find language that is strikingly familiar, suggesting a clear link between classroom and exhibit.
The MA in Art History and Museum Curating at the University of Sussex offers the opportunity to “evaluate diverse interpretive-approaches” to the subject, including “feminism, iconology, agency, gift giving, and post colonialism” – and to tackle issues such as “disability and access”, “Black Lives Matter”, “queer heritage and erotic art”.
At University College London, one of the compulsory modules in the Museum Studies MA investigates the museum’s part in “nation building”, its “social roles and responsibilities, from wellbeing to climate change”, and “confronts the legacies of colonialism”. The course provokes students to ask “what a museum is and does, and what it can be”.
These are good questions. The story of how the Western museum evolved, and how Left-wing ideas reacted to and then reshaped it, helps explain why woke won.
The museum as most of us understand it is a product of the Enlightenment, of the desire to collect and display for the betterment of the public. In 1753, for example, the physician Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his vast collection of “rarities”, manuscripts, coins and medals to the nation. The new British Museum was open to “all studious and curious persons”, a fine, egalitarian ideal.
But Sloane’s income partly derived from slave labour on plantations, and he exploited the growing reach of the British Empire to expand his collection. Some of the Museum’s current objects were dug up, purchased or stolen. It houses some of the controversial Benin Bronzes, looted by British soldiers when they invaded Benin City in 1897
– a “brutal, violent colonial episode”, as the Museum admits.
With the collapse of the European empires in the 20th century, and the flourishing of civil rights campaigns, critics argued that the great museums – relics of Victorian patronage and splendour – sustained a false narrative of Western superiority. As young people flooded into the expanding university sector to study art history or curation, they were exposed to ideas that suggested the Enlightenment museum was a fraud. The French historian Michel Foucault (1926-84), for example, argued that public institutions are never neutral; they are places where the elite reinforces its order of society through acts of “show and tell”.
Foucault’s fans applied this critique to the museum, noting that rich donors decide what’s in it, curators choose what goes on show and how it is labelled, and the visitor is expected to soak up information that is little more than elite propaganda. There was a need, said the new theorists, to debunk objectivity, to shift power away from the institution and towards the visitor and the wider community.
Still, there was room for fudge. In 2014, discussing the eternal call to repatriate the Elgin Marbles to Greece, Neil Macgregor, then-director at the British Museum, said that when the marbles were in Athens they had been “architectural decoration”; once unveiled in London they were visible as “great sculptures”. The meaning of objects, said the art establishment, can change over place and time.
But this liberal consensus – that objects and art belong to the world, and the museum, for all its faults, is the world’s showcase – could not hold. In 2020, George Floyd was killed by police officers in America. That same year, Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, who teaches at the Oxford School of Archaeology, released an explosive book called The Brutish Museums, calling out the Macgregor argument as preposterous and setting himself the task of exposing the anthropological museum as “a weapon, a method and a device for the ideology of white supremacy to legitimise, extend and naturalise new extremes of violence within corporate capitalism”. The only way to rescue museums, argued Hicks, is to “dismantle, repurpose, restitute [and] recognise” their status as “sites of conscience”.
Some curating staff, radicalised by Trump and Brexit, and bored rigid by lockdown, saw Floyd’s killing as a chance to force a reckoning within their workplace. “Many of our collections were founded on inequality,” declared the Cambridge Museum of Zoology. We want to stand “with those who are actively anti-racist”, said the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in Glasgow. “We have a responsibility to our black and minority employees … to better amplify and showcase their perspective,” said the V&A.
In Bristol, protesters dumped a statue of a slave trader into the harbour, symbolising a new era of impatient, hands-on activism. Sir Trevor says that if you counted the heads of the people who did the deed, about “80 per cent were white”.
This movement, he argues, “is a phenomenon driven by clever, affluent, white young people” – and for at least two decades, they’ve been pushing at doors with well-oiled hinges.
Charles Saumarez Smith - who has run the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy – recalls that during the 1980s, the older art-gallery establishment was “very conservative” because they “tended to be experts in a particular field of study, such as furniture or textiles”; beyond that “they weren’t really interested in how things were displayed or interpreted”. This began to change thanks to growing intellectual interest in the “cultural context and the history of how things have been interpreted”; the rise of “communication” experts who saw a more social role for the museum; and the Blair government’s insistence “that collections should encourage visits from a much broader range of people”. Interactivity, plain language, even hyperbole, became popular. Those that, like Saumarez Smith, think one should “put things on display, provide the information and allow the public to make an interpretation according to the interests that they bring to the collection” were increasingly regarded as old-fashioned.
Meanwhile, private companies – ie the donors – started to be subject to an Environmental, Social and Governance score. Alexander Adams, a writer and artist who agitates for the abolition of Arts Council England, explains that this rating system gives high marks for companies that can show “they have diverse workers or engage in environmentalism or [donate] to certain charities and so forth… That means that their stock [value] is improved, they’re more investment worthy.” In other words, there is now a financial motivation for companies to invest in “progressive art” or museums.
In short, state and private sector have fostered an environment within which youthful and politicised staff can make the leap from a museum that curates a culture to a museum that seeks to deconstruct that culture. This is what Robert R Janes and Richard Sandell argue for in their 2019 influential collection of essays Museum Activism: in the context of poverty, ecological collapse and Right-wing populism, inaction has become immoral.
If you wondered why a Cornish pepper pot museum might feel obliged to address climate change, herein lies the answer: “To persist with the status quo of unlimited [economic] growth is to perpetuate the privileged position of the elitist museums.”
One organisation trying to overcome our society’s “white fragility” is the Museums Association, which represents hundreds of institutions, including the British Museum and the V&A. Among its campaigns advertised online are “anti-racism” and “climate justice”.
The association is aware of potential consumer resistance. One document, entitled Understanding Audiences, divides likely public responses into “Engaged/passive Allies”, “Curious Neutral/passive Critics”, “Engaged Critics”, and “Malicious Critics”, whom one must not “engage or amplify”. Within the document online is a link to a text called “Divide and Rule” by the New Economy Organisers Network (Neon) that seeks to “help social justice movements win”. The so-called culture war, says Neon, is “the result of a toxic combination of a purposeful campaign from the reactionary Right and a media environment that is bent towards dangerous sensationalism and bigotry”. Labour, it laments, is almost as populist as the Tories. In the hands of such people, the past becomes a terrain upon which to pitch contemporary battles. But history resists playing out as good vs evil.
The record of empire is morally mixed; it eliminated cultures but it also studied and preserved them. Historian Zareer Masani argues that before the British arrived in India, “there was no indigenous tradition of exploring or conserving antiquity. The rediscovery of a classical past and the romantic appeal of its ruined remnants was a European sensibility.”
It is paradoxical, the American conservative David Frum has observed, that Westerners have spent decades promoting African art in our museums – insisting it is a serious contribution to global culture – only to decide it must now be repatriated, potentially to countries that are too poor, corrupt or violent to guarantee its protection. Museums, he argues, flourish in “stable states” that provide “unmatched security for fragile and valuable treasures”.
But if that’s true, it’s tempting to ask if modern Britain really is more stable than, say, Nigeria? This is now a country that topples statues and removes complicated art from galleries. The Tate closed its Rex Whistler restaurant because it contained a mural featuring slaves.
It is when beauty has been clumsily politicised that we’ve seen some of the stronger critical backlash. Tate Britain’s William Hogarth show was spoiled by an obsessive attempt to find something to be upset about: a label for a self-portrait of the artist sitting on a chair said that “the chair is made from timbers shipped from colonies via routes that also shipped enslaved people”. Was it possible that this humble piece of furniture stood for all those “unnamed black and brown people” who made such creativity possible?
Such attempts to reframe almost everything through the lens of activism commits the cardinal sin of being boring – monotonous, uncommercial. Pushed too far, might it leave the museums empty of visitors?
If the complaint about the Enlightenment museum was that it told people what to think, then things have gone full circle. A genuinely inclusive sector would find space for conservative or religious voices. Instead, the professional curator class is locking millions out by speaking a language it requires a graduate degree to understand, implementing a political agenda that has never been tested at the ballot box, and enforcing new standards for what we can see and how we’re supposed to interpret it.
The impetus for these changes comes from a white graduate class, by and large under 30
Those that want visitors to be free to interpret artefacts as they see fit are now ‘old-fashioned’