Increasingly, those in charge seem less interested in art or history than in promoting fashionable modern causes
A great change has come over our museums and art galleries. In the past, they were there to teach. Now, they prefer to preach.
At almost every major exhibition these days we find ourselves subjected to finger-wagging lectures about the evils of Western colonialism, transphobia, and other obsessions of the 21st-century Left – irrespective of whether they’re actually relevant to the subject at hand.
As part of a recent exhibition on Hogarth, for example, Tate Britain displayed a self-portrait of the artist seated at his easel, and added a caption asking whether his chair represents “all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity”. Similarly, the catalogue for the current Cezanne exhibition at Tate Modern asks whether there would “even be a ‘Cezanne’ without colonisation”. And, at the British Museum, a recent exhibition on Stonehenge claimed that the presence of both a dagger and a necklace in a single ancient burial plot suggests that “gender rules were being transformed”. Yes, now even prehistoric Britain has to be seen through the prism of 21st-century gender ideology. If only we could travel back in time, so we could seek the druids’ views on JK Rowling.
If you think this wearyingly pious trend is confined to London, however, think again. Last week, I visited the Burrell Collection, a museum in Glasgow which reopened this year after a major refurbishment. And the self-righteousness of some of its captions was so shrill, it’s a wonder that the more fragile exhibits didn’t shatter on the spot.