Decolonizing Museums

~ Clarissa

We all know Russia is stupid, so the offensive Nazi nipples won’t surprise anybody. Russia was always a mess, so we aren’t that shocked to hear it still is.

What’s Spain’s excuse for turning into a piece of woke shit, though? Let me tell you about a single recent example.

The Spanish cultural establishment is deeply enamored of the US left-wing ideas and is aping them in painfully embarrassing ways. Recently, it began to “decolonize museums.” The art of the Iberian culture is now considered colonialist and in need for removal. For instance, the famous Dama de Elche that dates to the 4th century BC is being cancelled in service of “decolonization.”

4th century BC, folks. Here’s the stunning Dama de Elche:

Dama de Elche, 4th century BC

Thank God, there are no nipples because then the statue would have been both Nazi and colonialist.

The criticisms of “colonialist art” weren’t expressed by some online crank. No, these were official statements by Spain’s Minister of Culture. His Ministry has produced or sponsored no piece of art worthy of standing in the shade of Dama de Elche or the portrait of Sor Juana by Miguel Cabrera (another artist slated for cancellation. But that never stops leftist fanatics who detest beauty.

Sor Juana, a famous Mexican poet and thinker, in a portrait by Miguel Cabrera

The goal is to strip museums of this beautiful art and fill them with hideous, politically correct images. Here is, for instance, a painting by Sandra Gamarra, one of the chief proponents of “decolonize museums” who received €400,000 from the Spanish government to produce an “anti-racist” exhibit in Madrid:

My readers understand art, so I’ll leave it to them to decide whether it makes sense to throw Dama de Elche and Miguel Cabrera out of museums to make space for the ideologicall correct art of Sandra Gamarra and Co. It is very clear, though, why woke art can’t peacefully co-exist with actual art.

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Published by Clarissa

30 thoughts on “Decolonizing Museums”

  1. This sounds crazy and I wonder what the hell has gotten into Spanish people, maybe they want to look super woke so that they look like progressive Western Europeans instead of backwards peasants.

    I can sort of understand why the portrait of Sor Juana by Cabrera could be triggering to woke idiots, it portrays a woman of color who is a nun painted by a white Spanish man. They probably thought Sor Juana was brainwashed into being Catholic and that she would have been better off under her people’s original pagan religion, Nevermind that she was most likely white with her mother being criolla.

    However, I don’t understand removing La Dama de Elche since it is originally from Spain itself. The only reason I can think of is that it was originally from a Phoenician colony and that some Phoenicians came from North Africa and the rest from the eastern Mediterranean, which by modern standards makes them people of color. But unlike Native American artifacts which can be traced to a specific tribe and reasonable geographical area, we don’t know exactly where the people who carved La Dama are from, only that they were Phoenician.

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    1. I didn’t manage to understand the argument about the Dama de Elche either. It’s something to do with how this statue symbolizes the Roman empire, which I don’t get. The Spanish language itself is the biggest monument to the Roman Empire in Spain. Maybe it should be cancelled and everybody can speak in woke Anglo slogans instead.

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  2. Removing things from museums is doing it wrong. During my last trip to Germany, I was in a museum that had done a project to confront racist items in their collection. (Most of it was old depictions of moors and colonial exoticizing of far away places.) They had done it by inviting contemporary artists from the places/groups depicted in racist ways to make new artworks responding to the racist art works and then they had put the responses up beside or across from the originals. Some of the response art works were stupid, but many of them were really interesting. Nothing was removed from the museum, but the visitors were prompted to give some extra thought to some of the exhibits. I thought it was a great approach.

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    1. This is somewhat better than removing but it’s still wrong. Why should one (very small) group inflict its political opinions on other people against their will? I don’t want to be confronted, prompted or improved. I do not believe these people are morally superior to me and have the right to improve me. I’m not trying to improve them. I’m not running after them with a cross and a Bible. Why should they be able to do it to me?

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      1. The writeup accompanying pieces of art at museums has become the primary object, and the actual art relegated to secondary status whose function is solely to validate its description as conceived by a tiny group of high priests.

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      2. I think I should have included a concrete example of what they did, because I think you are imagining something far worse than what they actually did.

        One of the paintings was an 18th century (I think it was Dutch) landscape painting of a Caribbean island that included a group of islanders heading out to work in the fields. The response artwork was hung across from it, it was a high resolution photo taken at the exact same spot on that island, there were some slightly run down houses in the distance, but no people. The direct comparison of the images makes it clear the painter embellished the landscape a bit and perhaps implies that we shouldn’t trust the painters depiction of the islanders. It’s a pretty spot, but it’s not quite as over the top gorgeous as it is in the painting. The text underneath the response artwork pointed out that the island was a colony at the time of the original painting, that all of the field hands in the colony would have been slaves, and that historical sources indicate that treatment of slaves in that colony was considered extremely brutal even by the standards of the time. They had done absolutely nothing to the original painting and you would have been totally free to look at the original painting and ignore the response artwork. I personally found the additional background information interesting because I don’t know much about the history of the Caribbean and it might not have occurred to me while looking at the painting that the field workers at the time would have been slaves.

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    2. “a project to confront racist items in their collection”

      Isn’t that presupposing that the items are ‘racist’? I don’t necessarily accpet that especially since those who like to use the word ‘racist’ don’t like defining it or explaining how their definition would apply to a particular work (or only define it in negative terms).

      ” colonial exoticizing of far away places”

      Edward Said has _soooooo_ much to answer for and his retarded theories about how first worlders don’t have any moral grounds for critiquing non-western cultures…..

      If the museum wants to solicit art from other countries that’s great. But ‘confronting racism’ is not the museum’s job.

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      1. In the context of the museum I was in, the racist artworks were either depictions of “happy” slaves and Moors in older paintings and more recent paintings that were anti-capitalist and conveyed “evil capitalist” by drawing on Jewish stereotypes. They hadn’t removed or covered up anything, they just added the response artworks and commentary, most of the commentary was additional historical background info.

        Just to be clear, I think it is absolutely wrong to remove art from museums. But I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of every artist, place, and event in world history and I thought providing that additional historical context was really interesting.

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        1. ” depictions of “happy” slaves and Moors in older paintings “

          How wonderful that the museum thinks its visitors are nincompoops with no knowledge of history.

          A temporary special exhibition contrasting paintings with real life locations might be interesting, a lecture on the evils of slavery that treats me like 6 year old…. is not.

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        2. OK, imagine the other side has all the power and is accompanying the painting of Goya’s Nude Maja with a poster saying “This is a lewd painting of a promiscuous woman who is rumored to have had many extramarital affairs.” This is all true. It’s context. It’s as ideological as the anti-racist explanations. Why would it be wrong to put it up?

          There could even be an alternative painting of the maja praying or cooking, just to reinforce the point about what’s appropriate for a woman in this ideological system.

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          1. “alternative painting of the maja praying or cooking”

            I thought the two portraits (clothed and nude) were exhibited together? They’re not?

            The real equivalent of these dunning lectures would be to remove the desnuda altogether and put up a sign:

            “Goya also painted this early feminist figure whose life was devoted to resisting the patriarchy without clothes. This is not on exhibit because it is not clear if she consented to this visualization of the male gaze and objectification of her sexuality.”

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  3. One of the worst attempts that I remember of a museum altering its display to avoid offense occurred at a German military aviation museum when I was stationed there in the 1980s.

    The museum displayed actual German military aircraft from World War II, but had falsified the military insignia on the planes by removing all of the actual 1940s insignia (the swastika) and replacing them with the older military insignia from World War I (the iron cross).

    This would be the equivalent of a Civil War museum removing the Confederate flag patch from Confederate uniforms and replacing it with a patch of the U.S. flag.

    The result was a ridiculous insult to the intelligence of the military museum’s visitors.

    Dreidel

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        1. Nazi symbols are allowed in history museums in Germany. The rules may have been different in the 80s, but museums are definitely allowed to display them in appropriate historical contexts today.

          It may be relevant that this was a military focused museum rather than a more general history museum. I know that there has been a lot of disagreement and arguments over the years about the guilt of the regular armed forces vs. extremely nazified special units. There are people (many associated with the modern armed forces) who want to distance the regular army from the worst of the Nazi atrocities and others who point out that regular units were involved in doing lots of terrible things. Replacing swastikas with older symbols would definitely fit with those pushing the idea that the regular army were less guilty than various special units.

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          1. Such a weird thing. As a kid, I was fascinated by coinage– but most particularly with coins that weren’t perfect, but which had been deliberately defaced in a purposeful way: Clipped coins, Bolivian colonial silver with punch-marks (they did this to verify the silver content), Hejaz countermarks, that sort of thing. One of the things that passed through my hands was a heavily defaced third-reich silver coin– the eagle holding the swastika, which you can just barely make out through the dense scratch-marks. That tells an interesting story– it’s silver, so somebody still needed to use it as money I think, but tried really hard to remove the mark. If I mention that I have a Nazi coin, people tend to jump to the bizarre conclusion that I’m one of those freaks who collects Nazi memorabilia. It ain’t so. I accumulated interesting small round artifacts that told interesting stories.

            Why does the symbol have to be the whole story? And don’t we *want* to tell that story? What happens if we stop telling that story?

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  6. OT: In other breaking news Navalny is dead. I never liked or supported him or wanted him to be in charge of any country but his arrest and imprisonment show just what a flaming garbage heap russia….. has become? still is?

    A culture built to appeal to losers.

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      1. “Bloody animals”

        Couple of thoughts…

        First putain “endorses” Biden and then this…. I can’t help but feel this is meant, at least in part, to humiliate Cucker. I’m fairly sure Navalny’s been dead for a while (when was the last verified sighting?)

        So they Cucker will be pimping out russia while they release the news and there’s nothing he can say or do about it.

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        1. Putin said that he found Tucker to not be impressive. This is a direct borrowing from Tucker’s signature phrase “these are not impressive people.” High-level trolling is happening. And it’s hard to feel bad for Tucker who totally opened himself to ridicule.

          This is the price of hubris. Pride goes before the fall, and Tucker is finding this out right now.

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    1. Every Aldi has them. Of course, dude is way too rich to know that Aldi exists but doesn’t he have editors, assistants, somebody who’s visited the real world?

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      1. “doesn’t he have editors, assistants”

        That’s the funny part…. even his staff is so out of touch they didn’t realize just how cringe this would look to real people.

        It’s complete alienation from the real world… they’re even alienated from their own alienation so they can’t recognize it.

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