Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” 1868

THE METROPOLITAN Museum of Art in New York City is a magnificent temple to art. Its immense galleries celebrate through painstaking preservation and exhibition the best of cultures around the world, offering the chance to explore and gain understanding of Ancient Egypt, Africa, Asia, Islam, Ancient Greece and Rome, and, of course, various ages of European civilization. You will not find anywhere in the non-Western world more sensitivity to and respect for the artistic efforts of distant strangers and races. The artworks in the museum’s collections also include many great works by Europeans depicting and often valorizing foreign cultures, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” shown above.

However, a new exhibit at the museum condemns the culture that produced such a museum and its rich diversity. Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

I highly recommend Mac Donald’s excellent article in its entirety.

This kind of exhibit, nothing more really than bitterly ugly, Communist-style agitprop, is not surprising of course, but still it’s depressing. The great museums of this country are destined for erasure. They will be obliterated in the flames of resentment and envy. Where truth is not, beauty cannot long survive.

— Comments —

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes from Ethiopia:

Mac Donald may write well, and passionately. But, then what? Writers have a responsibility to pursue their ideas. They have a responsibility to think through their ideas to its final point, its final conclusion. She neglected to do this in her many “black crime” articles, and is now confronted with the monster in her favorite New York museum. She realized that it is the whole country that will be destroyed.

But her neglect is not accidental, or even neglect. She has no principles to present her ideas other than what she sees and experiences. Lawrence Auster wrote about Mac Donald, and his interactions with her, and her avowed, publicly admitted, atheism. I wrote about her too, way back in 2009, in three postings. Her atheism makes her a non-candidate for the rebuilding of the beautiful, formidable, weakened (by people like her) Western culture.

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