It’s apparently not just problematic because the vast majority of it was produced by dead white males, but it’s also now considered to be a totem of white supremacist beliefs:
“The Raft of the Medusa” (French: Le Radeau de la Méduse) by Théodore Géricault 1818-19, an oil-on-canvas painting measuring 491 cm × 716 cm (16 ft 1 in × 23 ft 6 in)
Louvre, image via Wikimedia Commons.
A Philadelphia-based art historian and curator believes exhibitions of European art in American museums should be “reconsidered” in light of “a surge in white supremacist violence” across the country.
Alexander Kaufmann says that “[b]ecause the centering of Europe is baked into the architecture” of museums, and “usually inhabit the largest and most central galleries,” people might not notice a connection to white supremacy.
“But white supremacists do,” he adds ominously.
“Europe’s cultural prestige is their evidence for the racial superiority of white America,” Kaufmann writes in Hyperallergic. White supremacists and white nationalists gather at museums because that’s “where Europe’s cultural patrimony is most visibly singled out as exceptional.”
White supremacy notwithstanding, American museums’ original missions — “provid[ing] instruction for the industrial classes” and helping the country achieve the goal of becoming the “noblest development of humanity” — have long required a response, Kaufmann argues, and the activism of groups like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls can provide just that.
“After the violence in Charlottesville, Charleston, and Pittsburgh,” Kaufmann says, “our encyclopedic museums must take steps within their galleries of European Art to combat white supremacist ideology.” (But are women who run around in gorilla masks “to expose gender and ethnic bias [and] corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture” really part of a serious solution?)
