Further to this, and also via Charlotte Gill, let’s visit the world of politically radical tableware. Specifically,

Because this is what you need to know when taking a class in ceramics:

We funded this.

But remember, universities need more money 😉 pic.twitter.com/gKEbweQsVG

— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) July 29, 2024

For those deeply intrigued:

Well, obviously, you can’t just learn how to make plates.

And hey, who wouldn’t want some of that lovely racial awareness? Or, less coyly, practised question-begging and pretentious racial guilt. Or unearned racial resentment, depending on how brown you happen to be. I mean, you can’t just go through life interacting with people as individuals. You have to cultivate a neurotic habit of seeing people as avatars of some supposedly put-upon racial group. Or conversely, as oppressors, as proven by their pallor, their deplorable whiteness.

And a fragrant utopia will surely follow.

The creative titan behind the project – named, inevitably, Working With Whiteness – is Victoria Burgher, a self-styled “artist from a colonising country,” for whom pretentious, and rather invidious, racial agonising has been a path to many grants and awards. Ms Burgher, we’re told,

You see,

And,

Strained metaphors are very in, it seems. Along with teetering piles of assumptions. Also, Bad Whitey. It’s all terribly original. Very daring. Not at all conformist.

It occurs to me, however, that Ms Burgher’s contrived, modish waffle may make a kind of sense if you think of it as an attempt to add social heft to the otherwise pedestrian art that she actually produces.

For instance:

“From The River To The Sea… #2 (2023). Porcelain, cobalt, gold lustre and glaze, 27cm.”

And,

“White But Working On It (2022). Glazed porcelain ceramic badges, 5-6 cm.”

And,

“Whiteness (2018). Ink on bagasse (sugar cane fibre), fabric, pins, 14 x 14 cm.”

It would, I think, explain a few things. As it often does.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the unattractive objects shown above, and others very much like them, Martin D adds,

A fair question. One worth pondering.

Ms Burgher approvingly cites Ms Robin DiAngelo, the peddler of neurosis mentioned here, the L Ron Hubbard of wokeness, and whose devotees, as we’ve seen, are often wildly unhinged and nakedly malevolent. Which probably tells us much of what we need to know about Ms Burgher and her racial affectations. The mindset she wishes to inflict on others. And by extension, those who succumb.

And so, Ms Burgher makes her unattractive tat, and calls it art, and treads on ceramic eggshells, and calls it performance art, while listing the hallucinatory evils of having pale skin. And while telling those sufficiently credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” the source of all that is wrong, a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.”

You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

So, yes. Someone quite fucked up.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Attention, comrades. My fellow heroes, titans, thinkers of deep thoughts. It is time to map out the world of tomorrow:

There are no post revolution theatre troops, only post revolution mine troops, comrade. pic.twitter.com/ACIref7r9r

— Hegel Borg™️ (@xxclusionary) June 10, 2024

Because after the revolution, we will need accessible theatre.

Presumably, to take our minds off all the riots and ruin and burning cars. Earlier revolutionary rumblings can be found here and here. Topics covered include the pivotal importance of “artists and visionaries,” and the righteous washing of other people’s bin contents. Thereby enabling us to “eat from a revolutionary and resistance standpoint.”

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Time, I think, to better ourselves. Come, let us peek at the culture pages of the Guardian:

That’s Perth, Scotland. Lest there be confusion.

Bear with me. I’m setting the scene. Stoking your anticipation.

White horse. Big horn.

Again, big horn.

Ah, tat.

Brace yourselves for a full-on face-blast of culture:

Such wonders you’ll behold. Memories to treasure forever.

Because the above is “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” And so, while claiming to give exposure to the supposedly marginalised and unseen, the virtuous by default, the curators are expecting visitors to be enthralled by objects of mass-produced banality that are, by their own admission, utterly ubiquitous.

But wait. There’s more.

One of the above. Presumably the most photogenic.

I’m just going to leave this here, I think. Consider it an illustration of what can be done. A cultural benchmark for our times.

Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

So seldom. So terribly seldom.

Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.

Despite which, Ashleigh Hibbins, the head of audiences at the Perth Museum, where unicorns await, tells us,

Ah yes, those unheard voices. The dear downtrodden.

Via Julia.

Lifted from the comments, more pretentious agonising:

Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist.

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

Likewise, the demographics of Cambridge are skewed rather significantly by students, who make up about a fifth of the city’s population, and of which more than 40% are students from overseas. Which, again, may tilt one’s view of what constitutes “representation.”

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

Update, via the comments:

It’s worth noting that the museum apparently had its annual Arts Council funding reduced – from £1.2M to £637K – on grounds that the institution “hadn’t fulfilled its targets of diversifying its audience.” Hence, one assumes, the new signage, the fretting about “representation,” and the stern moral warnings about “nationalist feelings.”

It’s not clear to me how one might “diversify” the racial makeup of visitors to the museum, which is what is meant, albeit coyly. And it occurs to me that part of that problem – if indeed it is a problem – might be a “diverse” immigrant demographic that by and large shows less interest in the artistic and cultural history of the country to which they have moved.

See also, the British countryside.

Update 2:

Regarding the urge to correct the racial makeup of museum visitors, Julia asks,

Which isn’t entirely out of step with the general air of farce. The supposedly corrective fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to. Those doing the fretting then set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they have travelled to see, and with which they may feel some affinity, may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness. By liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption.

Andy adds,

Indeed. It’s very often a condition of taxpayer subsidy, as illustrated above. And of course such ham-fisted measures, along with the encroachment of wokeness more generally, may strike some visitors as inapt or patronising, or vaguely alienating, thereby deterring further visits. While the sought-after “diverse” demographic continues choosing not to visit anyway.

But hey, progress.

Lifted from the comments, where Mr Muldoon directs us to,

There is a dull mediocrity, a predictable trajectory:

I think it’s fair to say that, whatever her creative limitations, Liberal Jane, aka Ms Caitlin Blunnie, does like her slogans. One might say incantations. Almost all of which have an air of self-satisfaction, as if some previously unregistered profundity had been heroically unearthed.

One creation extols the radical virtues of skiving in the workplace and not doing the work one is being paid to do. “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” reads another. Also, “Self-love is self-care.” “Riots, not diets.” “Hex the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” “Fantasy is for everyone.” “Abortion builds new futures.” Oh, and “Smash the state and masturbate,” and “Stretch marks are ubiquitous to the human experience.”

And if even more excitement is called for:

The item below is a recent and fairly topical example of Ms Blunnie’s morally corrective offerings to the world:

Happy #InternationalWomensDay! 💜 pic.twitter.com/8LEdvZDeSj

— Liberal Jane (@liberaljanee) March 8, 2024

At which point, readers may note just how often progressive posturing seems to require a fairly high tolerance of contrivance and short-cuts, internal contradiction, and the kind of begged-question soundbites that are all but designed to shut down thought. A kind of pre-emptive short circuit.

For instance, in Ms Blunnie’s X feed, a professed concern for “bodily autonomy” appears alongside the slogans “Abortion builds new futures,” and “Funding abortion is an act of radical empathy,” along with a jolly pink poster for “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day,” which suggests that the bodily autonomy of some people, very small ones, doesn’t count.

And even if “bodily autonomy” applies only, and rather conveniently, to women, or a subset of women, one might have thought that it could extend to concerns regarding creepy, mentally ill men barging into women’s intimate spaces for a furtive wank.

But apparently not. Because “a woman is anyone who identifies as one.”

Update, via the comments: