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:

Here’s a tale for those who’ve wondered what happens when two Designated Victim Groups – both accustomed to deference – collide. Specifically, “Indigenous faculty members” at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the black Dean of the university’s social work department.

That would be our aforementioned black Dean and self-styled “radical.” A radical who invokes the “burden” of her unspecified “trauma,” who works “in the name of resistance,” and whose melanin-related grumbles include “the system of white mediocrity,” onto which her paler colleagues allegedly hold with “a vice grip.” One can only hope that Dr Hogarth’s “trauma,” whatever it might be, was at least partly soothed by the $200,000 salary.

I’m assuming that includes using social media to publicly badmouth colleagues based on their race. All that “white mediocrity.”

Since you ask,

In short, magic brownness.

It’s perhaps worth keeping in mind that the claims of emotional injury – and the subsequent escalation in rhetoric, which we’ll get to – started with a question of whether attendance via a Zoom call was ideal at a retreat intended to “foster community.”

Still, everyone’s happy now, right? Time for some collegial bonding.

Ah, maybe not.

Shots fired.

Before we venture further, you may want to pour a large one.

And suddenly, we’re in the realm of opera. Capes are a-flutter. The dry ice will be billowing any minute now.

Dr Hogarth was being strong, you see. Stoical. Not drama-queeny at all.

Yes, she has all the medals. See how they catch the light.

She suffers, heroically, and yet she pushes on, also heroically.

This accusation of racism – particulars of which were not forthcoming – was followed by an appeal to take the high road, to abandon “toxicity,” and to forge a “healthy community”:

Alas,

And,

So many feelings. We’re going to need more tissues. And louder music.

And then, inevitably, the big guns boomed:

A second letter from the Indigenous faculty, sent to the university’s senior executives, continued the tearful thundering:

Again, particulars of this “violence,” indeed “colonial violence,” remain oddly mysterious. We are, however, told that the Zoom meeting was “harmful and humiliating,” a “marginalising experience,” and “resulted in the team feeling unsafe in the workplace.”

I’ll spare you the full letter, which goes on to invoke the “aggressive and assaultive” properties of Dr Hogarth’s email, albeit in oddly non-specific terms, followed by a demand for a change in leadership “effective immediately.” Apparently, Dr Hogarth’s presence no longer enables the “meaningful decolonising” that the faculty regard as their Holy Mission.

Despite the competing feats of Olympic-level hyperbole, two formal investigations by the university uncovered no evidence of racism or indeed violence, whether colonial or of some other kind. However, the social work department – this bastion of “equity,” “diversity,” and “decolonisation” – was described in one of the reports as an intimidating and hostile workplace, with one witness favouring the phrase,

In the wake of the dramas above, Dr Hogarth has relocated her talents, and her radicalism, to pastures greener:

So, nothing to worry about there.

Wilfrid Laurier University and its farcical employees have of course been mentioned here before.

Habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime. Says Nora the socialist:

Nora doesn’t think that a third conviction for car theft should result in incarceration. Because, and I quote, the victims “get new cars though.”

They get new cars though

— Nora Loreto (@NoLore) February 5, 2024

“I write books and I know things,” says Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

I wonder if dear Nora has ever paused to consider what stolen cars are very often used for – besides, say, joyriding and endangering other road users. And whether those doing the stealing might often belong to criminal gangs, whose anti-social activities spill over into other areas. Say, smash-and-grabs, and forms of liveliness requiring a getaway car. Or, as Michael Rothe of the Canadian Finance and Leasing Association points out,

And then of course there are these jolly scenes.

But hey, no biggie.

Perhaps dear Nora was too busy airing pretentious sympathy for the practised criminal. Though one might note she seems rather less concerned for the criminal’s numerous victims, and likely future victims, whose violation she denies. Someone who steals a car and is apprehended for the third time is unlikely to have stolen only three cars. And the conviction rate for car theft is around one in twenty.

Perhaps it would be ungentlemanly to wish on dear Nora some first-hand experience of the crimes she so merrily diminishes when inflicted on someone else, someone who isn’t her. Though it is, I think, tempting.

And should this cake need a cherry:

Lifted from the comments, which you’re reading, of course. And yes, regular readers may detect a familiar pattern. One we’ve seen so many times.