The Brooklyn Museum is New York's second-largest museum for the breadth of its collections, ranging from ancient Egypt to Islamic art, from decorative arts to European and American painting, from photography to "feminist art." It welcomes more than 500000 visitors each year. To celebrate the institution's bicentennial, its curator Stephanie Sparling Williams has unveiled a new exhibition of 400 works, entitled Toward Joy. New Frameworks for American Art. What is it about ?
Joy is first communicated by the walls repainted in bright colors, sometimes displaying floral or patterned wallpapers, which make the colors of the paintings appear rather dull. But this hardly bothers the manager of the place, for whom art is only a means to an end.
What drives the Afro-feminist activist, who claims her "activism," is above all the joy of revenge. Revenge for so many centuries where art was dominated by slavery and colonialism. The painting collections are hung on two levels: the paintings of Black people at eye level and the paintings of White people at ground level, so as to force the visitor to bend down or sit down. The paintings, their models, and everything they represent are literally belittled and humiliated. Once seated and recovered from their surprise, the visitor can begin a salutary awakening, guided by the audio guide, which invites them to contemplate with horror this "sea of white faces," to reflect on their "privileges" in a society founded on "colonialism and slavery." Interviewed by Le Monde On February 2, Sparling Williams responded: "The goal was to change the relationship to power. We tell them: you've had your turn, now sit down."1 » Their Does it refer to the paintings, the characters represented or the visitors – or all three at once?
The entire exhibition is organized to depict the revenge of the colonized, whether Black or Native American. The works of the formerly dominated are confronted with those of their oppressors in order to instruct the trial of Western culture: next to a storm in the Rocky Mountains, symbol of the conquest of the West, is displayed a speech given by the Iroquois on the occasion of Thanksgiving to pay homage to Mother Nature, to clearly show that this essential holiday for the Americans pre-existed the arrival of the settlers. Elsewhere, a painting of the Niagara Falls by Louis-Rémy Mignot (1886) is accompanied by this comment: "the indigenous peoples, to whom this region provided means of subsistence and for whom it had a deep cultural significance, were displaced due to the arrival of European settlers and tourists like Mignot."
However, the curator was saddened to see that the collections comprised only 15% of works by women and less than 5% by African-American artists. From then on, she imagined this exhibition of 416 works, including 109 by women and 150 by artists of color, the beginnings of her desire to orient the institution in accordance with “Black Feminist and BIPOC” [Black, Indigenous and People of Color] perspectives, as the website states. This is evidenced by the acrylic canvas by Navajo artist Nanibah Chacon, Four Genders Were Born (2022), which depicts a transgender couple and provides a good synthesis of woke causes, although it does not offer any aesthetic interest.
Unable to throw away paintings painted by white people for white people and depicting white people, the curator imagined reorganizing the collections to "frame a largely white and dominant collection of American art through the cultural contributions, perspectives, and critical sensibilities of non-white communities." In other words, productions from BIPOC (works, texts, and various testimonies) are called upon to provide a critical commentary on white works and deconstruct their own discourse.
A table summarizes this project well: Shifting the Gaze, by Titus Kaphar, depicts a young black servant with a disgusted expression, surrounded by his white masters in 18th century costumee. At least as far as can be discerned, because the artist has left only the Black visible and, with an angry brush, has daubed over the Whites in an act of ostentatious erasure. As the title indicates, the aim is to "shift the gaze," so that "[the artists' and audiences'] sense of belonging does not depend solely on its proximity to whiteness, Western values, or the tropes of art history." (the curator's words). One question, however, nags at us: why whitewash the Whites, when the whole point of the exhibition is to blacken them? It is that, as in Hell According to Dante, sinners must be punished by what they have sinned: whiteness.
What are the reactions to this flamboyant cultural wokeness operation? In France, Le Monde admits that the visitor is "destabilized" but welcomes this hanging which "breaks the classic narrative" - the expression itself, worn to the bone, exudes the conformism of anti-conformism - and salutes the "tour de force" of this "assumed ideological bias". More directly, the Nova website states: "The curator of the Brooklyn Museum is messing up ancestral collections, but a joyful and very intelligent mess." In the United States, while waiting to find out if Donald Trump will continue to support the museum, a visitor from the Midwest did not appreciate the exhibition. She writes on Tripadvisor: "Brooklyn is a great place and lucky to have this great museum. Get ready for a pricey ticket for the privilege of walking through the woke side of racism via master pieces. Being from the mid-west I'm not used to having it stuck in my face at almost every turn."Brooklyn is a great place, and it's lucky to have this great museum. Prepare to pay a fortune for the privilege of wandering through the woke dimension of racism through masterpieces. Being from the Midwest, I'm not used to having it thrown at me all the time.].
If you have $20 to spare, plus airfare, you know what to do.
