THE PC STRAITJACKET NOW CONTROLS MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES

And, in Britain, if the ethnics don't come to your museum or gallery, you have to display ANYTHING that will attract them. Excellence, rarity, genius and historical importance don't count any more. One comment (Excerpts):

"It seems the Brits under Prime Minister Tony Blair are exceeding even American liberals when it comes to insisting on policies that are politically correct. Writing in the new issue of City Journal, the quarterly of the conservative Manhattan Institute, Theodore Dalrymple says the British government announced in May that plans are in gear to monitor the nation's publicly subsidized museums to make sure that they're attracting sufficient quotas of appropriate visitors. If museum visitorship doesn't match what the government thinks it should among minority groups, then subsidies the institution may be getting from government would be ended, the government said"


A more extensive comment (excerpts):

"Cultural diversity policy is one of the few things that unites British cultural institutions today. Every museum and gallery, large and small, has made cultural diversity into a key part of its mission. Funding and policy bodies trumpet this new agenda. The Arts Council's Cultural Diversity Action Plan reads: 'There can no longer be any question that responding to cultural diversity is a mainstream and not a marginal issue.' ...

cultural diversity policy represents the end of cultural policy as we have understood it. The pursuit of aesthetic or historical understanding, of attempting to distinguish good paintings from bad or correct interpretations from false ones, is deemed impossible. Instead, all cultural institutions can do is to revel in 'diversity', by promoting different kinds of art and competing judgements.

There has been an elision - in policy terms, at least - of all the special qualities that had previously been associated with culture. The concepts of beauty, sensitivity and skill have all but vanished. Flick through a New Labour cultural policy document, and it becomes clear that you could substitute 'museums' and 'art' for 'shops' and 'stereos', and the words would make as much sense. New Labour took on the right's demand that culture should be 'useful'. The government demanded that cultural institutions should roll up their sleeves and get to grips with social problems - by giving visitors useful skills or helping people with mental illnesses - and it demanded that cultural institutions prove their usefulness in facts and figures.

Among the events in the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council's (formerly known as re:source) cultural diversity festival in 2003, for example, was the 'Multicultural plaque' project at a museum in Stoke on Trent, which involved working with the town's 'black minority ethnic groups' in an 'ongoing oral history and documentation project'. The end point of the project was for some of the participants to produce a public mural, which represented their experiences and perspectives. A project at Hereford Museum featured objects, images and oral testimony from the local Jewish and traveller communities. Meanwhile, Harlow Museum created a display about people who had moved to Harlow. Visitors were asked to bring photographs, tell about their home customs, and record their stories of moving to Harlow

Because this policy sees every object in terms of personal identity, it is blind to imaginative or well-crafted paintings, interesting or rare historical artefacts. It is indifferent to form, colour or pattern. Cultural diversity officers must barely glance at the paintings they are putting on their walls, or the Asian art they use in their discussions about identity.

Cultural diversity policy makes historical artefacts similarly dumb. Chinese paintings, Greek brooches, and Egyptian mummies provide a glimpse into another time and place. They can take us out of our own lives, and give us an insight into other societies' worldview and way of life. Fragments of pot can speak of a long-dead civilisation's myths, social structure, economy and diet. Study of these artefacts in turn helps us to put our own society in perspective: seeing it as the latest step in the march of human history, rather than as the only possible way of living. If historical artefacts are viewed in personal terms, they stop telling us anything. Instead of learning about human 'diversity', then, we end up stuck in our present-day lives.

This policy also has a low view of its visitors. The assumption is that visitors are uninterested in or unable to learn about the world. Each person is seen as trapped within his or her own private bubble, in constant need of affirmation and recognition. The idea seems to be that if people fail to see their reflection in exhibitions they will feel worthless and excluded.

This target approach is indifferent to the content of culture - and this applies for 'diverse' exhibitions just as much as it does for Western fine art. Islamic art is not valued for its intricate, proportioned design, or because it provides us with an insight into one of the great historic civilisations; it is valued because it gets the right kind of punters through the door. The artefacts of different cultures are judged in terms of the colour of the faces that they bring in. Meanwhile, some of humanity's greatest artistic achievements, in European art from the Renaissance onwards, are sidelined for attracting the wrong kinds of people - which is a loss for everyone, regardless of ethnic background.

Diversity targets view ethnic minorities as uniform members of a group, rather than as intelligent and curious individuals with a range of interests. They are often assumed to be only interested in art relating to 'their' particular culture, which is why cultural institutions try to attract the Chinese community with exhibitions about Chinese culture or the Afro-Caribbean community with exhibitions about slavery. The effect of this approach is to institutionalise cultural divisions. A 'black artist' is marked out as different from other artists, a 'minority-ethnic individual' as different to other museum workers, and a British-Chinese museum-goer different to other museum-goers. The possibility of an open and universal public culture, in which each person can develop their own capabilities and learn from others, is placed yet further away.

In fact, today's diversity officers are foisting their cultural assumptions upon the past. The past is judged by the limited horizons of the present, and the present gets to pat itself on the back."


And in the U.S., slavery museums are all the rage (though whether anybody goes there does not seem to matter). As it says here:

"In a recent LRC column, I made mention of the city of Charleston's proposed $35 million slavery museum that will be constructed on ten acres of waterfront property. This surprised some of my respondents, who wondered, not only about the size, but also whether the new museum was needed as the city already has at least three museums with extensive slavery exhibits.

The question: how many slavery museums does a city need? Or: how many slavery museums does the United States need? is currently a much-debated topic. Unfortunately, the debate was a little late getting started because slavery museums have become the latest trend sweeping the nation.

In May, 2002, Bill Gwaltney, a member of the National Park Service and President of the Association of African American Museums, said of slavery museums: "We counted 19 new projects just last year and we knew there were several more. Clearly, there are several dozen more that are anticipated in 2002. They are all over the country, too. They're in the Midwest, the West, the Northeast and the South. It represents a maturation of thought about the breadth and depth of American history."

The numbers cited by Gwaltney indicate that, in a two-year period, 50 or more new slavery museums were constructed throughout the nation. This phenomenal rate of growth greatly exceeds the spread of civil rights museums in prior years. If this rate of growth continues, we can anticipate that all major cities as well as most moderately sized cities will soon have both a civil rights museum and a slavery museum. Furthermore, the day may come when a family traveling across the nation will encounter, in every town it drives through, a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Wal-Mart, a Target, a Best Western and a slavery museum."


And only ONE holocaust is ever mentioned in museums etc. The terrible truth of course is that holocausts were pretty common in the 20th century. But how many holocausts have YOU heard of? As it says here:

"The second source of the double standard lies in the excessive memorialization of the Jewish Holocaust in American life, which has squeezed out the historical memory of the other holocausts. This memorialization has many positive aspects, as we are certainly a culture that needs more historical memory, not less, and has an underdeveloped sense of the tragic dimension of politics. But it is also historically imbalanced, because now everyone is more conscious of the fate of the 6 million Jews than of the other 150 million-plus victims in our century. Let us review these holocausts:

1. By Communist China: 65,701,000.
2. By the Soviet Union: 62,000,000.
3. By Nazi Germany: 30,000,000.
4. By Kuomintang (Nationalist) China: 10,075,000.
5. By Nazi Japan: 6,000,000.
7. By Turkey: 2,500,000 (mainly Armenians and Greeks.)
8. By Communist (Khmer Rouge) Cambodia: 2,035,000.
9. By Communist Korea: 2,000,000.
10. By Communist Vietnam: 1,700,000.
11. In Africa: 1,700,000 (various Communist and other regimes and rebels.)
12. By Communist Poland: 1,600,000 (mostly ethnic Germans post-1945.)
13. In Pakistan: 1,500,000 (mostly in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.)
14. By Communists in Afghanistan: 1,500,000.
15. In Mexico (mostly in revolutionary chaos to 1920): 1, 417,000.
16. In Communist Yugoslavia: 1,072,000.
17. In Czarist Russia: 1,066,000.
18. In Rwanda: 800,000."