Art History in The Age of Identity Politics: Not a Thing of Beauty

Yale’s undergraduate survey of Western art history has been canceled with little fanfare, even though student demand for the course is high. 

If this had been the result of a bunch of conservative Christians complaining about nudity or disrespectful depictions of Christ, the media would be talking about it around the clock.  Instead, this area of study has been decimated by politically correct, woke liberals…. So no one is saying a word.

The American Spectator’s James Panero has the story about how British-born Tim Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum, is “decolonizing” Yale’s famous art survey course.

Instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’.  Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.

Panero goes on to explain how this purging is reminiscent of Stalin’s anti-art manifesto:

Stalin… declared that this art was too ‘politically harmful and is contributing to the spread, in Soviet art, of hostile, bourgeois, formalist opinions’. Want to see the Matisse? Sorry, comrade, now you were out of luck. Modern art was deemed to be ‘composed mainly of ideologically inadequate, anti-working class, formalist works of Western bourgeois art devoid of any progressive, civilizing value for Soviet visitors’. The paintings all went to the vaults of the State Hermitage and Pushkin Museums, not to be seen again for decades. In their place went up a three-year ‘Exhibition of Gifts to Comrade Stalin From the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries’. A thousand busts of Stalin replaced the great modernist works. Expect a thousand busts of Comrade Thunberg at Yale.

Freedom of art requires freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression.  After they canceled the “great books” and now the “great works of art.”  What part of classical liberal education is left for universities to teach?

None of these are allowed under the totalitarians now in control of once great universities.

As Richard H. Ebright tweeted, “Cancel culture cancels culture.”

We’re witnessing a great failure of civilization.  Remember who’s responsible for this ham-fisted thinking, the next time you see a meme like this:

Hat Tip: The Spectator

Image Credit: PXFuel