Down with the White Man in Art

Woke up to the joyful news that Beeston Council, Nottingham, under the guidance of their Civic Society, has decided to allow local road tunnels to be spray-painted with graffiti. According to Jeanie Barton of the society, the arrival of unintelligible writing in thick black lines and accompanying childlike bubbles in sugary colours is a ‘poignant’ commemoration of fifty years of ‘Hip Hop,’ a black music genre also known as rap music, originating in the Bronx, New York in the 1970s. The Beeston Civic Society website tells us, ‘Since the 1970s when graffiti was born as protest art in North America, spray painting has been an under the radar form of creative expression. This agreement enables expression by Nottingham’s artists to be both safe and permitted at this particular site moving forwards.’ ‘Moving forwards,’ or rather despoiling the environment with this sort of squalor is now considered, ‘progressive.’ If you don’t approve, you are racist. If a connection with black music had not been established and a group of white working-class youths requested the council let them loose with the spray paint, one wonders what the response would have been. But that is a racist speculation.

A new exhibition opens soon in Woodstock, an upmarket Oxfordshire village, entirely based on the work of migrant women. According to the curators, ‘South Asians of every generation living in the UK manage a minefield of the sliding scale of code-switching between white-ness and brown-ness. We are now in a landscape where many South Asians feel more comfortable embracing influences from eastern and western cultures, which has come after decades of rejecting our own heritage in order to feel like we fit in.’

One wonders about that ‘rejection.’ Having lived in Wolverhampton, London and now Oxford I have always seen large numbers of Muslim women and girls in traditional dress, often walking several paces behind their husbands on the pavements. A recent report, on the ultra-culturally sensitive BBC Woman’s Hour, stated that nearly a hundred and forty thousand Asian women in the UK are ‘living with the effects of FGM.’ Those are the ones who’ve been recorded by doctors, usually in maternity units when their plight becomes obvious. Exact figures are unknown as the practice is illegal and hidden. The same goes for forced marriage. Last year three hundred and forty cases were reported. The charity Karma Nirvana, which made a report to the government in 2021 citing cases in Hull and Middlesborough, says that child marriages occur regularly in the UK, ‘hidden in plain sight.’ In August last year, the Government raised the legal age for marriage to eighteen but religious marriages which are not formally registered are legally permitted to occur at any age in the UK, with girls as young as ten sometimes married off. Then we have the lovely old tradition of sweated (slave) labour by fashion chains including Boohoo, which has also proved difficult to tackle in UK cities such as Leicester. Then there was the issue of sexual grooming in the north, perhaps traditions some would prefer to lose, perhaps not. The Woodstock Gallery asserts that the loss of South Asian tradition in that community, ‘Has resulted in a huge generation gap with the third generation who are thirsty and hungry to learn about our own cultural backgrounds.  Languages, cuisines, religions, and clothing are disappearing; and our children are learning about these things as outsiders and tourists.’

News of this exhibition was greeted with great glee on my WhatsApp site, with someone suggesting it will be a much needed, ‘corrective’ to the ‘dominance of white men in the art world.’ Even a brief glance at the visual arts and publishing show that those oppressors have now been all but erased; the artist of the current zeitgeist is Sonia Boyce OBE, RA, ‘Professor of Black Art & Design’ who represented the UK last year at the Venice Biennale. The Turner Prize, 2022, was taken by Veronica Ryan from Montserrat. A look through this month’s Artist & Illustrator Magazine has thirteen features, seven by women artists, three about women painters.

Race, black not white, and sexual politics now constitute Art in Britain and the US and that is where the funding goes. Last year, the government has notoriously cut funding to highly acclaimed groups such as the English National Opera and the Britten Sinfonia, giving it instead to the BAME Chineke! Orchestra, handed a grant of £2.1 million, despite its leader Chi-Chi Nwanoku being forced to step down and the Charities Commission stepping in to investigate. Writer and critic Alexander Adams noted in the January issue of The Jackdaw art magazine, that The Annual Conference of the Museums Association (MA) a society founded in 1889 to provide technical guidance to museum staff, had opened under the title, ‘Make Change Happen,’ with six Muslim women on stage, four wearing hijabs. Above them, a photo of some Glaswegian men from the 1930s photographed outside an art gallery. In front a large screen menu with the words: ‘I Don’t See Myself Here. The MA passed a resolution to turn UK museums and galleries into platforms for the empowerment of marginalised groups, but only certain ones; white working-class boys forget it. Any argument against this will be met by cries of racism and/or Islamophobia. The MA also had on its agenda, ‘Creating an anti-racist country – practical lessons from Welsh museums,’ and ‘Disrupting narratives of racist science.’ We once went to museums and galleries on a wet Sunday to pass the time, learn a bit about the past and admire artists we loved. Most of those were by dead white males, increasingly secreted in the cupboard. What you will experience now in many galleries is an attempt at often state-supported social engineering. Better stay home and read the works of Michel Foucault.