Alexander Adams’ critique of the Tate Museum, a preeminent modern and contemporary art museum in the U.K., is a useful example of how the elite class’s continuous, P.C., virtue signaling is leading to an aesthetics that is ever more removed from the public’s life, concerns, and concepts of beauty.
And because the museum is in the U.K., there is the double-problem of such agenda-driven agitprop being extravagantly funded by the public taxpayer. Of the museum’s new director, Maria Balshaw:
Although you wouldn’t know it from the fawning accolades of newspaper profilers, Balshaw’s appointment alarms art historians. Balshaw, the new director of Britain’s largest fine-art museum, with four venues and £1.3 billion in assets, is not an art historian but a student of literature who attained a doctorate in critical theory, specialising in American authors. Critical theory is an academic branch of postmodernism that, preferring to concentrate on art’s ideological and social role, sees no qualitative difference between high and low (or popular) art forms. This might be a problematic grounding for the director of Britain’s largest collection of high art. Hitherto in her roles as head of the Whitworth and Manchester art galleries, she has demonstrated no detailed understanding of fine art or any willingness to defy fashion, exhibiting and collecting art on an agenda underpinned by identity politics and feminism…
The Tate’s fundamental problem is that it does not know why it exists; this will only get worse during Balshaw’s era, with its promised blend of identity politics, populism, community events, pop culture and an influx of school parties, not to mention a massive acquisition drive.
