A Tangled Mess
Some thoughts on art I’ve seen this week
This week I went to see the new show at the Royal Academy in London. It’s called Entangled Pasts: 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change, and it looks at the relationship between Britain’s imperial histories and the visual arts, and how art shapes narratives of empire, slavery and resistance. The explicit aim of the show, the curators say, is to explore how the effects of colonialism have permeated this British art establishment, whilst presenting the actual experiences of black and brown people over the past 250 years.
Almost every single art critic reviewing this show has described it as groundbreaking, extraordinary, or radical. I didn’t think it was any of those things. In fact the subject matter was so tamed and contained, that it made me a little bit annoyed. I kept waiting to see the realities of the violence and cruelty of our colonial history, but it never came. Occasionally it was hinted at. One art critic who gave the exhibition a 5-star review described the curatorial approach as shocking and enlightening, praising ‘the ideas embodied through art itself rather than via the deadening wall texts that instruct us round similar shows.’
I couldn’t disagree more. There was nothing shocking about this show — although it could have been if more explanation from the curators had been provided. It…
