The Ruling Class and Art

I am in Philadelphia over the weekend and I am doing the culture thing, including the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, which has been a cultural presence in downtown Philly since 1805.

Naturally the Academy has exhibition space, that nods to all the current cultural trends in the Arts. But there is also a corner of the exhibition space with portraits of the Founders. There are a couple of portraits of George Washington, and a huge painting of William Penn and his treaty with the Indians.

And over in a corner is this little gem, "Colonialism and its Legacies."



Ah yes,  the "Colonial Gallery" with "portraits that celebrated wealthy white colonial elites" and "highlighting their class status." Then we get down to business. The narrative thread of "global trade" and the "traumas" it inflicted.

That thread also connects these images to the long history of traumas wrought by colonizers on the communities they controlled, though those darker histories often lie hidden behind myths and mahogany furniture.

Yes, and one of the portraits in the Colonial Gallery is of the richest slave trader in America. But you will be glad to know this.

Contemporary artists, on view in conversation with these works from from hundreds of years ago, challenge us to unravel these threads, to consider the legacy of empire, slavery, and colonialism in the 21st century.

Not quite, kiddo. The right narrative would be that "We have selected contemporary artists that we believe best challenge the white patriarchal narrative of the colonial era and throw a proper light on the crimes of the fathers."

There is a delicious, mindless conceit in the art world, indeed in liberal world in general, that "we" have attained to a higher, nobler truth that the money-grubbing, slave-holding, racist, sexist elite of olden times.

In fact, then and now, the art world is the mouthpiece of the ruling class. If yesterday artists painted portraits of plump, benevolent slave traders today they paint patronizing pictures of a diverse America or worse, patronizingly patronize artists from diverse communities, pick them out of the crowd and make their name for them.

If yesterday the ruling class built marble monuments to the Founding Fathers, today it builds Holocaust and African American Museums. Because that is the story it wants to tell us, and we'd all better know what is good for us.

But it is all, then and now, mere ruling class propaganda, representing the ruling class, then and now, as benevolent and wise rulers always concerned with bending the arc of history towards justice.

Here is what I think.

I think that ruling classes, then and now, are mostly idiots. Obviously, because they are rulers, they believe in the beneficence of political power. But political power to do what? Tame the frontier? Enable, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Right the wrongs of the workers? Celebrate the diversity of our communities while being careful to avoid cultural appropriation? Teach us about the sins of slavery? Make American Great Again?

I  think that the important thing to know is that nobody knows what they are doing. Five hundred years ago Europeans began sailing and trading and dominating all over the world. As a Chinese Christian put it, if you were on the receiving end of this, you kept wondering: is it the guns? The  science? The political ideas?  Christianity? Who knew?

But was there any white European grand plan to conquer the world?  Not at all, or at least, not much.

Then, a century ago and more, some people got the idea of transforming the world  to a new vision of  brotherhood, socialism, guided by an avant-garde elite.  More recently our  political and business  elites have coalesced around a vision of globalism --  under their continuing benevolent hegemony.

But the truth is that any regime, political or economic, picks winners and losers, and the losers don't like it. I mean really don't like it. And really, in advance, nobody knows what will happen, what the result of any political or economic regime will be, just as nobody knows, in advance, which businesses will succeed and which will fail.

For instance, the socialist experiment of the last century, the product of the best minds and the best and the brightest, has been a monstrous and tragic failure. Yet the fumbling and bumbling of business innovators, from slave traders to tech start-up wizards, has produced the most astonishing increase in human welfare ever. Is there really any notion of what went right, and what went wrong, and why? Are there majestic narratives in all the world's art galleries examining what happened and why? Not really.

What we have, and what we have always had, are ruling class apologists spinning facile narratives. At one time we celebrated mahogany furniture. Now we celebrate bike lanes.

The only thing we know for sure is that it is all rubbish.