Complexions of Spite

What is Art? At the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) it apparently includes an exhibit called Conceptions of White. Take the Curator Walkthrough available on that webpage to get a better understanding.

You will be exposed to the standard disturbing images of the Ku Klux Klan, a lynch mob, and a White-trash male shouting racial abuse at a Black policewoman. Another display called Ancient Hair presents collage-like cut-outs pinned to a sheet of paper with handwritten side-notes including: When were white people invented?

​That grade-school-quality presentation suggests that hair curliness demonstrates that the classical Greek and Roman cultures may not have been White. It is courtesy of respected historian Nell Irvin Painter, who also wrote the book History of White People.
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Painter’s opinion of White culture is not very positive. In her New York Times article What Is Whiteness? she stated: Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.”

Contrary to the White Privilege narrative, Painter’s colour-hindered life didn’t turn out so bad. Mom and dad were well-educated and wealthy enough to fund her undergraduate studies abroad, and then her PHD work at Harvard. She got her first teaching job through Affirmative Action at the University of Pennsylvania and concluded an esteemed professorial career at Princeton. She has fared well in the bland nothingness of predominantly-White academia.

Now retired, her bucolic second home in the Adirondacks provides the peaceful space needed for creative work and social interaction with like-minded intellectuals.

At another gallery stop, artist Jennifer Chan presents her Aryan Recognition Tool. This charming artificial intelligence app analyses your face and then shows you which WW2 Nazi officer you most closely resemble. However, in Vancouver the majority of the population is non-White and that segment is predominately of Asian descent. So, for the enjoyment of those “visible minority” patrons, she should have also incorporated comparisons to the goons who carried out atrocities for Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, whose regimes also took millions of innocent lives.

It’s pretty clear that the two curators responsible for Conceptions of White, Lillian O’Brian Davis (identifies as Black) and John G. Hampton (identifies as Indigenous), self-loathe their partly-White genealogy. Artistically, they don’t seem to get that the denigration they have on display is badly out of step with the woke pace of White antipathy which peaked a couple years back. If Conceptions of White had been staged 10 years ago it would have achieved what it currently lacks … Art. Now it has about as much creative impact as one of the megaphone rants that regularly take place outside on the VAG steps.

Social provocation at VAG is part of the game, but if the message isn’t something new, different, avant-garde, etc. then it becomes just another tedious finger-point. Disguising hatred as Art, the badgering/hectoring from this cohort of the self-appointed-morally-elite just foments further divisive resentment on both sides.