Woke-washing is ruining art

Poe-faced preaching spoils the Tate's 'Sargent and Fashion' exhibition.

I was late to Tate Britain’s 'Sargent and Fashion’ exhibition. It opened in February but I found myself dragging my feet, even though I adore John Singer Sargent’s work. These days, the delightful anticipation of seeing art in person is mingled with a depressive reluctance to see it ruined by ideologically-captured curation.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian bemoaned the exhibition’s myopic focus on fashion and the ‘wretched’ displays of clothes distracting from the art itself. I didn’t mind the displays of clothing because the dresses are beautiful and fascinating, but they are nothing compared to Singer’s rendition of them, so they serve to demonstrate his magic. But Jones, along with all the other newspaper reviewers, failed to mention the woke-washing of the displays.

Any exhibition must now tick at least a few of the woke bingo boxes; for Sargent these are imperialism, gender and cultural appropriation. Fittingly, for an exhibition viewed through the lens of fashion, the labels wax lyrical about the silks, satins and velvets. But another thread inevitably weaves its way through the labels — a politically-correct, ’progressive’ and wholly unnecessary contextualisation of his work.

Sargent’s own favourite painting, ‘Madame X’, is accompanied by a label inviting the viewer to listen to artist and academic Kimathi Donor discuss the ‘hidden legacies of imperialism’ in the portrait. Oh god, really?

Donkor supposes that since Virginie Gautreau (Madame X) came from a slave-owning family, her white skin against the black dress is a ‘very powerful metaphorical and symbolic relationship … [to the] … history of enslavement’. He acknowledges that neither Gautreau or Singer would have intended this metaphor, but says it is nonetheless ‘insidious’ and promoting the ideology of ‘whiteness’. Apparently, ‘as a person of African heritage’ he is ‘actually always very alert to the possibilities which surround any given artwork in terms of its relationship to colonialism and imperialism’. In other words, he is actively looking for imperialist interpretations. You might even say he is seeing something which is not there and was never intended to be there. The viewer would be better served by information which is materially relevant and factual, rather than a tenuously imagined metaphor about slavery and imperialism.