"In many ways, nothing has really changed. But then at the same time, everything has changed because they're kind of reframed and you see them in a different light," says curator Elizabeth Athens.
I love this project. It’s more than a simple labelling of individuals as beneficiaries of slavery; more than what some might derisively call “virtue signaling”. It isn’t a cheap “gotcha! You thought this man looked cool, but it turns out he was an evil enslaver.”
Consider the erasure and concealment of violence within art, present at the founding of modern-day art markets. Consider the creation of the field of aesthetics. Consider that these enterprises were founded, essentially, because aristocratic and the burgeoning bourgeois classes needed to spend their money on something, needed to conspicuously consume. Art was a way of reasserting one’s elite social status for the aristocracy; or a way of verifying it for the bourgeois. Good taste became the marker of a good man.
Consider also that this new money, spent on luxuries because these classes had such a surfeit, came from the enslavement of African peoples. So this is the concealment of violence within art: that the hedonistic refinement of life depicted in art of this era –sumptuous still-lives, luxurious portraits featuring fox furs, women in taffeta, lace, and velvets, with golden chalices, horses bedecked in gold and silver reins– are all bought with money whose condition of possibility is the trading of Africans on the world market.
Of course these works are still beautiful– but rather than run from what makes the lifestyles captured in paint (not to mention the paint and canvas itself) possible, examine it. What does it mean that so much of Europe’s tradition of beautiful art is produced through such unsightly means. I have trouble in museums for just this reason. I’m enraptured by silver plates embossed with patterns of flowers, recoiled by the knowledge that what produced it was my ancestors’ enslavement, and– this is the largest part of my trouble, one cannot change the past after all– infuriated by the fact that this fact goes unacknowledged. Capitalism by definition frustrates efforts to trace the torturous routes of market circulation and the lives it immiserates in the process. Nevertheless, the ethical and, more importantly, knowledgeable consumption of art requires this contextualizing, historicizing detective work. So glad this project exists, it’s the first step.
