At Powerline, John Hinderaker stirred memories and frustrations from my teaching days:

Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum has an excellent collection that includes, among others, paintings by John Constable, one of my favorite artists. Like this one:

A lovely image of the British countryside, right? Not according to the museum. It now comes with a warning:

The Fitzwilliam Museum has suggested that paintings of the British countryside evoke dark “nationalist feelings”.

You might think England is a pretty country–I do–but how is that “nationalist,” let alone “dark”?

Graphic: X Screenshot

The museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, has undertaken an overhaul of its displays, in a move that its director insisted was not “woke”.

That is a good thing. The pushback by normals has been strong enough that liberals don’t want to be called “woke.”

But call it what you will, the people who run the Fitzwilliam are crazy:

The new signage states that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland”.

God forbid that anyone should take pride in his homeland!

God forbid anyone should think the Museum staff has gone terminally woke.

I speak of memories and frustrations because at the beginning of my teaching career, I naively believed there was such a thing as “good art,” art that represented the best a human being could hope to attain in their discipline—painting, sculpture, writing, music, etc.—art that inspires, that affirms the best in humanity, that encourages us to be better. I developed a general handout for literature, a way for students to recognize the elements of good writing as a guide to intelligently writing about a work on the path to competent literary criticism.

I presented that handout at a teaching seminar and it fell flat. No one overtly criticized it, but the embarrassment on some faces made it clear they felt it wrong to suggest there was such a thing as good, as opposed to bad, art, and teachers ought not make such arguments. In other words, teaching the idea of merit, that some people are more talented and capable than others, was somehow wrong.

I soon learned many teachers were determined to downgrade, even obliterate, the canon, replacing Shakespeare, and particularly iconic American authors, with contemporary authors obsessed with race, identity and grievance. Some of that determination came from people who were incapable of understanding Shakespeare’s writing or times. They weren’t willing to do the research necessary to learn, but the undercurrent was determining if art was good was a matter of personal preference. “Good” was in the eye of the beholder.

I began each year with a discussion of that idea. I displayed examples of good art on my classroom walls, works by Michaelangelo, Picasso, Pollock and more, and I would point to them, asking my students to identify good art, to define it. They always decided it’s up to the individual. I announced I was a great artist and would, on the blackboard, make a portrait of a volunteer. There were always plenty, and as they posed, I would, with a flourish and fiercely faux-concentration, draw a stick figure.

They laughed, but began to get it, as I feigned outrage that they didn’t appreciate the greatness of my art, and sadly erased the masterpiece. Then, as I pointed to Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, we developed a list of what makes painting, and a painter, great, among them: ability, talent, training, experience, mastery of light and perspective, and artistic vision. 

Perhaps merit mattered. Perhaps great painting and writing was great for actual, definable reasons. Perhaps they had more to say about a work of art than “I like it.” It was a first step to a broader world, and to becoming a better reader and writer.

Like Hinderaker, I’m appalled the curators of a great museum of art no longer find merit in the works better men and women strove to acquire and display. Instead, they find racism, hatred and eternal grievance. They do not strive to perpetuate the canon, to help others to understand what is good and valuable, worth exalting and preserving. They seek only to deconstruct, to deny to the viewer the pleasure and awe of experiencing a moment in time captured for all time, the beauty the artist expertly rendered and saved, a vision and expertise denied most of us. In so doing, they deny the reasons for the existence of their museum, of all museums.

If no parent showing Constable’s work to their child says: “Isn’t that beautiful? If you work hard, maybe someday you can paint like that,” merit dies, and with it, any reason for mankind to lift himself beyond mere, mean survival.

I wonder if that’s what the woke really intend?

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.