Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on June 18, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
Although the founder of La Tribune de l’Art—a French online magazine on art history and Western heritage—avoided calling his book Wokeism at the Museum, he admits from the introduction that this is indeed his subject. Drawing on his experience of museums and the art market, Didier Rykner makes an uncompromising diagnosis of the penetration of ideologies into French museums, which rival their American and European counterparts in this regard. Even if one can regret the absence of an overall perspective on the phenomenon, as well as unfortunate typos—when he repeatedly cites Jean-François “Bronstein”—and minor linguistic errors—“that’s without counting on”—and historical errors—there is no trace of women artists in Antiquity, whereas Pliny the Elder mentions several—this book is valuable because it provides and brilliantly comments on a series of eloquent examples.
Trivialization of Vandalism
In Didier Rykner’s eyes, wokeism is a negation of history—a desire to wipe the slate clean that translates into vandalism—recall that the term was coined by Abbé Grégoire, just like the word vandal, which was soon abandoned, even if the recurring incidents on the Champs-Élysées should encourage us to rehabilitate it. But unlike the revolutionaries—who protested against a power deemed despotic—statue-topplers attack the effigy of men who no longer belong to current events but to history and art. Joséphine de Beauharnais, Christopher Columbus, or Gandhi do not threaten anyone—assuming they ever made racist remarks—and yet their statues have been decapitated or pulled down. In 2020, when protesters demolished the statue of Joséphine in Fort-de-France, the prefect was ordered to allow it to happen. The same goes for the statue of Victor Schoelcher—who was behind the abolition of slavery. No one was prosecuted for this destruction—which the Republic therefore considers legitimate. Vandalism has become a militant gesture like any other, serving causes unrelated to art—in 2023, environmental activists—from the collective Just Stop Oil—attacked the hammer at Venus in the Mirror by Velázquez, at the National Gallery in London—paying little attention to the fact that the goddess was never a shareholder in Total or ExxonMobil.
For the woke, history has frozen in an eternal present and all Black people are still in the cotton fields—regardless of whether they are millionaires or the face of luxury brands. One thing is certain: they are as insensitive to memory—since they erase it—as they are to art—since they destroy it. Rykner recounts a chilling anecdote: Keith Christiansen, a world-renowned art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, went through a violent storm for posting on Instagram an engraving depicting Alexandre Lenoir defending the tombs of the kings at Saint-Denis against the revolutionaries hell-bent on destroying them.
Recall that Lenoir—a freethinker and Freemason—defended these tombs as masterpieces of medieval, Renaissance, and classical statuary, which he would later exhibit in his Musée des Monuments Français. The post read: “How many great works of art have been sacrificed in the desire to rid oneself of a past one does not approve of. And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir who realized that their value—both artistic and historical—extended beyond a decisive moment of social and political upheaval and change.” The Met curator suggested an implicit analogy with the statue destructions then in full swing in the United States. As soon as the message was published, the hostile reactions poured in, forcing Christiansen not only to delete his post and his Instagram account, but to retract it in The New York Times—“This post was not only inappropriate and misguided in its judgment, it was simply wrong.” This is a fine example of this marvelous “tolerant” and “inclusive” ideology—forcing a museum curator, who valued his position and his skin, to approve the destruction of works of art.
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Activist Museums
In the United States, as in Europe, ideological biases characterize both acquisition policies and mediation mechanisms. Regarding the first point, the injunction has been imposed to purchase primarily—or even exclusively—works created by “minorities,” women, or “racialized” artists. In Washington, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, inaugurated in 1981, exhibits only works by women. As for the National Gallery, it has been buying mainly works by women since 2021: some are excellent, but others are uninteresting dross. A small, very clumsy devotional painting by Caterina Pierozzi, an Italian painter from the late 17th century, was purchased at Drouot for €7,000 and resold to the museum for €700,000. [Editor’s Note: The figures €7,000 and €700,000 reflect what I believe the original author intended. I translated them from the French text, as the English rendering was unclear.] The Rikjsmuseum has a “women’s fund” dedicated to women’s art. In England, many museums devote a page on their website to the women artists in their collections.
This bias can also affect the presentation of works: the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent has scheduled, from 2027, an exhibition on “queer readings in the art of the Netherlands from 1400 to 1950,” and launched an appeal for volunteers to unearth works eligible for this new prism.
Racial Obsession
Museums are particularly obsessed with the history of slavery—they seek out works depicting black people and slaves but neglect white slaves who were victims of the Arab-Muslim slave trade, portraits of whom can nevertheless be found in auction rooms.
Failing that, educational posters are responsible for finding a link, even a distant one, with slavery: at the Philadelphia Museum, the poster accompanying the Portrait of the Willett Children by George Romney does not mention the painter or the models but recalls that these children benefited from the slave labor of their father, who later bought a plantation. The Tate Britain’s posters put English society in the eighteenth century on trial, and specifically slavery, even though it is invisible in the paintings.
In 2021, the Rijksmuseum organized a tour of the collections entitled “Rijksmuseum and Slavery,” bringing together seventy-seven works. The Night Watch is linked to “the black community and slavery,” because the place where Rembrandt painted the company of musketeers was also the refuge of an African community. As for the Pipe Smoker by van Ostade, it goes without saying that he can only smoke his tobacco thanks to slaves. And so on.
In 2023, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York entitled “Tiepolo and Multiracial Europe” saw black people everywhere, as long as the character was a little dark-skinned or left in the shadows.
This obsession becomes frankly problematic when the decolonial prism leads to misinterpretations of the works: in 2002, the Metropolitan Museum organized an exhibition around the bronze bust of Carpeaux, Why Be Born a Slave? Carpeaux produced several copies, in terracotta, marble, and bronze, between 1868 and 1870, based on a preparatory study for a figure of Africa on the Fountain of the Four Parts of the World, Avenue de l’Observatoire.
Struck by the recent Civil War, Carpeaux wanted to denounce slavery. But Fabienne Kanor, a Martinican novelist invited to comment on the work in an online guide, did not see it that way and accused the sculptor of racism: “I see a prisoner. I see a white fantasy.” According to the dogma of cultural appropriation, white people have no legitimacy to depict black people, even to create a beautiful work or to embrace their struggles.
While French museums have long resisted—just like universities—they seem eager to catch up in the march of progress and the race to repentance. In 2022, the exhibition “Mirror of the World,” organized at the Musée du Luxembourg, displayed a sculpture by Balthasar Permoser, Moor Presenting an Emerald Root (1724), commissioned by the Elector of Saxony to showcase a series of rare stones: emeralds, rubies, sapphires, garnets, not forgetting the tortoiseshell dish. The man depicted is probably an American Indian, who arrived in Saxony from Colombia as a prisoner of war.
Bénédicte Savoy, in the exhibition’s little journal, is careful not to contextualize the work in the culture of mirabilia—admiration for the wonders of nature and distant populations—but stigmatizes “racist and exoticizing stereotypes,” to deduce the need to adopt a postcolonial perspective in the presentation of works. The art historian is known for her work in favor of the restitution of works to colonized countries and her systematic denunciations of the darkness of France—to the point that Macron reportedly nicknamed her “my casting error,” according to Rykner. The doxa is now omnipresent: sixteenth- and eighteenth-century art is imbued with colonialism and racism. Certainly, these works reflect the West’s reductive view of these peoples, but it cannot be said that they were created to legitimize Western domination and slavery. On the contrary, the great beauty of the portraits of black people that we have preserved, both painted and sculpted, reflect curiosity and fascination for other physical types, considered no less beautiful than the European type.
The “decolonization of the museum” requires re-educating the visitor’s gaze. At the Manchester Museum, an empty frame represents “works by black women,” which are too often absent from the collections despite recent acquisitions. Increasingly, heritage works are being shelved in storage and replaced by digital devices or videos in which celebrities comment on the works. At the Antwerp Museum, Somali singer Ikraan can be heard declaring, “I don’t really feel at home here because of this country’s colonial and racist past.”
In France, it is Françoise Vergès who loudly upholds the mission of “Decolonizing the Arts,” the name of her association founded in 2015. This decolonial feminist, who devotes her life to expiating the crime of her great-great-grandmother—the owner of a plantation of 121 slaves in Réunion—is also a great specialist in denial, a denial illustrated by her desire to conceal the role of black Africa and the Muslim world in the slave trade, and more recently by her full support for Hamas in the face of the “structural racism” of the Israeli colonizer.
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Cancel Culture
Racialist activism often results in “cancel culture,” the removal of works deemed racist or simply too “white.” Museums have blindly adopted the militant concept of cultural appropriation, which holds that a black person can only be represented or played in cinema
by a black person, a woman by a woman, a homosexual by a homosexual, and so on. In 2016, the Whitney Museum of Art exhibited a painting depicting Emmet Till, a black teenager brutally murdered by two white men in 1955. But the painting was by a white artist, Dana Schutz. A black artist, Hannah Black, therefore asked curators to remove it and even destroy it, because “the subject is not Schutz’s,” and “contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution”—the painting disappeared. Similarly, the white curator of African art at the Brooklyn Museum was fired and replaced by a black curator, as part of the movement. Decolonize Brooklyn Museum.
Cancel culture has not spared French institutions. Rykner recalls the controversy sparked by the sign “Au Nègre Joyeux,” which has appeared since the end of the 18th century on a grocery store on Place de la Contrescarpe—the sign depicts a West Indian, dressed as a gentleman—in the manner of the free black people of the Antilles—making a toast, a napkin around his neck, served by a white maid—and not the other way around, as has been claimed. In 2021, the city of Paris decided to remove the sign and commission a report from Matthieu Couchet, who emphasized its heritage value and recommended installing a sign for passersby telling the story of this grocery store and the evolution of the word “nègre,” still claimed by Aimé Césaire. But City Hall decided that the object “is not in line with the anti-racist values upheld by our time and our city” and that “The City of Paris cannot put back into public space this advertising sign with its shocking and undeniably racist title”—which is factually false regarding the word “nègre.” Installed in 2022 in Carnavalet, the work is described as “racist” on the poster. If the representation of black people echoes stereotypes that could potentially be described as “racist,” the approach of condemning without explaining or contextualizing is unworthy of a museum.
Other institutions have given in to this white-glove vandalism: in 2021, the residents of the Villa Medici requested the removal of the Indian Tapestry, a sumptuous Gobelins work depicting a diplomatic visit by the king of Congo to Brazil, on the grounds that it celebrated “colonialist violence.” Presented to Louis XIV by Jean-Maurice de Nassau-Siegen, governor general of the Dutch colonies in Brazil, these tapestries were inspired by cartoons produced during a major scientific expedition tasked with recording in detail the fauna, flora, and population of northeastern Brazil. Although the tapestries do not depict any slaves, but only magnificently adorned black people—including the king of Congo—they are no longer on display, except for the animal scenes… until an animal rights group demands their removal, arguing that they were not woven by tigers and zebras?
The Republic has so far resisted another cancellation request: in 2019, a platform called for the removal of Hervé di Rosa’s fresco in the National Assembly (1991), commemorating the abolition of slavery. The black people in it have enormous lips, but that’s the style of this artist who paints all his characters in the same way; if we don’t find it beautiful, we can at least give credit to the good intentions of this illustrator of Césaire, actively committed to fighting racism.
This rewriting of history in black and white is firing on all cylinders, even going so far as conspiracy theories: the anti-racist orthodoxy claims to have discovered the polychromy of Greek statues—a discovery actually made by 19th-century archaeologists—but attributes the erasure of colors to a white conspiracy! “It was hidden from you to promote white as the ideal of a fantasized West,” proclaims a podcast on France Culture. This radio station, which is supposed to disseminate academic knowledge to honest people, no longer shies away from fake news activists, at the risk of denying its mission and its name. Cancel culture is so similar to cancel culture.
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Image: “Statue de l’impératrice Joséphine en 1998” by Patrice78500 on Wikimedia Commons
