There is quite a stir among mostly people of certain (white) colour and age about a documentary now running in movie houses. In White Balls on Walls shows creator Sarah Vos how the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has to get used to a new era in which old taken-for-grantedness is shaking to its foundations.
The fuss revolves mainly around the established art world's fear of rampant 'wokism': gender-neutral toilets, a priority policy for female artists and artists 'of colour', fuss over what word you can still use for white or black and prostitutes, and whether context should matter when exhibiting artworks.
That's how important context is
To start with the latter, Sarah Vos shows with a simple example how important that context can be. She lingers at length at the exhibition Kirchner And Nolde. Expressionism. Colonialism, revealing where both big names got their inspiration.
In a side note, it passes that their art consists of fairly true-to-life depictions of original works they found in Papua New Guinea. Those original works are not art by Western standards; the depictions the white artists made of them are. If you see the works side by side, you start to wonder where Nolde and Kirchner got that from. But it is ingrained in us that the works of Papua New Guinea natives cannot be art.
For all sorts of reasons that you start to find increasingly weird the more arguments you hear for them.
The canon is male and white
There is another embarrassing moment when one of the female curators explains that even during her art history studies, she was never taught otherwise than that the canon consisted of white western male artists. That until 2020, only 10% of the Stedelijk's collection was by female artists, and virtually no work by other than white artists was on display, apart from a single 'token' exhibition, speaks volumes.
Now that the museum, partly under pressure from a rather laconic councillor of culture Touria Meliani, has to diversify like hell, panic strikes. And then it's corona too. In beautiful scenes, we see alienating zoom meetings in which certain men drop out, women failing to come together at one-and-a-half metres, and mumblings about the height of two minuscule cloths in the room.
We also see Charl Landvreugd, Head of Research and Curatorial Practice, tell us that his main concern is to prevent his colleagues from being afraid of him (black man) and we see how the collection basement does contain female artworks, which have thus never been exhibited before.
Artist enough
The confidence that many people still have today that the art hanging in our museums is therefore the best and most universal can now really be taken with a huge grain of salt after seeing this documentary. It is also nice that documentary filmmaker Sarah Vos makes it clear that she seems to have more affinity with the established order that has been so cornered. She is artist enough not to really take sides, though.
In this, she is a step ahead of many of the critics of major newspapers, who - as we recently showed - happy to go along with the nothing-based panic fear of woke cancel culture.
Cons of art
Somewhere halfway through, we see an ingeniously chosen shot in which the man-sized letters of the exhibition Meet The Icons Of Modern Art are scraped off the windows. The crew has already removed the letters 'MEET THE' and we see the 'I' disappear. What remains is telling, and may provide both supporters and opponents of the new developments with plenty of substance for many heated debates: 'CONS OF MODERN ART'.
Go watch, it's worth it.
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