Bringing Back The One Drop Rule...

One of Britain’s greatest painters has fallen victim to woke culture, as art-lovers are being warned not to ‘idolise’ J. M. W. Turner because he once held a single share in a Jamaican business that used slave labour.

One share. One... 

During his lifetime, the artist was a liberal and an abolitionist, and his iconic painting The Slave Ship captured the horror of the trade in human lives. But a new exhibition of his work at Tate Britain comes with a warning that some of his pieces could be considered problematic.

To whom? To the real 'general public', or to the tiny but loud minority of woke activists? And if tenuous  slavery links weren't enough... 

The gallery’s director, Alex Farquharson, even warns that Turner’s depictions of steam power are linked to climate change.

*sighs* 

Mr Farquharson says: ‘We should not idolise Turner. His investment in 1805 in a Jamaican cattle ranch worked by enslaved labour suggests he had reset his own moral compass by 1840 when he painted Slave Ship as an indictment of the slave trade.’

The painting was inspired by the Zong massacre of 1781, in which a captain of a British ship ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard when drinking water ran low so he could claim insurance money.

Mr Farquharson describes The Slave Ship as salient today because ‘Black Lives Matter demands we confront histories of enslavement, exploitation and genocide whose legacies live on’, but says some critics ‘see its visual splendour as mitigating the horror of its subject’.

Probably the sort of 'experts' who fawn over modern 'art' like this... 

Michael Daley, the director of ArtWatch UK, said it was wrong to impose modern values on historical figures, adding: ‘The trouble is that everybody in the arts wants to play politics and not talk about art.’

Spot on, Mr Daley, and it suffers as a result. 

The episode could expose the Tate to allegations of hypocrisy – ancestors of founder Sir Henry Tate made their fortune from a sugar empire built on the slave trade.

Good. Let them be hoist by their own petard.