The Empire Gets Struck Back

 

I attended an exhibition yesterday at the Art Gallery of Ontario: “Faith and Fortune: Art across the Global Spanish Empire.” Faith was a draw for me; and my wife is from the Philippines. I have a thing for Hispanic concepts of beauty. So I had to have a look.

They had paintings by Goya, and El Greco, and Velasquez. Not great paintings by Goya, El Greco, or Velasquez, and none of them are much to my taste. Nevertheless, the artistry was magnificent. The religious statuary was exceptional. This is a Spanish and Portuguese specialty, in my experience. I would have liked to see more examples of cultural mixing, especially from South America. This felt oddly lacking; perhaps because it would be “cultural appropriation.” Perhaps because it would suggest that the Spanish and the various native peoples were not in constant conflict and struggle for power. They had a room full of early daguerrotypes of the Philippines. I was not impressed; daguerrotypes are designed to be looked at in print, not in an exhibit hall, and are more accessible online, without bending and squinting. The audio guide explained that they were taken by Spaniards, and so there was a need for Filipinos to “decolonize” and take possession of them. 

Martha and Mary

In the real world, of course, most Filipinos have some Spanish or European ancestry.

The audio guide was jammed with Critical Theory. The Spanish Empire was unambiguously an evil exploitation and corruption of indigenous cultures. This ignores the basic principle that any government, and an empire more widely than others, keeps the peace. The Roman Empire ushered in a millennium of “Pax Romana,” sorely missed when it fell. The British Empire produced a century or so of “Pax Britannica.” Even if you accept the Edenic myth that the happy natives were not, on the whole, enslaving one another, starving in large numbers, committing genocide, fighting endless wars, and so forth—something the exhibit expressly dismisses as Imperial propaganda--the Spanish imposition of peace and commerce over such a large area was probably to most people’s benefit.

I note also that, rather than similarly condemning the Muslim conquest of Spain, ended only in the year Columbus discovered America, the audio guide simply notes that “Muslims arrived in the peninsula in 711.” This particular empire, the Muslim Caliphate, supposedly brought peace and happiness in which all lived together in peace and harmony. 

Only Christian empires are bad, apparently.

Christianity is referred to as a “Western” doctrine, supposedly imposed on Spain’s new subjects. No awareness, it seems, that Christianity itself comes from Asia, and, from the Spanish perspective, the distant East. 

While there were, inevitably, religious statues and images of all sorts in the exhibition, the signage and the audio never spoke of faith. It was all about power. Saints were identified, towards the bottom of the signage, but in a cursory way. “Saint Michael represents good fighting evil.” “Saint X was martyred during a time when Christianity was illegal.” 

In one display box, four statues were identified as the four possibilities after death: heaven, purgatory, hell, and a skeleton to represent “the death of the body.” This was to my mind the most striking piece, and the one used for the Exhibit’s promotional materials.

The four fates of the soul.

But one of these four is not like the other ones. And Christianity does not ultimately believe in the death of the body, for those who go to heaven, hell, or purgatory. Rather, as the curators of the exhibition were presumably too theologically illiterate to know, the skeleton probably represents those who die unbaptized but without personal sin—the animal death.

The audio guide features a local artist of Filipino extraction and unconventional sexual preferences—all the voices heard were from non-Spanish ethnic minorities, and several of them identified themselves as gay or queer or the like. He (or she, or whatever) was celebrating the fact that Santo Nino, the patron saint of the southern Philippines, is sexually androgynous. This is counter to fact: Santo Nino is the baby Jesus. There is no room for sexual ambiguity in the very name: “Santo Nino” is masculine. The feminine would be “Santa Nina.”

Leaving, I had to thread my way through walls of gay pornography. “Blurred Boundaries: Queer Visions in Canadian Art.” 

Great idea—take your kids to the gallery and develop an appreciation for art?

No longer. Grooming.

Our established institutions have become illiterate and immoral, and we can no longer trust them to tell the truth.