Why is everybody obsessed with Tate being too “woke”?

It can take a while before you notice it, though once you do it is hard not to keep your eye fixed on the spot: a young Black child dragged, screaming, behind a woman in a straw hat and ribboned apron, her smiling face tilted towards him, her body a graceful arabesque. Created specifically for as a mural for Tate Britain’s restaurant by artist Rex Whistler, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats is large and the detail comparatively tiny, so that, to anybody who sat in the dining room and saw the painting up close, spotting it would be akin to finding a sliver of glass inside the food; a moment of disbelief, quickly followed by acute and pervasive horror. And there, again, almost hidden in the pastoral beauty of the scene, we see him trailing behind a horse and cart, his neck manacled.  

Concerns around the mural were brought up following its restoration in 2013, and again in 2018, when an interpretative text was placed at the entrance to the room. In 2020, it was decided by the museum’s ethics committee — responding to both calls from campaigners and the Black Lives Matter protests happening across the UK — that the mural should no longer serve as the backdrop to its restaurant. It would be nigh on impossible to remove the work anyway; the building is Grade-I listed, and removing the mural would cause significant structural damage.

Instead, the museum chose to commission a new artwork from Black British artist Keith Piper, whose video installation, Vice Voce, directly addressed the racism of Whistler’s mural. Although angering those who wanted the mural completely removed and those who felt it should be retained as part of the restaurant decor, the move seemed entirely appropriate — an artistic dialogue that deepened our understanding of the work while bridging two camps. And that, you might think, was that. Instead, the act has been the catalyst for an attack on the gallery that’s lasted half a decade.