Avoid your eyes, according to Yale. Restoration work being done on Rembrandt's "Night Watch" via The Boston Globe
Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course.
Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. But this change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.
So that's it, apparently: the great masterpieces recognized as such by the entire world for generations are now tainted by their supposed "whiteness" and must be censored by the Robespierre-like mob of the "woke".
It's not merely that the Western Civilization-focused “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” class has been deleted, but the entire concept of "Western art" itself will be a focus of criticism in the multiple new 'more culturally sensitive' classes that will replace it.
The Yale Daily News continues:
This spring, the final rendition of the course will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception. Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.
Clearly, it also sounds like students who happen to favor the Western and European greats will be set up for de-platforming and ridicule.
How long before the beautiful centuries-old campus buildings themselves will be "discovered" as part of the Western tradition of architecture? Will they survive the decades to come as the "purge" grows ever fiercer and more anti-intellectual?
In the name of "diversity" it appears assigning any level of uniqueness to a work of art which happens to have emerged from the medieval or renaissance or early modern period will immediately be shamed by the 'woke mob'.
This follows other Yale departments in prior years attempting to purge “decolonize” their programs, especially in the English/Literature Department. We wonder how long the title "English Department" itself will be allowed to stand.
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