Thursday, November 04, 2021
Woke curators target Hogarth: Famous cartoonist's depictions of 18th century Britain now come with notes about their 'sexual violence and slavery' in new Tate Britain exhibition
He was the godfather of satire, the man whose depictions of drunken debauchery in Britain made him a household name. But now, 18th century painter William Hogarth has become the latest target of the woke warriors.
A new exhibition at Tate Britain showcasing the famous painter's work also highlights what curators claim is the 'sexual violence, anti-Semitism and racism' in his paintings.
One of Hogarth's famous early works, A Midnight Modern Conversation, which shows drunken men inebriated by lavish helpings of punch, is among those highlighted in Hogarth and Europe.
According to The Telegraph, visitors are told in a label alongside the scene that, whilst the picture is meant to be funny, the 'punch they drink and the tobacco they smoke are material links to a wider world of commerce, exploitation and slavery.'
A catalogue accompanying the painting says the men may be 'queasily celebrating such manly misdemeanours - what we might today called "laddishness".'
Meanwhile, a self-portrait showing Hogarth sitting on a wooden chair while painting at an easel should also be seen within the context of slavery, according to the commentary accompanying the picture.
Artist Sonia Barret is said to claim in the note that Hogarth's chair was made from 'timbers shipped from the colonies' and asks if it could 'stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?'
Planning for the new exhibition began a decade ago but curators decided to change its focus in part because of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Sixty of Hogarth's works are deliberately displayed alongside those of European painters, in an attempt to show him in a 'fresh light'.
The new exhibition's curators, Alice Insley and Martin Myrone have also tried to highlight the alleged marginalisation of black people in Hogarth's work.
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Facebook Unleashed 2 Tools That Helped Suppress Conservative Content
The Wall Street Journal has run a series of articles as part of a project called “The Facebook Files.” One installment published Sunday is entitled “Facebook’s Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making.”
The Journal reviewed company documents and scoured internal employee communications to gain an understanding of how Facebook decides which news stories will be promoted and which will be suppressed.
The importance of these decisions cannot be overstated. Citing Pew Research Center, the Journal reported that over a third of Americans use Facebook as a regular source of news. The Big Tech company’s ability to determine the content its users read gives it the power to actually influence users’ views.
The Journal’s Sunday article focused on the simmering tension between Facebook employees and management over two tools the platform uses to detect “misinformation.” Surprisingly enough, employees are far more eager to censor conservative sites than managers who know the company would face backlash if its methods became too obvious.
The Journal reported that these tools — called “Sparing Sharing” and “Informed Engagement” — weren’t developed for the purpose of stifling conservative content. But that’s what they did.
In 2019, the social media giant conducted an analysis of the tools and found that if they were eliminated, traffic on “very conservative” sites would increase significantly — Breitbart’s would rise 20 percent, The Washington Times’ 18 percent, The Western Journal’s 16 percent and The Epoch Times’ 11 percent.
Facebook had essentially labeled conservative content as misinformation and prevented stories from going viral.
Heated debate followed. One company researcher wrote, “We could face significant backlash for having ‘experimented’ with distribution at the expense of conservative publishers.”
Much of the company’s attention was directed at Breitbart, a site many employees believed published prolific amounts of misinformation.
For example, when riots spread across the U.S. in June 2020 following the death of George Floyd, an employee wrote a message on a Facebook chat board saying, “Get Breitbart out of News Tab.” The News Tab feature “aggregates and promotes articles from various publishers, chosen by Facebook,” according to the Journal.
The employee cited several Breitbart headlines: “Minneapolis Mayhem: Riots in Masks,” “Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires!” and “BLM Protesters Pummel Police Cars on 101.”
These headlines, the employee said, were “emblematic of a concerted effort at Breitbart and similarly hyperpartisan sources (none of which belong in News Tab) to paint Black Americans and Black-led movements in a very negative way.” The Journal reported that many employees agreed.
A Facebook researcher responded by saying that removing Breitbart from News Tab could face internal opposition due to concerns about political backlash. “At best, it would be a very difficult policy discussion.”
Another employee wrote, “My argument is that allowing Breitbart to monetize through us is, in fact, a political statement. … It’s an acceptance of extreme, hateful, and often false news used to propagate fear, racism and bigotry. On a daily basis, it publishes articles that I believe insult our values as a company.”
In the end, Facebook kept Breitbart on News Tab. It eliminated the Informed Engagement tool but kept Sparing Sharing.
“We make changes to reduce problematic or low-quality content to improve people’s experiences on the platform, not because of a page’s political point of view,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said. “When it comes to changes that will impact public pages like publishers, of course we analyze the effect of the proposed change before we make it.”
Yes, Facebook obviously analyzes the effect of its algorithms. It wants to know how far it can go without getting caught. What can we do to undermine conservative sites before they figure it out? Management seems far more cognizant of the potential consequences than the company’s more aggressive employees.
Over the past few years, Big Tech has come under tremendous public scrutiny — and with good reason. The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter currently wield more power over political discourse than the federal government.
Unfortunately for us, they work in tandem with the federal government. When you throw the establishment media into the mix, we are in the fight of our lives.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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1 comment:
So we have been "ignoring black slavery" in the colonies [you know, just something that hundreds of thousands of Union Soldiers gave their lives to end after decades of abolitionist struggle] to OUTSIZING it's economic contribution to Britain's entire civilization.
NOTE TO WOKE: Not all production in the colonies was based on slavery. The claims from the examples sited are dubious at best. Slavery was, until the invention of the cotton gin, dying a slow death because of simple economics. It was the invention of the gin in 1794 that made cotton "King" of agriculture.
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