Museum Is Erasing “Offensive Art”
At first glance, a major museum altering racially insensitive titles and descriptions of works in its collection seems symptomatic of political correctness run amok. Surely most museum patrons understand the historical context of racial identifiers accompanying portraits of black women at the turn of the 20th century? Perhaps. But why run the risk of offending any museum patrons? Why not update the language of these titles and descriptions to reflect today’s cultural mores? That’s the rationale behind the new “Adjustment of Colonial Terminology†program implemented at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which is scrubbing potentially offensive language from digitized titles and descriptions of roughly 220,000 artworks in its collection. Identifiers that are considered discriminatory or outdated today like “Indian,†“negro,†“dwarf,†and “Mohammedan,’’ a word Westerners once affixed to Muslims, will be replaced by more appropriate terms. The museum has been accused of censorship by some art historians, but others say it’s not censorship if the original title is mentioned somewhere in the label.
