Woke curators at the Royal Collection Trust (RCT) are reviewing over 2,500 artworks and photographs to ensure they conform to politically correct language codes and emphasise any supposed links to slavery and imperialism.
Curators at the RCT, which manages the royal art collections held at royal residences like Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, among other locations, have revealed that they are trawling the works entrusted to them ensure they have a “woke” spin.
“Curators continued work to update terminology relating to race, enslavement, empire and disability, reviewing a total of 2,500 object records on the Collection Managements System over the year,” they confirmed in an annual report highlighted by The Sun.
“In many cases it is as simple as changing a caption to add names of those involved and to changing colonial place names to local ones,” a source said of the “updates” in comments to the right-leaning tabloid.
“But it is definitely done with one eye on how attitudes have been changing in recent years,” they added
The reference to “changing colonial place names to local ones” is likely an allusion to British institutions’ now long-standing policy of selectively changing the names for foreign locations and landmarks from their British ones — Ivory Coast, Peking, Ayers Rock, and so on — to foreign ones — Côte d’Ivoire, Beijing, Uluru — in what some regard as an example of “cultural cringe”.
While some of the changes to artworks’ captions reflect the trend of “recontextualising” depictions of historic characters to paint them as villains — by putting what would once have been considered undue emphasis on any links to the then-lawful slave trade, for example, or by excoriating a British Empire which operated at a time when imperialism was the norm — are in line with what has become standard behaviour since the Black Lives Matter unrest of 2020, other changes suggest a more thoroughgoing dedication to political correctness.
Text describing the subject of a 17th-century drawing by Italy’s Domenico ‘Domenichino’ Zampieri as an “epileptic boy” has been changed to “boy with epilepsy”, for example — for most a distinction without a difference, but one important to the woke language police.
Speaking to Breitbart London, Robert Poll of the Save Our Statues campaign said that “the woke witch hunt” was “moving rapidly into the heart” of British identity by “targeting the Queen’s art collection”.
“It continues to conflate two totally different ideas — empire and slavery — in the hope of tarring all history with the same brush,” he observed.
“They want to shame us into accepting their ideological dogmas by undermining the things we are most proud of, including our heroes and our monarchy. By targeting royal artworks, they are hitting both targets with one stone.”
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