Woker Art Gallery

Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is superb. When it comes to woke posturing, it is far better than Manchester’s. Whereas the latter seems to advertise LGBTQ and ecological issues in every room, the Liverpool curators contented themselves with just a few token information cards. This was irritating enough. Henry Tuke’s The Promise has an information card that doesn’t bother conveying anything about the work, but just the gallery’s woke credentials. I emailed the management to point out how intrusive it was, and how unhelpful to read nothing about the painting itself. Only a bore and cultural cloth-head would prefer to hear about the gallery’s preoccupations rather than the wonderful artworks themselves. This is the problem with identity politics and woke obsessions. While pretending to refocus on minorities, they blind us to the bigger picture- literally in this case. Secularist morality is tedious and tiresome. It knows people are valuable, but can't quite tell us why.