What follows is a guest post by Nils-Hennes Stear (University of Michigan) Last July, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (BMFA) put on an exhibition featuring Claude Monet’s La Japonaise (1875), a painting of Camille, Monet’s wife, dressed in a resplendent red kimono. For some of that period, the museum also invited visitors to “dress up” in a replica of the depicted kimono beside the painting, to take selfies, and share them with the museum. Protestors accused the BMFA of Orientalism and cultural appropriation, after which the museum cancelled the dress-up activity in favour of one in which visitors could interact with the garment in other ways. More details about the case are here and here. I am sympathetic to the protests, at least insofar as I think the museum should not have exhibited the pieces as they did. Nor should the museum have failed to engage properly with the … Continue reading →