Oil, Blood, Gold: What Art Has Always Cost

The frame gleams before the painting even registers — carved wood, lacquered in gold, a silent marquee announcing importance. Inside, a scene of oil and light: a woman draped in silk, a saint mid-ecstasy, a landscape softened by time. Around it, the air is conditioned and reverent. You’re in a museum, which is to say: you’re in a cathedral of taste, consecrated by capital. Nobody speaks above a murmur. It would be indecent. As if volume could disrupt the delicate choreography of history hanging quietly from the walls.

Behind every brushstroke is a benefactor, behind every pigment a patron with pockets full of conquest. The canvas is never blank, as it is stretched over the bones of something older, messier. Art, at its grandest, has always walked hand in hand with power, whispering in its ear and laundering its sins. The Medici knew it. So did Napoleon, and so do the hedge fund collectors quietly reshuffling their portfolios between Sotheby’s and Basel. Beauty, after all, makes empire look good.

Gold leaf doesn’t come from nowhere. It is mined, stolen, melted down and reapplied with reverence. That soft Renaissance light? Paid for with wool trade profits and papal indulgences. Even the abstract rebels of the 20th century were soon claimed, framed, and flipped for seven figures. Art resists, yes, but it also obeys. It decorates palaces, just as easily as it fuels revolutions. It hangs above fireplaces while bodies burn somewhere else.

To love art is to sit with that tension: to admire the glow while knowing it comes from fire. This isn’t cynicism, it’s clarity. Art is not above the world. It is of it. Built on it. Complicit in its violence and radiant despite it. And perhaps because of it.

There is no pure beauty. Only beauty paid for. Sometimes in coin. Sometimes in blood.

Gilded Altar, Bloodied Hands: Art and the Divine Right of Patronage

In Florence, the saints wore silk and the Virgin’s halo glowed with real gold. Holiness, for a time, was best expressed in pigment — not just divine light, but divine budget. Beneath every frescoed dome, there was a ledger. And on every ledger: a name, a seal, a family crest with ambitions that stretched past salvation and into legacy.

The Medici were narrative architects. They understood that the brush could immortalise more effectively than the sword. It’s no coincidence that the faces of biblical figures in Renaissance chapels often looked suspiciously like their patrons, that baby Jesus bore the faint profile of a Medici nephew or a future pope. Commissioning art was not merely an act of piety. It was a strategic investment in optics, a sanctified branding exercise. If God was everywhere, he was especially attentive to oil on panel.

Art didn’t flourish despite the Church’s grip; it bloomed precisely because of it. The Vatican was the most powerful commissioning body in Europe, and it employed artists the way modern corporations hire influencers: to control the narrative, to beautify the brutal, to sanctify conquest. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s reluctant masterpiece, was less an offering to the heavens than a mural-sized LinkedIn endorsement for papal dominance. Even its proportions are architectural propaganda: human grandeur masquerading as celestial.

And yet — the paradox. Within these gilded constraints, the sublime emerged. In the pursuit of power, beauty was born. The Renaissance wasn’t a movement; it was a public relations campaign with astonishing lighting. God’s face was rendered a thousand times, but always with the donor's coin in the margins. That divine glow on canvas? Paid for by tithes wrung from peasants and profits from loans. Angels were painted by men surviving on advance payments, dodging debtors while crafting paradise in tempera.

The Church and Crown needed images. Illiteracy was high, fear was higher, and nothing persuades like a martyr with good posture. Art became scripture for the eyes, a visual theology laced with dynastic aspiration. A crucifix here, a papal ring there, a subtle placement of a family sigil tucked into the folds of a robe. Salvation was curated. Piety was performative. To commission a chapel was to secure one's seat in heaven, or at least in history.

It’s easy, from the safe distance of now, to see Renaissance masterpieces as pure — the apex of creative genius untainted by commerce. But to believe that is to forget that the very ceilings we crane our necks at were ceilinged in politics, class, and control. Art was never neutral. Every angel had a benefactor. Every cherub, a price tag.

And perhaps that’s what makes the Renaissance so enduring: not just its beauty, but its brazenness. The sheer audacity of using God as a canvas for ego. These paintings prayed, but they also bragged. And in doing so, they reveal a truth older than oil paint: that art has always been more than aesthetics. It’s a mirror for the powerful, angled just slightly heavenward.

So, when you next stare at a Madonna wrapped in lapis and light, remember the balance ledger it once sat beside. Behind every masterpiece is a man who wanted to be remembered (preferably in gold leaf) ideally forever.

Plundered Beauty: Empire’s Aesthetic Spoils

In the hushed halls of Bloomsbury, glass vitrines glitter with the loot of fallen worlds. The Rosetta Stone sits under cool light, endlessly interpreted, rarely interrogated. In another wing, the Benin Bronzes gleam, not in the royal court where they were forged, but in the quiet custody of a foreign civilisation that mistook seizure for stewardship. Empire, ever efficient, didn’t just conquer land. It conquered context.

Art was not collateral damage; it was a priority. Napoleon’s troops marched not only with bayonets but with packing crates. When the French invaded Egypt, they pillaged not just bodies and grain but symbology. Obelisks were shipped up the Seine like prizes. The Louvre, newly Republican, was rapidly Monarchic in taste. Spoils lined its galleries under the guise of “enlightenment.” But enlightenment for whom?

The British, more bureaucratic than bombastic, perfected the theft of meaning. India’s treasures like Mughal jewels, sacred manuscripts, and ivory thrones were itemised, boxed, and sent westward with the chill detachment of clerks. Cultural evisceration dressed up as curation. By the time the Koh-i-Noor reached Queen Victoria’s hands, it had been so thoroughly reframed that it sparkled with imperial righteousness, not guilt.

The logic was elegant in its audacity: to steal the symbols of a people, place them under polished glass, and then narrate their history for them. The museum became a theatre where the coloniser wrote the script, cast himself as saviour, and dimmed the lights on everyone else. Artifacts weren’t just hoarded; they were rebranded. A Benin plaque once pulsing with spiritual charge now lies sterilised behind Plexiglas, labelled in Helvetica.

And yet, there’s still the insistence: we’re preserving it. As though the original owners were incapable of dusting their own heritage. As though plunder becomes pedagogy once it’s lit properly. Preservation, in the colonial dictionary, is a synonym for possession. Ownership disguised as rescue. Never mind that temples were razed to retrieve those “saved” sculptures. Never mind that altars were broken so British parlours could host a slice of the sublime.

But the violence is not just physical. It’s temporal. To remove an artefact from its landscape is to sever it from the soil of its meaning. A carved deity from Tamil Nadu is not the same god under London skies. Its aura dims in the antiseptic silence of Western display. What once breathed incense and chant now gasps beneath LED lights. It survives, but estranged.

The irony, of course, is that these stolen objects were often dismissed in their day as “primitive” or “tribal”, until they proved photogenic. Until their curves could echo in Art Deco salons, or their motifs inspire a Chanel runway. Only then were they worthy of conservation. Only then did their aesthetics earn an invitation to the empire’s mantelpiece.

Egypt. Benin. India. The list extends like a necklace of broken beads, each jewel stolen, catalogued, and made to speak English. And what is returned, when it is returned, is often too little and too late — repatriation in dribbles, gestures dressed as justice. Meanwhile, the institutions clutch their inventory with the cool rationality of colonial aftercare: They were better off with us.

But who decides what’s “better”? Who decides that the Parthenon Marbles belong more to the British Museum than to the marble-blue skies of Athens? These decisions were made with rifles, not reason. And they’re maintained with the quiet violence of paperwork, legalese, and shrugged responsibility.

Still, the artefacts remain mute, marvellous, and misfiled. Their presence indicts more effectively than protest ever could. To walk through these galleries is to move through a catalogue of conquest. Every label is a euphemism. Every object is a wound.

And so we ask — not just where these objects are, but where they belong. Because art, like land, remembers its origins. It doesn’t forget whose hands carved it, whose gods it praised, whose empire took it. And perhaps one day, the West will stop mistaking ownership for honour. Until then, the beauty behind glass is not just admired. It’s haunted.

The Slave Ship and the Portrait: Art in the Age of Capital

There’s a peculiar quiet that clings to Georgian portraiture. The gowns, the powdered wigs, the sly tilt of a wrist — elegance lacquered over empire. A woman glows in silk, gaze softened by candlelight, skin powdered to the palest of aristocratic aspirations. Her beauty is effortless. Her wealth, inherited. Her earrings, perhaps, paid for by molasses harvested under the sunburnt screams of Jamaica.

In 18th-century Britain, canvas and cruelty were often woven from the same loom. The transatlantic slave trade didn’t just build docks and ships, it built drawing rooms. Sugar money didn’t only line ledgers, it draped itself across satin upholstery and slipped into oil paint with the ease of a well-placed signature. Art became both a mirror and a laundering service: refining what was violent, elevating what was brutal, painting over the lash with lace.

Gainsborough painted the daughters of slave barons. Reynolds flattered the sons of sugar. Their subjects stood still, long enough for their generational guilt to be rendered into something tasteful… something worth hanging. Meanwhile, across the sea, Black bodies were bent into the soil, into the ships, into the economics of European civility. Their labour bankrolled enlightenment. Their deaths paid for ballrooms.

And yet, the paintings remain unbothered, beautiful, and cherished. They grace the walls of country houses where no one reads the captions too closely. A child might admire the blush of a cheek, the folds of a gown, unaware that those folds were stitched with blood. This is how empire preserves itself: not just through war, but through aesthetics. Through the calm gaze of a woman who never knew the names of the people who paid for her pleasure.

The proximity is obscene. While men were shackled below deck in the stench of the Middle Passage, their captors were sitting for sculpture. While women in Saint-Domingue were forced to bear children they would not be allowed to mother, their owners were investing in marble busts to commemorate their own lineage. Beauty was extracted, like sugarcane — cut, refined, consumed by those with the leisure to admire it.

The wealth that fuelled the great salons of Paris and the symphony halls of Vienna often arrived in barrels: sugar, rum, coffee, all commodities soaked in forced labour. Collecting art became a way to announce that you’d made it, but not necessarily how. The brush did not ask. The chisel did not protest. If art demands silence to be appreciated, empire demands it to be forgiven.

There were exceptions, of course. There always are. J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship was a scream on canvas, violent seas swallowing chained bodies tossed overboard for insurance money. But even this indictment was commodified, framed, and sold to those who could afford guilt in oils. The painting lives now in a museum far from the ocean, far from the teeth of the trade winds. Its horror is contained. Its message, manageable.

What’s more haunting than violence is its domestication. Slavery was normalised. Guests sipped tea beneath ceiling frescoes, entirely at ease with the knowledge that the tea came from colonised soil, stirred with sugar milled by men who no longer had names. What mattered was taste, not origin. Patrimony, not pain.

The art world still dances around this. Provenance is researched like a family tree with selected branches. Collectors speak of value, never cost. Museums host exhibitions on empire with polite disclaimers and a pastel colour palette. Rarely does anyone say outright: “This painting exists because a plantation did.” Rarely does anyone lean in close enough to hear the whisper behind the frame: How many lives did this beauty bury?

But the canvas remembers. So does the marble. They are not just art, they are artefacts of capitalism’s most grotesque flowering. A flowering that bloomed in tandem with genocide, that ripened on backs whipped raw, that smiled for the sketch while someone else starved.

And so we walk through galleries lined with loveliness, forgetting — or perhaps choosing not to know that art, too, was a ledger. Not innocent. Never separate. Always implicated. The portrait is not just an image. It is an inheritance. And sometimes, it’s a ghost.

Oil and Canvas, Oil and War: The 20th Century’s Industrial Aesthetic

The 20th century began in smoke. Chimneys, guns, locomotives, ideologies. If the Renaissance was painted in egg tempera and gold leaf, the modern age arrived splattered in crude oil and shrapnel. It hummed with factories, marched in boots, and rumbled beneath the floors of salons that still pretended beauty was apolitical.

Fascism understood aesthetics better than it understood economics. The Third Reich didn’t merely conquer land, as it curated culture. Statues stretched skyward like manifest destiny made marble. Bodies were chiselled into Aryan ideals, impossibly clean, impossibly obedient. Hitler, failed painter turned dictator, knew the power of a gallery. He weaponised neoclassicism like a hymn. Anything abstract was branded “degenerate.” Aesthetic clarity was paired with moral fascism: beauty equated with purity, distortion with threat. The canvas became a border: what belonged, what needed to be erased.

And yet, beyond the Reich’s clean lines and grand arches, other kinds of art whispered under rubble. Dada spat on sense. Surrealism tore logic at the seams. Picasso’s Guernica screamed across the walls of the 1937 World’s Fair — a fragmented bull, a burning child, a flattened city. Bombs had turned people into smears, so art responded in kind: incoherent, jagged, furious. There was no space for serenity. The world had exploded, and the gallery was now a crime scene.

Meanwhile, photography, a medium once doubted for its soul, became the witness that never blinked. War photographers marched with soldiers, crawled through trenches, captured ghosts. The camera didn’t judge, but it didn’t forgive either. Robert Capa’s blurred soldier mid-fall, the shadows of Hiroshima etched into pavement. These were art, too, though no one quite said it aloud. Beauty had been replaced by proof.

As the century staggered on, the violence industrialised further. Vietnam bled into televisions. War became ambient noise, a nightly programme, a backdrop to dinner. And with it came a new kind of patron: the corporation. Art no longer relied on the Church or the aristocrat, it was branded by oil companies, cigarette firms, soft drink conglomerates. The canvas was now an investment portfolio. Rothko’s moods, Warhol’s soup cans, Pollock’s chaos — all auctioned for sums large enough to destabilise small nations.

Oil, literal and figurative, slicked through everything. The same fossil fuels that powered tanks and razed cities also lit up auction houses. BP sponsored retrospectives. Shell hosted cultural nights. The new Medici wore suits and wielded shareholder reports. Their galleries gleamed with postmodern ambiguity, climate-controlled and curated to avoid discomfort. No blood on the floor, just sponsorship logos on the wall.

Even protest became collectible. Basquiat’s rage, once street-side and spattered, now sells for millions under white lights. Banksy’s sarcasm is auctioned off in pieces, sometimes shredding itself for performance. Art learned to scream and sell at the same time. Dissent became décor, a subversion with a price tag, rebellion repackaged in plexiglass.

And yet, somewhere in all this commerce, the old hauntings linger. War leaves fingerprints. Genocide does not wash out of fabric. You can frame a photograph, but not the history behind it. Galleries still host retrospectives on conflict with all the politeness of a dinner party, hoping no one brings up oil prices or drone strikes.

The 20th century taught us that beauty can live next to atrocity. Not in opposition, but in an uncomfortable parallel. A Rothko may hang in the same room where foreign policy is planned. A Chagall may dream while budgets are signed to flatten towns with no names. The artist can scream into the void, but the void has PR now. It’s sponsored, it’s catered, it’s wearing Balenciaga.

We are left with the question: what does art do, when its patrons are complicit? When the wars that make history also make markets? Perhaps it survives by shapeshifting. Perhaps it documents. Or maybe, sometimes, it simply endures as residue, as echo, as accusation. The canvas remains, even when everything else has burned.

The Auction House as Altar: Worshipping Wealth Through Art

The paddles rise like prayers. In a room padded by velvet and discretion, someone slightly nods once, and another hundred million dollars changes hands. Not for land, or labour, or a company with staff and strategy. No. For a canvas. A painting. A whisper of pigment suspended on fabric and myth.

Welcome to the church of capital: Sotheby’s. Christie’s. Where wealth is not hidden, but sanctified. Where art, once subversive, sacred, or simply human, now sits under white light like a relic, its value inflated by provenance, scarcity, and the breathless desire of the rich to matter more than they already do.

Here, Basquiat is no longer a boy from Brooklyn painting on walls. He’s a brand. A unit. His skulls and symbols, once urgent and erratic, now fetch more than a hospital wing. His griefs have become gilt. A billionaire hangs him in a climate-controlled bunker in Geneva, next to a Hirst that once floated diamonds in formaldehyde. Meanwhile, on the outside, kids spray-paint buildings and get arrested for less.

The absurdity is nearly operatic. A Lucian Freud goes for £60 million because someone once touched it. A Modigliani commands the GDP of a small nation. The catalogue notes read like scripture — “rare,” “museum-quality,” “fresh to market”, as if art were produce, ripened under silence and secret handshakes. What was once made with fingers and flaws now circulates like stock. And when the hammer falls, there’s applause. Reverence. Even awe. Not for the work, but for the number.

Private jets ferry paintings from Monaco to Abu Dhabi like sacrament. Art fairs are the new cathedrals. Basel, Miami, and Frieze are all sites of pilgrimage for the monied and moodboarded. Collectors arrive with spreadsheets and advisers, buying pieces they’ve never seen in person, but which will look good against matte concrete walls in Aspen. They speak of “portfolio diversification” and “emotional assets,” all while sipping champagne cold enough to sting.

This isn’t curation. It’s laundering of taste, of power, and of identity. The painting becomes less about what it evokes and more about what it secures. Access. Legacy. Proof of discernment in a world that increasingly mistakes liquidity for depth.

And the auction house? It’s the ritual site where this transaction is made sacred. The hushed voices. The thick doors. The crisp gloves holding something allegedly priceless. It’s performance as much as sale. The drama is intentional — the slow unveiling of the lot, the escalating bids, the final thud of the gavel. Like communion, but with better PR.

Even the language is devotional. “Masterpiece.” “Iconic.” “Once in a generation.” The lot notes drip with coded reverence, designed to elevate the object into something beyond scrutiny. You’re not buying a thing. You’re buying a myth. And myths, as we know, are priceless, especially when they can be flipped at Sotheby’s next quarter for a profit.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when art was passed between hands because it meant something. Because it hurt, or healed, or reminded. But in today’s market, meaning is secondary. What matters is scarcity. Rarity. Whether it’s one of ten. Whether it’s “fresh” — as if art ages like milk, not ideas.

And so we return, again and again, to the altar. Not to worship the artist, or the work, but the price. The price as prophecy. As spell. As status. The more obscene, the more celebrated. A child could draw it, but only this one is worth $32 million. Because someone said so. Because someone paid it. Because someone else will, again.

Meanwhile, outside the walls of Christie’s, artists still starve. Galleries close. Governments gut arts funding and call it fiscal responsibility. But inside, the money flows. The vaults hum. The canvases rest like sleeping gods, too valuable to be touched, too precious to be seen.

What we are left with is not art, but artefact. Worshipped not for what it says, but for what it costs. And in that reverence, something dies. Not the work itself — it endures, silently. But the conversation. The connection. The original sin of art: to speak the unspeakable, to witness the world without price.

Instead, the canvas is framed not with wood or gold, but with silence. The kind that money buys. And we, the viewers, become pilgrims to its glow, forgetting, perhaps deliberately, that not all altars offer salvation. Some are built only to burn.

The Collector’s Gaze: Taste, Ownership, and Control

There is a particular kind of gaze that does not look at art to feel, but to possess. It does not ask what does this mean?, but where will it go? Not how was this made?, but who else wants it? It is the gaze of the collector — part conquest, part curation, part soft-power chessboard.

Collecting has always been a performance of control. The Renaissance prince commissioning a Botticelli wasn’t expressing emotional vulnerability. He was staging dominion over space, over narrative, and over beauty itself. Monarchs didn’t amass cabinets of curiosities for introspection; they built them like mirror halls, where the reflections all pointed back to their own exceptionalism. What is Versailles, if not the world curated into a single ego?

Today’s collectors are no less imperial, just better dressed and algorithmically advised. The billionaire doesn’t need a crown, they have a Koons. The hedge fund manager doesn’t need legacy, they have a Warhol in a tax-free vault in Geneva, and a Richter hanging in the downstairs loo. The Silicon Valley founder, newly flushed with IPO afterglow, begins to “develop an eye.” Taste arrives not through hunger, but acquisition. They buy from fairs, not feelings.

And then there are the Gulf museums: Louvre Abu Dhabi, the planned Guggenheim in the desert. Grand gestures carved in marble and oil money. One part cultural diplomacy, one part PR correction. The artworks are stunning. The motives are... layered. Nothing says modernity like owning what once belonged to the colonial collector. The game hasn’t changed, just the players.

To collect is to curate the narrative. To say: I decide what matters. It is not merely about liking something. It’s about positioning. Collecting is often described in romantic terms — passion, pursuit, the joy of the find. But at its most powerful, it is the art-world equivalent of annexation. The artist creates; the collector decides who sees it. The frame becomes a fence. Access is rationed. Meaning is managed.

There’s a psychological kink to it too, a kind of aesthetic dominion. To own the thing that moves others is to control the movement itself. It’s not enough to love art; it must also love you back. It must sit where you put it. Preferably behind glass, preferably insured, preferably unattainable to everyone else.

And yes, sometimes there is reverence. Sometimes the collector is a steward, not a hoarder. But too often, the gaze devours. It turns art into asset, brushstroke into bargaining chip. What begins as awe ends in audit.

In this ecosystem, taste is weaponised. It becomes a tool of exclusion, a silent gate. If you don’t recognise the artist, you are uncultured. If you can’t afford the print, you are irrelevant. In its ugliest form, collecting becomes a pageant of subtle cruelty — an exercise in who gets to own the emotion, and who merely gets to observe it from behind a velvet rope.

Because that’s the real difference. The artist sees the world and makes something from it. The collector sees the made thing and claims the world through it.

Blood in the Marble: Who Gets to Make Art?

Behind every masterpiece is someone who never got to sign their name.

For every celebrated canvas, there is a shadow figure — an assistant, a muse, a cleaner, a wife with paint under her fingernails and dinner on the stove. The history of art is not just gilded frames and museum plaques; it is also omission, refusal, and the quiet grind of labour rendered invisible. Genius, we are told, is solitary. But the studio was always crowded.

Whose brush gets remembered? Whose vision is deemed valid? It’s a question soaked in class, colour, and gender. The white male artist. Perhaps tragic, brooding, preferably alcoholic is still the preferred myth. He suffers beautifully. He throws things. He innovates. Everyone else? They are derivative. Emotional. Political. Minor.

In colonised worlds, art was not even considered art. It was craft. Ritual. Folklore. Museums stuffed it into “ethnographic” wings — exotic but not elite, decorative but not conceptual. A Benin bronze was not a sculpture, it was loot. A Navajo weaving was not textile mastery, it was anthropology. The message was clear: some people make art. Others make culture.

And yet the margins have always made masterpieces. They just weren’t allowed to sell them. The economics of art-making are brutal, canvases cost money. Time costs money. Not everyone has a patron, a gallery, or the freedom to fail. The unpaid intern mixing oil paints in a New York loft. The woman forced to choose between childcare and a studio residency. The Black artist pigeonholed into “identity work,” expected to bleed on the canvas but smile at the opening. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re scaffolding.

Even pain, once expressed, is curated. There’s a market for trauma but only when it’s stylised. Grief must be framed. Oppression must be digestible. Curators want the struggle, but not the mess. The struggle must be archival. The mess must be reworked into meaning. Suffering is allowed, as long as it’s compelling, saleable, relevant. As long as it behaves.

Meanwhile, the canon remains a fortress. Occasionally, it lets someone in — a quota, a trend, a nod to the times. But the foundations? Still the same. Built on the unpaid, the uninvited, the unnamed. There’s blood in the marble, and most viewers just admire the polish.

And what of memory? Who gets the retrospective? Who gets the blue-chip gallery, the monograph, the legacy? For centuries, women’s art was signed in husbands’ names or lost altogether. Colonial artists worked under supervision. Indigenous forms were “collected,” rarely credited. Even now, the statistics stagger: the majority of art school students are women, but the majority of represented artists are not. Diversity panels bloom. The walls remain pale.

The irony is bitter, art is meant to reveal. But the system that preserves it is built to erase.

And yet, despite all this, the art is still made. In kitchens. On sidewalks. In prison cells. In after-school programmes and stolen hours. It is stitched, graffitied, improvised, whispered into being. It survives in spite of the system, not because of it. These works rewrite history. Every overlooked piece is an act of refusal: I was here. I felt. I made.

Perhaps the real masterpiece isn’t the painting. It’s the audacity of making it in a world that wasn’t designed for you.

The Museum as Mausoleum: Stillness, Silence, and Sanitisation

The museum, in its ideal form, is a temple — a place of reverence, of quiet admiration, where time bends and bends again, and the gaze becomes holy. Yet in its ideal form, the museum is also a mausoleum, and its objects are embalmed relics, preserved with meticulous care not just to protect them but to stifle them. The objects, in the forms of paintings, sculptures, and artefacts exist in an aseptic space, their histories sealed in glass cases and velvet ropes, their origin stories reduced to sterile labels on the wall. Time, once fluid, becomes immobile. The artist’s pulse is gone, but so too is the breath of the world they lived in.

What is lost when context is stripped? The original dirt, the original struggle, the voices of the communities long silenced. The museum transforms what was once alive into a pristine object for admiration, maybe a cut flower in a vase, whose roots have been severed. The violence of the artwork’s creation — the pillaging, the oppression, the forced labour — is erased. The artist’s pain, which can be as much a part of their craft as the paint or the marble itself, is sanitised into nothing more than an intellectual exercise. The museum stands still, presenting objects as neutral, timeless, apolitical, as if beauty was never linked to blood.

This erasure is not just historical. It’s contemporary too. When art is distilled into sterile galleries and auctioned as luxury commodities, it sheds its humanity, as if it never had any to begin with. The works might be hailed as revolutionary, subversive, or poignant, but in the safety of the white-washed walls, their power to challenge is neutered. They exist for the viewer’s gaze, but no longer for the people whose stories they embody. For the oppressed, the erased, the dispossessed, these works are no longer theirs to claim. They have been rebranded, recontextualised, stripped of their urgency.

The museum then becomes a place of veneration for what we can understand, and a mausoleum for what we would rather not confront. Death is not just the subject of art, it becomes its method. The objects, once part of a living culture, are embalmed and displayed like butterflies pinned to boards. We marvel at their form, but the messy, dirty, human life is gone. The history that made them revolutionary is lost in the silence, the hushed whispers of the gallery floor.

But what happens when we restore that context? When we allow the violence, the pain, the injustice to breathe alongside the beauty? To strip the museum of its sanitized reverence is to bring life back into the room. Perhaps art, at its truest, is not meant to be viewed from a distance but felt in the skin. Perhaps the greatest disservice we do to art is not to place it behind ropes but to forget that it was ever made by people who lived and died under the pressure of the very power we now admire. To preserve art for posterity, we must first confront what it was made to survive. Without this, we risk creating not just museums of art, but mausoleums of memory.

The irony is unbearable. In trying to preserve art, we often strip it of the very context that gave it meaning. In trying to make it timeless, we make it irrelevant. The museum doesn’t just house objects; it houses forgetting. The violence that fed these masterpieces remains the thing we don’t speak of. The stories that are erased — and we, as viewers, willingly allow the silence to wash over us.

In the end, the museum’s greatest achievement is also its greatest failure: it preserves the object but loses the moment. Art is not meant to be frozen, but to move. To stir, to provoke, to disturb. The moment we stop questioning what it cost to create, we stop feeling the urgency of its presence. The museum, then, might not be the temple we imagine, but a mausoleum of convenience. A place where art is not revered in its full, complex life, but simply… preserved.

And perhaps this is the greatest violence of all: not what is stolen, but what is left unsaid.

What We Still Choose to See

The museum is silent again, the quiet stillness a reverent pause, a moment when the world outside is shut out and only the gleaming surfaces of art remain. The beauty is almost palpable, a space where time holds its breath, allowing the strokes of paint, the chisel of marble, the gleam of gold to speak louder than the world that birthed them. But beneath this stillness, beneath the seduction of perfection, lies a tension we can no longer ignore. Art, in all its splendour, is a mirror, a weapon, a wound — and perhaps it always has been.

Art reflects the truth of the world it comes from, yet that reflection is often one we are reluctant to acknowledge. The beauty we see on the canvas or in the sculpture is not a disembodied purity, untouched by the hands of those who shaped it. It is the residue of violence, of conquest, of exploitation. The gilded edges of a masterpiece are often streaked with the blood of the oppressed, the marginalised, the forgotten. And yet, we still choose to see only the surface, to admire the form without confronting the substance.

In this way, art becomes a battleground, where the violence of history is softened, sanitised, and, in some cases, utterly erased. To gaze upon a painting by Rembrandt is to see genius — but it is also to ignore the wealth, the power, the plunder that financed it. To stand before a statue by Michelangelo is to witness mastery — but also to forget that such beauty was built on the backs of countless lives, the toll of empire ringing in the background. The question we must ask, then, is whether art can ever truly be clean. Should it be?

In my opinion, the very nature of art with its ability to transcend time, to move us, to seduce us, almost always carries within it the weight of history. To love beauty responsibly is to acknowledge that beauty is never neutral. It is an act of choosing: choosing to see beyond the frame, to feel the weight behind the brushstroke, to understand that in a world still drenched in inequality, the act of creation is never without consequence.

In this light, to love art is not to ignore its dark origins, but to wrestle with them. To embrace the beauty while grappling with its costs. To see the blood beneath the gold, and still choose to love. But the question remains: in a world where inequality persists, where injustice is woven into the very fabric of society, can we ever truly love art without also loving the responsibility that comes with it? Can we honour the art while refusing to forget the price it paid?

Art will always be a mirror, reflecting not just beauty but the wounds of history. The question is no longer whether we should see it, but what we will do once we have.

S xoxo

Written in São Paulo, Brazil

15th April 2025