“Black Is Beautiful”
De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam.
July 26-October 26, 2008

As you enter the “Black Is Beautiful” exhibition in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the first words that you read are “Black people are attractive.” These words produced in me, at any rate, a reaction akin to that I used to have when my teacher’s chalk squeaked on the blackboard, or he ran his nail down the blackboard because his chalk had dwindled away to nearly nothing.

Methinks the curator doth protest too much. After all, would he have have written “Slovaks are attractive” or “Amputees are attractive”? There is a whistling-in-the-dark quality about the words that would not entirely have pleased or convinced me if I had happened to be black. The next words are, if anything, even less reassuring: “Artists have known this for a long time.”

This implies that artists have been privy to a kind of knowledge that is not general, that is in some way technical, the result of something that is difficult to understand or to grasp. But is attractiveness the kind of quality that could be apprehended technically?

I think it is perfectly possible for artists to change our ways of looking at the world and seeing what we did not see before. Whether it is part of their vocation to do so is another matter, as is the question of whether any of the artists in this exhibition, of visual representations of blacks in Dutch art