A wave of totalising race-first exhibitions has swept through UK art institutions of late. The National Portrait Gallery’s remit of ‘reflecting’ British society could reasonably make one wary of its turn at the same project. Indeed, a false, stilted language accompanies curator Ekow Eshun’s The Time is Always Now. To have some 20 artists ‘reframing the black figure’ somehow sounds both ambiguous and politically predetermined.

What unites these works is more often a trendy hashtag than ‘lived reality’

Eshun has long been invested in the artistic black diaspora. His 2022 Hayward Gallery show In the Black Fantastic played on fantasy and Afrofuturism and had artists make new worlds that would take over the failing present. This time, however, he resorts to a safe and comfortable cadre of artists, many of whom, like the painter and museum activist Lubaina Himid, have featured in just about every other institution’s race and decoloniality-themed blockbuster. Works by the likes of dub-club abstractionist Denzil Forrester and barbershop-reminiscer Hurvin Anderson, who rose to prominence between earlier waves of interest in black creativity, mix with images by celebrated American chroniclers of urban life Henry Taylor and Jordan Casteel.

These are steady hands, and Eshun does little to challenge their aesthetic conservatism. He does even less to challenge the institution’s racial platitudes. In parts of the show, skin colour is a painter’s superpower – in others, the root of historical trauma. The gallery thinks nothing of bridging continents yet turns a blind eye to social class. It’s not clear if it’s the artists or the viewers who are expected to believe these contradictions.

One way to evaluate this proposition is to consider the sociological and material claims made by the museum on behalf of the art. Under such scrutiny, what unites these works by Brits, Kenyans, and Americans is more often a trendy hashtag than the ‘lived reality’ to which Eshun appeals.

To find a common denominator in the concerns of Amy Sherald, best known for her off-colour official portrait of Michelle Obama, and the Turner Prize nominee Barbara Walker’s sometimes naively expressed concern with art-historical absence is to play into this exaggeration. The point is that there is no aesthetic link between Sherald and Walker. But equally to call attention to this can become tedious and repetitive. Such criticism, anyway, meets with the institution’s outright refutation. In this exhibition’s introduction, for example, the gallery thanks Eshun for his emotional labour – implying that to question his method would be a breach of etiquette.

The alternative is to ignore the gallery’s narrative and read the works entirely on aesthetic terms. An oversized and dazzlingly golden-bronze statue of a young woman in casual sports attire and braided hair looms over the gallery’s entrance. Thomas J Price uses 3D scans to create his ‘everyman’ figures, so that they could, in principle, be young, black and from Croydon. But because this nod at the universality of the black experience is styled by Sports Direct and Price’s subjects are composites of multiple sitters, the work turns into a commodity fetish.

When, in a section of the exhibition dedicated to ‘aliveness’, the Brooklyn-based Toyin Ojih Odutola tries to show ‘a multiplicity of identities’ of her Nigerian ancestry, she likewise fictionalises them and poses them in interiors reminiscent of the Soho House franchise.

One may wonder why race, rather than art-world standing, should be the exhibition’s focus

On the canvas, concern with appearances and status becomes this diaspora’s trademark. Claudette Johnson’s self-portrait as a middle-aged woman reckoning with Picasso’s notorious African masks projects consternation rather than daring. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s aspirational anecdotes of hyphenated lifestyles in Los Angeles barely compensate for their inherent mundanity and jarringly opulent decoration.

As any winner of the Gallery’s annual portrait competition would attest, the trick to making it in the art world is to choose one’s sitters wisely. Of the three works included in the exhibition by Kerry James Marshall – an acclaimed American painter of the black figure – the most striking is the ‘Portrait of a Curator’ (2009), a slick image of a glamorous, expensively dressed woman. Neither artists nor the museum will ever tire of navel-gazing.

At this point, one may wonder why race, rather than art-world standing should be the exhibition’s focus. The proposition is a far cry from the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial which featured Daniel J. Martinez’s slogan ‘I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white’, which ushered identity politics into contemporary art. Back then, establishing race as an aesthetic category held political potential, which many of the artists featured here explored in their work. But that power is sorely lacking when the institution itself ventriloquises radicalism and attributes it to works that have very different, often equally pressing concerns. To predicate their success on subscribing to the DEI department’s tenets does everyone a disfavour.

Next to the Sunday supplement portraits that market Eshun’s exhibition, those works that directly speak to traumatic legacies are harder to parse. They do, however, deservingly capture attention. The American Noah Davis’s account of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, for example, is both unnerving and trippy. Dying bodies line the painting’s background but it is a pair of pheasants caged under lumps of gold that dominate the picture. The canvas thus blends the historical record with pure fantasy – revealing perhaps the artist’s desire to escape.

Turning to lowercase conservative aesthetics is a rite of passage for an artist keen to secure a place in art history. This isn’t a character flaw and Eshun’s exhibition rightly celebrates the painterly accomplishment of a generation of artists whose former social and political practices are today a vital part of the canon. There is a tension, however, between the bourgeois consciousness evident in the paint and the institution’s goading call to see all images through the prism of race. Intersectionality, it turns out, hits hard limits at the museum.