Pint-Sized Hurt Pimps Win One at the Getty

Art and research give way to BLM.

I’ ve written about the avalanche of open letters from museum staffs accusing their directors and boards of racism. It’s a twin phenomenon. First, staff are about preserving and interpreting art, not performing social work. It’s incredible to me that people working even at the Getty, a California miracle and a treasure trove of art, want to change the mission and focus on “eradicating white supremacy.” Don’t they like art? Second, staff taking a grievance, in public, over the head of the director, to the trustees, was once a nuke-level insurgence followed by warp-speed retaliation.

Call it empowerment, narcissism, or self-righteousness, but these days everyone has a bullhorn. I’ve read letters and petitions targeting the leadership at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the MFA in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others. Some of the grievances in these letters seem legitimate, some irrelevant, and some silly.

I’ll focus on the Getty today. It’s the richest museum in the world, with a $7 billion endowment, a great collection, library, scholarship center, and grants program. I know and like the president, the director of the museum, the head of the research center, and the chief curator. I had some of the curators as students. I’ve done shows with the Getty. I love it. It’s fantastic.

Here are bits of the “open letter to the Getty trustees” from July 15:

Racism abounds, from insensitive comments made by management and frequent microaggressions experienced by staff and visitors of color to collecting practices and exhibition programs that glorify the work of white cisgender male artists to the exclusion of others. . . . Black Lives Matter! Three simple words that the Getty time and again has refused the say publicly.

Without action, the Getty’s inclusive global mission “to advance and share the world’s visual art and cultural heritage for all” is fraudulent.

The letter demands a democratically elected task force on equity and inclusion, with money and power to make changes, and the task force ought to be paid extra. Other demands include a timetable and goals for remaking the staff by race. It demands the acquisition of more art by women and BIPOC artists, meaning “black, indigenous, and people of color.”

The letter targets Jim Cuno, the president of the Getty, and Tim Potts, the museum director, for foot-dragging.

On and on it goes.

Since I’m naturally curious, and a good journalist, I read the list of people who signed this letter. It’s interns, docents, assistants, former staff, former vendors, people who’ve used the Getty library, students at other institutions, “a visitor who has written to the Getty twice in the last eight years on these very points,” and lots of people who call themselves “allies.” That’s the flotsam and jetsam who, I guess, still cry about Alger Hiss getting a raw deal. They’ve lent George Soros their signature on auto pen, pushing whatever cause is the lefty flavor of the month.

No heavyweights, no titans of industry, no famous artists, no award-winning scholars, no Pulitzers, no Nobels, not even a Soapie winner, and the Getty is down the road from Hollywood!

It’s a ransom note signed by flunkies, hangers-on, and gadflies. And this made the Getty trustees blink, break open the safe, and bail on their senior leadership? One’s jaw does indeed drop when one is astonished.

And blink they did. The Getty president first responded to this letter with what was considered pablum. It wasn’t enough to still the restless. On July 21, the Getty trustees spoke. The board acknowledged “the historic gravity of the moment following the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.” I think everyone in America knows who George Floyd is. Taylor was killed in a drug raid, Arbery in a bizarre, random shooting that didn’t involve the police.

The trustees also acknowledge “the overwhelming response of millions of Americans in peaceful protest against systemic racism.” No mention of riots, looting, and vandalism in dozens of cities, day after day, over months. They don’t contest the open letter’s accusation that the Getty’s senior staff practices “overt and systemic racism” — no specifics are acknowledged, but none were ever alleged. In this respect, both letters are new forms of abstract art.

It says the magic words: “Black Lives Matter,” which the open letter demands. The faithful need to hear them and see them, every jot and tittle, like a prayer or a chant. It commits to taking “all necessary steps to recruit, hire, mentor, promote, and retain” staff who are black, indigenous, or people of color, which, let’s be practical, means a quota system. Whether or not the Getty admits it, it’s committed to a game of numbers, percentages, and targets now. Its hiring will be driven by race for a few years.

What have the trustees done? First, they’ve plunked their institution, an art museum and research center, in the middle of a political storm. This is a terrible mistake. I’m not concerned about offending donors or visitors, which is the reason most often advanced for keeping the focus on art rather than straying into politics.

I’m focused on what the mission of the Getty is, and it’s not social-justice warfare. If the Getty trustees want to meddle, as an institution, in police shootings, why not in a hundred other issues? If black lives matter so much to the trustees, what about the thousands of black-on-black shootings, mostly gang violence, happening in American cities each year?

What about Sincere Gaston, 20 months old, killed by a stray bullet in Chicago in July, or Mekhi James, a three-year-old boy killed while his dad took him for a haircut, also in Chicago, or Otis Williams, 14 years old, shot in an alley while taking a shortcut to a store in Los Angeles, or seven-year-old Zamar Jones, shot to death in Philadelphia this month while skipping rope in front of his home? What do the Getty trustees think about these young lives?

They don’t matter because that’s not fashionable. The trendy topic of the moment is police brutality. How tiresome, how obtuse, to plop dead children on the table. It’s like wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

How about some other issues that might pique the interests of the Getty’s prim little saints? When the government gutted the economy with its reckless, ruinous lockdown, 2.7 million Americans working in the arts lost their jobs, among, of course, 53 million other jobs trashed and 50 million children thrown out of school. Sounds like grave inequities to me. Any interest in people in the arts who are jobless?

Here we are, with entire ecosystems of art — gathering not only museum workers but also creative people in theater, music, and dance — frozen in place for a year, maybe longer. And all these people want to consider is “white supremacy”?

And then there’s Black Lives Matter. This group has good points. In 2014, its founders demanded accountability for police brutality and answers for why so many more African Americans than whites were stopped by cops. (One answer is that African Americans have more encounters with police because they commit a disproportionate amount of crime.) Since then, it’s grown into a big organization with a political arm, the Movement for Black Lives. Is Antifa its paramilitary wing? Who knows?

It isn’t just a slogan. It’s an organization with a detailed program, website, and national and local organization. That’s why the Getty staff, or at least its loudest mouths, want the president of the Getty and the trustees to say, specifically, “Black Lives Matter.” Nothing else will do. They want them to endorse the brand, the cause, and the agenda.

What is the Getty endorsing? Is Black Lives Matter anti-Semitic? I googled “Black Lives Matter” and “anti-Semitism” and found a pile of stories as big as the Gaza phone book. How deeply involved is LA Black Lives Matter with the Nation of Islam? Seems very much so. Open borders? Check. Reparations? The head of the Chicago branch of BLM said last week, “Oh, yeah, we support the looters, 100 percent, that’s reparations.” Is the Getty board all in with that? “Trained Marxist,” anyone? That’s how one of BLM’s founders describes herself. Good with that? Speaking of George Soros, who funds BLM? Where is the bundle it raises — millions of dollars — going?

And what do “systemic racism,” “colonialism,” or “white supremacy” mean, in a museum setting? I know, they’re clichés now, but the Getty is a scholarly place. It’s a research institution. Can the trustees define these words? Or the interns, allies, library card holders, and that “visitor who has written to the Getty twice on these very points in the last eight years?” What federal civil-rights laws has the Getty violated? Give us specifics. Art historians, at their best, deal with evidence.

Does Black Lives Matter have any arts issue on its agenda? Of course not.

We’ve elected an African-American president. Our colleges and big businesses give extraordinary preferences to designated people of color, mostly at the expense of Asian-Americans, Jews, and white men from working-class backgrounds. Americans with East Asian, Indian, Caribbean, and Nigerian heritage make more money, on average, than white Americans do. Doesn’t sound like white supremacy. There were over 300 million encounters between police and civilians in America last year. Only nine ended with an unarmed black man dying. Shouldn’t the trustees ask the people who signed this letter to explain this?

What special expertise do the trustees bring to the subject of police brutality or law enforcement? I looked at the biographies of the trustees, and the answer to my question is “none.” Who are these people? It’s a small board, mostly money pushers. There are two African Americans. One is the president of Spelman College. She ran the Studio Museum. Pamela Joyner is a distinguished collector of African-American art. Thelma Melendez is a public-school administrator in Los Angeles. Drew Faust was the president of Harvard. I like her. She wrote one of the best books on the Civil War and brought the ROTC back to Harvard. Kavita Singh is a scholar of Indian art with a specialty in “secularism and religion, fraught national identities, and the memorialization of difficult histories.” Anne Sweeney was a powerhouse at Disney.

It’s a very good board, corporate, establishment, probably very PC. For all I know, the Disney lady might have come up with the idea that the titular heroine in Pocahontas was a vegan.

The trustees come from many backgrounds. Each is a seriously accomplished person. What more can the Getty petitioners want? They’re bottomless-pit people, I know, but, immediately, complainers want the Getty to focus on the racial content of the staff, exorcising colonialism in the collection, whatever that means, and the agenda of Black Lives Matter. The Getty’s president and senior staff said “no,” awkwardly and weakly, because old-line museum directors like Jim Cuno don’t know how to deal with staff revolts. Yet “that’s not a priority” is the right answer.

The July 15 letter demands that the Getty “develop programming that reflects and responds to our Los Angeles community.” Didn’t the Getty just spend millions on the Pacific Standard Time initiative, which was mostly about local contemporary art? This initiative assembled exhibitions and programs at dozens of Los Angeles–area arts venues on California art. The Getty is what it is. It’s an art museum and research center. It’s not a community center. If a staffer wants to work at a community center, he or she needs to find another job.

I worked for Phillips Academy for years. It’s a high school. We would have called this “a teachable moment.” There’s nothing wrong with pushback, and indeed, challenging generalities, suppositions, and clichés is the job of a good teacher. I’m not for going down with the ship, but I don’t like needless cave-ins, either.

The trustees might be trying to stage kabuki theater, but this won’t work. Their letter sounds faddish and fanboy, like a USA Today editorial. It skates on a surface of bromides. “We’ll talk about this at every meeting,” the trustees promise, which is another way of saying, “Let’s do what we need to do to make this go away.” It won’t. The board has committed itself to racial targets, which are quotas. It has fed a beast that’ll return for more. It has admitted roiling distractions into the daily doings at the Getty, distractions that have nothing to do with art and scholarship. It has empowered a clique that’s committed to politics, not quality.

I have no problem believing there’s a culture of condescension at the Getty, with plenty of petty slights, put-downs, and backhanded compliments — as Jane and Michael Banks said, “toads in your bed, or pepper in your tea.” If people can’t bear this, they’re in the wrong world. I worked in academia for 30 years. Envy flows not like a mighty river, since that’s too obvious, but like creeks and bogs and tiny streams here and there. People there raise themselves up by putting others down, not always but more often than, let’s say, in a widget factory. It’s not attractive, I agree, but it’s not racist or colonialist. It’s insensitive and boorish. It’s not something trustees should waste their time addressing.

I also have no problem believing that low-level staff at the Getty are poorly paid. I was shocked once to learn of the disparity in pay between senior and junior curators, for example, but my knowledge is dated. If the Getty hasn’t addressed this, it should. If the junior staff across the board, in all the Getty’s departments, is poorly paid, the Getty needs to raise salaries. The junior staff there is likely to be far more diverse than the senior, old-school staff. These people need to be paid fairly and, at the Getty, paid well.

I think working for the Getty is an enormous privilege, the kind of privilege that makes complaining about what’s in the collection seem petty, but salaries are important. I once complained about my pay when I was teaching at Yale. A faculty member, speaking in a grating Boston Brahmin lockjaw accent, reminded me of “the psychic income of working for Yale.” The psychic income of working for Yale doesn’t pay the rent, and neither does it help in Brentwood.

I think Jim Cuno, the president of the Getty, whom I admire, understands that the mission of the place is art, not justice. “The contracts and employment of senior staff,” the July 15 letter demands, “should be incumbent on anti-racist work, from diversifying the staff to decolonizing the collections.” This is ridiculous. It’s for bean-counters and grudge-holders. Only a loser art historian would want to do this kind of work.