COVID Cash Battles in Museum World

Give relief to theaters, operas, and other live-performance venues first. Most museums, especially the big ones, don’t need the money, and they’ve failed the public.

I just read that Laura Lott, the president of the American Alliance of Museums, called President Trump “irresponsible and shameful” for suspending talks with Congress on the next wave of COVID-19 cash. Takes two to tango, but that’s another story. The Feds have already borrowed $2 trillion to address the Chinese coronavirus hysteria, but the museum community wants a few billion when the pig trough is replenished. There’s a bill circulating with a $4.9 billion price tag for arts organizations. Lott says 50,000 letters have gone to Congress demanding that a chunk of the cash to go to museums.

Well, I’m sending the 50,001st letter demanding that Congress do no such thing. “We’ve witnessed massive layoffs and furloughs” in the museum world, Lott says. “The pain has been incalculable.”

Cry me a river.

The museum community shouldn’t get a single sou. Museums didn’t help themselves, and they didn’t help the country. They dragged their lockdowns on and on for months, keeping the public out while the top brass Zoomed from home and still got fat paychecks. Of all the arts organizations in the country, museums were best equipped to open early and safely. The health protocols they needed to implement were simple and, from the beginning, clearly evident. Museum HVAC systems keep air clean and circulated. Guards are trained to distance visitors from art, and they can just as easily enforce the petty, silly, six-foot rule, a standard with no basis in science.

“The pain has been incalculable” only for the lowest-paid museum workers. The lucky duckies on top are still doing fine. The COVID catastrophe has punished the young and the poor everywhere.

Now, the biggest barrier the arts face is the public’s fear of crowds. It’s killing opera, theater, dance, and chorus companies. Art museums could have assuaged fears by opening their doors and proving to a terrorized public that people can enjoy a museum visit without catching the next available hearse to Hades. Instead, they kept the doors locked and stayed home in their slippers.

Most college and university museums are still closed to the public. Yes, museums like the Getty are barred from reopening by a lunatic state and local government, but the Getty seems fine with this. You’d think the richest, most powerful museum in California would at least have some scruples and demand the right to open its doors to the public it’s supposed to serve. Its trustees are speedy-on-the-spot to send love letters to Black Lives Matter and to peddle the limousine liberal lie that Americans are a pack of racists, but when it comes to its core enterprise — serving the public — the sound of a great big yawn from atop Mount Brentwood deafens.

No, as I said in that 50,001st letter to Congress, let the museum world stew in its own juice. I think, as a cohort, museums have proven they don’t need the money anyway. How else can we explain their capacity to keep big staffs on the payroll with no admissions, events, or shop income while at the same time vastly diminishing their work expectations? Most museum people are conscientious and creative, but let’s face it — a curator can only do so much work at home, without access to a collection, a library, files, and the public. For no museum staffer is “working from home” an efficient or productive use of time.

Seems to me they’d better start channeling their inner Gloria Gaynor, who survived very nicely without a federal bailout.

If arts organizations are to get COVID money, give it to theaters, opera companies, symphonies, and others whose very essence is based on live performance. They’re truly desperate.

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How did we get to this pathetic state? Well, look at who’s living large. For Fauci and his COVID Keystone Quacks, life’s never been better. Sure, Dr. Bungler had already sent $7.4 million in American tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018 and 2019 to research, of all things, bat coronaviruses, a notably improvident and embarrassing expenditure no one likes to mention. “Never mind,” as the idiot savant Emily Litella said. When Fauci’s in boo-boo mode, he aims high.

Once he got on Saturday Night Live, it was full steam ahead on the U.S.S. Hysteria.

He’s not stupid, though he works with plenty of mediocrities. He’s a swamp creature and didn’t want to go against the shutdown, crash-and-burn, command-and-control tide embraced by his brethren snakes and skeeters. Not allowed to be with a loved one on his deathbed? Verboten to have a proper funeral for Mom or Dad? “Too bad,” the Faucis of the world say. Serving the swamp’s will to power comes first, cruel though that might be.

Follow the science? For these lifers and second-raters, the latest science they know is from a leeching conference. Pink pills for pale people, obesity bath powder, and swamp root for better urine flow? For them, that’s cutting edge.

Now, they’re on TV all the time. Gullible, panicked politicians are sending billions their way. Big Pharma wants a vaccine cash cow. They’ll need the blessing of the federal time. Too bad 50 million kids were tossed from school. The rich are fine. It’s the poor kids who’ll never catch up. “Fight the virus” by throwing millions from their jobs and killing thousands of small businesses while you’re at it. Pump and puff those death numbers so the crisis never ends.

If a meteor falls on you, and your flattened former self tests positive for COVID-19, well, you died of COVID! Ninety, gaga, and riddled with cancer? Die with COVID. You’re a COVID death even if you’re asymptomatic.

The last thing the bureaucrats want is people learning that COVID-19 is no worse than a bad flu season. They’ll peddle any and every lie to cover their butts.

Dr. Killjoy said the other day that “we might have to sacrifice Thanksgiving.” Proves that turkeys stick together. And Fauci and friends have done something not even television could do: They’ve throttled the movie industry.

Theaters, opera, and symphonies are having near-death experiences, thanks to the public-health panic priests. Many small arts companies are failing. Young careers are derailed. Museums were closed for months. Atrocity propagandists tell us that maybe, a year after a vaccine, we’ll be able to go to the theater without fear, as if they have any credibility. There’s no vaccine for any of the dozens of coronaviruses. Why the certainty we’ll find one for COVID-19?

The government is headed toward trillions more in new debt for this doozy of a fool’s errand. Aren’t there better uses for that money? Of course there are, but we are where we are. As part of the borrow-and-spend mania, Congress gave $75 million each to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and $50 million to the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). What are they doing with the money?

The CARES Act required the NEA and NEH to transfer $30 million to the official arts and humanities commission for each state, leaving them with $45 million to give in direct grants to arts groups.

I’ll address how the NEA and IMLS spent their money in this story. I’ll write about the NEH separately.

The NEA, characteristically, did the easiest and most boring thing. It gave $50,000 each to 846 organizations regardless of degree of need, initiative shown in reopening fast, or ability to generate money. A third of the money went to big organizations, which have more capacity to survive our self-induced economic assault.

This was a bad idea. A tiny organization such as the Women of Color Quilters Network in Ohio, the National Institute of Flamenco in New Mexico, or Perseverance Theater in Alaska doesn’t have lots of places to cut. For a big organization, $50,000 isn’t a lot. For a small theater or music company, it pays a chunk of the bills.

NEA flatly refuses to consider need in giving money. They tell me that federal law limits them to using “artistic excellence” as their only standard. That’s not true. The statute mandates “artistic excellence” but doesn’t exclude other standards. The NEA doesn’t even follow its own interpretation. It has lots of programs that grant money to projects that target what they call “underserved audiences,” which, I imagine, means poor people and not descendants of the last Kaiser, who, I suspect, are also underserved by museums, however much stolen loot still supports them.

If the NEA is wedded to the letter of the law, it’s the only federal bureaucracy that is. Most have so much imagination, they make Jules Verne look like a dullard.

I don’t think NEA knows how to determine need, insofar as museums are concerned. I served on a panel once and thought the museum staff at the NEA was nice but clueless and happy to ship dough to the richest museums in the country, places with donor Rolodexes the size of the moon.

Colleges and universities got NEA COVID money, too, and they don’t deserve it. Unlike single-purpose arts groups, schools have lots of pots of money that leaders can move from place to place, depending on their priorities and the lobbying skills of arts stakeholders. Local governments got money, too. They aren’t needy. They can generate money by raising taxes.

Once again, Washington, D.C., and its suburbs did very well indeed. That’s where the NEA’s staff lives, and it’s writ large in Swamp Scripture that “we must take care of our buddies.” The area got more money than every state other than California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

So, 846 places got a cool $50,000 check. I suspect most of this money will go for budget offset.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services developed an exemplary plan. It’s one of the most altruistic and effective agencies in the government. As early as April, IMLS was the pioneer in examining what should have been the core issue for museums and libraries: what it will take to reopen.

First of all, the IMLS staff worked with recipients of ongoing grants to extend or tweak projects undermined by the lockdowns. Second, it partnered with OCLC Inc., the fascinating international library cooperative, and the health research giant Battell to develop new safety protocols based on the latest science.

In September, IMLS awarded money to Native American and Native Hawaiian museums and libraries and, again, unlike NEA, targeted the grants to handling the COVID crisis. The Coushatta Tribe in Louisiana got money to integrate its outdoor spaces, since we know that outdoor transmission of COVID is nearly nonexistent unless you’re rolling around on the beach à la Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community in Oregon are organizing a mobile library for at-risk elderly, thanks to IMLS.

A few weeks ago, IMLS awarded more money. This wave is heavy on digital learning and research, and that’s fine. It’s spending CARES Act money but it’s structuring the grants so they serve pilot programs that’ll have a life when the hysteria finally subsides. A $200,000 grant to the Weismann Arts Center in Minneapolis, for instance, will develop verbal-description museum tours for the vision-impaired and digital museum resources for the hearing-impaired.

The Lonesome Pine Regional Library in rural southwestern Virginia will spend $209,000 on long-term digital platforms serving the library needs of people living in remote areas. This will have national application. Alabama A&M University is getting $211,000 for curbside, contactless, click-and-collect access to library materials. This not only serves hypochondriacs and people with germ phobias. It also increases the public’s access to books outside of regular library hours.

There are grants for Internet hotspots outside libraries that are closed. I’m on the library board in tiny Arlington, Vt. Unlike almost all major libraries, we never closed. Our librarian developed a hotline for ordering books and curbside pickup. She also came to work every day. The public, though, couldn’t enter the building, and many of our patrons use the library for computer research. This isn’t uncommon. We have a hotspot outside our library, but many places don’t. IMLS is providing money to cities to establish hotspots where none exist.

I love the nearly $400,000 grant to the Intrepid Museum in New York to develop a virtual visit and education program. The Intrepid is an aircraft carrier moored at Pier 86 off 46th Street in Manhattan. It saw action in World War II and survived five kamikaze attacks. The museum is enormous — it’s a freakin’ aircraft carrier — and hosts the space shuttle Enterprise (the prototype for the shuttle orbiter that went on dozens of missions), a Concorde jet, and a guided-missile submarine.

It’s an homage to American ingenuity and might, fighting for freedom, discovery, and adventure. For bed-wetters, lockdown loonies, and the Hate America crowd, a more toxic, blasphemous mix can’t be found on land, sea, or air.

I’m delighted the Intrepid story is getting mileage, thanks to IMLS. Young people especially need to learn that sometimes we all have to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and while we’re at it, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. If there’s a pestilence of anything in this sad world, it’s lily-colored livers and sheep pusillanimity.