Crazies Launch a Coup at the Guggenheim

Among their revolutionary plans: Endorse BLM and take anti-racist naps.

F ull moons are multiplying like celestial rabbits. That’s one explanation for why people in museums are doing so many crazy things. And lots of the craziness comes from . . . guess where . . . New York and Washington. First, New York.

“A Better Guggenheim” describes itself as a “collective of Guggenheim staff, past and present.” It’s got a website and an Instagram account, publishes a newsletter, offers job guidance, and, more to the point, demands that the trustees of the museum fire the museum’s director, chief curator, and chief operating officer.

Richard Armstrong, the director, “nurtures a culture of racism, sexism, and classism” at all the Guggenheim branches, the collective tells us. He has endorsed a work environment that’s “fundamentally unsafe” to employees. He has breached the museum’s and the Art Museum Directors Association’s code of ethics. He’s “atavistic.” Fred Flintstone, they’re coming after you next. Lucky for Tarzan, he’s not a museum director.

Armstrong said two exhibitions about Hispanic women artists had “a lot of Latina flair,” suggesting he believes that too much of a good thing is, well, too much. He prioritized new bookcases for his office while the lowest-paid curatorial staff worked in cubicles. That’s classist, I guess. That’s life, too, kids. Suck it up, he’s the director.

The collective is “dismayed by the Guggenheim’s failure to affirm the most basic fact: Black Lives Matter.” This statement is linked to BLM’s website, which continues to be cleansed of its most extreme positions, such as support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, abolishing police departments, limitless immigration, racial quotas, and a socialist economy.

Two curators squabbled, “A Better Guggenheim” tells us — one the chief curator and the other an independent scholar hired to do a show at the museum. One is white, the other is black. Richard Armstrong, the director, insisting on meeting with both of them, together, to clean the air. That’s racist, we hear. Nancy Spector, the chief curator, “engaged in linguistic profiling” and called a black curator “angry” and “crazy.”

Spector is guilty of revanchism, too. Good word as it is, it shows that these people are the ones who are crazy. They’re using the language of Clemenceau to describe French revenge on the Prussians for sacking Paris, or the stab in the back that Germans in the 1920s believed cost them a win in World War I. Talk about inflated egos. Then they turn Darwinist. The COO, they complain, said that “the survival of the fittest” should govern staff cuts. That’s racist. All three — the director, the COO, and Spector — are evidently white supremacists.

On and on. It’s a very bitchy thing, “A Better Guggenheim” is. It’s a litany of hurt feelings by know-it-all delinquents. It’s got every grudge except “he looked at me funny.” I’d rather put a bullet in my head than spend a day working at the Guggenheim, and it’s not because of the director.

“A Better Guggenheim” has a resources page. There, I learned about a new group called the Nap Ministry. It “examines the liberating power of naps and views rest as a form of resistance and sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.” I clicked on the link, liking naps more and more as I get older.

Rest, I read, “pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.” All I want from a snooze is to stay up past ten to watch “House Hunters International.”

The staff sounds awful — petty, vindictive, lazy, disengaged with art, and corrupt. Why corrupt? They want the museum to endorse the Black Lives Matter platform. They want the museum to get involved in politics. They’re entitled, too. They think the museum is all about them. They want to run it themselves.

The sore-thumb question? Why haven’t these people been fired?

“Insubordination” sounds old-fashioned. It reminds me of old Westerns where a cranky colonel rips epaulets off the shoulders of a nervy but noble captain. It’s a good enough reason to sack a bad worker, but I’d add negativity, lack of enthusiasm, bad culture fit, inability to work with others, misunderstanding the job, and dissing the institution.

What these snapping turtles have done is undermine the museum’s fundraising and audience building. Why would anyone give money to a museum that, according to the staff, is riddled with racism? Why would an African-American family from Harlem visit such a place?

They’ve accused their director of violating federal and New York civil-rights law.

An artist’s group called the Illuminator is projecting “Open for Racism” and “Open for Exploitation” on the Guggenheim’s façade, surely encouraged to do so by “A Better Guggenheim,” once they woke up from their anti-racist nap, that is. It’s impossible to imagine these people ever working well with the director, chief curator, or COO. They’ve poisoned the collegiality well.

I shouldn’t say “why haven’t these people been fired?” Rather, why haven’t they been liberated? They clearly don’t want to work at the Guggenheim. Art bores them, and so does the public. Freeing them is a favor. They can then get jobs as professional protestors, since that’s what they seem to want to do.

This festers because the trustees are frightened. They’re letting themselves be bullied by junior people who think they should run the museum. I’d hoover the place of malcontents — the Guggenheim’s finances, trashed by COVID-19, justify it — and gradually assemble a staff that’s actually passionate about art.

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The Everson Museum of Art is the very good civic museum serving Syracuse. I’ve been there once. It’s in an impressive I. M. Pei building with a nice collection consisting almost entirely of American art.

It’s in the news because it put up for auction Red Composition, its only Jackson Pollock painting. It was on the block at Christie’s at its big evening sale of October 6. The estimate was $12 million to $18 million, and it sold for $13 million. It’s going to use the money to buy art by artists of color, women, and others underrepresented in the collection.

Pollock painted it in 1946. It’s a handsome picture, small, and transitional. Pollock was a surrealist painting glyphs and totem-pole-like figures in a style evoking disjointed dreams. In 1945 into 1946, he loosened his handling of paint, eliminated the discernible figure, and introduced drips from an overloaded brush. Red Composition is among his last steps toward the drip-and-pour technique that made him the Elvis of paint by 1947.

Museums deaccession art all the time. Usually, they sell things they never show to buy better things. I never did it. It’s easy to make mistakes of judgment since we’re creatures of our times and prevailing tastes. Every object in a collection is part of the museum’s history, too, and I respect history.

Sometimes, a museum will decide it wants to change its mission, selling broad categories of art to fund art expressing its new direction. The Albright-Knox in Buffalo did this about 20 years ago when it sold most of its Old Masters and antiquities to focus on modern and contemporary art. That’s the trustees’ call.

The Everson isn’t changing its mission. It’s still concentrating on American art. What it’s doing is selling what should be an anchor in any good American collection. Pollock’s no Whistler. All we need to do is visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and spend time in the gallery there, which exhibits nine Pollocks together. Some are splotchy indeed, and the work “schtick” rings true.

He was a janitor at the Guggenheim in 1943, hit on a gold-mine new idea around 1946, cultivated it for five years, and ran out of gas, dying in a liquor-launched car crash in 1956. Still, he’s important. He’s essential to the ascendance of American art after 1945 to world-class status. Most American art until, say, 1970, springs from Pollock. Pollock’s critical and marketplace success broke the back of America’s deep aversion to abstraction in art.

What the director and trustees have done is land on a racket. They’ve found a marketing device giving them millions in cash to go on a spending spree. Every good director, first and foremost, wants to buy art. The ego-trippers want new buildings, but the best directors know that enhancing a collection gives the greatest satisfaction. The Everson is selling its best art to go on a buying bender when it could keep its Pollock and achieve its narrow goal. All it takes is effort and savvy.

I’m very much in favor of buying work by artists of color and women. They were cut from the market for years. Now, many are blue-chip artists and too expensive. It’s easy to blow lots of dough on work that’s faddish. I think the Everson should have kept its Pollock and focused on the best young, up-and-coming women and people of color. A good eye can and will find them. They need the boost that comes with representation at a prestigious museum. Their work is cheap because they’re young and unknown.

Or focus on mid-career artists who haven’t electrified the market. Often, this doesn’t mean the artists aren’t great. It sometimes means the market hasn’t discovered them yet. My point is that smart shopping can get the Everson where it wants to go.

It seems, instead, that the Everson wants to make a big splash paid for by a self-made oil gusher.

The Everson can become part of a discovery story, as many museums were in the late 1940s when they bought Pollocks flogged by Peggy Guggenheim, his dealer. A good one sold in those days for $2,500. It’s easy today to spend $1 million for a Mark Bradford painting. He’s great, but only a few years ago his work went for a tenth of that. Kara Walker is famous, expensive, and uneven. Amy Sherald is overpriced.

I’d look at Torkwase Dyson, Henri Paul Broyard, Beverly McIver, Jennie C. Jones, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Chris “Daze” Ellis, or Martine Syms. They’re affordable and wonderful. I was happy to take a chance on a lesser-known artist. I had a great contemporary art curator at the Addison to guide me. Sometimes I had to raise $25,000 or even $100,000 to buy something really good. I did the work, and I had donors who, once they heard my pitch, wanted to be generous. The Everson’s director and trustees are taking the easy road. They’re selling the family jewels.

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I’m sorry that Carrie Barratt is leaving the New York Botanical Garden after only two years as president and CEO. She was the American-paintings curator at the Met for years and then the museum’s deputy director.

Barratt was in an impossible position at the Botanical Garden. She succeeded Gregory Long, the president for 30 years. Long transformed the garden in the early 1990s, salvaging its mangled finances and implementing a genius marketing plan. He was a fundraiser and PR man with no specialty in gardens or art. Showy as a hothouse flower and an oozy flatterer, he was a whiz at cultivating rich old ladies. He had a moment and a purpose that seemed to end at some point around 2005, but he lumbered on, on the make for flashy headlines.

He stayed long after his expiration date and, more damaging, made the institution all about him. He loaded the board and the senior staff with sycophants. I hear he meddled constantly. Like many New York philanthropies, he focused on a few rich, old donors without building a roster of engaged, enthusiastic, soon-to-be-rich young patrons.

It’s a challenge to follow a leader who’s been there for years. Expectations and relationships are programmed around that one person, and a personality cult develops. It’s impossible when that leader retires and doesn’t, as Cromwell put it, “in the name of God, go!” I hope the board lets the new president clean house and tells the old president to spend some time looking for orchid specimens on another planet.