Signs of Life, and Beauty, in a COVID-Afflicted World

The art-and-museum circuit is struggling, changing, but dare we say evolving in some corners, in response to this terrible year’s circumstances. 

T his is my 75th National Review story in 2020, and I hope I’ve said a few memorable things in a year which, overall, I think we want to forget. We Americans jumped through the looking glass in March. I wouldn’t describe much since then I’d call edifying. Whither 2021? More of the same, with a twist or two.

We’re living in a new zeitgeist, and that big picture affects the art world. One of the most illuminating consequences of the Trump phenomenon is a giant, pervasive unmasking. It’s not a coincidence that our betters obsess over masks as they deploy distracting, phony slogans such as “flatten the curve,” “beat the virus,” “your health and safety are our top priority,” and “stay safe,” all the while bankrupting, isolating, and dispiriting the public.

Masks obfuscate, disguise, and silence. Who knows whether they protect anyone since no one wears them correctly and people keep fiddling with them. Kentucky Fried Chicken dropped its “finger lickin’ good” slogan precisely because we’re not supposed to touch our faces. I do my best. I have a collection of aesthetically apt masks, and among my favorites are Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” details of Michelangelo’s “David,” and Bruegel’s and Bosch’s “Last Judgments.” Times such as these demand a nod to apocalypse fashion.

The mask mania is an elite tick. If 2020 has exposed anything, it’s that we live in an oligarchy now. For those who say, “Oh, Wall Street always was an oligarchy,” first, they’re wrong, and, second, the oligarchy now is a weird, unstable coalition going well beyond the Gnomes of Zurich types. I don’t know how this will evolve since it’s still coalescing but, for the time being, Big Tech, the corporate news media, Washington whores, the universities, Hollywood, and their strangest allies — the outrage pimps and the Stasi-in-Training called the FBI — have won the battle over who governs us.

Big Tech suppresses rather than disseminates. Reporters turn party hacks. Universities don’t teach. The FBI plays partisan politics. Black Lives Matter luxuriates in corporate and foundation dough. Only the D.C. whores stay faithful to their profession. Atop the heap is Joe Biden, a mediocrity long past his prime.

It’s a wobbly thing and barely ousted Trump, but the masks are off. Long-masked motives are exposed and raw. The new mandarins don’t seem to like the country very much. I never imagined I’d hear so much open contempt for people who work with their hands, the self-made, church-goers, the working class strivers– you know, the deplorables.

I’m an optimist. A museum director has to be since every new project or new idea is a leap of faith. An optimist believes every new ask for money will get a big smiling “yes” even though the last one was an unreturned phone call. Let’s see if the new zeitgeist will inspire good art. I think it will. The country’s a mess and seems more and more like Rome circa 170 a.d. It’s a good time for a Goya or a Hogarth or a Daumier.

I looked at what I’ve written in the last year. I’ll think about the Raphael retrospective in Rome for the rest of my life. It was a new look at Raphael on the 500th anniversary of his death. For art historians, Raphael is present like the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Pyramids – universally recognized and acknowledged but unknown. My mother was Italian, and I like Rome. I went in early September, using my press badge and the show’s imminent close to argue my visit was urgent business.

I saw the Raphael show three times and used my visit to Rome to visit work by Raphael that couldn’t travel, things such as “The School of Athens,” the frescoes at the Villa Farnesina, and the Chigi tomb. For me, it was a class on Raphael, among the Renaissance biggies with Michelangelo and Leonardo but devalued because neurotic art historians think he’s too sweet. In the spring, the Scuderie del Quirinale, which hosted the Raphael show, is doing a big survey of Baroque art in Genoa. I’m planning to see it.

I suppose art historians in my generation believe Raphael insipid. He created a template for beauty in women that many felt was belittling or lascivious or unattainable. He was a lover, not a lunatic. His work is erudite, not tortured. He frankly embraced Christianity and its bedrock humanist principles developed in Jerusalem but also in Athens. His work is serene. He’s a master of aesthetic equipoise.

Today, you’d think we’d savor beauty, love, erudition, serenity, and equipoise. I think most people do, which is why the exhibition was both timely and a big hit.

Alas, here, the COVID catastrophe still has months to unfold. I think we’ll have lots more lockdowns and public-health bullying and deceit. This weekend, the news in the U.K. was “the new strain.” The country’s in its third lockdown, with Europe isolating it. After months of stringent lockdowns, all of Europe itself is again paralyzed by COVID and forcing more lockdowns. The British government is quietly preparing a lockdown lasting until Easter. That will destroy its economy. What happened to Boris Johnson? He seems like a poster boy for the imperfectability of man.

A new lockdown mania is here in the U.S. We haven’t been terrified yet by “the new strain” but soon will be. There’s no point railing against the lockdown culture. It’s entrenched now. It’s like a skipping record. “Cleave to the line” and “It’s costing too much to back down now” are propaganda arguments powers-that-be use when they’ve dragged a country an endless, useless war.

Decimated finances will wring tears from museum boards and directors throughout 2021. It hasn’t been pretty and won’t beautify in 2021.

Last year, I wrote about the big trends I saw looming in 2020. I thought the biggest art news story of 2019 was the fire at Notre Dame in Paris. I thought the fire would stimulate attention to France’s Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, most in bad shape, but COVID took the air from everything. Two other big stories — the Warren Kanders trustee-as-arms-dealer ruckus at the Whitney and the push for racial and gender balance on museum boards — would, I thought, develop into bigger controversies and, quickly, into a miasma. I thought New York in 2020 would continue to recede as the center of the art world.

The Chinese coronavirus, a real danger, reminded us what we’ve forgotten: Humanity exists on the edge of a cliff. Epidemics aren’t rare. In my lifetime, we’ve seen polio, the 1957 and 1969 flu epidemics, AIDS, SARS, MERS, and Ebola and, of course, millions die each year of tuberculosis, malaria, and dozens of other viruses, though someplace else. Such has always been the case. This time, though, perspective and resilience fled to the hills with a speed seen only in the respiratory droplets of a church choir, that bizarre and new breed of serial killer.

Everyone now knows what it takes to paralyze the country.

New York’s not the center of the art world anymore. When it became COVID Central, its tourist economy died, its culture sector collapsed, its great museums closed for months, and its art industry went online. I didn’t need COVID to teach me that doctors, nurses, paramedics, cops, and firemen are heroic. I knew that. A different, new kind of hero are the dealers and auction house people. I’ve always liked them, and they rose to the wretched occasion.

They’re practical and cheerful, know connoisseurship better than most art historians, and, living in the private sector, know how to turn on a dime. Entrepreneurs, they salvaged their profession. As much as I like art fairs, dealer visits, and auction previews, dealers and the auction houses showed grit and imagination and created new ways to sell art. It’s not all virtual. You can still see a lot of the art you’re thinking of buying, sometimes on the sly.

The old dealers lived through the bear economies of 1974, 1990, the dot-com bust, and the financial crisis. They’re tough and wily. They’re not stuck in PC ruts, simply because these repel most buyers. Virtual auctions and art fairs have gotten better and better. Are the dealers and auction houses making a bundle? They’re staying alive.

There’s a big decorating boom now. People are working permanently from home or moving to the country from New York. Even the American pre-1945 art market is being revived as digs get redone. The good artists seem to have used 2020 to work in their studios with fewer vision-killing distractions. The lame artists will try to play the COVID card and won’t get anywhere. This is a piker of a plague. Even the Black Death figured in very little art.

I’ve written a dozen stories about museum lockdowns. I believed, and here I was a Pollyanna, that museums would open as quickly as they could. I thought their understanding that they served the public was inviolable. To my chagrin and mortification, museums stretched the public lockout as long as they could, and most stayed closed months after the public-health martinets decreed they could open. Laziness explains this to an extent. So does personal convenience. Working from home isn’t bad, senior staff learned.

More masks fell to the ground. Accessibility is a pop-museum mantra along with diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it’s the most fake of them all since, obviously, a museum is accessible to no one if it’s shut. “We miss you” and “we need time to prepare” were feints. That the museum profession never made a loud, public push to reopen is an ugly blot.

Many directors enjoy the distance Zoom puts between them and their staffs, especially if the staff is a kvetchy one, and I suspect some sensed the beat of war drums and hoped to postpone what turned out for certain museums to be atomic warfare.

Here the Kanders kerfuffle seems prophetic. I’d never seen a museum staff demand, in full daylight, for all the world to see and hear, that a museum trustee quit. One of Kanders’s companies sold arms to the Israeli Defense Forces and tear gas to the U.S. border police in Texas, and this fashioned him as an evil doer. The Whitney’s director and board thought sympathetic cluckings would assuage protesters. Of course, they didn’t. They’re dealing with bottomless-pit people, and in pushing Kanders — a $15 million donor — out the door, they invited upheaval everywhere.

The lockdowns kept the public away but kept museum staffs isolated, confused, frightened, and, let’s face it, underutilized. For most museum workers, including curators, fundraisers, teachers, PR people, librarians, art handlers, exhibition designers, and a range of flunkies, working from home isn’t ideal, and on many fronts, it’s impossible, since most projects require contact with art, books, files, or the public. On the visitor service, shop, restaurant, events, and security front, the public is their “raison d’etre.” The lockdown layoffs and the George Floyd killing together lit the disastrous fuse.

Staff empowerment isn’t a bad thing in itself, but a staff in open revolt is new. Traditional museum authority and hierarchy both went the way of the Model T this year. Museum staffs are unionizing. The vast Carnegie museum system in Pittsburgh voted for a union last week. The issues, noisily expressed, are racism and sexism broadly but, more specifically, hiring, pay, and promotions.

I can’t say there’s no racism or sexism in museums since I’m sure there is. Yet discrimination in employment by race or sex is illegal. Many museum staffs are claiming both are rampant yet no one, oddly, is suing. Their bitterness and insistence are as keen as their claims are amorphous. Many museums are hiring equity and diversity czars, which means quotas and separate HR offices based on race and sex. I can’t see how any of this can have a positive effect on creativity or productivity.

A difficult story the public might not notice will surround those awkward, awful weeks and months when staff and the museum’s top dogs are back together, in the same building, working together and seeing each other. Younger staff used social media to say hateful things about their bosses. This tension and the simple fact that museum staff has lost the discipline and habit of working in an office from nine to five might in themselves make 2021 another lost year.

Black Lives Matter and a protest mentality have displaced art as a museum focus. I’ve read dozens of staff manifestos. Art seems to bore these people. It’s irrelevant when it’s not a tool for their politics. I said last year that this was a New York phenomenon. I was wrong. The racism-and-sexism revolt spread to big museums in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington. The staff at the rich Getty, the most privileged museum staff on earth, behaved like aggrieved lettuce pickers. They sound like spoiled whiners. The most salubrious thing that can happen at these museums is a mass firing.

The feature of our new zeitgeist that troubles me the most is its steadily more vicious assault on independent thinking, which is the essence of creativity. This will, of course, affect the arts. Big Tech’s suppression of science at variance with government propaganda is shocking, its suppression of political speech less so but still the workings of a monopoly run amok. Faculty at colleges and universities are on pins and needles. Tenure is flimsy protection for a professor who offends. Students who don’t parrot the proper pieties are hounded not only by their peers but by their deans and the new, vast equity and inclusion bureaucracy on campus.

Hundreds of faculty and staff at Princeton University signed a petition demanding, among many items, that Princeton establish a committee to vet the anti-racist bona fides of faculty research and the curriculum of classes, with the committee establishing the criteria. At the Dalton School in Manhattan, faculty and staff are demanding “mandatory diversity plot lines in all school plays,” among many other things. I guess they won’t be performing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe.”

Princeton and Dalton are both prestigious institutions. Both, and many like them, are plagued with people who think everyone is a racist except them. Will the new equity and diversity czars in museums edit labels and catalogues or veto exhibition proposals? Will every exhibition and every hang of the permanent collection have to have “a diversity plot line?”

This is not only conceivable. It’s likely. The campus has already come to the museum. Younger staff, fresh from college, are conditioned to a culture of safety, speech codes, pretentious manifestos, virtue signaling, and grievance. Directors are frightened of them. Like college presidents, provosts, and deans, they don’t believe their masters will back them if they resist staff silliness or self-pity. So, we’ll get either exhibitions powered by the latest PC fads or pablum, both of which are boring, and nothing’s worse than a bore.

I enjoyed the Met’s 150th anniversary show. How could I not? It’s the greatest museum in the world. It’s not a badly governed place, and its staff sits on top of their profession. It still took a hit over racism and sexism.

The exhibition was tentative and needlessly apologetic. It awkwardly jammed in too many PC themes and tried to make amends for all its grasping, greedy, boorish plutocrat donors, confessing nothing we didn’t know already. It’s New York. The Master of the Universe was invented there.

Self-flagellation is never attractive. It doesn’t teach the public anything about art.

I think one thing we won’t see in 2021 is more monetization of museum collections. The Baltimore Museum of Art’s attempt to sell $70 million in art to finance an equity and diversity toot exploded and collapsed like the Hindenburg blimp. It’s the museum’s disaster but also exposes the Association of Art Museum Directors as feckless and feeble.

AAMD, the trade association for museum directors, amended its longtime ban on monetizing collections in the spring. It opened a window for art to be sold to fill desperate financial holes caused by the COVID lockdowns. I knew it would be abused, and Baltimore abused it, with AAMD’s wink and a nod. It took a donor uprising in Baltimore to ignite opposition to the sale, but a petition condemning it signed by 15 past AAMD presidents impaled this particular Dracula with the silver spike. AAMD switched gears. The money is to be used to keep a beggared place going, not to create a new utopia.

Since the klieg lights were on AAMD, I wondered, where was it when museums were shuttered? Why wasn’t it pushing governors and mayors to let museums reopen, and why wasn’t it pushing museums to reopen once they got the government’s okay?

This year, I balanced stories on museums in New York and New England with reviews of European exhibitions and stories about museums and artists between the East and West Coasts. I went to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio in June and did a swing through North Carolina in October. I went to St. Louis in July. I’m going to Texas, Tulsa, and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas right after Christmas.

I visited a dozen museums and met many artists, curators, donors, and directors. Their attitude was positive and can-do. Their places are vibrant. They have timed tickets, too, and they’re often sold out. Our oligarch rulers peddle depression, suppression, lockdown, isolation, racism, and anger. What I saw and felt on my visits and also on a visit to the El Greco show at the Art Institute in Chicago was a seriousness about art, education, and public service that’s both old-fashioned and uplifting.

I wish I felt more of this mood in museums between Washington and Boston. There are many exceptions — MoMA, for instance — but my sense is that the legacy museums, the rich places in New York, New England, Los Angeles, and California are stuck in a bog. I was stunned last week to visit the Clark Art Institute, a rich place that can do anything it wants, and see so many galleries empty.

I’m curious and adventurous. I take reasonable, sensible precautions on the COVID front but think Dr. Fauci et ilk are quacks who know one word, and that’s “lockdown.” In 2021, I’ll certainly go to California, if its museums ever reopen. The Imperial War Museum in London will open its new World War II wing. The Munch Museum in Oslo has built a new building that premieres in 2021, as has the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to show the contents of King Tut’s tomb. There’s a Botticelli retrospective in Paris this coming September.

I’m planning a trip to Athens to visit its no-longer-new museums for Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic art. I was there last in 1973, and I believe television had just arrived. The Greek gods were nothing like the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Uninterested in goodness and salvation, they entertained themselves thwarting, punishing, goading, and tricking a hapless humankind, rewarding us with a sparkling trinket now and then but otherwise having no interest in our doings. They might be making a comeback.

I want to enjoy the energy of more museums in the South and Midwest. I especially want to do a swing through Ohio, which has fantastic art, great small-city museums, and half a dozen presidential homes. These house museums are hagiographic, I know, but their history is better than the “1619 Project,” which is delusional and vindictive.