When PC Labels Hog Art’s Spotlight

Crystal Bridges, a great museum, should ditch the preachy wall panels, let the art speak for itself — and let visitors think for themselves.

W hether new or old, most museums are struggling today over how to present their permanent collections, both how the art is arranged and what the wall text tells us. Crystal Bridges in Bentonville in Arkansas is no different. It has a first-rate American art collection from the colonial period to today, and on my visit last month it seemed it was trying new ways, some good, some bad, some weird, to interpret what it shows.

Today, gender, race, justice, repudiation, and revenge are some of the new filters through which American art is called to pass. At the same time, self-righteousness and historical illiteracy are at pandemic levels. Even the best art can take only so much cultural sludge before it dissolves as a visual experience, leaving a label writer’s or curator’s animus tossing its curls in triumph.

When I was in school and, later, a curator, arranging and interpreting American art were straightforward. American art collections were usually arranged chronologically. Periods in history have specific styles, and mixing styles makes for aesthetic discord. Curators, remember, are decorators, among other things.

I’ve always mixed furniture, silver, ceramics, sculpture, and paintings, so I was a renegade among traditionalists. The issue was both turf and prestige. Painting curators enjoyed their place at the top of the heap and didn’t want their treasures sullied by andirons, chamber pots, and tea caddies. Decorative-arts curators, long regarded their inferiors, just wanted to be left alone, coveting what little space they’re granted. Galleries for objects such as textiles and furniture were often not in prime museum real estate. They were usually in the basement, near the toilets.

Introductory wall panels and didactic labels? For temporary exhibitions, yes, since they tell a story. For the permanent collection? What Sgt. Joe Friday called “just the facts, ma’am.” That means tombstone labels telling us the artist, title of the work, date, and the credit line, which means whose money bought it or who gave it. “C’est tout.”

Today, that’s a radical approach. The philosophy behind a minimalist touch is still sound, however out of style “less said, the better” is. It proposes that people look at the art first as aesthetic objects, not as illustrations, advertisements, or polemical bullhorns, and then draw meaning based not only on their individual moods and personalities but on core human values or emotions — beauty, love, innocence, fear, peace, grief, pity, disappointment, and exhilaration, and the list goes on. Good art has multiple meanings. Why impose one?

If visitors want to look at art through a filter of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, net neutrality, the Tea Party, Prohibition, Anti-Masonry, veganism, or Zoroastrianism, well, it’s a free country. They brown-bag their dispositions to the museum. Their interpretations will likely be grossly inapt, but museums, as public institutions, take all comers and, in their interpretive silence, indulge free thinkers.

The viewer is empowered. You take what you can or want. It confers on the viewer a burden, or duty, or pleasure — or reminds him of his God-given right — to do some thinking and looking. If the viewer has questions, whatever old schoolmarm voice he has in his head will say, “Look it up.”

But today, the public expects more, or thinks it should. Lots of people are cowed by experts into believing that there’s a right and wrong answer. Some are intellectually lazy. Everyone is on a power trip today, and that includes curators. Today, if they can impose a meaning, they will, but in my era, we considered that self-aggrandizement, and, anyway, we had better things to do than write labels.

Curators today think their permanent collections should tell a story, and most are itching to tell a story about injustice and exclusion — with the villains, for those who don’t like to be contradicted, all conveniently dead. Those poor, moldering souls, artists and patrons alike, have a champion in me, though.

I was deeply curious to see what Crystal Bridges would do. I read all the wall texts, for hundreds of objects. I’d scrap almost everything. It’s not horrible. It’s haphazard, at points irrelevant, sometimes preachy, bewildering, or awkward, and, overall, it doesn’t serve the visitor or the art. The arrangement of the art is good, with a few quibbles.

The museum needs a new strategy that drops the diversity, inclusion, and apology bosh, which is doofus art history, and, if it must have labels, focus on the things that make American art American.

I visited Crystal Bridges on January 1. The text introducing the collection — now gone, I’m told — immediately informed us that “democracy requires embracing all of our individual differences.” I cringed as I sensed a rhetorical high horse galloping in my direction. Jack Benny and George Burns produced a show called “Mr. Ed” in the 1960s. Mr. Ed was a talking horse, the sweetest ever, but I sensed this high horse wasn’t going to serve me homespun humor. I was in for some tut-tut finger wagging, or hoof stomping.

First of all, I thought, gathering my wits, America isn’t a democracy. It’s mostly a kleptocracy these days, though around Easter, Christmas, and Rosh Hashanah, when everyone’s on their best behavior and thinking charitably, we might call it an oligarchy. Officially, we’re a republic, which means there are mediating layers between the raw numbers of people and the power. I’m a stickler, and you don’t want to put a stickler in a questioning frame of mind right off the bat.

The introductory panel then suggested that Crystal Bridges is going to reinterpret American art history through the filters of race, gender, and the experiences of Native Americans. Democracy demands nothing less. I think the museum wanted scholars, connoisseurs, and art lovers to plumb the works in the gallery for how they express “identity,” a term that’s a quagmire, sinkhole, IED, deity, and just a standard for one-dimensional art. In that world, ruled by the dead hand of ennui, quality is governed by the sex, race, religion, or orientation of the artist and how well artists and subjects play a game of victim and oppressor.

“Ugh,” I said to anyone who might be clinging to my every word. Homer, Eakins, Whistler, “buckle up,” to tweak a line from All About Eve. “It’s going to be a bumpy buggy ride.”

I’m not sure whether someone decided this introductory panel made no sense, but it’s gone. It’s replaced by a work of art and another big panel of wall text. The art’s an eight-foot-wide wall sculpture by Nari Ward from 2015 made of old, multicolored shoelaces arranged to form “We the People,” the words that introduce the Preamble to the Constitution. Ward asks us to “reconsider this phrase,” its label reads. “Has its meaning changed?” it asks. “Who are ‘the people,’ and how do these words apply to our society today?”

I don’t object to the questions. They’re hardly original. And I’m happy to see the Constitution touted, anywhere, anyplace. Given the sad state of American education, though, many won’t know that “we the people” starts a long sentence, much less what the sentence says.

The Preamble prescribes the goals of civic government, not of art. Crystal Bridges is an art museum. The art on the walls dwells first in the realm of aesthetics, and while some of it might reference the Preamble’s promotion of “Justice” or “domestic Tranquility” or “the general Welfare,” most art has nothing to do with the central goal of the Constitution. That goal is a system of governance based on self-rule and popular sovereignty rather than rule by an elite few. A snow scene by John Twachtman or a flower painting by Georgia O’Keeffe exist in a different galaxy.

The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence might have been a better choice for Ward’s shoelaces. That celebrates “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” though it also advocates the overthrow of the government, an awkward suggestion these days.

As a work of art, Ward’s sculpture isn’t a masterpiece. Ward is a high stepper in Diversity Inc., however. He’s got a schtick producing multiple versions of the shoelace sculpture. I saw his retrospective at the New Museum and thought his art was whimsical — he works with junk he finds in Harlem — but intellectually thin, aesthetically unattractive, and rote. That’s good old American ingenuity, though. Like Sam Walton, he spotted a market. The Soho art chatterers love him.

Next to the sculpture is a new introductory wall text. Gone are fumbles over what kind of country we are or remaking art history. It reads:

At Crystal Bridges and the Momentary, we recognize our role as settlers and guests in the Northwest Arkansas Region. We acknowledge the Caddo, Quapaw, and Osage, as well as the many Indigenous caretakers of this land and water. We appreciate the enduring influence of the vibrant, diverse, and contemporary cultures of Indigenous people. We are conscious of the role in colonization museums have played. As cultural institutions, we have a role in dismantling historical and systemic invisibility of Indigenous peoples past, present, and future. We choose to intentionally hold ourselves accountable to appropriate conversation, representation, connection, and education to facilitate a space of measurable change.

This is very strange.

It’s the standard end tag on lots of the emails I’ve gotten from Crystal Bridges staff. I attended an online press preview for a new show at Crystal Bridges last week. The very nice director of PR for the museum read this document before the meeting started. She didn’t make us all recite it, like a communal prayer. That would be too Rotarian.

It’s what’s called a Land Acknowledgement, and it’s a fad in Canada, Australia, and now here. I bristle at anything that’s a fad in Canada. I think it’s a rhetorical flourish since no one’s giving anything back, and Alice Walton knows that both she and her museum aren’t guests of anyone, and everyone else knows it, too.

If the good people at Crystal Bridges are “conscious of the role in colonization museums have played,” well, more power to them since that’s a mystery to almost everyone else. If these same good people explain that “decolonizing the museum” is a movement that means annihilating entrenched white supremacy in museums, which is what their BLM buds think it means, then I expect someone will ask, “Where, who, and when exactly?” A vague “somewhere out there” doesn’t mean anything. It’s gratuitous.

I tend to take what I read in a museum literally and seriously since I’m content-oriented and like precision, but that’s me. Many people probably look at this Land Acknowledgement, which is posted all over the museum, as a bit of fluff, like a prayer before a high-school football game. It’s a secular confession of wrongdoing and comes with no penance, so once it’s recited, we can all go off to the beach and have fun.

I don’t think it belongs where it is: an introduction to a great survey collection of American art that, by the way, has very little Native American art.

Does the Land Acknowledgement frame what visitors are about to see in the galleries? No. Does this statement challenge me to look at work by Copley, Cole, Eakins, Sargent, Hopper, or O’Keeffe differently? No. Does it provide context for anything I’m seeing? No. Does any of the art reference white supremacy? I’d say no. Someone at the museum might say “it all does,” in which case “how and why” must be, given how incendiary that judgment is, the foundation for the museum’s interpretation and arrangement of its art. This would, alas, make a visit to Crystal Bridges excruciating, like spending the day at the Spanish Inquisition. Does the art make the Osage, Choctaw, or Caddo people less invisible? No.

Why is it there, then? Clearly, the museum is flailing over how to present its collection. I don’t object to stating that Native Americans were treated horribly, though the topic is very complicated, but the Land Acknowledgement seems suited to a gallery where Native art and subjects are in sufficient numbers to make it meaningful. The problem is that the museums wants to fault old American art for a failure in diversity and inclusion, since that’s the trendy thing to do, but its collection is actually more egalitarian than it cares to admit.

After Ward’s sculpture (a passage of mediocrity) and the Land Acknowledgement (a passage of meaningless contrition), we finally get to the good stuff, and good it is. I love the bracing arrangement of portraits we see as we’ve finished with the blather. It’s inspired and inspiring. At about that moment, I heard my Mr. Ed whinny, “Let the art speak for itself.” Finally, a horse with horse sense.

And it does, and what it says is that American art, first and foremost, is remarkably egalitarian. It also says that if we’re looking for a storyline, the art tells it nicely on its own. There’s The Portrait of Richa Franks, from around 1735, attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck. It’s on its own, but it’s one of six three-quarter-length portraits of the rich, New York, colonial-era Franks family at the museum. The other five are in another gallery. I don’t think that there’s so big and so nice an intact set of pre-revolutionary portraits done by one artist anywhere else in the country. It’s a formal studio painting evoking the Franks family’s prominence and aristocratic sangfroid. And they’re Jews.

Then there’s a full-length diva portrait by Alfred Maurer from 1904 called “Jeanne.” It depicts the actress Jeanne Blazy mocking, the label tells us, elegant, dignified high-society full-length portraits of the Edwardian era. She hams it up in clothes Maurer pulled from his collection of costumes. Maurer shows her in mid-laugh holding a cigarette. She looks like Carol Burnett in costume for a skit. Americans are highly cultured. It’s just that the culture is lowbrow.

Next to it is a large 2018 black-and-white photograph of Terry Berry by Will Wilson. Berry is described in the title as “a citizen of the Cherokee Nation by blood and freedman descent.” He’s also a Walmart manager, which is missing from the title but nice to know. It’s a handsome portrait, and he’s proud of his heritage. He’s proud of his success, too. Susie Lee’s Johnny, from 2013, is a 30-minute video portrait of a North Dakota oil rigger. Alice Neel’s Portrait of Hugh Hurd, from 1964, is there. He was a black movie actor.

There’s a Peale portrait of George Washington from around 1780, and then there’s Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter, from 1943. This really isn’t a portrait, though I knew the model. She lived not far from my house in Arlington in Vermont, where Rockwell worked and lived. Mary Keefe’s mother was the telephone operator in town. She knew everyone’s comings and goings.

This group is a very strong beginning of the actual story of American art, and that’s not a story of racism, sexism, embracing our differences, oppression, or the Caddo people. If we are to give people some written guidance on American art, then it’s fair to start with egalitarianism. If Crystal Bridges is going to do something useful, it might want to tackle what’s American about American art.

Putting aside that lots of American art is derivative of French, English, German, and Dutch art, I’d say American art from the colonial period forward is, dare I say, diverse.

At Crystal Bridges, the Franks family starts the story. Jews in Europe were ghettoized and often terrorized. In America, they could become rich. Rockwell’s subjects were working-class and middle-class. Through The Saturday Evening Post, his images were disseminated in the millions. In no country is the media — whether news, entertainment, or scholarship — so ubiquitous and so freely available.

Lee’s and Wilson’s portraits are strong and dynamic. Johnny depicts an oil rig worker who, I hope, hasn’t been thrown out of work yet in the new Biden assault on energy independence. It’s a 30-minute, ultra-slow video, so it first feels like a conventional portrait, but it’s alive and hypnotic. I think the museum is committed to enhancing the visibility of Native Americans in all aspects of American life, and I’m all for that, and the portrait of Terry Berry is one small step. This movement has been underway for 50 years, though. The Wounded Knee standoff started it in the early 1970s. Anyone remember Sacheen Littlefeather?

There are many fumbles in the wall text. The labels in the Early American galleries often observe that this work of art or that doesn’t have any African Americans in it. In one gallery, a wall placard about Native Americans uses the term “a past that never was” in its introduction to a space called “The Myth of the Frontier.” Western scenes, it says, are “romanticized” or, worse, depicted in ways that are mythical.

Stating the obvious, if we take the myth out of art, we’re left with very little, if anything, in any country with a tradition of representation. If we scorn art that makes something look better or more appealing than it actually is, or was, we’ve set an impossible standard. If curators use words such as “myth” and “romanticize” in their interpretation, then they need to explain what “reality” was. What did the artist fudge? The term “nostalgia” invites a detour down a dead end. American taste is schmaltzy, yes, but at the end of the day, it’s the here and now, immediacy, and the “momentary” (to borrow the name of the new Walton contemporary art museum) that animate American art. It’s not for nothing that many American artists were once in the newspaper business. The raw material of the news, as an industry, is what’s happening now, and what’s changing minute-by-minute.

The George Bellows 1908 nocturne, Excavation at Night, is moody and raw, a visceral city scene with a paint surface as dynamic and rough as the subject. It’s in the Early American Art Galleries, as is Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter, because it has an Old Master look. Its short label sniffs that “while the project,” the construction of Penn Station, “led to faster, safer travel, the construction displaced thousands of poor and working-class families.”

Here we’re getting weepy. Is that the most meaningful message we are to take from this picture? It’s among the few paintings from this era, and this artist I’d describe as “awesome” and know that I’m using the word precisely. I would say, and I’m a sucker for Modernist nocturnes, that it’s the best painting at Crystal Bridges. Does the Bellows suffer from a touch of evil because he neglected to pack the picture with sobbing widows and orphans dragged from their beds?

That wasn’t his subject.

The label is a sloppy non sequitur at best but, at worst, a rotten tomato tossed at an artist whose sin is not painting in 1904 what a curator in 2021 wants him to paint. And wouldn’t it be more relevant, and consistent with the subject, to note that greedy developers demolished Penn Station in 1963 to build Madison Square Garden? It’s the biggest instance of aesthetic terrorism in America, and it triggered the historic-preservation movement.

Faulting American art from the 19th century for omitting themes or events we think are important today is a trap set for the art and our history-hubristic selves. If Crystal Bridges thinks subjects or themes are missing, I’d say that means the collection has gaps. In fact, as Western — meaning American and European — art goes, American art treats a broad cross-section of humanity and situations, hence, for instance, the name “Ashcan School.”

American art is egalitarian for many reasons. I’m happy to draw something meaningful from the Constitution, which Ward tries in grabbing a three-word slogan and fails. America was the first country in the Western world to prohibit an aristocracy. A section called “Networks and Power” laments that “not all groups” in America “were treated equally or accepted as insiders,” a state as universal in human history as the observation is inane. The museum doesn’t have the art that teases this out. As content goes, “War News from Mexico” has topics and meanings more profound than where the artist placed its two African-American subjects.

If Crystal Bridges wants to teach visitors what’s American about American art, it made a good start with its selection of portraits, though I would include one of its two Copley portraits from the 1760s. Copley is a touchstone for American art. He visually expressed America’s fixation of material, tangible reality. American landscapes and seascapes, driven by topographical accuracy, do the same thing.

On one level, this comes from our Puritan heritage. Every object, however modest, was thought to be endowed by God with a purpose. Its integrity was not to be disturbed. This is why Copley’s buttons and lace look hyper-real. It’s why abstraction does not come naturally to American artists. It disrupts and dismantles the form.

This brings us back to egalitarianism. The raw materials of much American art are land and sea, ubiquitous and accessible to everyone. There is very little religious painting, which reflects Protestant iconoclasm but also an honest and, some might suggest, unhealthy concern with the here and now. Religious painting is dogmatic and heavy on iconography. That rings false in a country where so much is up for grabs and where so many are freely grabby.

In America, there was no Academy like Paris’s that regulated preferred styles and subjects. Most art patrons were a generation or two removed from farms or the frontier. Aside from Holland, no Western country has a deeper tradition of scenes of everyday working-class life. The art-buying class in Europe thought people beyond and beneath their privileged circle were little more than beasts of burden. Crystal Bridges’ galleries are filled with paintings of everyday life and everyday people.

Later in the galleries, the curators present with disdain and despair a montage of mostly portraits, faulting the art and the artists that the curators themselves selected. “Almost all represented white subjects.” American artists were “biased to standards of beauty based on classical (white) models and there was little room for diversity in style or subject.”

I looked at the wall of paintings. I saw the fantastic Eakins portrait The Artist, the full-length Whistler showing a ragged, ratty Chelsea child, an Ammi Phillips primitive, two Sargents, a late, bizarre Bellows painting of a proper grand dame having tea next to a naked lady, a fantasy portrait by Maxfield Parrish, Dennis Bunker’s austere Victorian portrait of a woman, an Art Deco painting of a man by Lucioni called “Portrait of Bob,” a Cubist burlesque scene by Max Weber, and Andy Warhol’s portrait of Dolly Parton. And that’s no “diversity in style or subject?”

The Artist and another Eakins in the same space, The Portrait of Benjamin Rand, are two of his best portraits. Is this all the curators have to say about them? A nearby Sargent portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson relaxing at home is unusually intimate, more of a painted snapshot and the kind of clever, quick thing Sargent loved to do as opposed to flashy portraits of overdressed, self-indulgent aristocrats.

“There’s no room for diversity in style or subject.” How more reductive and trivial could interpretation be? Did anyone actually look at the art before writing about it? I can’t say the statement’s unfair to the art since the art’s an object, but how unfair to the viewer! And it’s quite a subterfuge for curators to pick the pictures they put on a wall, only to then complain about what’s there and what isn’t.

The question of invisibility is a perfectly valid one. That a munchkin at the museum can argue that there’s “little room for diversity in style and subject” is, in part, the fault of the museum for not acquiring it. Homer and Eastman Johnson did plenty of subjects we’d call “diverse” — a code for African-American subjects — and Johnson was the most curious and intrepid of artists. If the museum wants more old art that looks like America looked in the 19th century, it needs to acquire it.

It’s there. Johnson’s Kitchen at Mount Vernon sold at Christie’s in 2019 for $450,000, an unbelievable bargain for so good a painting. Why didn’t Crystal Bridges buy it? The Addison Gallery did a show of 18th- and 19th-century African-American portraits in 2005. I suggested last week that the museum take the long dive no one else has and mix Native American and Anglo American 19th-century art in one grand installation. They’ll need to borrow and buy, and it’ll take courage, but the opportunity’s there.

I’ve done many Salon Style hangs over the years and have always found the concept more attractive than the reality. “Salon Style” is the way European art fairs in Paris and London were arranged before, more or less, the 1920s. Paintings were hung densely, from chair rails to the ceiling, in palace-size galleries. The word “salon” could mean the event (a big art fair) or the crowd (artists, critics, buyers, and gawkers) or the overall look (abundance). Crystal Bridges does a modified Salon Style, displaying about 40 paintings in a tight corner space.

I like the startling effect, the look of extravagance, but, as a practical matter, the viewer can’t see what’s too far above eye level, and the density overwhelms the power to discern. I’d rethink it. The art’s too good. The paintings need to be seen as individual treasures. People today, and that includes me, don’t have an eye trained for that kind of agglomeration. In its day, Salon hangs served a far narrower audience of art types accustomed to looking at walls crammed with art.

There are many other odd moments in the museum’s interpretation. John Mix Stanley’s Buffalo Hunt, from 1855, is placed next to a group of decorated Native-American knife cases in a pairing called “In Conversation,” but what they have to say to each other is beyond me. A big wall panel on Pop Art discusses the movement’s celebration of prosperity and brash popular culture. This works with Tom Wesselman’s Smoker #9 on one side of it but not with Will Barnet’s Summer Night, as dour a picture as they come and depicting rural Maine steadfastness and austerity. Nearby is an Alex Katz cutout sculpture of a cow, which doesn’t work with the text introducing that gallery, either.

I love Karen LaMonte’s Dress Impression with Wrinkled Cowl, a large glass sculpture. The label states that it “addresses contemporary aesthetic and feminist concerns, including the complex relationship of fine art with craft and shifting perspectives on beauty.” This is a mouthful, but it says very little that a viewer who’s not a feminist art historian will find meaningful. There are many labels as cryptic as this. It’s a good example of why it’s best to let good art speak for itself. The life-size sculpture is placed against a wall. It’s best seen in the round.

It’s odd, too, that the PC mood of the gallery interpretation stops when the art hits around 1900. I’m relieved but have to note the double standard at work. Pop Art unfolded during a time of social, political, and economic turbulence in America — the civil-rights movement and the antiwar movement occurred in the 1960s and 70s — but their absence jarred even me, by that time in my visit conditioned to look for outsiders everywhere and to expect to find none. I saw great Color Field and Conceptual Art at Crystal Bridges. Curator-detectives don’t give them the diversity hot lights, either. Artists working in these styles and in Abstract Expressionism are silent on politics and economics, one reason corporate collections were so keen on them.

I think the museum was canny to present its 20th-century collection with a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe. She said, “Nothing is less real than realism,” as she tried to explain the merits of abstraction. “It’s only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get to the real meaning of things.”

Well said, and much can be extrapolated from that single statement. American art is minimalist, and I don’t only mean Minimalism, though the movement was born here. American art is essentialist, at times spartan, at times empirical, and usually concerned with the surface appearance of things.

I want to return to Nari Ward’s wall sculpture, which, you recall, I said was mediocre, not bad. What is American about this? It embraces throwaway culture. Unencumbered by rules, he uses shoelaces, not paint or pencil, to make what is essentially a headline. He draws from popular culture. “We the People” is a ubiquitous phrase, or slogan. He’s given us what looks like a commercial billboard. It’s both humble and, I suppose, grand. I’d ditch it, though, since the group of portraits is provocative enough. It’s big and flashy. I’d put it in the museum restaurant.

And I’d let Crystal Bridges’ wonderful collection commune with visitors freed from banal tidbits about artists, art-history jargon, and snarky asides. A big introductory panel on what’s American about American art would work. Section panels on portraits, landscapes, the American West, artists in Europe, work, industry, abstraction, and the art of today would be traditional — and boring — but visitors at least will learn something real.

Or do nothing but tombstone labels. And put some comfortable seating so visitors can take the time to contemplate Crystal Bridges’ trove of great art. Mr. Ed was a talking horse, but Trigger and Buttermilk won hearts by saying nothing.