Cancel Culture Tries a Hit ’n’ Run at a Detroit Museum Director

Anonymous charges of racism, sexism, and El Greco abuse

S omething stinks in the Motor City, and it’s not diesel fumes. Museum trustees love good news, but bad news? No one except a flagellant likes bad news, and trustees aren’t known for self-mortification with whips, chains, and tail pipes. Finger pointing? That’s a well-known trustee ritual, along with the chant “blame the director,” as trustees up the volume on the eight-track and drag out of town to an undisclosed location.

I don’t know what to make of what’s happening at the distinguished Detroit Institute of Art (DIA). Its director is in hot water. I have followed the story and still don’t know whether it’s farce, catharsis, or kabuki theater. I know that if I were a director, I’d be terrified over what’s happened there. Do trustees prefer their directors paralyzed by fear?

Salvador Salort-Pons is the director of the DIA, one of the country’s best museums. I don’t know him. He’s been the director since 2015, and before that he was a paintings curator there. He’s an accomplished scholar specializing in Spanish Old Masters. He’s from Spain, and he’s worked in America for about 15 years. He seems personable and a persuasive leader. Last year, he led the charge in persuading Detroit’s suburban counties to pay increased taxes to fund the museum. At 50, he’s neither young nor old but never ran anything before he was hired as director.

Salort-Pons is the latest director hit by charges of racism, sexism, and workplace toxicity. An open, anonymous letter purported to be from current and former staff propelled a furor. These letters are now a staple in museum life in America. Many sound the same and almost all demand the director’s firing. Sometimes they gather signatures online, augmenting the feel of a drive-by shooting. Sometimes they have the ring of truth. They uncover festering issues that need to be addressed and, over the past year, have led to resignations, firings, and worthy reforms, such as paying people fairly.

The DIA’s drama started last year. Salort-Pons’s father-in-law made a loan to the museum of a painting by El Greco that he owned. That’s a nice thing to have and a generous thing to do. Someone on the staff complained, anonymously, of course, charging that the loan was a conflict of interest since displaying it at the museum might boost its value. At the time, I thought this complaint was kvetchy and dumb. I still do. A good El Greco, and this is a good one, doesn’t need 15 minutes of fame in Detroit. It rests on ample laurels. Salort-Pons, I thought, has a skunk in his neighborhood.

This staff complaint was pushed by a D.C. nonprofit called Whistleblower Aid. It’s led by John Tye, a compelling figure and himself once a whistle-blower involved in the State Department’s handling of the Snowden document dump, and Mark Zaid, who represented the little sleazeball hack from the CIA who leaked notes from a Trump phone call with the president of Ukraine, leading to silly-season impeachment.

Whistleblower Aid, as far as I can tell, focuses on federal government mischief. I have no idea why it got involved with an El Greco loan to the DIA, and I’m curious about it. It seems too random. “We love El Greco and hate seeing him used and abused” won’t do. Isn’t there enough skullduggery in Washington?

This was only the beginning. Last summer, an open, anonymous letter to the board from a group called DIA Staff Action charged the director with racism, sex discrimination, retaliation, bad communication, and ruling autocratically. Charges flew as fast and as many as cars at Le Mans.

Some are ridiculous. A “digital experiences specialist” at the museum quit because Salort-Pons wouldn’t slap a panegyric to Black Lives Matter on the museum homepage. Good for him. It’s a multimillion-dollar business pimping outrage and anger. It dabbles in anti-Semitism, and no one knows how it’s spending the tens of millions of dollars it’s gotten in corporate protection money.

This staffer, who went to the New York Times, also wanted the label for Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching to deal with sexual assault, since the subject is Gauguin’s 13-year-old “wife.” The staffer got her picture in the paper.

I don’t like discursive labels and know next to nothing about Gauguin’s Tahitian concubines. That said, if a “digital experiences specialist” wants to quit over something like this, which is none of her business, I’d say, “Farewell, au revoir, auf wiedersehen, adieu, and don’t let the door smack your back bumper.”

The letter demands a pay raise for staff. Signers demand (as have Detroit’s public-school teachers’ union) endless COVID precautions, plus hazard pay. During the lockdown calamity, no one at the museum was furloughed. The DIA is in good shape financially. Its pension system is Cadillac-standard. It’s fully funded, and, yes, staffers get pensions! Aren’t people there grateful?

Some gripes have substance. Salort-Pons made high-level hires without searches. Not good. A morale survey in 2018 showed drops, not plummets, across the board. He isn’t a good communicator. His priorities are unclear to staffers, though they seem clear to me. He “doesn’t have a facility with race.” He retaliates against staffers who disagree with him, not by firing them but by cutting them from decision-making.

The trustees launched an investigation, hiring Crowell & Moring, a big Washington law firm with an employment-law practice. I don’t know why they didn’t hire a Detroit firm. A couple of weeks ago, the lawyers finished their report and briefed the trustees of its findings via a Zoom board meeting. Someone surreptitiously taped the lawyers’ presentation and sent it to Metro Times, a Detroit newspaper, which published it.

I listened to the tape. First of all, it’s horribly bad judgment on the part of the board chairman, Eugene Gargaro, and the outside lawyers to air this report, a personnel matter, at a forum open not only to current board members but past members and honorary members who don’t have fiduciary responsibility. The pool of people eligible to attend is 130. I don’t know how many actually came, but the crowd was big enough for the chair to exclaim, “So many faces I haven’t seen in a while!” The board has an HR committee and an executive committee. Personnel discussions belong there.

Gargaro told the crowd not to take notes. In an era where everyone has a camera and recorder in their iPhones, this is a directive only old Henry Ford would be so antediluvian to make. If you expect 20 or 30 or 130 people to keep something confidential, you’re foolish indeed. That doesn’t make the leaker any less of a rat, and a big rat, joining the skunk who cried about El Greco and the whiner who doesn’t like Gauguin. If the leaker is a trustee, he or she has violated fiduciary duties.

The lawyers interviewed 14 current and six former staff members. My sense is that, being a big, white-shoe, expensive firm, they felt they couldn’t come back with nothing. They’re paid a bundle to pick nits.

This seems to me to be a story of trustee overkill and mean-spiritedness on the part of self-involved, bitchy staffers. On the trustees, loyalty is a two-way street. Yes, the relationship between board and director sometimes gets too cozy, with mischief ignored. It’s one of employer and employee, and the board needs to enforce proper standards. Directors still need to feel their trustees won’t sandbag them, as the DIA board seems to have done. In the face of sensitive charges over race and sexism directed at Salort-Pons, the board seems inordinately concerned with how it looks.

Gargaro, by the way, is a heroic figure in the museum world. I’m surprised he flubbed on dealing with these issues. From 1919 to 2014, the DIA was owned by the city government in Detroit. The museum managed to stay above the fetid quagmire until Detroit’s bankruptcy, when its multibillion-dollar collection loomed, fat, succulent, and supine, as an asset.

Gargaro was the board chair. He and Graham Beal, then the director, achieved the extraordinary. They marshaled a coalition from suburbs and foundations to pry the museum from city ownership. It’s now a private museum serving not only Detroit but the counties surrounding it. Gargaro clearly has titanic leadership skills.

Salort-Pons is Spanish, isn’t from Detroit, and is a curator, not a community organizer, so it’s likely he doesn’t have a precisely calibrated “facility with race.” Detroit’s race issues date to the 1930s. After nearly 100 years, there’s a specific and complex culture, language, and MO surrounding race.

He was said to demand the hiring of unqualified individuals because they were women or African Americans. This is illegal. That said, hiring less qualified individuals because of gender and race is legal and widely practiced in the public and business sectors and in private education. This is now the case in museums. Most museums, I hear, are developing stealth quota systems driven by reduced standards. Over time, will this make for more or less workplace toxicity? Team building means all are pulling their weight.

One staffer, an assistant curator, was hired at Salort-Pons’s insistence, though, the lawyers say, those involved in the hire agreed that she was unqualified. It was a racial hire. She floundered and quit, citing “tokenism.” Salort-Pons says he erred in “not giving her enough support.” Her drama is part of the string of anonymous charges and calls for the director’s flattening by a minivan.

The DIA has hundreds of employees. The director’s job is immense. While quality control of the curatorial program is essential work for the director, tracking an assistant curator’s progress isn’t. She had a supervisor and colleagues, and I suspect that her supervisor had a supervisor. The DIA also has an HR department.

I wonder whether the high-priced lawyers dove deeply into her hiring and performance. I was neither impressed nor unimpressed with them overall. I hope the DIA didn’t pay them a D.C.-size fee.

Since Salort-Pons became the director in 2016, the lawyers tell us that women have left DIA employment at a higher rate than men. They should have looked at statistics for the four years before 2016. The director doesn’t create a culture from scratch. The investigators found “one or more instances of women who are paid less than men for comparable work.” Is it one or two or 20? Given the investigators’ odd language, it might be only one.

The biggest flight was in Salort-Pons’s first year. That’s to be expected. His predecessor, Graham Beal, whom I do know and like, was director for 16 years. He hired Salort-Pons as a curator, but house cleanings happen.

Beal’s approach to gallery interpretation is touchy-feely, with labels aiming to be inclusive. Galleries were arranged evocatively, say some — with a Disney touch, say others. Salort-Pons is European. Serious curators in Europe don’t do Disney, and they don’t aim for the lowest common denominator. Some staff didn’t like the new director’s modest adjustments to Beal’s strategy. Too bad. He’s the director. If they’re not happy, there’s always the exit ramp.

We know that only one former employee claimed she was punished for disagreeing and left without a job. Of the six former employees interviewed, some left for better jobs. Other than that, complaints about retaliation were “generalized.” Evidently there’s been a great deal of chatter by former employees on social media. None agreed to be interviewed.

Did the investigators look at evaluations done by Salort-Pons of staff reporting to him? When I supervised people, I did extensive written evaluations, including yearly goals, to give staff praise, direction, and ways to do better but also to establish a record of my oversight and mentorship. I’ve supervised battle axes and many others, most good, some lemons, but each very different, many lifers, and a good many eccentrics. I think the lawyers would have gleaned much on the director’s communication and team-building skills there. I bet they didn’t look.

And why isn’t there a museum director from another institution on the DIA board? An experienced outsider, serving on the board, can nicely suggest to an enthusiastic, outside-the-box trustee that his or her ideas aren’t realistic, might be clunkers, and might even be of Spruce Goose insanity. An outside director could have conveyed to the board that it might be permanently hobbling its director.

I admire whistle-blowers and am more than open to suggestions that emperors have no clothes. Bunglers, creeps, brutes, and frauds in high places abound. That said, “my director doesn’t listen to me” isn’t a brave blast of truth in the face of theft or treachery. It’s whining. It could also mean “my director won’t do what I want,” which is a different matter altogether. That’s an ego trip or, worse, a lack of respect and deference on the part of a subordinate. The director needs to do what he or she thinks is right, not what the staff wants.

“He’s a bad communicator” can very well suggest “I hear only what I want to hear.” “I don’t feel valued” is known to be a synonym for “I’m needy” or “I come to work unhappy.” I think the high-priced lawyers took a lot of what they heard at face value.

The recording is 35 minutes long and ends in midsentence. The leaker sent the tape to the newspaper with a note stating that “the findings are extremely negative concerning the management style of the director” and that the board chair “isn’t making the hard decisions in the best interests of the institution.”

The leaker’s goal is clear. I think the abrupt cutoff suggests that what happened after the first 35 minutes was positive for Salort-Pons. Or the tape recorder might have been like an old, pre-Ford Jag and simply broke.

I wonder if the board realizes how much they’ve undermined their director by siccing high-priced Washington lawyers on him? Nationwide, these anonymous letters citing racism, sexism, and “toxic work environments” are as many as cars on a dealer’s lot on the first day of spring, and there’s a sameness to them, too. These open letters seem to come from assembly lines. Directors everywhere are petrified that they’re going to face the same inquisition that Salort-Pons has.

These letters make general claims that are actionable under federal and state law, yet we very rarely see formal legal complaints. We see anonymous charges on social media and in open letters. Such charges can be smoke pointing to fire. Or they can be character assassination. If staffers think a law was broken, they’ve got ample legal venues for redress.

I read a one-page précis of the museum’s new strategic plan, which is what I found on the museum website. Its mission is to be “the town square of our community, a gathering place for all,” which is crazy, and it’s part of Salort-Pons’s problem. That’s the mission of a big museum? What about art, education, and scholarship? Why did they get tossed out the Cadillac’s window?

If a museum puts itself out as a civic center, it’s going to be judged in the same way people judge their civic leaders. People will judge its director not as a scholar but as a politician. At one all-staff meeting two years ago, according to one of the many complaints about the director, a staffer asked him “to elaborate about his idea that the museum should be like a town hall.”

Salort-Pons is said to have “rolled his eyes,” and, yes, that’s condescending. He’s Spanish. I don’t think I ever brazenly rolled my eyes in the workplace and, goodness knows, I’ve heard a million dumb things, but that staffer’s question was reasonable. Where’s the human kindness, though? Salort-Pons, like every director, has a huge job. He works 24 hours a day. Leaders err.

The vice-chair of the board of trustees will serve as “board-employee relations liaison.” Unhappy staff can call her. I wonder how long it’ll take before she’s sick of wasting her time listening to crackpots.

Salort-Pons will stay, sent back to Driver’s Ed. I assume he’ll be tethered to a high-priced management consultant for the next few months. Easily offended and misfit staff smell blood. The DIA is doing a multimillion-dollar endowment campaign. Has any of this helped that cause? The DIA is top of the line, the Rolls-Royce of museums. Does it really want to junk its director?