Museums Turn Dumb After a Year of Lockdowns

Are virtue-signaling, virtual yoga, lightweight shows, and race-based hiring a success formula?

T he toll of a year’s COVID hysteria will unfold quickly and clearly, like 100,000 small businesses killed and our city centers empty. Or slowly and painfully, like tens of millions of children tossed from school, lagging in math and reading, depressed and neurotic. Or stealthily like $5 trillion in new debt. That’s more than the $4.1 trillion in current dollars the Congressional Research Office says the United States spent to beat the Nazis and the Japanese. Or daftly, like museums that no longer know how to function as museums. After a year, every theater, symphony, and opera and dance company are still closed. All to fight a virus that targets almost exclusively the very old, the critically ill, and the obese.

We jumped into the quicksand of lockdowns, masks, six-foot rules, and no-touch zones with little scientific evidence of their value and no thought to their cost and consequences. Still, after a year, debate of cost and consequences is verboten.

Here are examples from the last few days alone of life-on-the-daft-side, museum edition.

I got a mass email the other day from the Yale University Art Gallery asking me to give to its annual fund. I went to Yale and was a townie, which means it was from childhood my local museum. I love the museum. Since, for more than a year, there has been a big sign on its homepage and front door noting that the gallery is closed to the public until further notice, I can’t imagine why anyone would give.

It’s a disgrace that museums at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Smith — among the finest museums in America — are still closed to the public. The Met, MoMa, and almost every other New York museum opened months ago. This past weekend, they moved to 50 percent capacity. I don’t know how much the directors at academic museums pushed their presidents and provosts, who need to be educated on the simple fact that there are no known cases of coronavirus transmission in a museum setting. I suspect not much.

Our best colleges and universities are following crackpot science in keeping their museums shut. They’re also following their snootiest instincts. Is it that they never really loved the idea that the Great Undisinfected were looking at their art anyway.

The appeal came on Earth Day. “Care for community, art, and the environment is fundamental to the Yale University Art Gallery,” the appeal begins. Well, at least art’s still in the mix. If “community” is fundamental, the museum has failed. The gallery’s closed. Even Yale students are restricted in their use of the space. And it not just Yale. The last of the Lockdown Lovers are the Ivy Leagues and other highly selective schools, the federal bureaucracy, and big-city public-school teachers’ unions.

Isn’t Yale’s letter an odd, tone-deaf pitch, or is the new normal a virtual community? Is it that easy to forget the joy of seeing people enjoy great art?

During 20 years as a museum director and curator, I never considered the environment as “fundamental” to my work. I like breathing clean air and drinking clean water but occupied myself with exhibitions, fundraising, and scholarship and left the plumbing and air filtration to others.

The gallery uses “natural cleaning and maintenance materials,” the appeal reads, and has cut energy consumption by 25 percent. My cleaning lady uses those materials, too, but she’s not sending annual appeals. And about that 25 percent: That means you don’t need as much money!

The letter says the museum offers yoga in the galleries, except that the galleries are closed, so they’re offering virtual yoga. I like yoga. I’d never tout it to raise money for, in my opinion, in better days, the finest university art museum in the country. Oh, the scorn from the heavens spewed by the likes of history painter John Trumbull, who founded the gallery — volcanic and sulfuric, now that yoga beneath the Van Goghs and Manets is now its rallying cry. “Is this why we fought the American Revolution?” he bellows.

I learned in the appeal that the art gallery has saved 300 metric tons of carbon in the past five years. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest, most brazen, most dishonest polluter — that would be China — probably pumped 300 metric tons of carbon in the time it took me to type “dishonest,” “polluter,” and “China,” and I’m a fast typist. Okay, Yale’s letter says nothing about China, since that might be racist. I’m sure, though, that 300 metric tons a Shanghai second is about right.

Have people forgotten how to think?

Why, on Earth Day — which is a fake, pagan holiday anyway — would I find Yale’s art gallery an attractive place for my charitable dollars, as opposed to, say, Green Up Day in ye olde Arlington in Vermont, where I live? Then and there, high-school kids clean winter debris from lawns and gardens at our churches, library, two schools, and a hundred homes whose elderly owners can’t do it anymore. Green Up Days occur on May 1 in most small Vermont towns. Now, that’s worth supporting, not virtual yoga at a university with a $30 billion endowment.

The art gallery has been closed for a year, its staff “working from home.” Any new initiatives come from all that quiet time? Any new dissertations using the gallery’s collection? What are the exhibitions on the docket if and when the museum reopens? Any blockbuster acquisitions? Getting “new LED lights for one-third of the galleries” is nice, but I can’t think of a more niche achievement, and I can think of dozens more compelling to art lovers.

The Chinese coronavirus panic invited an escape from reality, and it seems that lots of brain cells among lots of people in museums have evaporated. Where’s the creativity? Where’s the big thinking I expect from Yale? Where’s the excitement? Where’s the hustle?

The art gallery doesn’t need the money, I know. Though its endowment is buried in Yale’s, it’s loaded. COVID is no romp in the park but it shouldn’t dull the animal spirits. A year in an unnatural, unprecedented, unhealthy, unproductive limbo does.

Next time, some better lines, please.

I’ve written a lot about the grotesque, needlessly extended museum lockdowns. It’s the biggest museum scandal in my lifetime and a factor in the staff rebellions that most big museums experienced last year and continue to face. Lockdowns are great for senior staffs. They get their big paychecks via direct deposit, Zoom in their slippers, garden, tan, and work on their soufflé technique. They dress from the waist up, Bermuda shorts and hula skirts, if that, from the waist down.

Younger and less empowered staff are frightened, isolated, and restless. When they see layoffs, they know they’re targets.

Explosions over racism, sexism, and the indifference and trifling of the higher-ups were bound to happen and did. Now, as staffers stream back to work, those who called their bosses bigots, scrooges, users, and intriguers and said it loudly, in print, and in endless tweets have to look them once again in the eye. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be all smiles, like This Is Your Life.

There’s something to the anger, because most museums underpay junior and support staff. I think sexism is a big problem in museums, mostly in pay and promotions for curators. All of this is inexcusable. That said, last year’s ugly name-calling and antics among the staff at the Guggenheim, the Getty, SFMoMA, the MFA, the National Gallery, and many other places showed that directors aren’t the only ones who can be flatulent bores.

Obviously, many on the staff at these and other museums aren’t that interested in art. They’re interested in themselves and in protesting, in which case they should go back to college and waste their parents’ money rather than their museums’. The failure of directors and trustees is in not tossing the loudmouths out. These are bottomless-pit people. They’ll never be happy. Staffers who publicly call their museums “racist” are chasing visitors and donors away. They need to get the deep six, as my long-ago, organized-crime friends would have proposed. These were not fuzzy-minded people. Earth Day meant burying whoever last got whacked.

When the COVID fantasy panic fizzles, and it’s fizzling now, going back to work won’t be like flipping the switch back to the old days. Watch for directors to let the work-from-home culture take root. Malcontents, the directors don’t want to see you, either, and after the last year, hate you as much as you hate them.

This is bound to create a dysfunctional, inefficient, uncreative culture. Art, learning, and visitors will suffer. This is on the directors, who allowed their institutions to be compromised for their convenience and, overall, on the creeps such as Fauci who fomented the COVID lockdown disaster and are still milking it for their self-aggrandizement.

It seems to me that museums are well into an institutional nervous breakdown.

Aside from the dumb annual appeal letter from Yale’s art gallery, there’s the race to raid the art vault for cash, about which I’ve spilled a word or two. Then there’s the weird collapse in quality control.

Over the last couple of weeks, I wrote about two shows — Mythmakers: Homer and Remington at the Amon Carter and Alice Neel: People Come First at the Met — that desperately needed an intervention. Both were muddles. The Neel show was a rehash of old scholarship with pop clichés like “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy” added as turd sprinkles. Mythmakers wasn’t a rehash. It was a nada-hash, specious, and lame.

Both had fantastic art in them, since the museums involved have great collections and can get any loans they want. They are, though, the museum kin of all those boring, forgettable superhero blockbusters. A dazzle here and there but no vision.

When an exhibition drifts off to La La Land, it’s the director or, in a big place, the chief curator who delivers the slap of firm art history. This isn’t new, this isn’t working, this needs an edit, and this makes no sense are messages that directors or chief curators have to convey sometimes. It’s not happening.

Much of the problem is a year of virtual work, which is like grazing. It’s hard to be truly engaged on-screen. I think I know at least one other reason why.

Speaking of La La Land, last week, Mia Locks, the curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, or LA MoCA, quit in a huff. It was in the art news. Locks was in charge of the museum’s IDEA program, which means its inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility initiative. When a cause gets an acronym, it means it’s eliding into a racket. The U.N. is an example of a dizzying, debauched racket with a shortcut tag.

“MOCA’s leadership is not ready to embrace IDEA,” Locks said. She’s been there for nearly two years trying to kindle a love match between a toxic fad and leadership that evidently doesn’t want to go along for the ride.

IDEA, to which I would add the prefixes BAD, AWFUL, and SYSTEMICALLY STUPID is seeping into museum culture, and people aren’t embracing it like a new chinchilla coat under the Christmas tree. Most museums slapped panegyrics to Black Lives Matter on their homepages last year, but now the staff are getting the bill for all that smug sloganeering.

Locks is one of the most talented curators of her generation. She has wasted two years of her career and made a disruptive exit that has hurt the museum, which is already known as an aesthetically pleasing train wreck.

IDEA is driven by two intertwined concepts. First, people are either oppressors or victims. Second, race explains everything. It’s comforting to know that not even Locks, an exceptionally smart and articulate curator, could sell this barrel of snakes at MoCA, although it’s a bleeding-edge art museum.

The only things about IDEA that aren’t shams and fads are fair pay for staff and a balanced, inquisitive exhibition-and-acquisitions program. Fair pay is an initiative that takes an hour to implement. The museum profession has detailed national and regional salary ranges for dozens of specific jobs. A good director simply applies these figures and raises salaries for those who are underpaid. This figure will be modest because out-of-whack pay mostly affects those who aren’t honchos.

If the curators, directors, and board don’t want a balanced, inquisitive exhibition-and-acquisitions program, I wouldn’t call them racist or elitist or sexist or patriarchal or excessively white. I’d call them incompetent, which is an entirely different and mundane state with a solution different from hiring more Outrage People.

Locks is by no means an Outrage Person, but two years is a long time. Did she push the anti-racist flimflam? That’s a regime of struggle sessions, forced confessions, endless training, high-priced consultants asking intrusive questions, dumbed-down shows, and the celebration of bad art.

If she did, no wonder she hit resistance. Socrates aside, people will emphatically resist a cup of poison when it’s handed to them.

I think Locks’s experience shows how disruptive IDEA is. The inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility scam will surely take the air out of everything. It means busybody HR people editing catalogues and labels. It means hiring people using quotas and excusing poor performance. It means vetting exhibition ideas using a victim-and-oppressor index. It means no one on the museum staff can say anything that might possibly make anyone on the staff feel unvalued.

These are almost entirely internal and of no interest to the public, yet when a museum’s staff is on a navel-gazing marathon, the public suffers, as does serious scholarship. Art takes a back seat as staff dynamics reign supreme.

But not all is lost, good, art-loving people out there. The Yale University Art Gallery will show you a mean tree pose, plank, downward-facing dog, and seated-forward fold.

Urdhva Dhanurasana, anyone? That’s when you contort so your head is upside down. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? After all, the whole world’s upside down these days.