Open the Museums! All of Them!

And solve budget woes by freezing (or reducing) the pay of the higher-ups, not by selling art for cash.

T he two biggest museum scandals in my lifetime started last year. They’re still unfolding, and they’re in plain sight. The first, and I’ve written about this over the year, is the American museum world’s quick addiction to lockdown leisure. Many museums kept the shut sign on their doors as long as they possibly could. “Sooo inconvenient,” museum lazies purred when asked why they weren’t serving the public. “Sooo convenient” to Zoom the day away from home, paychecks by direct deposit, feet up, sipping a cool beverage, the kind with a maraschino cherry and little umbrella bobbing on top.

The panic closed every museum, library, and performing-arts space in the country. Cultural institutions lost billions of dollars. They’ve lost audiences it took years to develop. The public has lost a year of its cultural heritage. Lots of museums are still closed, and it’s not surprising who they are. COVID is the ultimate excuse for not doing what you’re supposed to do.

The second, child of the first, is the scheme, led by the Met, of all places, to sell art to both balance museum budgets and pursue the diversity flimflam. It’s called progressive deaccessioning, but it’s really left-wing looting. “Sooo much easier,” directors coo, “than begging for money.”

They look at the art vaults, with all that art sitting there, gathering dust, and hear Willie Sutton whispering from the grave. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton said, “Because that’s where the money is.” Yes, directors think, eyeing the vaults again. That’s where the money is.

I don’t know why the term “progressive” has crept into the language as go-to lingo for what we all once called “left-wing” or “liberal,” both time-tested dirty words. There’s nothing forward-looking about “progressive.” It’s a retread of Woodrow Wilson’s cult of the expert, Eleanor Roosevelt’s cult of the do-gooder, and Lenin’s “do-what-I-say-or-I’ll-shoot-you” cult of inspired leadership. It’s not progress they’re after. It’s power. Forgive me if I pass on 2021 “progressivism.”

Back to art looters. If museums want to up pay for staffers they’ve exploited for years, I’m all for it, adding “Why so stingy for so long?” I paid people fairly when I was a director. Raising those salaries doesn’t cost a bundle, though. The big personnel expenses are on top.

The affluent are loaded these days. Raising salaries for guards, janitors, and secretaries is, in our social environment, a fundraising draw. Get out there, beacon lights of equity, and make the pitch. Or, pious progressives on high, freeze your own salaries for a few years and give your raises to people at the bottom. Horrifying, I know. “Progressives” rarely practice what they preach. Just don’t raid the art collection.

“Progressive deaccessioning.” What a hoax. It’s all about grabbing cash. Museums can already deaccession old art to buy new art. Overall, it’s unwise to sell the old stuff. We’re all products of the current culture. What’s out of fashion now will have its moment in the sun, some day.

Most sell to buy anyway. It’s a practice that raises tens of millions of dollars each year. The auction houses love it. “Progressives deaccessioning” is music to their ears, with “ka-ching” a lyric that lingers.

MoMA wants to sell low-end art to endow programs. It’s probably got a lot, as do most museums. The stuff on the remainder table doesn’t make much money, though. Once that’s evident, paws will inexorably fondle the high-value goods. That’s human nature. “Isn’t this pretty?” directors will wax. “Get Christie’s on the horn,” they’ll then growl at the low-paid lackey holding their ermine mantle.

If museums must sell to buy, here’s the dirty secret. Lots of the art they want to buy and should buy is inexpensive if a museum buys right. I’m all for adding art by black, Hispanic, Native American, and female artists. Many have been overlooked. For a museum that has overlooked them, the way to get value for money is straightforward as well as gratifying. Buy the work of young artists. It’s cheap, supports careers at a critical time, and tests the curatorial eye.

I had $150,000 a year to spend on art and acquired wonderful art by artists all over the racial and gender lot. The crying-poor Met has $50 million a year, and many museums have a million. Acquisitions endowments were once fashionable. In spending my few sous, I focused on young, undiscovered, off-the-beaten-track artists too outré for the high-tone, white-shoe world. I worked for a high school. Oddball art had cachet. The job for curators is to find the next Mark Bradford and the next Kara Walker. That takes work, and it’s risky. Not every museum needs a $5 million painting by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656), a good but not great artist.

If museums are truly passionate about diversity, what about “progressive layoffs”? They’d have to find a sexier name, though, or a name that obfuscates.

“Freedom Finders,” say. “Gee, sorry, still-alive white man,” the social-justice director might say. “We’re letting you go, or, um, we’re liberating you to explore new opportunities.” Reconfigure the job description and make a hire that helps to achieve the secret quotas many museums are developing. That’s one way to get the desirable racial balance. Abhorrent? Of course. Just don’t raid the art vault to create equity, inclusion, and diversity positions you don’t need, which is what will happen, too. The new museum IDEA rage — creating big, new bureaucracies for “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility” — is a multimillion-dollar industry.

It’s a scandal that the Met’s director, Max Hollein, wants to reboot the 21st-century museum director into the next Bonnie or the new Clyde. The Met, with a $3 billion endowment and the biggest donor base of any not-for-profit in world history, doesn’t need to sell art to balance its budget. The Met needs to lead by example, yes, but not in the craft of stick-ups and safe cracking. Lead by example in probity and restraint. If its budget isn’t balanced, get pruning shears.

Most museums are open now as the coronavirus crisis recedes. Tinny and fey are calls to triple-mask, the umpteenth warning that “the next three weeks are critical,” new strains found under every rock, and perky new slogans like “we can do this.” Many museums were closed for months through government edict. Of course, there’s been no documented case of Chinese coronavirus transmission in a museum, but public-health second-raters, panic pimps, and control freaks kept the doors shut anyway. Texas museums opened first, in late May. Nobody died.

The museum world’s two professional associations — the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors — were shamefully silent. There was no big lobbying push, and no effort to educate politicians and public-health zilches that museums aren’t the same as bowling alleys, bars, and pool halls. I’m impressed and heartened that museums in Texas, North Carolina, and, I suspect, other states as well as individual museums such as Mass MoCA made the case on their own.

Museums have HVAC systems creating the purest air in any public building, anywhere. Museums can easily establish time-and-number-limited ticketing.

Guards at museums are already trained in crowd control. They know how to keep people from getting too close to the art.

Though the six-feet social-distance rule has no basis in science and is entirely a Fauci fantasy, guards can enforce that, too. With abundant hand-sanitizing stations and a mask requirement, there’s absolutely no public-safety reason for a museum to stay closed.

If museums hadn’t shut for so long, they wouldn’t have so many budget problems. If they’d downsized staff to reflect the work actually happening in a museum closed to the public for months, they wouldn’t have so many budget problems.

The museums that remain closed are — don’t let your jaws drop to the floor — museums owned by the federal government and museums belonging to elite colleges and universities. The Smithsonian museums, some of the best in the world, still have the Keep Out signs on their doors. Tourism in Washington has dwindled to nothing, and it’s not only because of COVID. With thousands of troops, expected to stay for months, the neighborhood around the Mall isn’t exactly inviting. Average people sense that most of the pols and paper-pushing lifers in those big buildings and under that big dome fear if not despise them.

Last year, I wrote about the ethos of public-employee teachers’ unions oozing into the museum culture. In ye olde Arlington in Vermont, where I live, schools opened for in-person learning in September. We have conscientious, reasonable teachers. So do many other places. Big-city teachers’ unions, though, don’t want teachers to work. Museums, in keeping the public out, are taking their cues from unionized teachers keeping kids out of school.

If the Smithsonian and the National Gallery unions don’t want to go to work, the management needs to make that known. Teachers’ unions seem to think they decide when schools open. Schools don’t exist to coddle unionized teachers. Museums don’t exist to service the conveniences of the staff.

If museums can open safely in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and every other American city, they can open safely in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian and National Gallery serve the public and operate with public money. They exist to be open to the public. Their collections are meant to be seen. They’re not private clubs, and they’re not high-end storage units. I asked the communications director of the Smithsonian why its museums are still closed. “We’re just being cautious,” she said. I know Washington is a bubble, but a gilded bubble?

The Smithsonian museums and the National Gallery have a worldwide audience but a local one, too. Over 700,000 people live in D.C. Multiples of that live in the suburbs. These museums belong to them. New York’s museums have been open for months. Why isn’t the Cooper-Hewitt open? Though located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it’s a Smithsonian museum — and an important New York institution as far as almost everyone is concerned.

I admire Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian, and Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery. They run fantastic museums. It’s time we get back to normal. They’re national, rightly esteemed leaders and shouldn’t be bringing up the rear.

When I was in San Francisco, I asked the communications director of the city’s museum system why the de Young was open while the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the city’s European art museum, wasn’t. “Oh, they’re seeing how the crowd-control system at the de Young works first.” Excuse me, but the Legion of Honor has been closed for a year. It took less time to design, produce, and distribute the COVID vaccines.

There’s no reason for presidential libraries to be shut, either. Federally owned and operated museums and libraries honoring Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, and Clinton have kept the public as well as most scholars out for a year. These are located throughout the country. Why should neurotics and lazies at the Interior Department in Washington impose their COVID phobias on Austin, Kansas City, Dallas, Grand Rapids, and Little Rock?

Yale’s art gallery and the British Art Center are university-owned but serve the New Haven area’s half-million people. They’ve been shut for a year. The Fogg Museum at Harvard has been closed to the public for a year, but everyone knows the university doesn’t give a hoot about people in Cambridge. The RISD Museum, the art museum for Providence and its suburbs, nailed the Keep Out to its front door more than a year ago.

The superb, prestigious Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University opened last summer. It’s one of the few university museums to take its public mission seriously.

The Hood, the museum serving Dartmouth but also the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont, has been closed for a year. The Smith College museum is shut. It tells the public to read a website page called “Smith’s Culture of Care,” more aptly called “Smith’s Culture of Not Giving a Mound of Turdettes about the Public.”

Doesn’t Smith already have a twisted, hostile town–gown relationship with Northampton? The school’s deans of the PC cult are quick to tag as racist poorly paid locals working for the college, I know, but at least let the riffraff look at some art. Williams, where I went to school, is also keeping its nice little museum closed to the public.

All of these schools pay no property taxes and no federal and state income taxes. The tax subsidy is incalculable but enormous. Everyone’s taxes are a little higher because of the subsidies. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Smith, and most other colleges and universities often own sweeps of high-quality land in the center of town, tax-free. Yale owns much of impoverished New Haven’s downtown. In many cases, these museums are the only benefit the townies can enjoy. There’s absolutely no reason to keep the public out except contempt and, at best, navel-gazing indifference, and, of course, habit. Yale has had a long history of walling off the locals.

Colleges and universities have established COVID police states. A young, healthy person has a greater chance of dying squashed by a meteor than from COVID. The administrators love it. For the past year, they’ve had students under their collective thumb. Aside from BLM protests, which are COVID-proof, apparently, students can’t wander, rollick, walk on the grass, or score points in sports. Reunions are off-limits, so the legions of high-paid bureaucrats don’t have to schmooze alumni, whom they consider yahoos and, worse, dirtied by private-sector money.

For the deans, deanlets, cup-bearer deans, deans of the horse, deans of the stool, and deans-in-waiting, there’s one downside. Students aren’t partying, and they aren’t hooking up. The sex snoops who handle on-campus sex-crime claims, many of whom are high-paid prudes, lifelong wallflowers, and voyeurs, well, they’re having a business depression. Things at Kangaroo Court aren’t hoppin’.

Grabby museum directors might be channeling John Dillinger, but Washington and the universities seem to have Marie Antoinette on their Ouija board’s speed dial. “Let them eat cake” can easily translate into “if you don’t like webinars, too bad.”

People deserve to see art in the flesh. The COVID Era is ending. Washington and the universities are sitting on mountains of art. Elmo, the Hope Diamond, the Spirit of Saint Louis, and Lincoln’s top hat sit unadored, dusty, and lonely. Opening the doors to the public is long overdue.

And museums don’t need to sell art to pay the bills. The rich are richer than ever. Raising money is near the top of a director’s and a trustee’s job description. Museums that show they care about the public will attract generous donors. Museums that stay shut or obsess over internal staff grievances and grudges won’t. If people think a museum can raise money by selling art, they’ll send their philanthropy elsewhere, either in protest or in a realistic appraisal that museums really don’t need them.

*****

On an entirely different matter, a reader of last week’s story on the Frida Kahlo show responded with a scholarly gem. I’d written about Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky while he and his wife were hiding at the home of Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera. Kahlo was a hardcore Communist. Trotsky later learned the sharp-and-pointy way, via an ice axe in the back, the extremes to which Moscow “progressives” would go to settle scores.

My scholar-reader, an authority on the Mexican muralists, years ago discovered correspondence between Nelson Rockefeller and Rivera surrounding Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, Man, Controller of the Universe. Painted in 1934, it was a magisterial thing with one big boil, and a Red one at that: Rivera included a portrait of Lenin. Rockefeller demanded its removal. He and Rivera went back and forth. Rivera offered to add a portrait of Lincoln, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe but wouldn’t paint Lenin out. The impasse led to the mural’s destruction before it was finished.

Kahlo evidently told Rivera she would leave him if he removed Lenin.

Rivera believed that the donnybrook destroyed his American career. After multiple infidelities by husband and wife, they divorced in 1939, though they later remarried. Rivera told Rockefeller later that Kahlo’s intransigence and revilement over the Lenin cameo poisoned the well.