The Whitney Museum’s Lessons, Good and Bad

With new curators, next year’s Biennial has nowhere to go but up.

I had a good visit to the Whitney last week. It’s a fantastic place. In my opinion, one of the happiest art stories in the past 20 or so years is the Whitney’s now-six-year-old building and the museum’s move from the Upper East Side to what formerly was, in my memory, a dodgy, scuzzy waterfront and, before that, the home of the city’s meatpacking industry. No esplanades of hyacinths and gloved doormen there.

Walking through the Julie Mehretu show, occupying the entire fifth floor, and the smaller Dawoud Bey show, I pinch myself. The galleries are elegant and gracious. I love being there. This state of being doesn’t happen by kismet alone.

Before this move, the best word to describe the Whitney was “fraught.” It’s a New York arts organization, so that means plenty of kvetch and neurotics but, beyond that, it tried for years to make the Breuer building on Madison Avenue work. Additions were proposed and then were nixed. Directors and trustees were never in sync.

Finally, the stars aligned. Breaking the cycle of hope, angst, and failure was Adam Weinberg, who became the Whitney’s director in 2003. At the Whitney, Weinberg, working with the very rich trustee Leonard Lauder, envisioned and engineered both the move downtown and a new, classy building that functions as hoped. Given the Whitney’s history, that’s a miracle. Lauder was frustrated and impatient after so many false starts, for which the Whitney was so renowned that it seemed both snakebit and doomed. Weinberg’s steady, generous leadership, good taste, and capacity to listen and learn were, however, the not-so-secret sauce.

I’ve thought of Weinberg often during this terrible year. Arts organizations seem in the middle of a nervous breakdown over charges of racism, sexism, and hierarchy run amok. It’s toxic, sad, and unedifying. At the Whitney, the staff complains too much about layoffs, but, hey, the economy collapsed and the museum was closed and without admission income for months. Unlike the government in Washington, it can’t print money.

I saw Weinberg in action when he dealt with staff problems at the Whitney having nothing to do with the building. When Weinberg went to the Whitney in 2003, he inherited an internal culture of backbiting, bullying, and cliques. The Whitney was well known for mean-spiritedness. The visitor-services staff was stealing from the till. Every decision turned into a knife fight. Loonies went unsupervised and uncorrected.

Weinberg had a simple, clear message to the staff: “Knock it off.” It worked. He changed the culture at the Whitney, partially through example, since Weinberg is a natural gentleman, but mostly through lowering the boom on bad behavior. Now, I know this happened at a time when directors ruled like kings. These days, they cower in fear — fear of staff misfits and loudmouths and fear of trustees who won’t back them. These days, when charges of unfair pay and promotions, racism, favoritism, and exploitation take the air out of everything, directors and trustees scramble to assemble a phalanx of equity, inclusion, and diversity bureaucrats.

This high-paid ilk, part HR director, part busybody, part curator wannabe, thrive on injustice as a business model. Its quiver includes quotas, expectation tiers based on race, and purging curatorial content of anything that gives offense. When it comes to a culture of low pay and cronyism and other systems of haves and have-nots, am I too naïve in suggesting that directors should own the mess, start with a tried-and-true “knock it off” strategy, and skip the bureaucrats who don’t truly want outrage and resentment to go away?

Is the Whitney too big to achieve fair pay and treatment without a new bureaucracy? I don’t think so. It’s not the Met. Midsize museums such as the Clark in Williamstown, Mass., the Toledo in Ohio, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., have 100 or so employees, depending on whether or not the guards are outsourced. A no-tolerance policy for unfair pay, snooty curators, privilege, and bad mentorship is possible in most places if the director means it and makes it his or her personal priority. The director, his office, and the regular HR office are enforcers. Setting up new offices and staffs devoted to “belonging” seems like sloughing off an unpleasant task the director really doesn’t want to undertake. It’s inviting higher costs and a new kind of mischief on the part of people trained to see racism everywhere.

When I was at the Whitney, I chatted with young staffers about the Julie Mehretu and Dawoud Bey shows, getting back to work, the very hot weather, and, as it turned out, the new Whitney staff union, a UAW affiliate. I asked one staffer, clearly not astrophysicist material but good at her job, what the union dues would be.

“Dues? . . . What dues?”

I was chirpy, having found a storyline and, double treat, a means to subvert. “You know, the 2 percent or 3 percent the union withholds from your paycheck every month to pay for union business.” That was news to her, judging from looks of surprise and, then, befuddlement as she instantly tried to do what, for her, seemed hard math.

I haven’t, obviously, learned yet how clueless young adults are. They’re easy pickings. I’m sure the question of dues was made plain to her. It got lost in the chorus of pixies singing “We Shall Overcome.”

Whitney staffers think a union will get them raises and promotions. I’m not sure. They don’t expect the first thing employers do when staffs unionize — outsource every union job they can to outside contractors.

When the union movement erupted in May, the Whitney caved instantly and recognized the union without a staff vote. I wrote a few weeks ago that this was a mistake and an injustice. Though it seems a foregone conclusion that the staff will unionize — it’s New York, and that’s now the thing to do — the hardy breed that doesn’t want to surrender workplace freedom to a union should have the right to vote no. I suspect that will be 25 percent of the staff. Even at the MFA in Boston, at the peak of the George Floyd protests and union fervor, 15 percent of the staff voted no, and that’s at a place with good reasons to despise management.

That skepticism about the labor–management opera, instead, is going ignored. Workers won’t have the right to vote on how they want their work life organized and managed. The Whitney is trying to pry curators and others with creative autonomy from the unionized pool, claiming that these workers don’t belong in a union because of their on-the-job decision-making discretion. I think that’s a good idea but combined with a force-the-vote move. Accountability for the union’s birth is now muddled.

Last week, I had a mixed report on the Julie Mehretu exhibition at the Whitney. I’ve thought about it more after an art-historian friend called me to agree with me. It’s always nice to have agreeable friends. She said she saw Mehretu at the opening of the Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim last year. Mehretu, she said, seemed lost and dazed among an army of cooing sycophants and flunkies, cohorts, I’m happy to say, that don’t surround me when I go, say, to the firemen’s carnival in ye olde Arlington in rural Vermont.

These cohorts are the ones who drink in — as though it’s all nectar from the gods — references to the Ferguson riot, migrant children in cages, decolonization, patriarchy, imperialism, Occupy Wall Street, and the proposition that the weather, of all things, on our 4-billion-year-old planet can and will somehow change if we drive electric cars and abandon plastic bags. Mehretu should pass on predictable pablum. Her art’s too good to be pinned down and too good to be sullied by pop trends.

I think Mehretu should listen less to what the chattering class and clapping seals say and follow her own vision. “She’s spent too much time in Berlin,” my friend added. I know next to nothing about contemporary German art, but my natural Yankee skepticism tells me it’s a thing that warps the soul.

In 2019, I wrote a couple of stories about the Whitney Biennial. They’re always a mixed bag and often awful, but 2019’s seemed worse than usual, even bizarre.

It was in the middle of the staff’s rebellion over, again, of all things, a Whitney trustee’s business dealings. The trustee, Warren Kanders, owned a business that sold tear gas to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department, which used it to disperse crowds trying to cross the U.S. border illegally. Who’s a trustee is none of the staff’s business, of course, but why bother with a triviality like that?

As tensions rose, Weinberg, in a case of uniquely atrocious judgment, allowed Biennial curators to include a space in the Biennial to dissect Kanders’s business dealings with those policing our border as well as the Israeli army’s work to keep Palestinian terrorists from blowing up school buses and cafés in Israel. Trying to diffuse staff anger by humiliating a trustee, Weinberg only inflamed it. Kanders, a $10 million donor, eventually quit. In botching this, the Whitney’s leaders emboldened the chronically unhappy on museum staffs throughout New York. The Kanders mess was the prelude to the 2020 uprisings in museums across the country.

Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta curated the 2019 Biennial. The Biennial is supposed to measure the state of American art. I felt at the time that they brought a blinkered, warped Manhattan sensibility to the project. That’s why the show seemed so narrow, predictable, and boring. I wondered whether they had the experience and maturity to see value in art that doesn’t treat the topics regularly on the front page of the New York Times every morning. Hockley was one of two curators of the Mehretu show, which might explain the cast of woes offered as Mehretu’s inspirations.

The Biennial slated for 2021 has been postponed to next year because of the COVID crisis and subsequent mass hysteria. David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards are the curators of the show set for next year. At least adults will be in the room. Breslin is a brilliant, widely experienced curator with intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. He’s not one for bubbled thinking and boutique fads. Edwards is the curator of performance at the Whitney. I’ve never seen any of her shows. Music and dance are art, but the mix of the two with painting, sculpture, video, and prints is so niche that it verges on contrived, useless noise.

Still, Edwards has worked with jazz musicians. She has a nose for the good version of seedy.

Edwards has worked almost exclusively with African-American artists, her Whitney biography tells us. She is, however, curating an exhibition this fall at the Whitney surveying the 20-year career of My Barbarian, an art collective that “uses performance to play with social difficulties, theatricalize historic problems, and imagine ways of being together.” They seem an unusual amalgam — goofy, fretful, earnest, and delinquent. Could be okay, could be overboweled.

Dawoud Bey is a wonderful artist and the topic of Dawoud Bey: An American Project, also at the Whitney until October. Here’s a mid-career master photographer, producing work every few years that’s new, challenging, and exquisitely moving yet part of a coherent trajectory. Bey’s exhibition at the Whitney covers portfolios he’s done over 30 years. As a young man in the late ’70s, he took his camera to Harlem. Harlem, USA reminds me of Aaron Siskind’s 1940 series, The Harlem Document. It’s everyday life in Harlem but with tenderness. It’s street photography like Siskind’s work, but the figures, all African-American, are less part of the furniture and more confident and filled with agency and purpose.

Since then, Bey has done portfolios focusing on high-school students and combining portraiture and photography. In 2012, he did a series called “The Birmingham Project” memorializing the 1963 church bombing that killed four girls. Two or three years ago, he did a series of sultry, ethereal nocturnes exploring the Underground Railroad. The Whitney exhibition is well done. I’ll write about it before it closes. It explores each portfolio and examines his technique. Alas, it’s saddled with one of the worst catalogues I’ve ever read. It’s a weepy, anecdotal thing. The Whitney didn’t produce it. It came from SF MoMA, which organized the show.