The Mindless Theater of Museum Mandates 

On mask and vaccine rules, and a dumb move by the Chicago Art Institute

L ast week was my first visit to New York City since Mayor De-Bottom-De-Barrel imposed a vaccine mandate for museumgoers. No vaccine, no admission, no exceptions. I’m certain no one in City Hall gave this much deep thought since there’s a mandate barring that, too, or so it seems.

I’m happily vaccinated and scheduled for the booster shot that antiques like me can get, but pregnant women and people who’ve already been infected with COVID have reasonable arguments against getting jabbed. There are people with religious objections, too, and American law respects these whether we like it or not. President Biden issued “an order” mandating vaccines for federal employees, but there are no rules managing its implementation, no one’s developing any, so no one’s taking it seriously. Businesses, among them hospitals, are firing people willy-nilly for not getting vaccinated. They’re finding they can’t replace the lost workers.

Most young African Americans in New York don’t want the thing, so they’re a racially targeted group. Many have been fed Black Lives Matter race poison.

They believe BLM’s atrocity propaganda about pervasive government medical experiments. This happened once, at the Tuskegee Institute, courtesy of the CDC, but it ended in scandal 50 years ago. Is this belief reasonable? Of course not, but we reap what we sow. Once hysteria becomes a habit, we can’t predict where it’ll lead us. Right now, these young people can’t go to a museum in New York.

Like so much of what passes as governance these days, it’s kabuki theater. In New York, though, it’s real. I went to eight or nine museums and galleries. Each checked my vaccine card.

Now, many museums in places not blessed by the leadership of America’s Worst Mayor are barring the unvaccinated from entering. They’re also requiring vaccinated visitors to be masked. It’s more mindless theater. Does anybody in the museum world think about anything anymore? Unless a mask is an N95 type, worn correctly, it’s not effective. The mask needs to be replaced by a fresh one frequently, not used for weeks on end and, when unworn, stored in a bag, pocket, glove box, or any such receptacle that’s functionally a dump for soiled tissues, cash, bits of last month’s lunch, and things that ooze.

The cheap masks sold everywhere aren’t N95-quality. They’re usually made from plastic polymers, bits of which, of course, we breathe. This isn’t healthy, but who cares? And so masks protect the wearer from the bore and lout who sneezes in his or her face, or does it protect the innocent bystander? Ask 100 people, and you’ll get a 50/50 split. Museums have HVAC-purified air. They can and do control numbers. Guards are trained to keep people from both the art and one another. There’s no need for a mask requirement except to pacify neurotics and to signal virtue.

After nearly two years of COVID hysteria, Dr. Bait ’n’ Switch, a vain, mediocre little man and the face of the COVID regime, has no credibility, but theater means everything today, as does compliance. Whether what we do actually solves a problem we mean to address seems beside the point, or too hard a concept for uncritical thinkers. As hard as it is for the obsessed among us, and COVID caution has long ago become COVID hysteria, we need to ditch the mandates.

At this point, they’re accomplishing nothing but angering and bewildering people. They mock science and medicine.

Mocking science and medicine is bad enough, but mocking decency and good sense is terrible. Science and medicine are tactics. They’re means to an end but, alas, they’re turning into superstitions and ideology. Decency and good sense are philosophical glue. A week or so ago, the Art Institute of Chicago fired its 82 volunteer museum educators, or docents, because the group was too white, almost all older women. This move terminates a 60-year-old program that’s shown millions of school-age children through the museums. To teach, docents complete two years of classes led by curators and develop expertise in a dozen fields across the museum’s 300,000 objects.

The Art Institute won’t say it’s a racial decision. They’ll hire paid educators at $25 an hour, using an “income-equity-focused lens.”

Aside from “Have the Art Institute’s leaders been beaten by the Stupid Stick?” I’d ask the following. What is an “income-equity-focused lens?” Did they look at these ladies’ tax returns? And is “equity” the kinder, gentler word for “race” or, more precisely, the proposition that race explains everything, excuses every deficiency, and justifies every decision? Is the museum so flush that it can turn down volunteer labor? Why does it think it’s going to get workers willing to learn and then to teach public-school kids for $25 an hour? We’re told it’ll take three years to build a new program teaching children from Chicago’s and suburban schools. What happens in the meantime? Programs will continue “on a reduced scale,” which means reduced to next to nothing.

Haven’t Chicago’s public-school kids suffered enough? They received inferior online learning for a year from unionized teachers who refused to go to work.

Now that schools have restarted in-person teaching, kids are masked, tested, and kept apart at recess. Now they won’t even get museum visits. Shouldn’t art be deployed now, and heavy-duty, to ameliorate the abuse these poor kids have faced during the COVID hysteria?

The canned docents get a two-year free pass to the museum as a “thank-you.”

Their average length of service is 15 years. How ungracious. I’ve worked with docents and admire their passion, application, and vinegar. They’re better communicators than many curators, who often think that dealing with the public is beneath them.

The Art Institute won’t change its foolish mind. Robert M. Levy, the chairman of its board of trustees, wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune in favor of firing the docents, saying, “We must embrace change.” He’s a $20 million donor whose money comes from pushing other people’s money around. I doubt he’s ever plunked himself down before a group of inner-city seventh-graders to teach for 50 minutes on art. That’s one “change” I’d embrace, but only if Levy’s captured on film. What the docents do is very hard work. That they get pleasure from it is a blessing. That they’re kicked out the door is ungracious.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has a new chairman, Maria Rosario Jackson, who, since it’s an independent federal agency, will run the place on a day-to-day basis. She worked for the Urban Institute, a big Washington think tank, for 20 years. It’s swampy and one of those places at the intersection of big federal grants, foundation money, wonkery, and left-wing bromides. Art, as far as I can tell, is peripheral at best.

Jackson is touted as both African American and Mexican American. She co-chaired the Los Angeles County Equity and Inclusion Advisory Commission, a new creature. Her expertise is in “comprehensive community revitalization, systems change, the dynamics of race and ethnicities, and the role of and arts and culture in communities,” which makes no sense but tells me she’s a well-paid bureaucrat.

She’s been a tenured professor at Arizona State University since 2017. I looked at her Arizona State teaching load. As far as I can tell, she has never taught a lecture course but seems to do “special topics” or “applied courses,” which aren’t described but might be independent studies or tutorials or nothing at all.

Her one specialty evident from her modest Internet presence is called “creative placemaking.” This is an economic-development strategy that incorporates good design at the very beginning of a downtown revitalization project and makes art an anchor purpose in the project itself. The NEA currently has a creative-placemaking division, and under Jackson’s leadership I suspect this division will grow.

Creative placemaking sounds good, but I don’t consider it an arts program. It’s an economic-development program, if that, and belongs in a part of the government with expertise in economic development. The NEA has no such expertise since, unlike the Commerce Department or HUD, it’s not an economic-development agency.

In thinking about NEA grants, I look at how much of the grant check that goes out in the mail directly benefits artists or art lovers. What’s the direct impact on the art experience? Grant checks for creative placemaking go out, and some are hefty, but then everyone and his brother, mother, cousin, dog, and parakeet take a cut as the money trickles down to architects, designers, strategic planners, mayor’s offices, and builders, among others. Only pennies on the dollar directly benefit people like you and me or artists.

These programs aren’t economically efficient, at least when run by an agency charged with supporting the nuts and bolts of art making, scholarship, and audience engagement. The NEA’s budget is now $167 million. Plus, it’s giving away millions in special COVID money. Its grants are boring and inconsequential. It’s not a dynamic agency, and it doesn’t move the needle in enhancing culture. It exists to exist and not get killed by meanie Republicans. I don’t see how Jackson changes any of this, which probably suits the NEA bureaucracy just fine.