The Great Unmasking — of Patrons and Fake Altruists Alike

Plus, London’s Tate has a problem on its hands: Who can drink fine wine against a backdrop of painted slaves?

C ovid, the Ukraine war, and race are huge topics unfolding in three stories in this week’s art world.

Collapsing and decomposing with each passing instant is the Chinese coronavirus mass hysteria and hypnosis. Children are back in school, their elders still abusing them with needless mask mandates that throttle learning and social development, but at least they’re in the classroom, discovering that race explains everything and men can get pregnant. Fifty million children, mostly poor and working class, were tossed from school for months, getting inferior online learning in return, and the virus doesn’t even affect them.

Our two-year vacation from reality is drawing to a close as people are once again paying their mortgages and rent. Can paying their student loans be far behind? “Where did that $5 trillion in new government debt go?” a broad cross section of American humanity asks, gobsmacked.

“Where’s Dr. Quack?” we also might ask, about that geriatric lifer public-health mediocrity. Called Il Piccolo Prosciutto, or the Littlest Ham, for his media ubiquity, he’s now doing left-wing podcasts in Austin and interviews with newspapers in Bangladesh. He’s still blaming beleaguered bats and pangolins for Covid, though we’re now free to say that the Wuhan lab funded by Dr. Fake Science leaked like a colander draining fettuccine. He has no credibility. A swath of highly credentialed immunologists and epidemiologists lost theirs, too, in their rush to protect their NIH and CDC dough.

But I write only about art. When are museums going to ditch their mask mandates?

Lots of people wear masks out of consideration for others. That’s good. It’s altruism to be valued. They’re moral bludgeons now, though, and political statements.

I think I’ve said the word “Trump” once in everything I’ve written. The phenomenon we call “Trump” provoked a great unmasking. Corporate news media, government bureaucrats, security apparatchiks like the FBI, academics getting government money, and many other niches pretended to be altruistic and without political or personal agendas. Trump was so perilous a threat that this pretense — their masks — dissolved, revealing them as self-absorbed, grasping, smug, and jealous of their privilege. Emperors, big or small, real or fake, are peevish once unclothed.

I wonder whether the terrible, new will to censor and to censure free thinkers and contrarians isn’t a consequence of this rather than an ugly coincidence. Masks might protect, though I don’t think they’re useful hygiene-wise, but they also hide. They muffle speech. Children hate them since they’re uncomfortable and throttle communication. They’re symbolic muzzles.

Some people have health issues, wear the right masks and wear them correctly, and feel that they work. Go for it, I say. They’ve got to do what they think is best for their own health.

Mask mandates remind us that we’re in an epidemic and ought to be afraid and need to cling to Dr. Swamp and his ilk, but also that we can’t say the things we think. Lia Thomas can dance and prance singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl” all day. It’s a free country. But in the pool, in competition, is this strapping 6’3” galoot, with big hands, big feet, long legs, shoulders that go on and on, a woman? Lia’s built less like Jane Russell, that full-figured girl from the old Playtex ads, and more like Johnny Weissmuller. Take the mask off, observe all of this, simple reality as it is, ask the question, blurt “of course not,” and you’re as damned as Judas.

I understand, empathetic as I am, why some cling to masks, and to mask mandates. They soothe, like a baby’s Binky. Mask agonists tend to be both crumbly and choleric, a bad combination and ample reason to seek comfort. Masks, their disciples might believe, are a tip of the woke hat to old indigenous traditions, like the Botocudo tribe in the Amazon jungle, who donned mouth-covering, plate-shaped lip piercings to scare evil spirits during storms. Damn easier to wear, too.

There’s mask chic, too. Maybe, just maybe, maskers like to preen and prance, flaunting their we-know-best, follow-the-science virtue, smug and spurious as it is. They’ve enlisted a corps of get-along, go-along types. Every culture has what we used to call Good Germans.

And, along the way, mask militants love forcing everyone else to indulge their fancies, pagan, petty, or pathological.

Or maybe it’s just ignorance and naïveté. Even Dr. Franken-Fauci said masks don’t work, until he admitted that he’d lied and then said they did. Unless it’s an N95-grade mask, properly worn, frequently changed, and no fiddling with it, a mask is about as prophylactic as, well, a prophylactic with holes in it. Better get some real baby Binkies.

Seriously, though, museum directors need to seize the plastic-polymer-packed, totally ineffective, cheap, blue drugstore mask by its elastic ear straps. Start with new “mask optional” guidance in place of the “Masks Required” signs illustrated by the Mona Lisa, her famous smile covered. Visitors and staff can wear masks if they choose. If I want hygiene theater, I’ll watch reruns of Dr. Kildare.

Last week, the CDC, competent in nothing but goose-step obeisance to big-city teachers’ unions, pushed another fake study on the utility of masks. This one was a phone survey in which respondents self-reported on what kind of mask they were wearing and whether or not they’d had Covid. Of course, there was no control group, since that would be, well, too scientific. The public, and that includes art lovers, is done with fake science, phony computer models, puffed-up death counts, censorship, and propaganda that stokes fear and dependence.

Art historians, being historians, should know better than most that epidemics are part of human existence. We all live on the edge of a cliff. Covid isn’t the Spanish flu, polio, AIDS, or the Black Death, and it’s with us. Museums — with HVAC filtering the air, guards trained to direct the public’s movement, and ticketing systems to limit crowds — are among the safest places. Museums had no reason, aside from laziness, indifference to the public, and saving money, to keep their doors shut, some for as long as 18 months.

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As the horrible Ukraine war unfolds, I hope museums, symphonies, opera houses, and theaters remember that Putin’s terror machine and Russian culture are two different things. Raphael’s Holy Family, a lovely, early painting done when the artist looked keenly and greedily at Leonardo, won’t travel from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg to London for the National Gallery’s Raphael survey this spring. The Russians have withdrawn all foreign loans, or at least loans not going to North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela. With flights to and from Russia and most of Europe banned, the picture would have had a hard time getting to London anyway. France recalled 15 loans from the Louvre and other state museums to the Kremlin Museum in Moscow, for a show on the history of dueling, of all ironies.

There’s no change — so far — for the multi-billion-dollar cache of Russian-owned French art now on display at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Bernard Arnault, second-richest man in the world and the owner of Vuitton and other luxury brands, is possibly the only European Putin has on speed dial, in case he needs a Brioni suit in a hurry.

The Metropolitan Opera canned Anna Netrebko, a Russian soprano and one of its great stars, because she wouldn’t denounce Putin’s war. Last week, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra dropped the Russian piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev from his solo concert. At 20, he’s the classical music savant of our time. He has said that he’s against the invasion. What more can he do? He, Netrebko, and artists like them have family in Russia. They’re Russian citizens. Putting aside patriotism, their home is a police state. Let’s try to keep high culture out of this terrible situation.

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And then there’s the other Whistler. That’s the artist Rex Whistler. Most Americans don’t know him. Though a charming but middling painter and illustrator, and dead since 1944, he’s in the British art news. Americans who have had lunch or dinner at the Tate’s elegant restaurant probably remember the banquette-to-ceiling murals Whistler painted for the space. Done in 1927, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats is a sweeping, pastoral view of a fictional Duchy called Epicuriana. It depicts English hills, carriage riders, unicorns, truffle hounds, garden parties, country houses, and, you guessed it, two chained black slave children and an old African-American cook, possibly a slave.

No one noticed these tiny figures in a mural covering hundreds of running feet, or at least no one with a megaphone ever said anything about them. I watched a video about the 2013 Tate project cleaning and restoring the murals, and no one said diddly-squat about them. When the space reopened after conservation and the restaurant’s refurbishment, the Tate touted it as “the most amusing room in Europe.”

Around 2019, though, the Tate discovered it had a problem. Someone with a megaphone (called a Twitter account) noticed. It’s the White Pube blog, run by two young women, vigilantes chasing art-establishment foibles. Working together since 2015, they find most art criticism “boringggg . . . just bad chat by middle class old white men.” Point well taken, though I’d advise them not to throw this middle-class old white man out with the bathwater as my art criticism isn’t “boringggg.” It’s a good blog I didn’t know. And I admire the breadth of their interests, their obvious smarts, and high spirits.

“How do these rich white people still go there to drink from the ‘capital’s finest wine cellars’ with some choice slavery in the background?’” the blog posted, and it’s not an outrageous question.

Whistler (1905–44) painted high-society portraits and wall murals for London townhouses and big country houses, too. He also designed posters, theater costumes, and backdrops, and illustrated about a hundred books. He’s part of the 1920s and ’30s Bright Young Things cohort along with Cecil Beaton, the Sitwell siblings, Evelyn Waugh, Stephen Tennant, Diana Cooper, and a cast of many others populating Masterpiece Theatre. He’s a talented Art Deco artist translating Watteau and Claude into a visual vocabulary scrutable to the Unspeakable Pursuing the Inedible class, with humor and flair.

Whistler joined the Welsh Guard in 1939, rejecting the chance to serve as a war artist in favor of commanding a tank battalion. He was killed in action in Normandy. He’s never had a close, scholarly look, mostly because his murals, and he painted lots of them, are in private homes, as are his portraits. His theater work is ephemeral and gone, and his illustrations are tiny, and few like looking at tiny things for long. Alas, his affair with Tallulah Bankhead wasn’t recorded, and I think it would have been X-rated. She was a sheet-tearer.

The very good director of the Tate, Alex Farquharson, has a problem I don’t envy. I agree, appalled as I am to agree with the heinous Trot MP Diane Abbott on anything, that these little passages are disturbing and off-putting, indeed, grotesque. Whistler was 23 when he painted the murals. I don’t know what he was thinking. The murals launched his career. In part because it’s the Tate, and because the restaurant, at least until it closed because of the Covid lockdowns in 2020, was much praised for its wine list, it was a destination. Now it’s a nightmare.

The Tate won’t reopen the space as a restaurant. The figures ruin the ambiance, becoming the focus of the place and spoiling appetites. The murals are accessioned works of art, part of the Tate’s permanent collection. I’m tempted to suggest, rural Green Mountain philistine that I am, slapping a painting, topically, of the Battle of Balaclava over the offensive images and calling it a day. That isn’t a solution, though. Not all my ideas are good ones.

Farquharson tasked a committee in pursuit not of rare meats but of a direction among bad options, no unicorn or truffle hounds pointing the way. It’s a five-member committee with four co-chairs — what can go wrong? I ask — and mostly in-house people, among them Farquharson, the one member who isn’t a co-chair but, as the museum’s director, the one making the final decision. The space will reopen with an artist intervention “to critically engage with its racist imagery.” I suspect the result will be ponderous, preachy, and, as the two White Pube writers said, “boringggg.”

I’ve had lunch in the restaurant many times. I don’t know how this will work. It’s a big, rambling space with built-in seats. The figures are tiny. I can’t imagine what new observations an artist can contribute. The Savile Row, titled, Oxbridge, Home Counties set of the 1920s could be fun but, overall, was pretty awful. Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and Henry Green, among many others, covered that ground years ago. And the Tate will need a new restaurant! That’ll cost a bit more than the £287 Whistler made for painting his murals. A visit to Epicuriana is proving to be a pricey one.

Brian Allen will be teaching an online course on Norman Rockwell, in conjunction with New York’s 92nd Street Y, in June. To sign up for the June 6 and June 13 sessions, click here.