The Getty Trust, the World’s Richest Arts Organization, Gets a New Leader 

Katherine Fleming needs to focus on education and art, not politics and climate hysteria.

T he J. Paul Getty Trust, known as the Getty, has a new president. Katherine Fleming, the provost of New York University, will succeed Jim Cuno, who’s retiring after heading the world’s richest arts organization for eleven years. I think she’s a great choice and am excited to see what she’ll do.

The Getty is not only a museum but an art-research institution, library, art-conservation center, and grant-maker, all working at a beautiful campus in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. I don’t know Fleming but know all of her predecessors, starting with Harold Williams, who took an inchoate foundation funded by the oil riches of J. Paul Getty and made it a world powerhouse in high culture. The less said about the disastrous Barry Munitz, his successor, the better, but why not mention that before he left to spend more time with his family he was said to have played loosey-goosey with his expense account and was known to be a churl?

I don’t think there’s a museum director I admired more than Jim Wood. He led the Art Institute of Chicago for years. He came out of retirement to clean the Munitz mess. Jim Cuno ran the Fogg at Harvard and followed Jim Wood at the Art Institute and, coincidentally, at the Getty. Munitz excepted, they were all men of integrity and achievement.

My only problem with it is that it has too much money. No nonprofit should have $11 billion. All the big foundations — from Mellon to Ford, Hewlett, Sloan, and Gates, Soros’s Open Society Institute, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, among others, and universities such as Harvard and Yale with tens of billions — need Marine-style fiscal crew cuts. Lean and mean is the way to go, not fat and smug.

These rich nonprofits have too much power. Piles of money remove them from reality and deaden creative energy. That said, aside from bureaucratic bloat and a churlish element among its staff, the Getty is highly effective. It’s transformed the Los Angeles cultural scene. Its exhibitions and scholarship are great.

The art museum at the Getty Center in Brentwood is superb. The paintings collection isn’t big, but it’s got great things by Rembrandt, Poussin, David, the Impressionists, and Post-Impressionists. It’s bought well, sometimes extravagantly. The Getty Villa in Malibu deals with antiquities.

Fleming is a scholar of modern Greek history. Knowing nothing about her, I watched her lecture on modern Greece and Orientalism given at Cornell a few years ago and recommend it. Philhellenism — fascination with ancient Greece — was a rage especially in the 1820s, she said. Then, scholars, writers, and sentimentalists saw what today we know as Greece as the birthplace of Western values, a place not of the present but of antiquity, of Pericles and Homer, and battles such as Thermopylae. Byron was the poetical standard-bearer for nostalgia for ancient Greece.

At the same time, living and breathing Greeks struggled for freedom from the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled them for hundreds of years. The new Greece straddled East and West, the Orient and the Occident, with characteristics of both. What enthralled Philhellenes in London and Paris didn’t inspire the new Greece, deeply Orthodox and Byzantine, rural, and folkloric as it was.

Fleming reviewed how the culture clash unfolded, especially how free Greece would and would not make the ancient world their past. She’s obviously an impressive scholar and teacher. In a one-hour talk, she united Herodotus, Byron, and Cavafy, among others, in a convincing historical narrative filled with drama. She strikes me as practical and transparent.

NYU is a great school, and a huge, complex one. As provost, Fleming has been the traffic cop managing the place. She’s without scandal, not a small achievement given how corrupt colleges and universities are these days. I googled NYU and words such as “controversy,” “fraud,” “deficit,” and “scandal.” NYU was under fire last year for encouraging its students to smother their futures via the debt they incur to pay its pricey tuition. When this hit the Wall Street Journal, an NYU student-affairs bureaucrat suggested that those in Queer Street because of high tuition “eat fewer meals.” Not helpful, but I wonder how much power Fleming has had over tuition and debt.

Then there’s Avital Ronell, the Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy at NYU. During the #MeToo moment, she was accused by a male graduate student of sexual harassment. She electronically whispered sweet nothings such as “sweet, cuddly baby” and “my cock-er spaniel,” demanded he lie on her bed and she his, kissed and touched him repeatedly, and excessively called and emailed him. The student, whose name is Nimrod Reitman, and I’d say a name like “Nimrod” is a turnoff, is gay, and Avital’s a lesbian. Avital was disciplined.

NYU received a yellow-light rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is a keeper of free-speech and free-thought standards on campuses. That’s not bad. Given Avital’s story, I googled NYU and “sex scandal.” Nothing eyebrow-raising surfaced except a false rumor generated by chatty students online that Timothée Chalamet caused a chlamydia epidemic while he was an NYU student. “Kids say the darnedest things,” Art Linkletter would have noted.

Yes, there are the usual kerfuffles over labor unions and Covid, but Fleming has run a tight ship. She has made work–life balance a focus. NYU is a high-pressure, high-achieving place. Having taught there for 20 years and chaired departments, Fleming is aware of this and believes in balance. Attention to family, friends, and recreation leads to better teaching, scholarship, and decision-making, she has said. She’s got common sense, too.

I have to have a quibble. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Fleming said,

Climate change is going to be one of the major, if not the major, defining features of human existence over the coming century or so. . . . Awareness of that fact . . . will certainly inform my thinking as I take the helm of the trust.

Methought, “This is crazy.” First of all, the Getty is an arts organization, not a meteorological troubleshooter. Second, the climate of our 4-billion-year-old planet is always changing. No one knows how and why, and we still don’t know what caused the Ice Age, the Big Thaw, the Little Ice Age, or the little blips in temperature occurring since scientists developed satellite climate measurement only 40 years ago. Third, climate derangement is a fog machine obscuring a multi-billion-dollar industry enriching corporations, bureaucrats, and academics. It’s paradise for grifters, charlatans, and Chinese hegemons who love seeing us swap cheap, reliable energy for wind-delivered pixie dust and solar-heated Ent-draughts. Fourth, as a historian, Fleming should know that predicting what’s going to happen over a century, much less planning for it, is a fool’s enterprise.

I hope Fleming, like the Greeks in the days leading to their fight for independence, has her own, new Great Awakening once she gets to Los Angeles. She’ll be free from Manhattan’s disgustingly hot and humid summers and its crappy, slushy, brown winters, as well as free from Manhattan groupthink. She’ll come to find the climate in Brentwood, Santa Monica, Bel Air, or Pacific Palisades to be just fine. So perfect that she’ll forget about trying to fiddle with it.

Fleming will have a full agenda addressing the cultural needs of L.A. and stewarding the Getty’s art-history prowess. In my humble opinion, the biggest challenge facing humanities nonprofits is easy to see. It’s using their power and money to repair the damage to children, especially children attending public schools, whose educations were compromised by a year of Covid lockouts and inferior online learning.

Not sexy, I know, but a real need. Can the arts play a role here? I think they and the Getty can. Leave the useless, pointless tasks to Sisyphus, the action-hero stuff to Heracles, and hubristic toots like climate change to Icarus and Daedalus, who paid for trying to behave like the gods.

Filling a high-profile job like this one is hard, exacting work. Getty’s search committee was a good one, so we have to assume their judgment is sound. Praise the Lord, she’s no Barry Munitz. Judging from her lecture and NYU interviews over the past few years, I think she’s a warm, reassuring presence. She’ll be a great president.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president of Spelman College and a Getty trustee, chaired the search committee. She directed the Studio Museum in Harlem before serving for 20 years as the dean of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She probably knew Fleming while she was there.

I know Campbell for her time leading the Department of Cultural Affairs in New York City under Mayor Koch and Mayor Dinkins. She notoriously, or I would say famously and splendidly, proposed transferring city anti-drug-education money, its “Just Say No” money, to her department to target young people in the city’s schools with culture-enrichment programs. As much as I liked Nancy Reagan, I thought Campbell’s idea was a good one. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In those days, her department was an arts dynamo rather than the pork barrel it has become. Her survey book on the Harlem Renaissance is still authoritative.

Among the other search-committee trustees were Ronald Spogli, a businessman who was the American ambassador to Italy during the second Bush era, and Pamela Joyner, who runs an investment firm and collects African-American art. I saw an exhibition of her and her husband’s collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art a few years ago. They own a powerful, show-stopping Mark Bradford painting. David Lee, chairman of Getty’s board, was also on the search committee. A theoretical physicist and businessman, he chaired Caltech’s board of trustees before moving to the Getty.

This brings me back to 2020. These and the other Getty trustees are serious, trustworthy people. This is why I was so surprised to see them pull the rug from under Cuno in 2020 when staff members demanded that the Getty plaster Black Lives Matter swill on its website after the firebomb-and-plunder George Floyd riots.

Oops, I mean the mostly peaceful coffee klatch and prayer-shawl knitting circle fest that killed about 50 people and destroyed billions in property. Maybe all those BLM thugs . . . oops again . . . heartfelt do-gooders . . . were toasting marshmallows around the campfire, singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and it all went terribly awry.

Cuno and the senior staff at the Getty faced a naïve, hubristic, surly staff on Zoom demanding a Black Lives Matter banner on its website and copious social-justice treacle ’n dross decorating it. Cuno is a traditionalist and didn’t want the Getty involved in politics.

At that point, I’d written about the dozens of museums pushing BLM, noting correctly that Black Lives Matter isn’t just a slogan. Museums might’ve been naïve, but Black Lives Matter is a brand name and a money-raising organization about which no one knew much of anything except that it was anti-police, pro-crime, which BLM sees as restitution, anti-Israel, which means antisemitic, and anti-capitalist, which is not a trifle for museums funded by private money that someone like, say, J. Paul Getty, earned as a capitalist. In any event, even acknowledging that BLM had good points among bad ones, museums shouldn’t endorse causes unrelated to their mission.

Cuno dug in his heels, as did bawling fools on his staff. The Getty trustees finally intervened to break the impasse. Rather than support its hired leaders, rather than suggest that its whipped-up staff chill, the Getty board capitulated. “The Getty board of trustees and senior staff stand united behind the declaration: Black Lives Matter,” a board statement blared in letters no smaller than “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

The board vowed to lead “an anti-racist institution,” meaning it conceded that race explains everything. It decried “systemic racism,” that undefined spook in the dark shadows. I doubt the board actually believed what it said. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nike, a dozen big banks, and apparel companies paid BLM protection money. The Getty supplied protection rhetoric. Talk is cheap, I know, but I object to mainstreaming lies such as “America’s a racist country,” “our systems are racist,” and “our history is rotten to the core.”

Since museums and other arts organizations like the Getty sent all those love letters to Black Lives Matter, BLM has had one scandal after another. Affiliate groups complain they’ve gotten no support from BLM, which raised $90 million and spent $30 million on who-knows-what, while it sits on $60 million and has a nebulous board and staff. BLM’s a tangle of for-profit and nonprofit entities. It’s not clear who runs what. Aside from perpetuating itself, it’s done nothing to achieve the social justice it touts.

We do know that Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of BLM’s three founders, spent $3 million on residential real estate, including a $1.4 million house in a ritzy neighborhood not far from the Getty Villa. BLM just bought a $6 million house in Bel Air outfitted with a pool, Carrara marble bathrooms, and a butler’s pantry.

What is it doing with this nice chunk of palatial living? No one knows. What has BLM done to alleviate “systemic racism” or to make our blighted land more “anti-racist”? Nuttin’. If the Getty is ever short of space, it should keep the new BLM house in mind.

There’s one good thing coming from the Getty’s staff meltdown and its embarrassing blind date with BLM. The Getty is now addressing a badly out-of-whack salary hierarchy in which the top staff do very well and everyone else doesn’t. Fleming seems very fair and will keep making progress.

Most museums seem to have memory-holed their fling with BLM politics, which, alas, damaged their credibility. They were endorsing a brand name and cause about which they knew next to nothing. I worked in museums for years and have heard all kinds of political opinions among my colleagues. Most of these opinions seemed very ill-informed, naïve, and contemptuous of the earned wealth and consequent philanthropy that now funds museum salaries. Given the source of J. Paul Getty’s — and his museum’s — immense wealth, circumspection is in order. It’s best for the Getty and other museums to stick to what they know best. And that’s art.