Is the Clark Art Institute the Latest Anti-Art Museum?

Its prestigious scholars program funds quack art history about racism and hot weather.

A friend asked me a question a couple of weeks ago. “Is there a museum in the country that isn’t woke?” I define “woke,” in a museum setting, as “foregrounding racism and other forms of oppression and social activism in programs and scholarship.” It’s what passes for art history for people bored with art. I said to my friend that I think it varies. A museum like the MFA in Boston not only drinks the woke Kool-Aid but soaks in it and, who knows, might very well put a Kool-Aid water feature in its front yard.

Directors, HR people, school outreach staff, chief curators, and trustees are among those spending lots of their time on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Most museums, though, have a million moving parts. Most curators have specialties that, even when contorted, have nothing to do with racism à la mode.

That said, I think it’s hard to get a big, expensive exhibition approved at, say, the Met without a social-justice theme, however labored and dull. At the High Museum, I was astonished to see a big exhibition called “Love” that peddled race hate. It’s a terrible game, one that would appall Atlantan Martin Luther King Jr.

Museums are doing more shows about African-American and women artists, which is great when the shows are good. They’re buying art by people they’ve neglected, too. This isn’t woke, though, when the work is quality and the curators don’t use the art as props for their own dumb politics. A good director and good curator know how to see quality.

“I don’t see the Clark as woke at all,” I said to my friend, referring to the nearby, tony, rich museum where I was once a curator. Its collection stops at 1900, and it’s heavy on Impressionism, Homer, Rococo-era English silver, and Old Master prints. The audience skews elderly, touristical, and suburban. The curators have old-fashioned specialties. “Now” isn’t its brand. “It’s a traditional place,” I assured him. Goodness, they’ve just done a big Rodin show.

The next day, a scholar friend sent me a Clark press release announcing that it’s giving a new grant to scholars working to “reimagine new art histories while also engaging with the structural racism that has informed and built the discipline.” It’s called the Critical Race Theory Fellowship. Another new pot of cash goes to a scholar who “radically advances feminist perspectives and equal representation in the canon of art history.” It’s funded by the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, a social and environmental justice and shout-your-abortion foundation run by the rich daughter of the inventor of Cheetos.

Another grant is earmarked for “social justice and the arts.” These three grants are called Clark Fellowships, some of the cushiest art-history grants in the country. The program started while I was at the Clark as a curator. It brought scholars from all over the world to our rural, isolated museum, turbocharging the intellectual atmosphere. With a superb art library, a nice apartment and office for every scholar, the museum itself, Williams, and, mud season aside, a pretty setting, the fellowship program is unique.

“Critical race theory” and “social justice” are pretty, too. Pretty poison. They mean “race explains everything,” which is a false value and a fake religion. In action, it’s Chaédria LaBouvier, whose race row at the Guggenheim I discussed last week. She plays the victim, trying to win by pretending to lose. It’s always bad art history, too. It reduces art to illustration. Art is the dummy to the social-justice warmonger’s ventriloquist. It’s drama-queen stuff. Reckonings, blood libels, 1619, “slavery’s our original sin” are all slogans for art-free and history-free art history.

I read the profiles of the latest cohort of Clark fellows. One is writing a book about environmental catastrophes and critical race theory. Where’s the Chinese coronavirus mass hysteria? Those little molecules leaked from the Fauci-funded Wuhan lab feel shunned, and we all know silence is violence. One fellow is working on whiteness, colonialism, and systemic forms of oppression in migration. She’s a perinatal community health worker and a doula. She’s also a performance artist.

Another is working on a book “about liking trees and being like trees.” I’m not against horticulture as art, but he’s an English professor. Another is researching integrated art salons at American Missionary Association art academies, which sounds like a good topic but a very, very narrow one. One scholar is studying jazz album covers that “express the tension between enslavement and a concomitant freedom drive that is the condition of Black being.”

The new CRT fellowship that’s charged with “engaging with the structural racism” that supposedly built art history is premised on a fake issue. Exhibitions and catalogues about African-American art are plentiful. Prices in the art market are high. The last three American pavilions at the Biennale in Venice featured black artists.

Yale’s art-history Ph.D. program had an affirmative-action component when I was there nearly 30 years ago. I’m sure it still exists and also sure that race preferences are endemic in the field, in both school admissions and museum hiring. Museums desperately want to hire black curators, but the supply is tiny, and then, to be honest, no one wants a LaBouvier.

“Reimaging art history” and “equalizing the canon of great artists,” as movements in the field, have been around for a few years. So has “race explains everything” as a methodology. Taken together, what they explain is the stunning drop in art-history majors and enrollment in art-history classes. At Williams, on the Clark’s doorstep, the art-history survey attracts about half the students it did 20 years ago. Nobody wants to study this crap.

Critical race theory in art history and feminist art history were around when I was a student, though just getting traction. They’ve become intractable ideologies and are anti-art and anti-connoisseurship. If “equalizing the canon of great artists” means Lilly Martin Spencer and Mary Cassatt are now on Parnassus with Whistler and Homer, well, no young scholar with the eyes of a connoisseur is going to buy the lie.

“Equalizing” and “great artists” together mean that everyone gets a participation trophy. It’s not scholarship. This and LaBouvier’s rant are enough to chase any college student with common sense straight to STEM, even if it means wearing a pocket protector.

On the Clark’s website, I found a profile of every Clark Fellow since the museum created the program in 1998 as well as a sentence or two on his or her project at the Clark. I read them. After nearly 25 years and many hundreds of awards, the Clark has funded only seven projects on American art before the age of Modernism.

That’s the time of Homer and Eakins, Whistler, Copley, Trumbull’s scenes of the American Revolution, Bingham’s views of life on the Mississippi, and the Hudson River School. And that’s counting, using the PC term, inclusively. One fellowship supported research on Eakins and Duchamp, another on Robert Smithson and the American landscape tradition — both topics, loosely, predating the landmark 1913 Armory Show. Two were short, two-week grants for a local museum curator researching late-19th-century ads for séances.

Of the last 50 fellows, starting in 2021 and going back to 2019, 42 were women and only eight were men. Currently, art-history majors are almost entirely women, but the fellowship cohort is supposed to be senior scholars. Most of the topics are esoteric, and that’s fine, but, really, the art of climate change in the Dominican Republic? A feminist history of Sufi shrines in Pakistan? The visual culture of plantation slavery in colonial Cuba? Postcolonial, queer, and feminist approaches to the Necrocene landscape? That book, funded by the Clark, begins with:

This version of the Necrocene does not so much partake of the apocalypticism of certain nihilist versions of dark ecology but puts the emphasis on feminist, trans*, and queer interventions that redirect Anthropocene extremities of deep past and ostensibly still-remote future of the present pressures of thinking and feeling with the turbulent unpredictabilities of mixed effects and entangled agencies, with the enwrapping of the wildly incommensurate, and the ruptures of not the reparative but of demands for reparations and revolution on the part of those entitles, those forms of life, bare life, and not-life, and ways of being and becoming for whom the ostensible privileges of the status of the human have never constituted refuge, those for whom the imperatives to sustain and reproduce life have, rather, been the terms of slow death, and those whose very form or lack of privileged form is rendered as unlivable, killable, and not even registered as loss, as grievable losses or deaths that count.

Quite a sentence. The Clark financed this yakety-yak when it gave Jill Casid, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, its hefty yearlong fellowship in 2018. Her project was about the weather getting too hot, except when it’s too cold, and I searched for what the asterisk about the trans people signified, but it must have been submerged in a flood from a melting glacier that really isn’t melting.

Isn’t the Clark leadership embarrassed? And where’s the art?

It’s not that no one cares. Even PC art historians have mothers. The problem is that it all feels so forced and desperate on the part of the Clark. Why look like something you’re not? I’ve read Sterling Clark’s diaries. He was awful. Putting him aside, I’d stick to serious scholarship about art. I’d ditch pop subjects such as the slave trade, the weather, and colonialism. Other foundations cover this. The Clark’s grant program is rambling and unfocused. In picking winners, are friends favored? Who knows?

It’s actually difficult to get grant money to support American art-history scholarship if the scholarship is pre-1900. It’s the art of our country and part of our heritage, but, alas, the artists are dead white men. That was the reality of the art world everywhere.

The Clark awards one of its prestigious fellowships to the study of the art of Spain before 1900. The Clark would serve art history better if it dropped the hooey and focused on solid art history in fields where the need exists. Every foundation in America is rushing fast as the bulls at Pamplona to support social-justice art history. Why do what everyone else is doing? Why not dedicate a fellowship to American art before the 1913 Armory Show, and skip the tiresome trash about everything being racist? That would be truly radical.

In 2016, the Clark awarded a plum fellowship to a woman studying Ted Kaczynski. Yes, the Unabomber. And she’s an archivist, not an art historian. And Kaczynski, a terrorist and a nut, isn’t an artist.

A committee of outside scholars vet fellowship applications, though the head of the program, a Clark employee, and the Clark director ultimately select which scholars and projects to support. They need to get better priorities.