The Art World in an Age of Rage

This week saw the spectacle of a furious curator, who is black, ranting against the Atlantic over a white journalist’s request for comment.

I ’ve written off and on about race hysteria at museums. I think there are many problems in museums surrounding fairness in pay and promotions. Staff revolts starting in 2020 pushed not-for-profit culture institutions of all stripes to address them. A race obsession has developed, too, along with legitimate grievances. It’s a spectacle of naïveté, conceit, and grift, and earlier this week the Guggenheim in New York once more found itself in the spotlight, or crosshairs.

I’ve written a couple of times about a 2020 race kerfuffle on the Upper East Side. A black guest curator, Chaédria LaBouvier, hired to develop a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, had a disastrously unhappy experience and very publicly said the problem was racist senior staff, specifically Nancy Spector, the chief curator and a Guggenheim old-timer. NR’s Isaac Schorr wrote about this flap on Thursday.

In June 2020, LaBouvier used Twitter to air her gripes. Working with Spector, she said, “was the most racist professional experience in my life.” She recited what to her were a bevy of slights as well as what seemed to me was a basic dispute over the show’s intellectual content. The Guggenheim had never hired a black curator before — strange but true — and, LaBouvier said, “didn’t know how to deal with my blackness.”

Was this a curatorial lynching? LaBouvier thinks so. I thought not, knowing the Guggenheim’s management. LaBouvier seemed, to me, to be a diva. The Guggenheim, desperate for a high-profile show on a black artist, and Basquiat fit the bill, made an opportunistic hire. Spector, who supervised outside curators, mishandled the égotiste LaBouvier.

As Covid-lockdown layoffs bit and the Floyd protests raged, staffs all over Manhattan, from the Whitney in the Meatpacking District to Fifth Avenue and 88th, were bruisin’ for combat over pay, promotions, recruitment, and, among Millennials, “not being listened to.” This cohort, as we all know, is filled to the brim with the collective wisdom of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Pajama Boy.

Spector was pushed out, the director, Richard Armstrong, retired, and the museum went union. Unions are crazy about equity, which means race explains everything. LaBouvier disappeared. I saw her Basquiat show, Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story, in 2019 and thought it was good. Basquiat was a talented artist who, having died at 28 (in 1988), can’t be judged as great. He wasn’t a fully formed person yet. “Defacement” was the informal title of The Death of Michael Stewart, a painting Basquiat did in memory of the young man whose high-profile death in 1983 following a fight with New York police led to brutality charges, of which officers were acquitted.

Last week, LaBouvier roared back like all three Furies. Helen Lewis, a staff writer for the Atlantic, which I read, sent LaBouvier a short, polite email asking her for an interview. “I’m writing about US museums and the racial reckoning of 2020,” she wrote. “I plan to discuss your experience at the Guggenheim,” she said, asking, “Might we talk?” This is as benign as it gets, but LaBouvier exploded in rage that a white rather than a black woman was writing a story about “my experience.” I read her entire thread on Twitter, a rare journey into the Slough of Despond for me since I never use it.

LaBouvier said that, earlier, a black journalist had pitched a story to the Atlantic about her experience as the Basquiat’s Defacement curator, which was rejected. In an email to Lewis and Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of the Atlantic, which LaBouvier reproduces in her Twitter thread, she wrote: “This is another example of a clueless, rapacious White woman, backed and resourced by a publication that has a history of harm.” Twitter brings out the worst in people. “Everything about her [Lewis’s] outreach & subsequent behavior,” LaBouvier went on, “was bullying/ presumptive/unethical/unprofessional/arrogant, and dangerously wrong.” Now, who’s the bully here?

She’s furious that a white woman “with no expertise in race” wants to tell her story, that Lewis has too few bylines to bring it the attention it deserves, that the Atlantic didn’t cover the Guggenheim story as it happened — though it was indeed covered, wisely, in newspapers — and describes the magazine as “unhinged and deranged” in its “desperation” to now write about what happened. Neither the magazine nor the art press covered LaBouvier’s work, she complained, to raise bail money for arrested protesters and rent and food money for trans black women.

“As I said in my Instagram message to you,” LaBouvier went on, “should you f**k this up—which you will—I will be on your ass like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm at a KKK rally.”

She says a white person couldn’t possibly understand her anger, her “hurt.” “I plan to discuss YOUR experience,” LaBouvier quoted poor Lewis. How dare she. “She is at an expertise and knowledge deficit, as well as an ethical one.”

And, she added, “f*** you.”

LaBouvier focuses on film studies, too. She says her favorite movie is The Godfather. If I were Lewis, I’d padlock the horse stable.

I’m no Nancy Drew, but my inner detective tells me that LaBouvier, working at the Guggenheim, must have been one big pain in the ass. If working with Spector was “the most racist experience” of her “entire life,” why didn’t she sue the Guggenheim? I’ve read so much about racism in museums, yet no one goes to court or to any of the federal, state, or local agencies handling civil-rights disputes. Why?

One of the sources of LaBouvier’s anger was that she was barred from sitting on the stage as part of a Basquiat’s Defacement panel discussion. She protested from the floor. That’s good. These panels are usually boring. That was the point when she and her grievances became a news story. The Guggenheim board then hired an outside law firm to review LaBouvier’s charges of racism. I’d love to see its report, which found no evidence that she “was subject to adverse treatment on the basis of her race.” LaBouvier wouldn’t speak with the investigator. “It was not safe to do so,” she said. Was she thinking, “no Luca Brasi endings for me”? Schorr, NR’s reporter, asked LaBouvier for an interview. She wouldn’t oblige.

LaBouvier is one person, and, obviously, she’s angry. On the one hand, her reasoning and tone are both ranty and fringe, and it’s important to note she doesn’t have a museum job. I think she’s vented herself out of ever getting one. But, fringe though her rant may be, LaBouvier’s sense of being “harmed,” her sense of entitlement, and her fury are growing into a mantra when it comes to race relations in museums.

Even as an independent contractor, which is what she was vis-à-vis the Guggenheim, LaBouvier had to follow the museum’s rules on deadlines, the content and length of labels, the art loans the museum sought, the content of the catalogue, and the roster of invited speakers at events related to the Basquiat show. She might have been a free agent, but she wasn’t free as a bird to do as she wanted. She believes her race entitled her to different standards. Every element of her relationship with the Guggenheim, she feels, was molded and guided by racism. This is her schtick.

LaBouvier may or may not have come to the Guggenheim with a chip on her shoulder, but she left with one the size of the Rock of Gibraltar. And the Atlantic is a magazine of thought, not a newspaper. It writes about issues that take time to ferment. The charge that Lewis isn’t qualified to write LaBouvier’s story is egotism. Whom does she want? Harriet Beecher Stowe? She wrote for the Atlantic.

LaBouvier went to Williams, where I went to school, so I naturally wondered how, after four years at the college, she learned nothing about the Williams Way. This is many things, but consensus-building and civility are two and come, in part, from Williams’s rural home on the edge of northern New England. Temper tantrums aren’t allowed. Everyone knows everyone else. You’ve got to be nice to the guy whose politics you might abhor but, someday, might be the same guy who helps you get your car out of a snowdrift.

I watched an hour-long interview with LaBouvier conducted after she won an award from Williams in 2021 for the Basquiat show. She was introduced by the president of the college. LaBouvier was very measured, nice as pie, and, of course, coming from Williams, eloquent. Her behavior is situational, it seems, and she knows how to milk her audience. She’s very manipulative.

I thought the president of Williams, a real fawner, was going to cry. She’s strong, though, and made it — without sobs — through the salute to the Mohicans at the beginning of LaBouvier’s talk, when the interviewer, the director of the college museum, said the college, and the Williams president’s house, were on stolen land.

In her Guggenheim meltdown, LaBouvier played to a New York, BLM-inflamed crowd. Is she the future? Every chief curator and director is either experiencing some aspect of LaBouvier’s attitude or sees it on the horizon. Affirmative action — the recruitment of candidates from different backgrounds, schools, and museums — is one thing, but what is called equity really means quotas and race-based expectations, and every result has a racial component. This is the most paralyzing, dishonest thing that can happen in a museum.