Art to Look Forward to in 2023 

Tartan, Chanel, the Marbles, and will King Tut get a new home?

H appy 2023. W. H. Auden called the ’30s “a low, dishonest decade.”

Last year has to be a low, dishonest year and a triumph for no one but the conceited and dumb. Adding insult to injury, it followed 2020 — catastrophic — and 2021 — scabrous. Will 2023 be any better? The ’70s, after all, were a ten-year subfusc run.

Here are a few things I know, and some I think will unfold in the new year.

I always hope for the best, and the best would be the demise of DIE — diversity, inclusion, and equity — in museums. Curators and directors tell me they’re sick of hiring people who aren’t qualified and then suffering their inadequacies for which they blame abstractions such as white supremacy. Experienced curators are sick of shoehorning oppression themes into exhibitions and scholarship where they’re irrelevant.

For a happy DIE afterlife, museums will need to deal with the expensive, intrusive HR barnacles they created starting in 2020. “Don’t let the door hit you in the bippy” is my suggestion. Treating staff fairly on pay, promotions, and evaluations and hiring the best people don’t need new bureaucracies. For crybaby race drama à la Meghan Markle, turn to Netflix. In a museum, it undermines quality and ill serves the public, which doesn’t care about internal museum dynamics.

On another front, Pope Francis said in mid December that the Vatican would give to the Greek Orthodox Church the three Parthenon fragments the Vatican Museum owns, which means they’re going to Athens for good. Francis, strange for a Peronist as well as for a pope, reliably signals what the chattering classes think, so this is one more sign that the British Museum will send its haul — the Elgin Marbles — back before too long. I wrote about bat squeaks in London favoring the giveback last summer.

These bat squeaks have grown as loud as blasts from the Queen Mary. I hoped then that the Tory regime would squelch the idea. Liz Truss said they’d stay in London, but out the door she went after a month. The new gang’s feeble and distracted. The momentum’s with returning the sculptures. George Osborne, the chairman of the British Museum’s board and once chancellor of the exchequer, is behind the push. He is neither feeble nor distracted and craves the praise he’ll get from the Davos set for sending them back. A deal is in the works now.

Restitution is a fine and often overdue thing. I’m glad many of the Benin Bronzes are going back to Nigeria. The problem is there’s not much evidence even suggesting that the British Museum doesn’t own the Parthenon sculptures fair and square. Ideology — the Decolonize the Museum movement and a bourgeois socialist impulse to screw the British public — is immune to evidence that doesn’t go its way. I don’t think Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite, and the gang will spend New Year’s Day, 2024, snacking on baklava.

There’s no such thing as “the art market.” Hundreds of markets compose the purchase and sale of art, distinguished by period, medium, place of origin, and price point. The top end — art such as Shot Blue Marilyn, by Andy Warhol — will sell well. It went for $195 million at a Christie’s auction in May. It’s an obscene price, given what it is, but there’s immense wealth in our blighted world, chasing few blue-chip brands. Given the needs that private philanthropy can address, spending hundreds of millions on art is anti-human.

The past few years have been good ones for quality dealers who don’t necessarily dwell in the stratosphere. There aren’t many great, market-ready things by, say, the Old Masters or American Modernists. People who aren’t billionaires are cautious these days. Tighter wallets and fewer works of remarkable quality will together depress many markets. I’m told that curators and directors who are shopping — most museums have acquisitions endowments — tell dealers, “I’m only looking for women” or “gimme a black artist.” Open to quality, surprise, and serendipity, I’d be embarrassed to say this. I’d feel like a john talking to a pimp.

There are so many promising exhibitions and openings in 2023, but a few put me in a state of anticipation akin to our dog’s dreams of his next meal.

“Fashion changes but style endures,” Coco Chanel said, and right she was as well as Burkean, but for modern times when arguing that tradition endures is futile. The Victoria & Albert Museum does serious, blockbuster fashion shows I always see if I’m in London. Its Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, a retrospective of her work, opens in September. London is the only place in the world where men are, as a rule, better dressed than women. Chanel died in 1971. She was very French, so I’m curious to see what an English museum does with her. She’s more than the little black dress, so I expect a fashion bar will be raised.

Starting in April and running into 2024 is Tartan, organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum’s only branch, located in Dundee in Scotland. It’s the history of tartan and a look at tartan in our times. Dundee has its own very good curators. They’re doing the show, as should be the case with the most Scottish of textiles.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is doing a Vermeer retrospective opening on February 10. It’s showing 28 of his 35 known paintings. So much has been learned about Vermeer (1632–1675) since the National Gallery’s big show in Washington 25 or so years ago. Since then, whether or not Vermeer used a camera obscura to project on a canvas the subjects that he then painted has been a controversial topic.

David Hockney was among the first in modern times to claim this was so. Vermeer, as far as we know, had next to no art training, yet his compositions, light, and figures are sublime. This is only one reason to suspect he used a camera obscura to aid him, though the exhibition in Amsterdam might put the controversy to rest.

The Kimbell in Fort Worth always does good shows. It’s concluding its 50th anniversary in late 2023 with Bonnard’s World, a survey of Pierre Bonnard’s landscapes and interiors. Bonnard (1867–1947) should be as famous and as loved as Matisse, but he isn’t. He’s the better artist of the two, and the Kimbell’s sure to get great loans.

A retrospective of the work of Bay Area New Wave artist Joan Brown opened at SF MoMA in December, but I hope to see it this year. Brown (1938–1990) was a fantastic painter of whimsy and spirituality. Juane Quick-to-See Smith’s retrospective at the Whitney, opening in April, will be great, I hope. She’s a very good artist, and she hasn’t had a retrospective. The curator doing the show is young. Let’s not present her as an Oppression Olympics star. Smith deserves better than that.

Big construction projects closed three of my favorite museums: the Bruce in Greenwich, Conn., the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Each will reopen this year. The Bruce Museum treats art as well as science and natural history, an unconventional but appealing mission. Art and science do indeed meet at many points quirky, surprising, and logical. The Bruce is getting a massive expansion, as is the Albright-Knox, now called the AKG Buffalo Museum. The “G” is for billionaire Buffalonian Jeffrey Gundlach, who has given close to $70 million to this superb, distinguished gallery. Good for him. Gundlach’s international, but he’s putting his money into his hometown.

The NPG in London isn’t expanding its footprint but is getting a makeover and reconfiguration. It’ll have refurbished galleries, new galleries harvested from behind-the-scenes spaces, and a new, more spacious entrance. I’m looking forward to seeing all three.

The other day I learned that the NPG purchased a 1,500-square-foot old Victorian underground lavatory. The £3 million price is right for Soho real estate. Victorian public lavatories, and I’ve visited the one at Rothsay, near Glasgow, can be temples to bodily evacuations, with enough fancy tile, marble, and copper to service Olympus. The NPG’s new parcel might be more modest, but I’m sure it’s spacious. It’ll be converted to exhibition space for art, possibly performance that is — the NPG hastens to add — “related to portraiture.” It’s a brilliant purchase. I say, “Ready, aim, fire!” All genders welcome.

Taunt me, tease me, oh, Land of the Pharaohs. The new Grand Egyptian Museum by the Pyramids, the $900 million museum set to house the contents of King Tut’s tomb, postponed its 2022 opening to 2023. It already postponed its 2021 opening to 2022 as well as its 2020 opening to 2021. The Egyptians might well operate on biblical time, but I think it will happen at some point this year. Khonsu is the old Egyptian god of the moon but also of travel since the moon travels the sky each night. There’s a big temple to him at Karnak. If I can hitch a ride with him, I’ll go to the opening.