Whitney Strikes Out in Its New Director Choice

Skipping a formal search in favor of an insider is always a bad idea.

T he jaw does indeed land kerplunk, even on the Texas prairie. I’m in Dallas now to give two lectures and to visit museums. I got a press release today announcing that Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney for 20 years, would leave this fall, and that Scott Rothkopf, the chief curator, would be the new director.

I don’t know whether Weinberg is retiring, but I doubt it. Was he pushed? I doubt that, too. Twenty years is a long time, I know, but there’s no one I admire more among the directors of our most prestigious big-city museums. He was my predecessor as director of the Addison Gallery, and I consider his work the foundation for my own. Through his considerable diplomatic skills and good taste, the Whitney got a new building that’s both gorgeous and practical, after years of false starts.

Weinberg’s younger than I. After a successful biennial and with the Whitney’s new staff union finally agreeing to a contract this week, he probably wants to do something new.

But Scott Rothkopf? Without a search? Rothkopf, whom I’ve met a couple of times, is a museum bureaucrat. He curated the nauseating Jeff Koons retrospective and the Jasper Johns retrospective, wave upon wave of aesthetic flatulence, in my opinion. I might be wrong in my view of these two shows. This happens. I’m never wrong, though, in viewing a proper search as essential in fulfilling the board’s fiduciary duties of loyalty and care and in giving a new director, insider or outsider, a path to success. An insider hire after a rigorous search lets the new director say, “I earned this.” A search brings outsider perspectives to the mix. No search means no competition and no questions asked. It’s something that Podunk boards do.

“One of the great things about an internal succession like this,” Rothkopf said, “is that we can continue the work we’ve been doing on equity and inclusion.” This tells us he’s a cipher and conformist. “Equity and inclusion” mean race-based hiring and double standards. It’s Manhattan-speak for mediocrity. And where’s the art?

As much as I like Weinberg and love visiting the splendid museum he was instrumental in building, many questions need to be asked of the Whitney board. I’ve reviewed lots of Whitney exhibitions over the years. They’ve been a very mixed bag, some obese, some with crappy catalogues, some based on sloppy, immature thinking, many, like the exhibition on Puerto Rican art I recently reviewed, more concerned with politics than art.

Art can be political, but it has to be brave, enigmatic, sensual, and tense, too. The director, even in a big place, is in charge of quality control but, in a big place, so is the chief curator. That’s Rothkopf. Outsider candidates are more likely to address problems like these.

One of the biggest museum scandals in the scandal-plagued era starting in the late Teens was the Whitney leadership’s handling of trustee and $10 million donor Warren Kanders. Kanders was hounded from the board by a surly, haughty staff because one of his companies sold tear gas to the Israeli military and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

It’s pure ignorance to believe that hundreds of thousands of people should be allowed to cross the border willy-nilly. Antisemitism, a far worse sin, motivated the noise surrounding Kanders and Israel. Weinberg and the Whitney board dawdled, placated, and obfuscated for months. Weinberg even allowed curators to devote a gallery in the 2019 Whitney biennial to an attack on Kanders’s business dealings with the Israeli government. Curators protesting Kanders’s service as a trustee were promoted.

Ecclesiastes was wrong. Some things are indeed new under the sun.

Kanders eventually quit, wisely concluding that the angst wasn’t worth it. Ken Griffin, probably the Whitney’s biggest donor after Leonard Lauder, quit in support of Kanders, then unquit after other trustees begged him to stay.

Weinberg reminded protesting staff that, as the hired help, they have no voice in who is and isn’t a trustee. That’s the board’s decision, advised by the director. The flip side of the coin, he noted, is that the board doesn’t meddle in the staff’s day-to-day work. When I was a curator and director, these facts of museum life went without saying. Now, younger staff especially tend to believe that their opinions, often dumb, are the stuff of institutional gospel.

They should have gotten what Mrs. Thatcher called “the slap of firm government.” Instead they got bland admonishments. The Kanders contretemps stretched from 2019 into 2020. Once Covid and the George Floyd murder hit the beach, “don’t you dare” wasn’t something the Whitney’s blinkered, sanctimonious staff wanted to hear.

The chairman of the board is Richard DeMartini, a banking executive. Fern Tessler is the president. She’s a Hamptons socialite. Robert Hurst, another money man, chairs the executive committee. They made the announcement that Weinberg’s out and Rothkopf’s in. I did some research on them and the rest of the board. Griffin and a few others aside, there aren’t any kings and queens. Were the trustees too lazy to do a proper search? Possibly. More likely is their deployment of a corporate model. Corporations are big on succession planning, but a nonprofit isn’t a corporation. Shaking things up with a new perspective is often a good idea.

After a long directorship, museum trustees often pick either a tame insider or a novice. They want to claw back the power they lost during the dear departed’s reign by picking someone who’ll need to cling to them. Where there’s no search, the new director more often than not fails. Even an insider needs to go through a vigorous vetting.

I’ve found Weinberg to be both kind and exacting as a director. He’s a fair person who possibly doesn’t get the credit he deserves for exorcizing the many demons that, over the years before his directorship, made the Whitney a snake pit.

On a bright note, I’m in Dallas for a few days. I’ve given two lectures, one at UT Dallas on my biography of the art dealer Allan Stone and the other at Southern Methodist University on what it’s like to be an art critic. UT Dallas is the state university system’s MIT, but it has a very good art-history program and is the home of the Edith O’Donnell Institute, an art-history think tank. I think STEM’s important but STEAM, adding the “A” for art, makes more sense. We live in a visual culture. Learning to look enriches life but also seems essential in all branches of the sciences. SMU is one of America’s great universities. The Meadows Museum, located on campus, specializes in Spanish art. It’s one of my favorite museums.

The Meadows’s longtime director, Mark Roglán, died in 2020. He was an old friend. SMU appointed a Meadows curator, Amanda Dotseth, as the acting director. She’s a well-respected scholar of Spanish medieval art. I was happy to see that SMU appointed her the permanent director a couple of weeks ago after a yearlong, comprehensive search. That’s the commonsense thing to do.

The museum went through a necessary time of self-reflection. Stakeholders had their say. Now Dotseth and her colleagues know she earned it. Texans have can-do spirit, and they do things the right way. Next week I’ll write about the Meadows’s very good show on art from Spain’s lovely, intimate, and mostly unknown Museum of Spanish Abstract Art. Formed during the depths of the Franco dictatorship, it’s a most surprising place. I’ll also write about the Dallas Museum of Art. Alas, I don’t have time to go to Fort Worth but will visit in the fall to see the Kimbell’s Bonnard retrospective.