And the Inaugural ‘Supreme Flower of Nitwittery’ Awards Go To . . .

Judges shouldn’t pretend to be curators, Churchill is both big money and purged from money, and Etruscan art looms large in Rome.

G iven America’s 250th, I postponed my art-news piece for June as well as the announcement of my first Supreme Flower of Nitwittery awards, given to those people — the prize has multiple winners, so many are the choices — especially endowed by their Creator with heads so filled with cotton, hay, rags, roots, mulch, and frilly, silly flowers that they could float at the Rose Bowl Parade. “No Kings,” I agree, but the real kings and queens — and they’re mutton-headed dopes — are judges. Some of these lifetime judges suddenly think they’re curators and impresarios.

Federal District Court Judge Christopher Cooper gets a Flower Pot for a Brain Prize but not for ordering the removal of President Trump’s name from the façade of the Kennedy Center. Yes, there was a woke lawsuit, and Trump’s team lost. Cooper ruled that the new name must go, and he’s right. I read the federal statute, and it’s crystal-clear: Only Congress can change the name. Government buildings shouldn’t be named after the living anyway. After death, people’s merits as role models and symbols can be shrewdly assessed. I suppose that naming wings and rooms and escalators and loos for the living is fine if there’s philanthropic money plunked on the table — naming furniture is fine, too — since that’s what we need to do, especially for the Smithsonian.

I don’t know why Trump made himself the chairman of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees. It’s not La Scala. Doesn’t President Trump have bigger and better things to do than run a performing arts center? Writing as an average Joe-Sixpack-of-Perrier, I see the name kerfuffle as a distraction from issues that mean more to me.

Cooper, though, in a 94-page decision, went la-di-da and thick-as-two-bricks in a ruling that the Kennedy Center needs to stay open during its $257 million renovation. Many people seem to think that the center should stay open. That’s ridiculous. Don’t they realize that the Kennedy Center will be a construction site for two years? Pipes, wires, tunnels, HVAC, toilets, curtains, seats, expansion joints, soffit panels, marble slabs, and much else will be disturbed and replaced or remediated. How would “Younger Than Springtime” — my favorite tune from South Pacific — or Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” sound amid dump trucks and cement mixers. And how would it feel with no heat and no air-conditioning? In a top-to-bottom renovation, they’re turned off. We’ll also need special hard hats for freshly coiffed, high-society hair.

The place is closed, construction work has begun, and the center’s board won’t schedule new programs. Is Cooper going to hire performers? Whoopi Goldberg, Hanoi Jane, and Robert De Niro singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” anyone? Better renovate those handicapped ramps and install on-stage oxygen tanks.

Will the courts be meddling now in every single vote of the Kennedy Center board? Suing Trump seems to be the Swamp’s pastime. Don’t they have better things to do?

Cooper is a nitwit and a peacock, and so is Judge Cynthia Rufe of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. There was the 1950s TV show Queen for a Day and lifetime monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth, and then there’s Rufe, Queen Curator and winner of my Supreme Flower of Nitwittery Award. She ruled in February that the U.S. Park Service must retore interpretive wall panels in an outdoor exhibition by Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The exhibition, originally installed in 2010, was made of manufactured walls that outlined what was thought to be the footprint of Washington’s home in Philadelphia while he was president and when the city was, temporarily, our capital. The exhibition consisted of text only, focusing, to the exclusion of all other topics, on the nine slaves who served him during his term.

I saw the thing a few years ago and thought it was predictably woke, earnest, dull, and weepy, and about the millionth time I’ve heard that Washington was an enslaver, cue the Days of Our Lives organ music. Is this what we want young people to know about the first days of the Republic? Nuts and ingrates who want to destroy the country say yes. Aren’t there more valuable topics, like Washington and leadership?

President Trump issued an executive order last year called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Among other things, it guided Department of the Interior interpretation at national parks and monuments. It required the department to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people,” ditch “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” and develop themes such as our “extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

So the story of Washington’s slaveholding in Philadelphia went into the dumpster, since it’s a footnote in the full account of his time as president. At other sites, the Interior Department removed climate change lies, such as that Fort Sumter might be under water soon; boring, sophomoric “they stole our land” lingo vis-à-vis Native tribes; and, on a wall panel at, of all places, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a mea culpa about “holding Japanese Americans in wartime camps.” Were the camps there, among the wild mushrooms, muskrats, and piping plovers? I don’t think so.

With her periwig askew, Rufe leaned over her Ouija board in a spasm of outrage and beseeched George Orwell to send her a sign. Refreshing that display after a mere 16 years is as evil a deed as any by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Is this the work of a new Ministry of Truth? She got him, I see in reading her decision, and, boy, that planchette spelled “yes, yes, and more yes” with the speed of a Bugatti. Arlen Specter sponsored her judgeship. She reached him, too, and got “8647” over and over. Arlen’s as snarlin’ in the afterlife as he was in the here and now.

I would have tweaked the language in Trump’s executive order to make it more precise, but it’s clear that park interpretation is sometimes hijacked. And 16 years is a long, long time for one exhibition to be up. The thing’s not a monument. It’s a pop-up show. When its message is delivered, it’s time to move on. Slavery and Washington are so 1789.

Curatorial text at the Bunker Hill Monument references slavery and the joys of illegal immigration. Off to the incinerator that went, and I’m glad. It’s irrelevant. Judge Angel Kelley is at it, too, ruling from the District of Massachusetts. She wants it back. She said in her decision that “preferred narratives” are illegal, but her preferred narratives are apparently just fine. She also says we can’t touch the Biden era’s DEI-drenched Park Service interpretation, anywhere. She’s a district court trial judge, too, and shouldn’t be issuing injunctions affecting matters outside of her district.

Rufe has already been overruled. Kelley’s going to be overruled, too. Federal judges can’t be deciding the interpretation at national parks and monuments. That’s the Department of the Interior’s job, directed by the president, who runs the government. If you don’t like it, go out and win an election. Try running someone who isn’t a nitwit next time.

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In art news just last month, the Bank of England’s currency designers axed Winston Churchill’s portrait from its banknotes. Too “elite and divisive,” “backward looking,” and “contentious,” and it’s an affront to DEI, which has replaced the Church of England as the official religion. Churchill reeks of imperialism. The White Cliffs of Dover are anti-immigrant, too, I see. England is more swamped with illegals than we are, and the cliffs might give offense since they suggest heights to be scaled and that’s unwelcoming — plus, they’re white. The old cathedrals, well, they’re too Christian, William the Conqueror is too martial, and the Hobbits are too Tory. Too bad the Virgin Queen wasn’t trans. Without Churchill, they’d have swastikas on their money. But what has he done for us lately? Churchill offered blood, sweat, and tears. Where’s the free stuff? What would Mrs. Thatcher do? That’s a good guide to all things civic. Since the Bank says Jane Austen must go, Thatcher would swap in the courageous, truth-telling J. K. Rowling, giving nitwits everywhere a collective heart attack.

Churchill, Austen, J. M. W. Turner, and the gay codebreaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing are set to leave the backside of British pound sterling notes. King Charles will stay on the front. In their place will likely be beavers, puffins, rabbits, red squirrels, and owls. Critters don’t give offense, though if I were a rabbit, I’d pause at the promotion of owls, who prefer an eat-in-one-gulp bunny over teatime’s egg and cress.

The art nitwits tell us that changing the currency design is partially about counterfeiting. Portraits, they say, are easier to counterfeit, but that makes no sense. I see beavers in my yard, and they all look the same.

God save the king and the whole lot of them. The Supreme Flower of Nitwittery Awards reach across oceans and borders. Here’s one for the Bank of England’s art cops.

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Not all the news comes from nitwits. In Italy, I see good, solid, meaningful news, not fun, games, and tomfoolery, and it’s about the Etruscans. Last week, the Villa Giulia, the Rome museum devoted to the art and archaeology of the Etruscan era, opened an exhibition of very rare fourth-century b.c. Etruscan wall frescoes that the museum, run by the Italian state, just purchased for €15 million ($17 million). The Etruscans lived in Lazio — the region that includes Rome — and Tuscany, western Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna, establishing a sophisticated culture from around 900 b.c. until the Roman Republic absorbed them, around 100 b.c.

I love Etruscan art, which is fluid and fleshy, unlike, say, Greek Archaic and Egyptian sculpture, which is linear, remote, and abstract. The Greeks and Romans eventually moved toward realism, but the Etruscans got there and to the realms of emotion and carnality first.

The Villa Giulia’s paintings come from the François Tomb, discovered in 1857 in Vulci, an old Etruscan town near Rome. Among the scenes is the sacrifice of twelve Trojans by Achilles on the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Griffins, lions, wild boar, and panthers abound. It took 21 heirs from three old Italian families to agree to sell the frescoes. Discussions started in 1921. That’s Italy for you. It runs on opera time.

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Mr. Market never sleeps. Sotheby’s and Christie’s do a group of summertime auctions called Classics Week, a mix of offbeat but very good Old Masters as well as things deemed “exceptional.” These are masterworks across cultures and reflect a trend among younger buyers. They don’t like depth and focus more on this-and-that collecting and a look that defines them as worldly, erudite, and very rich.

Churchill might be too elite — his grandfather was a duke — and contentious, silver-tongued, philosemitic, and imperialist for the monied English designer class. They’re bureaucrats, and they’re happy with puffins. For the money-making and money-spending classes, though, he’s just supercalifragilistic-and-all-that. At Christie’s Exceptional Sale last week, four pieces of Churchilliana fetched a heap of sterling.

A humidor given to him by FDR, probably at either the Casablanca or Yalta conference, went for £330,000 ($441,000) on an estimate of £25,000–40,000 ($33,000–53,000) It was probably filled with Cuban cigars — Churchill smoked at least half a dozen cigars a day, for decades. Never mind that the humidor was regifted. FDR got it as a gift from the president of Cuba, likely in 1942.

Three of Churchill’s dispatch boxes went through the thatched roof, too. These are the special boxes that ministers get and that are stuffed with official documents and letters they need to see. They’re embossed leather and well-used. One box is from his days in 1940 as prime minister, after his return from the Wilderness and immediately before he was picked to lead the fight against Hitler, by the by a socialist, in Britain’s Finest Hour. Match that, you red squirrel.