Lectured by Curators at My Alma Mater

I spent an afternoon last weekend strolling through the Princeton University Art Museum, which was under construction when I was an undergraduate. (The song of the jackhammer orchestra still rings in my ears as the unofficial anthem from my student days.) The building was not difficult to spot because it is a hideous gray cement block, potentially inspired by a window-unit air conditioner. The imposing structure is uninspiring, even somewhat depressing, and visually disrupts the otherwise scenic northern part of campus. (The south side largely consists of demoralizing modern buildings.) As I approached the ugly bunker, I discovered another problem: its impracticality. It is not obvious which doors are for the main entrance. I circled around the whole building, then realized the front doors are down a set of steps.

I descended with the same trepidation as a horror movie character venturing nervously into a haunted basement with just a candle. I worried anxiously, How much worse could this get? But upon entering, there were two nice surprises. First, entrance is free. Second, there’s no sort of bag check or metal detectors. (Is nobody concerned about the soup-throwing climate activists who believe that ruining paintings fosters support for net-zero policies?) Walking right into the museum without some officer conducting a procedural purse rummage was a weirdly refreshing instance of a norm in high-trust cultures that I rarely experience.

Although the outside is an atrocity, the inside space is actually . . . decent. Visitors find themselves in a relaxing and cool atmosphere, sort of like a crossover of a spa and a cave. In very plain summary, the building itself is not art, but it does enhance the art inside. One thing was really odd, though. I don’t have the interior design knowledge to diagnose the source of the problem, but the scale just seemed off: I felt very small in the building, which is maybe what the architectural team was hoping to achieve, and perhaps other people aren’t bothered by that feeling.

But an article about a museum should probably focus on what people are really there to see, namely, the collections. Princeton’s is a treasure trove, and surely most people expect that from such a long-standing and wealthy institution. Unfortunately, there’s a massive (and, as readers of NR’s art critic Brian Allen know all too well, very common) problem: The curators decided to weaponize placards throughout the “American Art” section to explain why America is terrible. (In some instances, the placards were written by the artists themselves.) Progressive buzzwords and phrases are scattered throughout the object descriptions: “colonial paradigm,” “cultural cosmopolitanism,” “inequitable social order,” “racial degeneration,” “the desire of colonists to uphold their power,” “the allocation of privileges in contemporary society,” “postcolonial,” “racist logic,” “acts of resistance,” “enslaved labor,” “anthropomorphize,” “inaccessible,” “the elite planter class,” “violent displacement,” and “settler colonialism” were written beside the objects on display. The supposedly helpful pieces of context in the placards are actually just thinly veiled condemnations. One description explains that “[William] Rush’s bust of [George] Washington was once owned by another president, Thomas Jefferson, like Washington a major enslaver, with a particularly troubling relationship to slavery owing to his intimate relations with a woman he enslaved.” The sentence is so poorly constructed that it might have been written by a middle schooler. More noticeably, that’s the only mention of Jefferson on the placard. As a result, his great legacy is reduced to a cardinal sin and all his important contributions are ignored.

The museum encourages shame by attempting to “juxtapose” American art so that you can reflect on “tensions” that reveal how we are a “work in progress.” You are meant to look at some object depicting a white person or produced by a white person, then look at something produced by a minority, and arrive at the conclusion that America is enriched by multiculturalism but must perpetually repent for previous instances of injustice.

A clear example of this dynamic is the massive portrait of Mary Mackall Jackson; the placard explains that she opposed slavery but was married to Reverdy Johnson, who “represented the slave-owning defendant in the landmark Dred Scott case of 1857, which held that enslaved persons could not be considered citizens even in free states, a decision that contributed to the Civil War.” (The placard doesn’t explain why the portrait was commissioned, why she opposed slavery, what she accomplished in life, or really anything else about her.) About half that placard is dedicated to describing a photograph on the next wall: “By contrast, the contemporary Jamaican American artist Renée Cox foregrounds the issue of race . . . Cox substitutes Black men and women for white males in her restaging of Howard Chandler Christy’s 1940 painting Signing of the Constitution, which enshrines a document that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person and contained several provisions protecting and perpetuating the institution of slavery.” That photograph — a landscape image of black people in drag-like costumes — is also described on a second placard written by the artist herself. Indeed, this establishes a juxtaposition: The beautiful painting of a white woman by a white man apparently doesn’t deserve a full placard dedicated to it, and what is discussed about the painting is just the subject’s tenuous relationship to slavery, whereas an unimpressive photo capturing an underwhelming historical reenactment that subverts American history gets one and a half placards free from critical commentary.

I was frustrated by the sanctimonious commentary, but as I left the American section, I saw a breathtaking arrangement of paintings. Each seems representative of the best of America. Somehow, each stands out, but they all fuse together on the wall. Rather tragically, this wall is contained in a narrow hallway, which means you can’t actually take a step back to appreciate the whole thing, nor can you sit down to just stare and think. (Given the inability to stand far back, it is especially hard for someone short like me to really see the ones at the top.) It’s like the museum staff is taunting us. The wall is proof that the curators can recognize good art, and they do know what constitutes a good display, yet they render it so difficult for us to enjoy the works by situating them in the most awkward possible setting.

Of course, the progressive nonsense is not confined to the American section, and incoherent ramblings in pseudo-English are everywhere. I walked aimlessly through the rest of the floor and laughed at one artist’s description of his work, which involves “mestizo identity theory,” “intermixed Latinx bodies,” a “cosmic race,” “subvert[ing] racial hierarchy,” “hetero-patriarchal order,” and ultimately “mythologizing the interwoven logic of European conquest, U.S. border imperialism, data colonialism, and AI-assisted automated radicalized discrimination.”

So-called educators will insist on the need to “contextualize” historical objects and the legacies of historical figures. In practice, they want to commit borderline defamation by omitting relevant context while expounding on moral failings — provided there’s a tenuous connection to an oppressor narrative. What frustrates me most about the placards is not the factual errors or inconsistent moralizing or unimpressive art, but rather the undeniable narcissism: An exceptional level of smugness is necessary to project modern views into the past, then harshly judge an individual while refusing to acknowledge that person’s positive contributions. The irony is that American heroes are irreplaceable, whereas museum staff are easily substituted because progressive activists parrot the same rhetoric when advancing their ever-shifting hierarchical victimology. If we switched out the entire staff tomorrow with people from Yale, the placards wouldn’t change because wokeness requires everyone to say the same things. (Or, maybe, the placards would get even worse.) Very few, if any, of the people bashing historical figures memorialized in art will ever themselves be candidates for a portrait.

So, if you visit the Princeton Art Museum, do yourself a favor and ignore the descriptions. Admire the art, where you can, and try not to get lost.