The State Department’s Passport to Patriotism Is a Junk Show

Art showing flags with hearts in the middle, kids riding bikes, and rainbow eagles insult concepts of citizenship, love of country, and what makes America great.

A painting booted from our embassy in Santo Domingo, replaced by a baseball jersey. And then there’s Passport to Patriotism, the inaugural Washington art exhibition done by the Art in Embassies program at the State Department. It’s packed with schlock. A dud in Venice and a defenestration from the Smithsonian’s castle. What do these have in common? Bad judgment among people in power and, here and there, a double scoop of bad taste.

As I wrote earlier this month, I’m fixed on the purge of a painting that our Dominican Republic ambassador hates. Ambassador Leah Campos had a Kehinde Wiley painting removed from the embassy walls, saying that the Trump administration wants to turn away from “globalist and woke ideologies” and that “we are . . . instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country.” Wiley’s painting is a nearly life-size, in-your-face whopper that depicts four young people. Two are black, and two look mixed-race. The models were artists, and they’re in casual street wear, not cotillion wear, and the theme, it seems, is the look and feeling of the intense friendships of the till-a-new-school-year-do-us-part variety. Campos seemed to be resorting to stereotypes. As I noted, “Campos said in an interview in Spanish with a radio program in the Dominican Republic, ‘I saw a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians.’” I’m not a mind reader, but maybe she thought, and it’s not very nice, The fat one looks like a dyke?

The thing isn’t to Campos’s taste, and she has to look at it, but I remain clueless over what she sees as “globalist and woke ideologies.” Is it a racial issue? Is it their dress? They’re young. They don’t look like they’re Harvard MBA students, but who knows? As a Christian, I like to think that each of us is a gift from God to be treasured, though some, yes, are booby prizes. And Wiley’s shtick — and, granted, he’s not Joshua Reynolds — is the portrayal of black and Latino subjects, often young, sometimes famous, like his depiction of Michael Jackson as Napoleon on horseback, sometimes not famous. His format is drawn from Old Master aristocratic portraits by Titian, Rubens, van Dyck, and Reynolds. He paints them, likely with workshop help, and museums buy them. Guy’s gotta pay the rent.

“Every man a king” was Huey Long’s slogan and the title of his autobiography. Wiley thinks these types of subjects have been “erased,” and I use scare quotes because that’s a woke thought though it’s the most innocuous of them. The Le Nain artists of the 17th century, Gainsborough, Caravaggio, Millet, van Gogh, and dozens of other artists have depicted lowbrow and low-on-the-totem-pole types. Hey, they’re not robbing iPhones in broad daylight. Thomas Lawrence, George IV’s court painter, didn’t portray my very white ancestors: farmers, ministers, tradesmen, and teachers, none rich, none aristocrats, none an admiral. I don’t fret about it. If I had a Titian portrait of one of my Italian relatives, who were peasants in Titian’s time, I’d happily erase it and them from my life, sell it, and finish my half-built garage.

I wrote the press flacks at the American Embassy in Santo Domingo to ask what the ambassador means by “woke and globalist ideologies.” Campos seems well qualified and says her wish to serve the public is motivated by her Catholic faith. Not to go all picky and Methodist, but isn’t the Vatican a globalist enterprise with ideologies galore? The response was that I had to fill out a form on the State Department media portal. I did and got radio silence, not even “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the Twisted Sister tune accompanying Campos’s Instagram video of Wiley’s picture being crated.

The embassy sent the Wiley back to the Art in Embassies program at the State Department, which had commissioned it under the Obama regime. The press flack there said they’d “proudly” sell it. Spoken like a true hayseed. If Campos didn’t like it, she should have put it in storage. Ambassador appointments are rotated every two years. The next ambassador might like it.

Hearing naught from the embassy, I looked at the State Department’s Art in Embassies website. It’s charged with helping new ambassadors decorate their embassies and residences with good American art, displaying our aesthetic prowess, and promoting American values. It’s a show of soft power. The program sometimes networks with museums, which often lend art to embassies, especially if the ambassador is a local, though they never lend their best. Embassies rarely have museum-quality climate control, and the public areas are often party spaces. Guests probably wouldn’t steal art, but parties mean food and red wine and martinis and, if the parties are really fun, swinging on chandeliers and belly dancers hurling snakes.

Erin Scavino, the political appointee who heads the department, called the Wiley “aesthetically terrifying.” When I went to the Getty Museum yesterday, I wondered whether she’d call the art there, which is fantastic, “aesthetically terrifying.” James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, painted in 1888, is one of my favorite things there. It’s gorgeous — not pretty — and riveting, bracing, puzzling, weird, very Belgian, and a serious religious picture. It shows a mob of Belgians, freaks and frauds among them, taunting Jesus as he enters the city. The marble sculpture nearby, Christ and Mary Magdalene, is by Rodin, from 1908. It seems to depict Jesus on the Cross, embraced by Mary Magdalene, but Rodin also called it Prometheus and the Oceanid and The Genius and Pity. We don’t know whether he thought it finished. Beauty and narrative, human things, come from raw rock. Jesus’s next move was to a hewn rock tomb where He was resurrected. Hallmark-card stuff? No, but the sculpture holds the eye and evokes a different facet of the Crucifixion.

Art in Embassies organizes exhibitions and had indeed done one for the American Embassy in Santo Domingo. The list of objects in that show included Peter Max’s view of the Statue of Liberty looking like it was made of pink cotton candy; a tier-three Jasper Johns print called Tattered Banner that depicts an abstract, upside-down flag in black slashes; and lots of photographs of Babe Ruth. I saw a painting of a jazz band and another of a cactus, both junk, photographs of Mount Rushmore and of the Iwo Jima Memorial with fireworks in the background. They’re calendar art. The dramatic photograph of then-candidate Trump seconds after the Butler shooting is very good. Mark Lipp’s painting based on the photograph isn’t. It has no immediacy. It’s as if the photograph has been embalmed. Another version by Lipp is hanging in the White House and isn’t good, either.

Strange to say, the exhibition also displays two Arizona Diamondback baseball jerseys and two baseball bats. I’ve got a broad view of what’s art, but these objects aren’t. They’re artifacts and souvenirs. So there you have it. I would have shown work by American artists with Dominican heritage. Having lived in Andover, Mass., next to Lawrence, a small city that’s 80 percent Dominican, I know some. What the Art in Embassies program sent for the show and Campos took is, to be diplomatic, lame.

***

I wasn’t going to write about Passport to Patriotism: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Diplomacy, which I saw right after it opened, but the fuss in Santa Domingo stimulated me. It’s organized by the Art in Embassies program and the American Arts Conservancy, which sponsored the Venice Biennale’s American pavilion, devoted this year to the work of Alma Allen. It’s at the Organization of American States art gallery in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of D.C. It’s touted as “the most patriotic art by the most patriotic artists in America,” dedicated to “celebrating a land of opportunity and promise” and “celebrating self-government” and “bringing people together” to “start the conversation,” but it’s paper-thin content-wise, and the art, by and large, is not only junk but boring junk. Bringing people together over what? Start the conversation about what? These are clichés. Self-government isn’t easy or hunky-dory, since it demands a multitude of virtues, among them self-control, courage, patience, prudence, charity, gratitude, and tact. What I saw was dead-end art.

It’s all happy-clappy but also disturbing at times for its reduction of the American flag to the realm of cake frosting, a tattoo, or decoration on a baby’s onesie. There’s a “People Room” of vinyl photographs applied to the wall, not-quite-kitsch scenes of everyday life — kids riding bikes, firemen, old people looking wise, couples holding hands, and babies — but what does this have to do with citizenship? The scenes are universal — we’re not the only country with people like this, but it’s so banal. What’s American about it? And there’s no narrative. An eagle with rainbow colors? That’s trite.

It’s a missed opportunity because American art from, say, John Singleton Copley’s portraits to Hudson River School landscapes, George Caleb Bingham’s election pictures, Eakins’s and Homer’s and George Bellows’s sport picturs, Grant Wood, Pollock, Pictures Generation photographs, and dozens of artists today treat freedom, sacrifice, courage in war, and protest. The American Revolution wouldn’t have happened without naysayers, risk-takers, loudmouths, cavaliers, Roundheads, and hotheads. What bothers me about Passport to Patriotism is its cluelessness. It’s vacuous. The exhibition looks nice, and the space is lovely, but some decent art and some depth would have been welcomed. What’s on view isn’t even kitsch.

“I want people to come here and feel happy, I want them to feel inspired, and I want them to start conversations with their families,” Scavino said in an interview about the show. Well, there’s art for family entertainment and children, and there are zoos and gardens, but then there’s art for adults. Passport to Patriotism is just baby talk.

On view is a sequined jacket with a “USA 250” banner across the front and flag and star arm lapels, designed by Deborah Yanna. Fun, but it reminds me of President Bush’s exhortation that we should “go shopping” in response to economic disruptions from 9/11. That’s fun and goofy and the ultimate victory of sparkle over substance.

There are lots of paintings of the American flag, in its pure form a mass-produced object with a uniform look that puts people on the same page. “Isn’t this cute” or “isn’t this cheery” and then move on isn’t what we want the flag to promote. I look at the American flag with awe and reverence. Slapping a heart and squiggles on a painting of the flag doesn’t desecrate the flag — it’s too silly — but it trivializes the flag. The flag loses its gravity when it’s tarted up. There’s certainly nothing in the show that deepens or enriches the flag. The art is so bad — banal, boring bad — that it blocks thoughts of our flag as a symbol of mystery and miracle. How did this unique, heretical, inconceivable enterprise — our country — ever get off the ground much less succeed and endure? Nothing in Passport to Patriotism brings this to the fore.

The U.S. Flag Code bars slapping images on the American flag, things like hammers and sickles, swastikas, happy faces, a Superman logo, a pregnant-man emoji, and, yes, hearts. This isn’t an actual flag, you say, but a painting of a flag, but let’s not quibble.

The Greats, by Brandon Ralph, is a set of black-and-white portraits of a group of Founding Fathers that uses AI to develop what they really looked like. What did Benjamin Franklin look like? He looks just like he does on the $100 bill. Joseph Duplessis’s 1787 portrait of Franklin was the model, but, for all of Ralph’s AI magic, his portrait looks the same. And whoop-di-doo. Where do these portraits take us? Kate Wasserbach Moore’s America 250 Betsy Ross Gown is supposed to imagine what Betsy Ross would wear today. Well, maybe, if this were 1942 and she were auditioning for Yankee Doodle Dandy. The show feels like it’s stacked with artists who were chosen because they were friends of the curator. That’s a no-no.

It’s a dumb, anti-art, anti-history show, and all fluff, the opposite of the subjects I covered in honor of America’s 250th: art, architecture, battlefields, and heroes, ending on July Fourth with a look at Mount Rushmore. The show is smug, too, since there’s no heavy lifting, given all the clichéd art. It’s embarrassing, much more so than the Venice Biennale’s American pavilion. Allen’s art is at least good even if boring and derivative. The Biennale was a swamp of victim art, but Allen’s work has none of that. It’s art for art’s sake. Still, for America 250, we delivered a dud to the world’s Olympics of contemporary art.

***

This takes me to the Smithsonian. Lonnie Bunch, its woke bureaucrat head, is out. Righting the Smithsonian is the prize on which all eyes must be fixed. Given Bunch’s exit — he embraced toxic 1619 Project ideology and should have been canned — White House engagement, Congress’s composition, and the fact that many trustee terms are soon expiring, we’ll never have this chance again. The Smithsonian is our great national treasure and an institution — to channel the odious Rudi Dutschke and abominable Antonio Gramsci — through which evildoers believe they’d long ago marched and conquered for keeps. Will the Smithsonian get the Passport to Patriotism treatment? Or be another Kennedy Center–type debacle? Inquiring minds want to know. Will we hear “We’re Not Gonna Take It” played as the Spirit of St. Louis heads to the scrapyard? I smell a globalist ideology! Lindbergh did, after all, fly it to France.