Woke Takes a Hit at the Smithsonian, and Watch the Philistinism, Please

Art and culture news has some notable comings and goings.

T here’s lots of art news that doesn’t involve the federal government, but, alas, news from the Swamp looms large. I see that Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian, is retiring at the end of the year. I interviewed him in 2019 when he’d just become the Smithsonian’s boss and the fantastic National Museum of African American History and Culture — his project — had just opened. Having done a renovation and addition to a 16-gallery museum, I’m awed by anyone who could lead the charge toward a brand new — and gorgeous — museum many times that size.

He’s 74, so he deserves to retire and rest on his African American museum laurels. Alas, elsewhere he lost the plot of our times. He’s a DEI kingpin at a time when the whole toxic woke enterprise has a target on its back and the White House is aiming at it with orders to fire — and fire bazookas. Under his watch, the Smithsonian co-sponsored the 1619 Project with the New York Times, an unforgivable conspiracy against merit, common sense, quality, and the best in human nature. Driven as it is by race-based preferences and the false value of “equity” — everyone has to land in the same place — much of DEI is illegal. Bunch was proud of the Smithsonian’s role.

Bunch couldn’t right a ship that, in 2020 and with his encouragement, went woke. He’s too much a believer. The African American History and Culture Museum’s “Talking About Race” program — which said that logic, working hard, self-reliance are “white supremacist” — was horrifying. He’s a smooth, evasive talker. That’s a key part of a job that is, after all, political, but he took a side. Scandals at the National Portrait Gallery, the new-and-should-be-nixed Museum of the American Latino, and the American History museum proved to me he needed to go.

I chuckle when I read that he’s “had enough with outside interference.” Sixty percent of the Smithsonian’s money comes from Congress. The government owns its buildings and collections. Its workers are federal employees. It’s mostly in Washington, where politics is a business, sport, favorite vaudeville show, and obsession. “Be careful” is a reasonable thing to expect of the Smithsonian’s leaders. Bunch wasn’t careful enough.

***

Will the Trump people botch what comes next? I’m fascinated by the tempest over the purge of a painting that our Dominican Republic ambassador doesn’t like. Last week, Ambassador Leah Campos ordered Kehinde Wiley’s Young Artists After Siamases 1960 removed from the walls of the American Embassy in Santo Domingo. The Obama regime commissioned it in 2013 specifically for that spot.

It’s big and bold and might very well be considered “aesthetically terrifying,” as the head of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program said. It depicts four young people: two standing women — one rotund and with a rotunda of an Afro, and, I have to say, she’s no Grace Kelly — and two young men sitting on the ground below them. Two of the figures are black, and two look mixed-race. They’re young artists so they all look ratty, and it’s all very Grease and harmless. One of the men wears a shirt with the logo of an Evangelical Christian school. They’re set against Wiley’s signature backdrop of vines and flowers. It’s pretty and ugly and feisty and takes up a lot of wall. I wouldn’t want it in my house. It would discommode the chintz.

The picture is based on Siamesas, a 1960 painting by Dominican artist Gilberto Hernández Ortega. He’s famous in the Dominican Republic, and his 1960 picture is apparently famous, but I’ve never heard of him. Who has? It’s Wiley’s tribute to him, so it doesn’t come out of the blue. In Spanish, siamesas can mean Siamese twins or it can mean two sides of the same coin. I asked a Dominican friend, and he said it’s slang for kindred spirits.

Wiley later painted President Obama’s official portrait, and Young Artists got a swipe because of that. I liked the Obama portrait and thought it was unintentionally subversive in presenting Obama as decorative, hothouse flower — a pretty package that has no depth. Young Artists is the kind of thing Wiley does. At this point, nearly every museum in America has one of his paintings. He’s a good but formulaic artist.

If the ambassador doesn’t like it, she shouldn’t have to look at it every day. Taking it down and putting it in storage is her prerogative. But noooo, there has to be a drama. Erin Scavino, the head of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program called the thing “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” In a video post on Instagram, Ambassador Campos said it was and example of “globalist and woke ideologies.” The New York Times, which rarely delivers news fit to print, reported that 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.” Talk about stereotyping. Campos ordered the painting covered with a tarp depicting an American flag. Campos’s Instagram video show the thing being hauled away by workers, with Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” from 1984 playing. Now, I remember Twisted Sister. Talk about aesthetically terrifying.

Why does Scavino think this picture is “very woke,” I wonder. Because it depicts two young black people and two young mixed-race people? Not every good work of art has to look like the Mona Lisa. Walk down any main drag in Washington, well, maybe not in Georgetown, and lots of people look like the figures in Young Artists. Not dressed by Brooks Brothers, but they’re living their lives. They’re young, Americans like you and me and Scavino and Campos. And what do “globalist ideologies” mean in the context of this picture? I’m baffled. The group in Young Artists couldn’t find Davos on a map to save their lives. The painting isn’t even political. And Campos is an ambassador. Shouldn’t she be at least a little bit worldly? And, really, why “We’re Not Gonna Take It”? Take what? Campos isn’t exactly living under the heel of a jackbooted thug. Will the State Department sell it? “It would be the goal of Art in Embassies to proudly do so,” we’re told by a press flack. There are worse things than being a yahoo and proud of it, but not many.

It’s all so silly and gratuitous, and it contributes to a sour mood among the crowd at the Smithsonian, the staff, visitors, and donors, with whom the next museum head, I hope a great reformer, will have to deal. They’re terrified that a new regime will shout “global ideologies” and “woke,” and off go the pandas to the abattoir. Remember, they’ve got TDS. The Smithsonian is a vital part of our culture and a treasure trove. Tossing “woke” and “globalist” at something that’s merely “aesthetically terrifying” cheapens what “woke” and “globalist” actually mean. It doesn’t apply to everything unsuited for a Hallmark card.

***

Two other stories, oddly related to each other, are in the news. The masters of the Kennedy Center, whoever they may be, dismantled Joel Shapiro’s Blue, a 24-foot-tall abstract metal sculpture of a dancer on the Kennedy Center grounds since 2019. Shapiro, who died last year, gave it to the Kennedy Center. I’m not inspired by it, but its performative, playful look fits. Shapiro used blue a lot and considered it a very Jewish color. Blue is thought to remind Jews of the open sky and sea where God, though unseen, is enthroned and omnipresent. A day or two after it was dismantled and sent back to Shapiro’s foundation, David Rubenstein, once head of the Kennedy Center board, bought it and sent it over to the National Gallery.

I wouldn’t care a whit about it except for what strikes me as bizarre, which is President Trump’s interest in the Kennedy Center, a middling performing arts space in a middling city where high culture, enigmatic and poetic, is instinctively suspect. Spending five presidential minutes on it is five presidential minutes too many.

Where does the Kennedy Center board stand on Blue’s fate? Rubenstein paid $2 million for the sculpture. Did the board authorize forfeiting a $2 million asset?

And why the herculean, embarrassing crusade to rename the Kennedy Center? The federal statute naming it after JFK says clearly that it can’t be changed without amending the statute. The issue is now headed to the Supreme Court, with an alternative new name suggested by the Kennedy Center board: Under JFK’s name, an inscription would read “Restored and Renovated by President Donald Trump” and “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” Kennedy, by the by, didn’t give much of a hoot about high culture, or any culture unless Marilyn Monroe was on the striptease program singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” The high culture was all Jackie. Still, the law’s the law.

Public buildings shouldn’t be named after living people, but the Kennedy Center is, like the Smithsonian, public and in the nonprofit art business. Public spaces at the Smithsonian, for instance, are named for big donors, but these are people who’ve opened their wallets and put their millions on the line. Getting others, like Congress — i.e,, taxpayers — to do so doesn’t count. And the restoration and renovation haven’t been finished. I’ve been badgered by donors now and then to break the unwritten rules on naming opportunities. It’s a bad idea to do it.

Is the Kennedy Center board the least bit engaged in what’s happening? Trustees are known to pay no attention, but they sometimes also to pay too much attention and pull strings that they ought not touch, and pull them hard. Reading long judicial opinions as lawsuits have made their way through the courts, with lawyers enriched along the way, the judges at least think the board has a fiduciary responsibility. It also seems to me that they’re not paying attention. And as soon as the Democrats get back in, on Day One, Trump’s name will come down, and to the tune of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” if anyone has a stiletto-in-the-ribs-then-twist turn of mind.

***

I’m afraid, being a bit of a yahoo myself, that I’ve only just heard of John Galliano (b. 1960), a top British fashion designer. His work looks plush and lovely and not like a billboard for outer-space travel. I don’t remember headlines over his gross, antisemitic and racist name-calling sprees in 2010 and 2011. The Met’s Costume Institute has picked him as the subject of a retrospective for its 2027 anchor fashion exhibition.

Fashion is art, and I cover the Met Gala, a fun and educational project for me, and I did wonder whether his bad behavior should or would figure in his selection. He would, after all, be only the third living designer to get a Met retrospective. For a few weeks, it seemed that Galliano’s years of contrition would allow the show to go forward, but forgiveness isn’t infinite. Last week, the Met pulled the plug in a statement with Galliano.

Given the atmosphere, with an obviously antisemitic mayor of New York and a wave of horrible antisemitism on campuses and stealth antisemitism among many elites, this is best. These beliefs are beyond the pale. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde wrote, “One pays for one’s sins and one pays again, and all of one’s life, one pays.” Confession and atonement for some sins, and loathing and resenting and blaming Jews is among them, aren’t a one-time transaction, since this sin always takes us to a bad place.

At the Kennedy Center, the trustees seem clueless, inert, and tangential. In this case, one Met trustee, Anna Wintour, wielded too much power. She didn’t so much push for a Galliano show as she commanded it. The Costume Institute is part of the Met — all the Met trustees have a fiduciary responsibility for it — but Wintour, a Met trustee, is informally the trustee in charge. She didn’t properly weigh the times and the mood, much as Bunch didn’t, or she wrongly measured. I don’t know whether Max Hollein, the Met’s director, approves Costume Institute exhibitions, but he should, especially since the Met’s biggest fundraiser, the Met Gala, would have been yoked to a Galliano show. He might have wrongly deferred to Wintour, whose 77th birthday is in November, by the by. Might be time for her to retire, too.