Ancient Roman Swag Sells, the Smithsonian’s Shunned, and Your Art Critic Visits Cornell

For a lecture, not an orgy. And are the two Adams presidents back in vogue? Yes, and deservedly so.

I t’s time for this month’s art news, the good, the bad, and the sad. I’ve written about a dozen presidential sites over the years, the last a two-parter on the new Theodore Roosevelt Library in North Dakota’s badlands. And NR’s Judson Berger also wrote a rollicking account of his recent visit to the TR Library for the magazine. Since our schools are at their most negligent in history instruction, these presidential centers can fill the void. In wonderful news, a high-level group is making progress in creating a presidential center exploring the life and times of John Adams, Founding Father, diplomat, and president, and John Quincy Adams, his son. Their house museums are in Quincy, near Boston, and the center, a proper research center and history museum, will be there, too. The board of the Adams center hired the director of the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., to lead the charge with them. The board itself is very strong.

The two Adams presidents don’t get the respect and recognition they deserve. John Quincy was our most consequential diplomat and the president who marked the end of the Founding era. After his presidency, he had a brilliant career in Congress, from 1830 until his death. Adams père was, I’d argue, the Revolution’s chief arranger, manager, and tactician. His presidency — the Alien and Sedition Acts, the XYZ diplomatic imbroglio leading to the Quasi-War between the U.S. and France in 1798–1800, and then the 1800 election — was an intriguer’s paradise. Both men had magnificent wives. If the new center were to attempt a hagiography, it would probably fail, since both men were acrid by nature, the father more than the son. Hard to love, but that’s good. We’re less likely to be swept away by visions of thumping hearts, flowers, unicorns, and baloney.

What stories to tell, about leadership, endurance, and complexity. The biggest challenge will be giving not only the sharp elbow but the groin strike-and-stomp to the sort of left-wing ideological capture that is underway, I fear, at the TR Library.

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I visited Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., last week to give a lecture called “Who Gets to Say It’s Good.” I spoke about who among art’s many audiences ought to be the keeper of the flame when it comes to quality. “Quality” is a dirty word, especially among art academics, since they tend to prize art about race, gender, and oppression, the new Trinity. Most hate craftsmanship — how things actually get made, well made, baffles them — and hate enigma and nuance, too, since you’re either oppressed or an oppressor, and that’s that. Beauty, for many, ought to be verboten.

Critics are in the mix. Curators, the government, and the art market figure, too. Who gets to say it’s good? My quick answer is “you,” the viewer. Experts who impose meanings are to be despised. I talked about the new federal mandate in favor of Classical architecture in government buildings and curatorial abuses of power. I also looked at beauty and quality in unexpected places and how these concepts have evolved from the days of Raphael to now.

Cornell’s Program on Freedom and Free Societies sponsored my visit. The classicist Barry Strauss, whose Ten Caesars and Jews vs. Rome are very good books, started the program to promote heterodoxy on campus. It’s a great way to counter conformity and the loud voices of the living brain-dead, often tenured. It’s good to meet smart young people thinking for themselves. I suspect it’s not easy at Ivy League schools. I hope they don’t leave with PTSD.

The sex scandal? I have an opinion, of course, but write only about art. Harvest season’s done, though, and we Vermonters have free time, so I watched a tape of the faculty meeting called to condemn the administration. “White supremacy,” “Believe All Women,” and “@#&% the Patriarchy” are shorthand for the big minds on offer. What happened to evidence or nuance or soaring eloquence? A gender studies professor connected the sex scandal to Gaza. What happened to logic? Why does everything have to be about everything? She held a sign as she spoke, but it was upside down.

It’s not a Cornell thing — the faculty I got to know are learned and serious — but a high-end university thing. I thought of Christopher Guest and Billy Wilder, subtle, brilliant satirists. Could even comic talents like theirs have imagined what I saw and heard?

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Sotheby’s had a coup of imperial proportions at its October 21 Magnum Opus sale in New York. Up on the block was a marble, larger-than-life-size armored torso of a Roman emperor from the first century a.d. It sports a resplendent cuirass with the sun god Sol emerging from the sea in his chariot to bring order to chaos. Gallia tumultibus divisa est — Gaul is divided by turbulence — I hear in news from Paris, which could use a Roman emperor and his sun-god backup.

This sculpture was found in Dalmatia, though. On the cuirass, fierce feline heads, ram heads, and Medusa heads on overlapping straps were meant to repel evil. The head’s gone, but the sculpture was made to allow new heads to be attached as emperors came and went. The marble is from Paros, pure white with the translucence of sugar and crisply carved. It’s fantastic. It flew like Sol on his chariot past its $8–12 million estimate, selling for $34.3 million, including the buyer’s commission. That’s an auction record for an ancient Roman sculpture.

I’m fascinated by the sale itself. It’s titled Magnum Opus, but it’s a four-part sale of 900 works spanning the ages and continents, all from a single mystery collector. I’ve got many hundreds of works of art, too, but among them are my presidential Pez dispensers, elephant tchotchkes, and schnauzer Christmas ornaments. But Sotheby’s mystery collector owned ancien régime Sèvres, a Canaletto, Gio Ponti furniture, and — the star — the Roman torso. The four sales, called “acts,” each had a snazzy title. This sale was Act III: Darkness and Light, offering things that have expressive contrast like shadow and illumination and black and white.

The art is high-quality, but one eye-opener was a Soviet porcelain plate with a red star enclosing a hammer and a hand plow, and a cobalt border with finely embossed images of agricultural and architectural implements. It’s from 1922, showing how fast the transition was from equity for all to indulgence for the insider few. Such is human nature. And it sold for $32,000 on a $7–10,000 estimate! Competition among Trot billionaires was intense. Is a Soros dining on beluga caviar on this very plate as I write?

The four sales made $63 million. Together, Magnum Opusis the perfect shopping excursion for today’s rich Millennial, not by nature a collector in depth but eclectic and wanting, as a global citizen, to project worldliness. Art in the first — and priciest — sale ran in sequence from an Iznik tile to a Klimt drawing, a Venetian enamel tazza — a footed, shallow dish — the Roman torso, an Avedon photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and two George II wall settees in the manner of William Kent. Now that’s eclectic. This is not your father’s high-end auction.

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The Smithsonian’s in the news, and, once again, it’s bad. Its visitorship has plummeted by half since its peak in 2016, from 30 million to 15 million, newly published attendance figures show. The Smithsonian is free, so it doesn’t rely on the gate for income, but I was the director of a free art museum, too, and closely followed visitorship. A good director and a good curator want people to come, but the Smithsonian suffers from a shortage — not a total lack by any means — of both. The Museum of American History’s attendance has collapsed in the last few years, too. Bad but well-deserved publicity is likely one factor as woke — and redundantly woke — programming takes a toll. Hit, too, were the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.

Nobody visiting a museum likes to be on the receiving end of a sermon from a blinkered egghead on the gilded federal dime. And many understand that they’re not getting what Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian, calls “the truth, warts and all” but warts, fake warts, and, here and there, enough reality to make for agitprop. I’m sorry to see this since I like the Smithsonian. Once a museum loses credibility, it’s a slog to get it back.

Via expiring Smithsonian board terms and term limits, Congress and President Trump have a unique chance to redirect the Smithsonian. This means freeing a cohort of curators and directors from their duties to be objective, compelling, scholarly, and fresh. Then they can pursue their true callings as community organizers, campaign gurus, and lobbyists. Ah, the smell of liberation in the air! Viva whatever, as Che might say. I hope it also means ditching the Museum of the Latino and the American Women’s History Museum, which together would save a cool billion and deliver us from two more museums in a city that already has too many. Tick, tick, tick, though. The powers that be need to act.

John Quincy Adams, by the by, can fairly be called the father of the Smithsonian. James Smithson’s bequest — $500,000 — was a near miss since it was contingent on his nephew dying, as he did, without heirs and was vaguely dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of Knowledge among men.” That could embrace a lot — a chain of free bordellos — but not with Quincy at the helm. He shaped the bequest so that the money went to establish museums.

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Paul Stankard died on October 6. He was among the pioneers in the art-glass revival in America and the master of the paperweight. Born in 1943, he grew up at a time when his severe dyslexia was diagnosed as simplemindedness. He learned to make glass medical gadgets, got a job, made playful glass figures that he sold at craft fairs, and then taught himself to make paperweights. Walt Whitman’s love of handcrafted rather than machine-made objects inspired him, but so did high-end Romantic-era French paperweights made by Baccarat. He probably peeked at Dutch Old Master flower pictures and Ruskin’s art criticism.

Stankard’s work is beautiful and hypnotic. He used tiny torches to create molten glass sculpted into hyperrealistic forms of flowers, bugs, worms, fruit, elves, leaves, and other motifs. He created intricate still lifes in glass and then encased his fantasy scene in hot, heavy lead glass. I love miniatures. His paperweights have the same extreme refinement but also lots of nature mysticism.

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Paris Basel is what people in the arts call the new — since 2022 — art-fair magnum and satellite of the Art Basel chain. I haven’t been to Paris this year and wanted, as an abstraction, to go. It was set to run from October 21 to October 25, with the private preview on the 21st for the gazillionaires and, if I’d gone, me, only because I’m considered “international art press.” The fair is blue-chip cutting-edge contemporary art and modern art, and Paris is the art city non pareil. I surveyed my closet, saw that sea of flannel and plaid, and thought I’d better skip it.

My pitchfork would have come in handy. The fair was proving to be a smashing success, with at least $147 million in sales made during the preview alone, but then there was the smell of burning plastic and tear gas and French rioters, who aren’t the bathing types. The five-day fair closed two days early. On the one hand, the rich get richer, disaster and mayhem are long-term profit centers, and I’d probably max my credit card on art if I thought the world was about to end. On the other, Paris Basel’s doors were wide open, the plaza in front of the venue, the Grand Palais, displayed pricy modern sculptures, and among the works on view indoors was a $100 million Modigliani. Closing early seems wise. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” I remembered, and that didn’t end well.