A few summer loose ends and some news, and greetings from Fort Worth. I love Texas. Every couple of years I find a big, fat, wicked rat in the art world’s garden of earthly delights and chase it with my rhetorical broomstick until it’s fled, dead, or recast into something right and proper. The Smithsonian is this fall’s fat rat. Since 2022, I’ve been in Washington off and on, working on my Allan Stone biography at the Archives of American Art, where Stone’s gallery files were donated. So I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly at the 21-museum blob.
The Smithsonian is in a Swamp bubble, so — too often — it pimps the divisive shtick that we’re either victims or oppressors, abusing its great art and reducing it to a handy prop, mostly for race politics. With a new sheriff in town this past January 20, the White House noticed and called it. Letters have gone back and forth. The Trump people have placed the Smithsonian — whose collection and buildings belong to the government, whose staff are federal employees, and most of whose money comes from you and me and our Chinese Communist Party lenders — under enhanced supervision. Lonnie Bunch, head of the Smithsonian, lunched with President Trump last week. It was all nicey-nice — Bunch is a schmoozer — and, I suspect, there were lots of sweetly murmured promises to change.
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