There are many dismaying stories of canceled artists whose professional, creative, and personal lives were severely damaged by their inability to agree to some requirement of progressive orthodoxy. This series at FAIR in the Arts has featured two of them so far, those of Rosie Kay and Mary McDonald-Lewis. But the more usual case is a quiet ratcheting of exclusion in which artists have found it increasingly difficult to garner opportunities to create and display their work. They may have committed no particular transgressions against progressive code. Rather, through no fault of their own, they have become the wrong kind of person as far as the leaders of the institutional systems are concerned.
This has been apparent to me for longer than it has to many artists because I’m not a progressive. In that respect, I am out of sync with most of my colleagues in the arts. But as an artist, I have no desire to conform, even to the supposed non-conformists. As a semi-outsider, I have witnessed a two-decade-long deterioration in what might be called the culture of culture—the mores among people who create and exhibit. “Culture war” ought to be an oxymoron, but it increasingly describes the state of American cultural terrain.
In 2015, I started writing about these battles for The Federalist, such as an effort by protesters to shut down an educational program at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston that let museum visitors try on a kimono. I mocked them, but there was something profoundly sinister about the protesters’ objections. After the MFA arranged for the kimono to be handled, but not donned, the protesters complained that even that was “white supremacy propaganda.” In their minds, for a white person to touch a kimono without the proper progressive racial priors in mind was tantamount to a crime. Progressive politics had taken an identitarian turn that in essence tried to retrofit race war into the Marxian conception of class war. Furthermore, it demanded feats of controlled contemplation that we normally associate with religion. It did not even slightly recognize the sanctity of private experience or interpretive freedom.
Since then, arts institutions have internalized that critique. A few months ago, the Center for Italian Modern Art closed after ten years of presenting scholarly, beautifully installed exhibitions on Broome Street in New York City. As New York Times journalist Zachary Small reported, “After the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, [CIMA founding director Laura Mattioli] said, many grant-making organizations appeared to require that exhibition proposals include elements of diversity and inclusion. She said themes of social justice were more prevalent in American art than in modern Italian art, making it difficult for her museum to compete for funding.”
It was startling that she said so out loud. Hardly anyone wants to be seen gainsaying those requirements for fear of institutions cutting them off and colleagues branding them as conservatives, bigots, or similar epithets. However, even an outsider could look at museum programming and deduce that many exhibitions are the products of diversity and inclusion diktats.
Those pressures were apparent even at CIMA. In the 20-teens, the center displayed contemplative exhibitions of works by giants of Italian modernism, such as Medardo Rosso, Marino Marini, and Giorgio Morandi (which I reviewed for The New Criterion). In recent years, however, it mounted exhibitions with expressly political angles. They had titles like “Staging Injustice: Italian Art 1880–1917” and “Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action—One Thousand and One Voices.” CIMA devoted a 2023 exhibition to Corrado Cagli, a minor, inconsistent artist whom they deemed of note for being gay, Jewish, and the target of fascism. His life story is indeed interesting. If only the same could be said of his paintings.
This exemplifies a pattern: an increased focus on the artist’s person, with a commensurate need for the viewer’s indulgence regarding the quality of the art. In this context, “diversity” doesn’t mean diversity, and “inclusion” doesn’t mean inclusion. Instead, those words point to an ethos that reifies an iconic Straight White Man as an effigy of Western culture, and tears down the effigy in order to attack the culture. In practice, this results in an overweening emphasis on identity, with institutions giving out opportunities to artists according to how little they resemble the effigy. In 2022, critic Ben Davis noted approvingly regarding a wide swath of group exhibitions that “the once-drastically overrepresented white Euro-American male demographic has been rendered a near non-presence in almost every such recent survey.”
Why did he regard this as a good thing? Because the arts are preponderantly progressive, and contemporary progressivism is a project that imagines that justice will bloom of its own accord from the rubble of a destroyed Western order. As a student activist group at Columbia University recently put it, “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
There are progressives who regard that vision as a betrayal of progressivism, not its fulfillment. But they have been sidelined by what I call postliberal progressive autocracy: our current institutional regime of intolerance, left-identitarianism, and redistributive economics, enforced by foundations with millions or billions of dollars of capital. Political partisans who subscribe to this worldview would rather starve CIMA to death than allow them to exhibit art for art’s sake.
The main objective of these partisans is to tear down the effigy of Western culture. However, there’s an important corollary: If you don’t resemble this effigy, but your art is not about your lack of resemblance to the effigy, then your work is of no use to postliberal progressive autocracy. If you’re a black woman, for example, but you’re painting still lifes that don’t address your being a black woman, then you’re likely experiencing the ratcheting of exclusion as much as any white male artist. Demographic studies have consistently found that whites comprise about 80% of American artists and arts professionals. Creative Capital gives its $50,000 awards to an artist pool that is 80% non-white, a fact they announce proudly.
Moreover, most of these “artists of color” are working on projects that highlight their identities. The smattering of exceptions to this pattern are projects addressing climate change, colonialism, or another acute concern of progressive politics. It’s not clear to me that there’s a single cissexual straight white male recipient on the fifty-item 2024 Creative Capital award slate. It’s likewise not clear that any of the included artists are making something simply because it would look good. It all serves a non-art agenda that requires both a progressive-favored identity and ideological subservience.
Decades of effort to remedy the lack of representation of women in the institutions have culminated in the irony that these institutions are losing interest in white women. I’m friends with quite a few of them, and they too are experiencing the ratcheting of exclusion. They are painters I admire, in some cases to the point of envy. But the fulfillment of creative visions for its own sake, long assumed to be a proper pursuit only for men, no longer serves institutional purposes. It’s as if they gained admission to an ivory tower just in time for it to collapse. This is even though women—again, around 80% of whom are white—comprise 76% of intellectual leadership at museums. (One wonders whether it’s because of that fact.)
Herein lies the trouble with representation. If a given year of museum programming featured no women, no blacks, or no homosexuals, we would rightly suspect that the museum was neglecting an enormous range of artistic talent. But the goal of the museum is not to represent a particular percentage of women, blacks, or homosexuals in its programming, but to discover and display artistic talent. Likewise, this can be said of the grant programs. The diversity of an exhibition or award slate indicates—not definitively, but significantly—whether the associated selection processes are fair. But diversity is a meaningless goal, particularly the redefined “diversity” of postliberal progressive autocracy. It is inspiring to see ourselves represented in the museum in a laudatory way, as makers or subjects. Everyone ought to experience that pride. But it is crucial to the apprehension of art to imagine our way into the lives of makers and subjects who do not resemble us. That requires humility, which better extracts the juice of art than pride alone.
The politicization of arts programming previously noted at CIMA is illustrated by hundreds of other examples in Western museums. A recent and pointed one is an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, “Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration.” According to the museum, “The exhibition features new works in painting, sculpture, and installation… that highlight the figure’s malleability and continuing metamorphosis, expressing the lived experiences of a multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers.” Two of the seven artists included are men, or appear to be. One of them is a biracial painter whose work, says his gallery, draws on “archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.” The other’s Wikipedia page describes singular-them as “an American actor, model, artist, YouTuber, and LGBTQ activist… known for sharing their experiences as a transgender, deaf, Asian, and Jewish person of color.” The women are all Latina or mixed-race. A source familiar with the institution tells me that it takes no interest in artists whose Jewishness is not made tolerable by another ethnicity more desirable to the progressive imagination. It is now possible, in other words, for an artist to be too Jewish for the Jewish Museum.
Increasingly, museums are being influenced by postliberal progressive autocracy, mounting exhibitions in which art is merely a vehicle for didacticism. It may be possible to enjoy the art made by the aforementioned transgender, deaf, Asian, and Jewish person of color. But that’s not the point. The point is the feeling you get from the representation of this particular identity in the Jewish Museum. And you are to feel good about it, or you are a bigot.
The correct operation of taste begins with detecting artistic quality, in both senses—degree and kind. From there the viewer might inform his taste by investigating the background behind the work, including the artist’s biography. The identitarian exhibition would have you work the other way, from biography to object. I have known people who trained themselves accordingly. One of them is a white woman who once told me that she couldn’t enjoy the permanent collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston because it was too white.
Public support for museums is suspected to be in long-term decline. Millennials are known not to attend cultural events at rates that will sustain the institutions that host them. An astonishing 76% of surveyed millennials who work in museums are considering leaving the field. Consequently, museums are reaching out to philanthropic foundations. Many of them, and some of the largest of them, advance postliberal progressive autocracy. The Ford Foundation has been linked to numerous beneficiary organizations that spread leftist extremism and antisemitism. Ford’s outgoing director defended the cancellation of the 2021 start of a four-museum exhibition it funded, “Philip Guston Now,” for reasons justified by left-identitarianism. (Guston, who died in 1980, was Jewish.)
The president of the Mellon Foundation announced in 2020 that “There won't be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society.” Mellon regularly gives six and seven-figure grants to art organizations, including Creative Capital. It recently pledged a half-billion dollars to its Monuments Project, aimed at “fostering more complete and inclusive storytelling of who we are as Americans.” Like the prior examples, “inclusive” here does not mean inclusive. One of its first initiatives was to award $3 million to a proposal from the City of Boston titled “Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument: Transforming Boston.” This program is commissioning a New York-based Chicano artist to stack thirty or forty coolers into the shape of a Mayan pyramid. “De-monument” betrays the program's fundamentally destructive attitude.
There have been many times in art history that the establishment dutifully supported artists of much less worth than those it neglected. There are reasons to think that the same is going on at present. One supposes that eventually, arts institutions will rediscover the transcendent value of art, which is the premise of their existence. But for now, they appear to be trending away from doing so. In the meantime, the rest of us must find less institutional (or non-institutional) ways to keep creating. We leave the rest to posterity. It sometimes takes centuries, but history consistently punishes all who try to pass off humbug as vital art. The art of our time will not be the exception.
