A Glimpse at the Art World According to The New York Times

Aporia Magazine has some really good material devoid of typical leftist nonsense. This article, by Bruce Gilley posted on January 4, 2024, skewers sections on art from the New York Times issue of October 22, 2023. If you ever had any doubt that the Times and the art world in general are entirely on the anti-White left, this should clear that up. As Gilley notes, “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the art establishment of the contemporary United States is staffed by culturally and historically ignorant, mostly-female activists who don’t really love art, even if they knew what the term meant.” Sadly, these activists, including any random males (likely gay or transgender) who have managed to become curators in this environment, are all too likely to be White.

Many writers on the arts have noted how art has gone from being political and politicized – things it has always been – to being totalitarian, which is the opposite of being political. What I found new in these pages, and perhaps this is no surprise if the totalitarian thesis holds, is that it has also become profoundly ignorant as well.

The lead story enthuses that “The Art World Expands Its Notion of What Art Is and Who Can Make It.” An 80-year old Russian-Jewish artist from Buenos Aires is having a retrospective at the Jewish Museum of New York. Her work includes dropping live chickens and lettuce onto a crowd from a helicopter and dressing up like a mattress (“That’s why mattresses are so important.”) The 30-something curator expresses a “deep frustration” that no one likes the art. “As curators we have an obligation and a commitment to bring unheard, unrecognized, or underrepresented artists into the discussion,” she explains. The museum prefers works “that focus on Black, Jewish, queer and trans experience in the United States.” It makes a point to display such works “in a German and Nazi context.” All this apparently represents the latest thinking in “the art world.” Mattresses in a Nazi context. …

Our first port is a story on the yeoman’s work being done by university galleries at Yale, Princeton, Duke and Vassar to atone for their “systemic racism.” These “historically white spaces with pasts that are entangled with slavery” are now hastening to host shows by blacks, the Times enthuses. One need not read further to know in advance that the art will be superb, the artists under-appreciated geniuses, the curators ebullient about their newfound virtue, and the didactic purposes beyond overdue. One featured artist glues Post-It notes, bits of her hair, and other items found on the floor onto Ghanaian textiles and calls it a “multiplicity of elements with which to engage.” Another sells photographs of herself nude mocking classical Western paintings (including a Last Supper where she is Christ and only Judas is white). She simultaneously complains to the Times reporter about the “dehumanization and commodification of the Black body.” The Duke exhibition is hosted by an institution “whose history is entwined with slavery…segregation, and white supremacy.” But visitors are also warned against “portraying Black people as victims.” …

Can we ever again have art for art’s sake? An opportunity arose at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis when the war in Ukraine erupted. It was a rare moment when a cultural institution could bring people together to celebrate art for art’s sake. Let’s not associate the great Russian art tradition with today’s rulers. On second thought, let’s, according to the enthusiastic report on the museum’s decision to go all in for anti-Russia messaging with the headline “Taking Sides.”

The museum has taken sides by “focusing on work critical of Russia.” It features a newly-commissioned work called “Glory to Ukraine.” All the art is now being mobilized for this glorious political project centered on “oppression and resistance.” Every item in the museum has been given a “context” label. Those beautiful Russian icons of the 5^th century are now identified as precursors to the seizure of Crimea. “You don’t just say ‘Oh, look at this art, how great it is’,” instructs the curator. You don’t? The Russians used to have a word for this. They called it agit-prop. It is another icon of the diminished artistic imagination evident in the Times art section. …

Section Two opens with a precis of the story so far: “Artists and Art Institutions Take On Social and Political Issues of the Day.” If our knowledge of the contemporary art world had been drawn from Section One, we might wonder what else they could possibly be doing. In this story, a Nigerian artist has “tackled colonialism, the subjugation of peoples that enabled the global slave trade and carved a callous cartography across Africa and other continents.” Another thing that “we did not learn about”, apparently, was that the global slave trade existed long before European colonialism and was ended because of that colonialism, and that the myth of “artificial borders” forced on hapless black people by devious colonialists has been demolished time and again, though its staying power is impressive.

The artist is not satisfied to scotch the colonialists for their slavery and borders. He insists they stole modernity itself from Africa. The more he looked at Picasso, the more he realized that these abstract ideas were looted from Mother Africa. The “white male artists were lionized by Western art history” while the true geniuses in Africa went unrecognized. “Throughout Black culture,” he proposes, “it’s always happened.” (The injunction back at Duke against “portraying Black people as victims” is now wearing very thin.)

The Nigerian was inspired to his latest work by “the zeitgeist since the George Floyd moment.” He apparently took seriously the assertions on NPR that blacks are now leading “the whole global conversation on culture.” The Times seems to agree. Take blacks out of modern music and what are you left with, he chortles to the reporter. “Folk music? Yodeling?” Well, Yes, we might reply. Also Stravinsky, Debussy, and Sibelius, as well as the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Kiss. And speaking of looted art, is it time for black jazz artists who appropriated Benny Goodman and the Big Band tradition to pay up? What about black classical and opera performers who have been lionized for their looting of these Western traditions? …

Our final offering from the front page of Section Two tells us “We’re all living in Indian territory.” True enough. My flight to Portland is now over the Great Plains where many an Indian tribe once subjugated, murdered, and enslaved his fellow Indian before U.S. expansion forced a modern state upon the primitive mayhem. The artist claims Cherokee ancestry. Like so many “native” artists these days, she looks wholly European. WalkingStick, or so she is called, was raised in white American society by her white mother and did not identify as Indian until attending art school in her late 30s, according to a 1985 Times article. Another thing “we did not learn”, in this case in journalism school, was to consult the back issues of the publication we write for. In 1989, the Times noted with arresting candor: “With romanticism still the order of the day, nobody wants to be considered white and Ms. Walkingstick is fortunate, for her father is a Cherokee.” Or so she says. The label has certainly allowed her to trade in Indian art fetish. When Congress passed a law in 1990 requiring sellers of “Indian art” to prove their native bona fides, WalkingStick complained about the personal intrusion, according to a Times article of that year. I’ll reserve judgement until I see a DNA test verified by a third party.

Our weekend read now turns to a “people’s art” exhibit featuring the not-very-typical people of San Francisco. The “democratic” and “inclusionary” jury process opened new vistas of hitherto oppressed art, the curator explains. The result? A trove of “socially or politically loaded” works. The people are apparently very concerned with “immigration, Ukraine, Black Lives Matter, January 6 and election deniers, and people who are unhoused,” enthuses the curator. A life-sized wooden toy soldier of General Robert E. Lee lies on its back “to evoke the way in which racial reckonings have toppled historical figures.”

Both journalist and jurors offer grave assent to these “socially or political loaded” works. Yet another thing that “we did not learn” in college was that brutalist and didactic works were the stock-in-trade of the socialist-realist tradition in communist lands. The response of free societies at the time was to treat them as kitsch, as in Andy Warhol’s Mao series. But the arts savants in the Times are so beholden to a totalizing ideology that they can’t bring themselves to invert the meaning of this latest iteration of “people’s art” as the only possible critical response. It is not just the inability to judge good art from bad. It is the inability even to know what art is anymore.

Next up: Annie Leibovitz, at 74, has a new show of photographs in, wait for it, Bentonville, Arkansas. The regulars of the financial page will be savvy to the location. Yes, it is the Walmart fortune, in this case from the founder’s daughter who has funded the exhibition. Leibovitz swoons that it’s the best endowed and freest project she has ever worked on. No underfunded socialist-realist party diktat guiding this show. In gratitude, Leibovitz created new portraits of Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and John Locke to celebrate the capitalist spirit that created the jobs, consumer welfare, and philanthropy of Walmart. Correction: she took a series of photos of her liberal friends, including Stacey Abrams, Rachel Maddow, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all sporting angry faces about the social injustice of late capitalism.

Perhaps Abrams, Maddow, and Jackson were not told that it was the Walmart fortune paying for it all. Or perhaps Leibovitz did not notice the irony. Nor did the reporter. Maddow, a San Francisco lesbian, has been hammering away at Walmart for years. Capitalism, it seems, is OK as long as its fuels the anti-capitalist arts community. …

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the art establishment of the contemporary United States is staffed by culturally and historically ignorant, mostly-female activists [bolded for emphasis] who don’t really love art, even if they knew what the term meant. What they were not taught, what our whole civilization is not being taught, is more than just how to think about art. It is how to think at all.