By Brian T. Allen
Saturday, May 14,
2022
For the first time in three years, I’m in Venice, so why am I writing about la ciarlatana arrivista, which I think means “self-serving charlatan,” who directs the Museum of Jewish Heritage (MJH) in New York? Because Jack Kliger’s in the news, and even in Italy I follow the American museum scene. I’ve written many times about museums getting involved in politics. In 2020, directors, most at the insistence of wacky young staff, plastered their websites with love letters to the outrage pimps of Black Lives Matter. This was the first frolic down the slippery slope to a divisive, distracting soak in a swamp.
Lots of museum directors and staff want more. They’re bloated with woke righteousness and bored with art. It’s up to trustees, especially where directors have run amok, to say “basta,” or “genug iz genug.” I like to try some Yiddish, but remember, I’m a Methodist and from Vermont.
Enough already. A highly paid, smug head needs to roll.
Last week, the museum forced the Tikvah Fund, a Jewish philanthropic foundation and cultural institution, to cancel its annual fundraising dinner there because its guest of honor and speaker, Governor Ron DeSantis, “didn’t align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity.” His speech was going to be about Florida’s Jewish revival, which you’d think they’d like. The museum’s leaders just don’t like him. They’ve hosted all kinds of humans, among them Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose best bud in Congress carries water for Hamas. DeSantis? Beyond the pale.
Mario Loyola, in a good National Review story earlier this week, recites the facts. I think they’re clear. The bottom line’s clear, too. Kliger, the museum’s CEO, needs to go. He runs the place. He blocked a Tikvah event because he doesn’t like the speaker’s politics, though DeSantis’s talk wasn’t going to be a political one. Kliger then lied about what he’d done.
At least three levels of the MJH bureaucracy, topped by Kliger, told Tikvah it wouldn’t host the event if DeSantis spoke. Once the place landed in scalding hot water, it phonily demurred. Its press people described pushing out DeSantis and Tikvah as “a contractual and logistics decision.”
There’s no way to befog the space between “didn’t align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity” and a mere “contractual and logistics decision.” One is the museum’s intent. The other is weasel words and a lie.
I’ve never been to this museum, which looks like a rinky-dink place, and I know nothing about Kliger. The museum rents its spaces for events and for income. It has hosted Tikvah many times. DeSantis’s talk about the Jewish renaissance in Florida is topical and, I would think, something that a museum dedicated to Jewish heritage would celebrate. Kliger and Elyse Buxbaum, executive vice president of the museum, were clear. If DeSantis remained as a speaker, Tikvah would have to look elsewhere for a host.
This isn’t a question of tolerance. It’s an issue of a museum polluting itself with the personal politics of the hired help. Kliger should be fired for this alone. Lying to the press and public is worse. He has plunged the museum into a front-page controversy that has nothing to do with his mission and the museum’s program. In getting involved in political censorship, he has threatened the museum’s nonprofit status.
Which of Governor DeSantis’s values, by the way, don’t align with the museum’s? I assume, since this is in the news, that Kliger is disturbed by Florida’s new law banning public-school instruction in sexual orientation and gender identity for kids in grades K–3. Does the MJH, as an institution, think that children age seven or six or five ought to be taught — by a government employee, no less — what “nonbinary,” “intersex,” “trans,” “gay,” “bisexual,” “queer,” “polyamorous,” or “pansexual” mean? Or “bears,” “butch,” “femme,” or “kink”? Or “bondage and discipline,” “dominance and submission,” or “sadism and masochism”? Or “Ursula,” and I’m not referring to the sea witch in The Little Mermaid? Some or all of this vocabulary, and in place of what other lesson plans? Do the museum’s “values” prioritize time for sex education for first-graders over, say, reading or addition?
Sex education is best left to parents of young children. No responsible parent would leave a child alone with anyone who thinks otherwise. By the by, does the Museum of Jewish Heritage incorporate this sex-ed material in its school tours? The Book of Leviticus mentions it here and there, in no great detail. Does the museum do a deeper dive?
“Inclusivity” is the new doubletalk for “my way or the highway.” Its spirit isn’t warm and fuzzy. Left-wing inclusivity, we’re learning, is despotic. It might look like a rainbow, but everyone’s thought and speech are closely regulated.
You’d think that a museum like the MJH, about to launch an exhibition about the Holocaust, would honor a real pluralism. The Holocaust began with political rhetoric that became law, but cultural and institutional stigma operated in powerful ways, too.
It’s up to the trustees to enforce a “no politics, no lying” standard. Kliger might be so blinkered by self-righteousness that he didn’t consult Steven Ratner, a Manhattan real-estate developer and chairman of MJH’s board, before banning DeSantis. Ratner lost more than 100 family members to the Holocaust. He has to be sensitive to abuses of power that start small and escalate. If Kliger gets away with turning his museum into a political soapbox, other directors will notice and do the same.
I don’t want to see people fired, but that’s really the only thing left-wingers will understand. They shouldn’t use their museums to advance a personal political agenda.
***
I want to return to Superbarocco, the very good and ambitious exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. It’s about Baroque art in Genoa, and I reviewed it earlier this week. Initially, the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington planned to host the exhibition last year. It pulled the plug peremptorily and at great cost to the Scuderie.
Exhibitions involving many dozens of loans are delicate organisms, more so when they’re slotted for two places and even more so when one is in America and the other’s in Europe. Some lenders don’t want their pictures to cross the ocean in a plane. Some want to lend to only one place. There are lots of moving parts.
The NGA said that Covid, especially last year’s uptick, complicated shipments of art. Art lent by a museum usually travels with a representative of the museum. I’ve been a courier many times. Couriers don’t haul crates from place to place. That’s the job of art shippers. A courier ensures that the transit’s smooth. He or she, with the borrower, agree on the condition of the work on its arrival. Often the courier stays to see the object hung on the wall.
When the Chinese coronavirus reared its ugly Delta head, lending museums professed to have problems finding couriers willing to travel. Art handlers, registrars, and curators hesitated to work with couriers who had just been on the road. “Have you traveled out of state?” was a common institutional question. Off and on, the NGA was shut by order of the D.C. health department.
When the museum ditched its promise to host Superbarocco, I heard that it used Covid as a cover. It didn’t want to do yet another dead-white-Italian-man show and, besides, needed the space for Afro-Atlantic Histories, which I reviewed two weeks ago. I don’t believe this. The NGA has honorable leaders who felt the logistics were impossible. It didn’t, it said, have a slot available after Superbarocco premiered in Rome.
It is doing a big Robert Adams retrospective this summer, though. I can take him or leave him as an artist. He had a big retrospective a few years ago. I saw it at Yale’s art gallery. Genug iz genug — enough is enough. I see that the climate-change windbag Bill McKibben is slotted to lecture at the NGA while the Adams show is there. Madone, what a bore. Baroque Genoa, it should go without saying, is osso buco with a Super Tuscan.
The Scuderie is brave to have chosen to mount the show anyway. It’s committed to its scholarship and to the curators who worked years on it. The NGA, it seems, is still involved. It’s still co-organizing the show and, in fact, producing an English-language catalogue.
I’ve co-organized dozens of exhibitions but have never known a museum to partner with a place that’s not showing the thing on its walls. The NGA’s own curators are deeply involved in Superbarocco, so dumping it entirely leaves them having worked for naught and without a publication credit. Now, while its hometown curators won’t get their show, they’ll get their book. I suspect the NGA’s making a subvention toward the Scuderie’s expenses.
Given that the NGA’s a government museum, and I’m a taxpayer, I’m happy to observe that it’s spending an Andrea Doria–size boatload of money on a project the American public won’t be able to enjoy. Why couldn’t it just show Superbarocco this summer?
***
Marilyn Monroe’s in the news, too. Kim Kardashian, who’s famous but I don’t know why, wore Monroe’s fabulous, Jean Louis–designed, 2,500-rhinestone-decorated “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress to the Costume Institute’s gala at the Met on May 2. The dress is a work of art. Costume historians thought Kardashian might have damaged the thing when she squeezed into it.
Monroe’s tuneful tribute to Jack Kennedy at a May 19, 1962, Democratic fundraiser in Los Angeles, slinky-dress-adorned and almost 60 years ago, is a unique moment in presidential history. Six weeks later, on August 4, Monroe died. Readers might recall my visit to her grave last year. Who knows what killed her.
No, that’s not the only reason Monroe’s in the news. Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, from 1964, in a private collection since 1986, went for $195 million, with the buyer’s premium, at Christie’s on May 9. The dealer Larry Gagosian bought it. It’s the priciest American painting sold at auction and, to boot, the priciest 20th-century work of art to have sold. The hammer price was $170 million. Christie’s reports that the seller, the Swiss-based Ammann Foundation, agreed that 20 percent of the hammer price would go to a charity of the buyer’s choice, pending the foundation’s approval.
The picture’s one of five depicting Marilyn. Dorothy Podber, a performance artist and Warhol groupie, visited Warhol in his studio one fine day. She saw the stack of five paintings, each with a different-colored background, and asked Warhol whether she could shoot them. He said “Sure,” thinking she wanted to photograph them, but, no, out of her purse a pistol came and fire away she did.
The bullet must have been of anemic caliber since it pierced four Marilyns, nearly straight through the eyes, but not the sage version.
Hopes were for a hammer price closer to $200 million, but $170 million is a prodigious haul, considering that the newsprint manufacturer Peter Brant, then 19 years old, bought it in 1967 for $5,000. I’ve seen one or two of the other Shot Marilyn paintings, bullet holes plugged. They’ve got wall power.
I don’t think Warhol’s an American Leonardo. He had a few good years as an artist. The Marilyn pictures are smack at his height and among his best and most inventive things. Otherwise, he’s worth remembering as a celebrity and magazine impresario. We don’t know whether Gagosian bought it for a client. If so, the new owner is probably Emirati. I hear Russian oligarchs aren’t buying these days . . .
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