Entering the Fray
The summer of 2019 will go down in history as when museums were forced to crack open their genteel facade of political neutrality and enter the wider and wilder field of social justice.
Hand it to the artists, activists, and museum workers who compelled some of the world’s most august cultural institutions to change their ways. Warren Kanders has resigned from the Whitney. The Met, Tate, Guggenheim, and others have cut ties with Sackler money and the Louvre has scrubbed the Sackler name from its walls altogether. Added to this are the philanthropic dramas still playing out over British Petroleum, the Selzes and their anti-vax advocacy, and the Koch brothers in museums and a panoply of international cultural organizations.
Like a tornado ripping off the roof, grassroots pressure has created for museums a sudden, undeniable transparency. Things that had been opaque and sacrosanct such as board recruitment and donor cultivation are now in the spotlight. Activists have turned the moral power of museums into a weapon against them, challenging the philanthropic paradigm that is the bedrock of museum funding.
Philanthropy has always had critics such as John Steinbeck, who indicted the system as a money-laundering con in which the wealthy “spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back” through donations to worthy causes. But this moment feels different. Words have become protests, protests boycotts, boycotts publicity, publicity action. At least temporarily, museums are re-examining the ethics of their development strategies.
The activists’ success has been in the moral arena, revolving mostly around what the Buddhists call “right livelihood,” with donors and board members coming under scrutiny for the way they made their fortunes. Weapons manufacturing, Big Pharma, and fossil fuels are among the currently-tainted professions.
But activism in the political arena is impinging on museums as well, challenging donors’ stances on issues and whether those stances align with the museum’s mission. David Koch’s involvement with the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is under attack not just because of his fossil fuel fortune, but because of his right-wing support of climate science denial. The philanthropy of Bernard and Lisa Selz to the Frick, the Walters, and a number of other museums is under attack because of their political support of the anti-vaccination movement.
Although museums have mostly stayed above partisan politics, I wonder if that day of reckoning is very far off. Party affiliation and support for particular politicians has not yet become a litmus test for board service or philanthropy. But with the increasing divisiveness of political discourse, the hardening of political allegiances into tribalism, and a president intent on building a cult of personality, museums may find in the not-too-distant future that they must confront the uncomfortable and painful necessity of choosing sides.
There may be a day when it is untenable for museums to maintain their “big tent” mentality of welcoming all people, no matter their political persuasion, because the warring factions threaten to destroy the tent itself. (One of Kander’s fellow trustees at the Whitney resigned the day afterward, citing the “left-wing” direction the museum was taking.)
While political neutrality has been a wise strategy for philanthropic success, it could become a major threat to museums as we know them. History shows us how autocratic and fundamentalist regimes hijack societal institutions such as churches, the media, and, yes, museums in order to amplify their propaganda and reinforce their power. Museums in particular are targets because they present cultural heritage in all its multifaceted and sometimes controversial ways. In this regard, museums and fundamentalism don’t mix, as we saw most vividly when ISIS destroyed the temples at Palmyra and when dictators have acted as curators who purge galleries of “degenerate” art.
It’s not unrealistic to imagine that the gains museums have made in the last decade with regard to DEAI, multiculturalism, reinterpretation, demythologizing, decolonizing, and so on might be undermined if not lost altogether were they engulfed in a political tsunami that insists on making a re-mythologized America great again through racial cleansing. Were that wave to crash, we might look back on this summer and ask what we did to resist the tide.
Museums have long considered themselves above the fray, but that notion is being exposed as a fiction. At some point soon we may need to make the awful choice of entering the fray or being consumed by it. Are we prepared to make a stand?
Dan Yaeger