The Outstater
Woke Lives at the Art Museum
‘WHEN I HEAR the word culture, I reach for my Luger,” said Herman Goring. Good advice for those trying to follow the internal machinations of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, as it likes to now be called.
Culture in Indianapolis, once known as Nap Town and a wide spot in a cornfield, is a sensitive topic for the haut mode there. They are constantly on guard for any cultural slip that might give them away as insufficiently hip, which alas they are, always behind the two coasts by a few years or even decades.
So it is with diversity, equity and inclusion. A portentious statement in a museum employment listing created a tsunami of embarrassment, hand-ringing, kowtowing and executive musical chairs. The listing had said that the museum required a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain (trigger warning) its “traditional, core, white art audience.”
The curators for the museum’s upcoming “DRIP: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural” exhibition announced that they could no longer be involved. And ditto for the co-founders of GANGGANG, a local art incubator working to elevate artists of color: “Our exhibition cannot be produced in this context and this environment.”
Now, don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out why any of that would send the museum directors screaming into the night, just know that whiteness is a negative in the museum’s woke new administration and, one must assume, in its collection. And it goes without saying that a black female director was immediately hired to allay suspicions that the DEI handbook had not been fully absorbed.
From there on, we don’t know exactly what went wrong but the black female exited after 15 months, perhaps having gotten lost in the intricacies of the museum’s $350 million endowment. The new director is black, of course, but a certified public accountant.
Problem solved, but you would be right to wonder what any of this has to do with art. My best explanation is that the people wrapped up in that world are crazy. They exalt paintings, for example, that are ugly or at least incomprehensible to anyone other than the artist. They dismiss as the work of “dead white men” that in which the artist has invested decades of effort to impart beauty and grace to those of whatever skin pigment.
In sum, the hard work of appreciation shifted arbitrarily from the artist to the hapless viewer. The meaning of a piece of art decayed into meaningless or at least into cryptology, now identity cryptology.
It is a development that can have deadly impact on the moral bearings of a community. For love it or hate it, modern art requires acceptance of a portentous statement — that word again — i.e., that an arrangement of colors and shapes needs no relationship to objects outside the canvass. When this thinking expands into the actual running of a city, which it is apt to do, art patrons being influential by definition, the trouble begins. Neither cities nor museums can be run on portentous statements, on the idea that discernment is optional.
The late Roger Starr, an urban planner and a member of the New York Times editorial board, addressed just this in his best-selling “The Rise and Fall of New York.” He argued that his city’s decline was intricately linked to the above described artistic decay:
“It is not overreaching to suggest that when the institutional leaders of a city make modern painting and sculpture their most prized art form, and when they devote as much time, intelligence and, not least, money to its pursuit as leaders of the postwar world have done, they demonstrate a set of values that endangers those needed to keep an urban polity on a firm, reasonable and safe course.”
It was the view of Starr as a former New York City housing commissioner that the degradation of art is both a reflection of and a catalyst for urban decay, underscoring the interconnectedness of cultural and economic health in a city. Throw in the insanity of DEI and you have to worry about Indianapolis. — tcl
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