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November 8, 2011, 8:13 am

SFMOMA’s pro-marriage equality show, book

Over the weekend the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did something unusual: It effectively came out in favor of marriage equality.

Well, sort of. Art museums rarely issue policy statements per se, but they can reveal themselves in other ways. On Saturday SFMOMA opened “The Air We Breathe,” which the museum describes as a show that will “promote dialogue and enable understanding” and that “brings together visual artists and poets to reflect on the subject of equal rights for same-sex couples.” The exhibition is a too-rare example of a museum presenting an exhibition that takes takes as its raison d’etre showing how artists are engaged with an au courant issue — and it suggests that SFMOMA is unconcerned about any potential “Hide/Seek”-style controversy. More on that in a minute.

“The Air We Breathe” emerged from a book proposal that the David Teiger Foundation solicited from SFMOMA curator Apsara DiQuinzio. Later, the museum and DiQuinzio expanded it into an exhibition. The project consists of work SFMOMA commissioned from 30 artists and eight poets. (A couple of artists chose to exhibit earlier work that fit the show’s subject.) The book includes essays by critic Frank Rich, poet/novelist Eileen Myles and philosopher and University of Chicago law-and-ethics professor Martha Nussbaum, as well as poetry by Langston Hughes, John Ashbery and others. “The Air We Breathe” is on view through February 20; the book is available here. (I have read the book; I have not seen the show.) [Image: Martha Colburn, Untitled, 2011.]

Judging from a galley, the artwork in the show and the poems that are presented with it is overwhelmingly, possibly entirely, pro-equality. If  ”Hide/Seek” was a history textbook, “The Air We Breathe” is an op-ed.

“I believe in art as a powerful tool of communication, that art has the ability to reframe subjects and open them up when they may have been stagnant or contained,” DiQuinzio told me several weeks ago. “I wanted to do a project that was participating in that debate and that was propelling it forward in a productive way.”

Mission accomplished. From the art to the poems to the essays, the project is relentlessly progressive. “To refuse [marriage] rights to some individuals when they are granted to others is by definition discrimination,” DiQuinzio writes in the book-opening essay. Succeeding writers uniformly concur: There’s Myles, who writes, “The show is simply asking the question if all these people, if Ann, if Susan, if Eileen, if Leo, if Colter and Bob have the right to publicly announce their love and get answered: You do. You go girl. Here’s a blender.”

From Rich: “Make no mistake about it: The Proposition 8 trial, Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision [opening marriage to all Californians], and the subsequent reaction to it (as much a non-reaction as anything else) constitute a high point in America’s history-long struggle to live up to its democratic ideals.” Nussbaum’s essay is a 16-page legal and philosophical treatise in favor of marriage equality.

The art in the show is similarly unambiguous. A 2003 Raymond Pettibon work on paper, No Title (Paint fills them…) [above] suggests that two hearts beat as one, but that another form of unity is a ways off. An untitled 2011 Dan Perjovschi [below, left] notes that marriage is a contract and suggests that love matters even when that contract is (temporarily?) withheld. And so on.

DiQuinzio’s project is a big step for SFMOMA, which is typically one of America’s most conservative modern and contemporary art museums. In recent years the museum has often shirked hot-button issues: Last year the museum presented “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870.” The exhibition included tough, challenging pictures from World War II and Vietnam, but did not include seemingly relevant images from Iraq, such as photographs from Abu Ghraib. In 2008 the museum installed Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2001-03) with a strange wall-text that explained away the content of Jacir’s artwork. At the time – early 2009 – a museum spokesperson explained that SFMOMA had provided similar explanations for other “sensitive” works and cited an artwork with sexual themes as a point of comparison. “We felt we should contextualize the piece acknowledging the sensitivities that surround it,” an SFMOMA spokesperson told me in 2009. “We deeply believe in the merits of her work but of course, are not taking political sides.”

Late last week, SFMOMA director Neal Benezra told me that’s still true. “We’re all kind of clear that the purpose of a museum is to act as a forum for debate and thinking and looking,” Benezra said. “We’re also clear that we’re not advocating a point of view in this and that’s important to me.”

I told Benezra that while I hadn’t seen the show installed on his museum’s second-floor landing, the book was as close as I’ve ever seen a large art museum come to taking a position on a social issue. Benezra said he could understand that point-of-view, but maintained that SFMOMA wasn’t declaring itself to be pro-marriage equality. ”I went back and read the text that Apsara wrote and it’s a very good text,” he said. “She says that this project aims to create an open forum. I  thought those were really good words. I think one of the things a museum can do from time to time is take on an issue — and this is an important issue, especially here in this community. For us to serve as a forum for people to look at the work these artist sand poets have produced can only be a good thing.” [Image: Johanna Calle, Untitled (roles) ,2011.]

“The Air We Breathe” just opened, so it remains to be seen whether the extreme-right will attack the show the same way it attacked “Hide/Seek.” Benezra says if that’s what’s coming, his team is ready. “I’m not unnecessarily concerned about it,” he said. “I know from my time in Washington [Benezra was a curator and later a deputy director at the Hirshhorn] that you don’t’ want to be blindsided by an inquiry. You want to be prepared. You want to know what you think and we’re prepared to express that in a really clear way. I don’t imagine there’s going to be any controversy about this show. I really do think that it’s going to facilitate conversation.”

Related: I’ll have a review of DiQuinzio’s book in a couple weeks. Also interesting: SFMOMA has priced the book much more aggressively than museums typically price show-related publications. It’s yours for about $13.

Posted in Exhibitions, Hide/Seek | 2 Comments »

May 16, 2011, 2:46 pm

AAMC: “Hide/Seek” top thematic show of 2010

Today, almost five months into 2011, the Association of Art Museum Curators named its picks for the best 2010 shows.

I’m not a fan of these art museum exhibition awards, be they the awards of my own association, the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) or AAMC or whomever: Quite simply, there are too many good shows in too many places for the voters to have seen everything — or even enough to pick a “best.”

Still, it’s worth noting that AAMC’s selection for best thematic exhibition was the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the exhibition that was censored by Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough.

Shortly after Clough censored his own historians’ exhibition by ordering the removal of  David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly,” (1986-87) the Museum of Modern Art bought the piece. (The NPG showed a version of the work edited by the exhibition’s curators and approved by Wojnarowicz’s estate.)

Today “A Fire in My Belly” is on view at MoMA, on the museum’s second floor. [Image: Detail from "A Fire in My Belly."] In addition to the usual wall label that provides details about the work, the museum has taken the extraordinary step of calling out the Smithsonian for its censorship of the piece. I’ve never seen that before. It’s a reminder of how in 2010-2011 art museums performed admirably in the face of censorship, and that museum directors, boards and curators learned from the Mapplethorpe-related mistakes of 1989.

Here’s MoMA’s label:

AIDS was formally identified by the United States Centers for Disease Control in 1982, but it was not until 1985, the year the number of known AIDS-related deaths in the United States reached 8,161, that President Reagan publicly acknowledged the disease’s existence. [Marlon] Riggs and Wojnarowicz were among the many artists and activists who worked to shatter the silence around AIDS in the 1980s. During their lives, cut short by the disease, both artists vocally protested against the censorship and distortion of their works for political purposes.

Riggs’s Anthem celebrates the pleasures and challenges of being a black, gay man; at times angry and erotic, it is a fervent affirmation of visibility. By focusing candidly and experimentally on the convergence of black and gay cultures in his work, including videos and documentaries aired on public television, Riggs brought underrepresented histories to a broader audience. Wojnarowicz, a visual artist and writer, captured the lives of outsiders such as French writer Jean Genet, denizens of New York’s East Village, and activists struggling to raise awareness around AIDS. A Fire in My Belly is a meditation on mortality and suffering, referring, often in graphic detail, to death, social inequality, faith, and desire.

The curators added A Fire in My Belly, recently acquired by MoMA, to this exhibition in January 2011; it is the thirteenth work by Wojnarowicz to enter the Museum’s collection. A four-minute excerpt of A Fire in My Belly included in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture was removed by officials of the Smithsonian Institution on November 30, 2010.

Posted in Exhibitions, Hide/Seek | 3 Comments »

March 29, 2011, 9:35 am

Smithsonian releases report on visitor reaction to NPG’s ‘Hide/Seek’

A visitor study of  the National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” conducted by the Smithsonian’s own Office of Policy and Analysis and published yesterday found strong visitor approval for and appreciation of the show.  The report indicates that visitors formed strong intellectual and emotional connections with “Hide/Seek,” that visitors overwhelmingly praised the NPG for presenting a scholarly, inclusive exhibition that brought together social history and art history, and that visitors were perplexed by the Smithsonian leadership’s censoring of the exhibition.

“OP&A has conducted visitor studies of Smithsonian exhibitions for many years, and comments on Hide/Seek were among the most reflective, emotional, authentic, and discerning that OP&A staff have heard,” OP&A director Carole M.P. Neves wrote in the forward to the report. The study found that Hide/Seek made a “strong impact” on visitors who anticipated “an enriched understanding of art and history, and the exhibition delivered in this area.”

The report was based on 69 interviews researchers conducted with 55 visitors and on survey responses from 470 visitors who entered the exhibition and 429 visitors who were on their way out of it. (While many Smithsonian reports are dry, dull affairs, MAN readers will likely find this one unusually engaging. It’s available in PDF form here.)

While the report mostly sidestepped the controversy generated by Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough’s removal of a David Wojnarowicz artwork from the exhibition, it found that no one the study’s researchers spoke with “explicitly approved” of Clough’s decision. The report found that museum visitors were much more comfortable with the exhibition’s subject matter than Clough and other Smithsonian administrators seemed to be, and that many visitors wondered why more museums didn’t make clear, explicit links between art history and social history. [The report quotes one visitor: "[SFMOMA] should do [a show like this], and they haven’t.… People don’t do this. People aren’t bold enough to do this. They aren’t brave. Because it takes some guts … to do a show that has gay or lesbian themes in it.”]

At the time the exhibition was on view, Clough’s decision to remove Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly” was widely criticized. A three-person review panel assembled by the Smithsonian’s board of regents failed to endorse Clough’s censorship of the exhibition and a regent who sat on the review panel strongly suggested that Clough’s removal of the Wojnarowicz (rather than its inclusion in the exhibition) was the institution’s major error.

Responses recorded by the Smithsonian researchers indicate exhibition visitors were comfortable with the exhibition’s address of gay and lesbian history. “If a substantial proportion of visitors were offended by it, this did not show up in any obvious way in the study,” the report said. ” ‘Hide/Seek’ made a strong impression on many visitors, such as those who focused on the larger-than-life image of an emaciated AIDS victim, Felix, a few hours after his death. Some commented on how works in ‘Hide/Seek’ led them to a deeper understanding of the suffering caused by that disease—not only through its direct effects on the bodies of the afflicted, but also indirectly, through society’s marginalization of AIDS victims. Some interviewees cried as they talked about these issues.” [Image: AA Bronson, Felix, June 5, 1994, collection of the National Gallery of Canada.]

In several places the report’s unnamed author or authors noted that the exhibition subject was effectively within the mainstream of American experience. “In [the view of many visitors], standards for what is considered outside-the-box are simply low in Washington D.C., at least in comparison with major cultural centers,” the report said, and then quoted many visitors who were stunned at the Smithsonian’s leadership’s perceived prudery.

(The report examined only visitor response and not scholar-response. However, gays and lesbians have long been within the mainstream of scholarly inquiry.)

The report also seemed to affirm the exhibition’s scholarly approach to its subject: “Visitors came to Hide/Seek anticipating an enriched understanding of art and history, and the exhibition delivered in this area. Nearly half of entering visitors selected ‘Enriching my understanding’ as an experience they were looking forward to, and a similar percentage reported this as an actual satisfying experience upon exit.”

The report indicated that the exhibition’s ‘thesis,’ that gays and lesbians developed ways in communicating otherhood through art and that those codes became or inspired the semiotics that both gay and straight artists have used throughout American art history, was effectively conveyed by the exhibition: “One idea that many visitors took away from the exhibition was that artists often ‘coded’ gay themes into their works rather than making them explicit, particularly in the days when homosexuality was widely stigmatized. Visitors detected this type of coding not only in works by artists who were themselves gay, but also in works portraying gay (or ambiguous) subjects by artists of any sexual orientation.”

The researchers also indicated that the Smithsonian is widely seen as an institution that affirms previously known histories rather than an institution that supports probative, revisionist histories that re-considers the American experience: “A number [of visitors] were surprised that the exhibition was held at such an ‘unlikely’ place as the Smithsonian Institution,” the report said. “Some believed that the Smithsonian should present more exhibitions that engage with provocative themes and depart from traditional expectations.”

The report’s conclusion noted that the show should serve as a warning shot for the Smithsonian: “Far from being a cautionary tale, Hide/Seek suggests how the Smithsonian can succeed in presenting a potentially sensitive issue while staying within boundaries that most visitors are willing to accept, even if in the end not all are enthusiastic about it. If the Smithsonian wishes to remain relevant in a rapidly-changing world, it may have to be willing at times to grapple with social and contemporary issues of the sort treated in this exhibition.”

Nota bene: I’ll update this post when information I’ve requested from the Smithsonian becomes available.

Posted in Breaking news, Hide/Seek | 2 Comments »

February 16, 2011, 11:27 am

PFAW files a FOIA with the Smithsonian

The People for the American Way, which has called for the resignation of Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Smithsonian in order to find out more information about how and why the Smithsonian censored “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” with whom the Smithsonian discussed its censorship, and more. You can download and read the document here.

Update, 2pm EST: The Smithsonian is “quasi-federal” which means it is not an executive-branch agency and thus is not under the Freedom of Information Act. However, a Smithsonian spokesperson told MAN that the Smithsonian has an open records policy that “follows FOIA very closely.” The spokesperson said that the Smithsonian forwarded PFAW’s request to the SI’s general counsel’s office.

Posted in Hide/Seek | No Comments »

February 10, 2011, 12:08 pm

The latest sign that the Smithsonian appropriation is not a GOP target

The latest federal budget news from Capitol Hill is more evidence that Smithsonian Institution secretary G. Wayne Clough miscalculated when he ordered the removal of an artwork from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. After Clough censored David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” from “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” he suggested he was worried about the Smithsonian’s federal funding.

For the second time in a month, House Republicans have sent a clear signal that they don’t intend make “Hide/Seek” an appropriations issue. Yesterday Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, announced proposed cuts of $40 billion to about 70 government programs in the fiscal year 2011 federal budget.

If Rogers proposal is enacted by the Appropriations Committee, the full House and the Senate and is signed into law by the President, the cuts would trim the Obama administration’s proposed FY 2011 $797.6 million outlay for the Smithsonian to $790.3 million, a cut of nine-tenths of one percent, roughly in line with the cuts Rogers has proposed for dozens of other discretionary programs. (Previously the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus, had proposed deeper budget cuts that left alone the Smithsonian’s appropriation.)

In fact, the cut Rogers is proposing to the Smithsonian budget is far smaller than suggested cuts to other cultural funding. Rogers also proposed appropriating $6 million less to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities than the White House had requested. Rogers’ budget would roll back NEA and NEH appropriations to the FY 2009 level of $155.3 million each, a nearly four percent cut from the administration’s requested figure.

Posted in Breaking news, Hide/Seek, Policy | No Comments »

February 1, 2011, 9:54 am

Clough survives, at least for now

Yesterday the Smithsonian board of regents held its annual quarterly meeting, a typically routine affair made atypically interesting by secretary G. Wayne Clough’s recent censorship of an exhibition. In the two months since Clough ordered an artwork removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” several commentators have called for his departure (including me), and Clough has been widely criticized. [Image courtesy AFP/Getty.]

Once it was clear that Clough had kept his job (more on that later), the question I had for regents chairperson Patty Stonesifer and special ‘Clough review panel’ chairman, Field Museum director and Smithsonian regent John McCarter was: Which was more damaging to the Smithsonian, that David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” was a part of “Hide/Seek” or that the artwork was removed from the show?

Stonesifer took the first pass. She hemmed, hawed and didn’t answer. I followed-up by asking my question again, and once again she effectively passed. McCarter had said earlier in the press conference that “mistakes” had been made, but he hadn’t specified them. I explained to Stonesifer and McCarter that I was trying to understand exactly what was the institution’s core mistake.

McCarter leaned forward and made clear he was going to take the question. He paused for a moment. “The inclusion [of "A Fire in My Belly"] in the show, I do not believe was a mistake,” he said. McCarter went on to explain the symbolism in “A Fire in My Belly,” giving the speech his secretary should have given last November. McCarter also suggested that by acting so quickly, Clough created the Smithsonian’s problem: “Had we had time to go through the iconography…” he said. The subtext was unusually clear: Clough’s decision to pull the video was The Mistake. We consider him to have acted rashly rather than wisely.

That was the clearest rebuke issued to the wounded Smithsonian secretary since the “Hide/Seek” affair began two months ago. The second-clearest rebuke came by way of something neither Stonesifer nor McCarter said: The assembled media repeatedly gave the duo chances to affirm Clough’s decision to censor “Hide/Seek.” Despite half a dozen opportunities, they never said Clough made the right call in censoring the exhibition.

And so Clough survived. Stonesifer said that the regents never considered dismissing Clough, but I suspect that non-consideration had less to do with Clough than it did with the Smithsonian’s recent history: In 2007 Clough’s predecessor, Lawrence Small, resigned from the Smithsonian in disgrace after an internal audit found that Small spent Smithsonian funds to support his own lavish lifestyle and that he had managed the institution poorly.

Consider the Smithsonian regents’ decision to keep Clough as being mostly about the recent past, as being mostly about the regents’ pragmatic unwillingness to discard two consecutive secretaries. Forcing out a second chief executive in four years would have indicated that the Smithsonian has serious structural problems. The board seems to have considered the biggest threat to Smithsonian funding and Congressional relations not to be an artwork in an exhibition or the censoring of that exhibition, but the message of crisis and institutional weakness that the Smithsonian would have sent by dumping a second straight leader. In a related story, when the Smithsonian regents addressed Clough’s censorship, they did it through a three-person panel that examined not Clough’s behavior, but one that affirmed the alleged strength of the Smithsonian’s structure.

And what of that report? The Smithsonian’s press release on yesterday’s events is titled “Regents Issue Report on Exhibition Planning and Practices,” which makes clear how much the regents wanted to paper-push Clough’s error away. The six-page report offers nothing substantial and nothing substantially new. It allowed the regents and panelists McCarter, National Gallery of Art director Rusty Powell and Harvard’s David Gergen to find a way for the regents to act like they’d taken Clough’s errors seriously. (And now we know what Gergen was doing for the Smithsonian, a relationship first reported here on MAN. Why was the Smithsonian so secretive about engaging him and near-panicky when it was discovered? Bizarre.)

How hollow an exercise was the production of those six pages of paper? Twice during the press conference the assembled officials inadvertently revealed that the report is a convenient farce: The group was asked about how seriously they took the Hirshhorn board of trustees’ pointed rebuke of the secretary. Clough said that the Smithsonian has 30 advisory boards and that he valued the input of all of them. Left unsaid about the report from McCarter’s panel: They’re just Advisory Board No. 31.

Later, Clough and McCarter were asked about a specific part of the report, one which suggested that there should be citizen involvement in the pre-planning stage of Smithsonian exhibitions. They described how that had worked for an exhibition on human origins at the Smithsonian’s natural history museum: The Smithsonian had gathered input from interested parties and then, Clough and McCarter said, the Smithsonian curators had moved forward and installed the exhibition they wanted to present. In other words: What’s in the report is  nothing new. And besides, once citizens provided us with input, we went forward and did it our way anyway.

While the Smithsonian strained to present yesterday’s paper-pushing as the last word on Clough’s censorship of “Hide/Seek,” it won’t be. Smithsonian art museums — especially the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian’s contemporary art museum — will have to deal with the after-effects of Clough’s censorship as they court funders and trustees for as long as Clough remains at the Smithsonian. Speaking of which: Clough is almost exactly halfway through his five-year contract. The final judgment on how Clough handled “Hide/Seek” didn’t come yesterday; it will come in about a year and a half, when the Smithsonian regents will have to decide whether to extend Clough’s contract or to replace him.

Posted in Hide/Seek | 6 Comments »

January 31, 2011, 8:38 am

In an LAT op-ed, I explain why Clough should go

The Smithsonian’s board of regents gathers in Washington today for its first quarterly meeting since secretary G. Wayne Clough censored “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. In the two months since Clough’s actions, no member of the board of regents has spoken out in support of him or his censorship of “Hide/Seek.”

On the Los Angeles Times’ op-ed page, I  explain why the Smithsonian cannot begin to recover from the damage inflicted by Clough until he resigns or is dismissed by the regents.

From my op-ed:

Historians and curators at our national museums must be able to examine all of our history with determination, fearlessness and fealty to the facts. Clough’s actions ensure that, instead, they will wonder which facts they can present before he will find the truth inconvenient. As long as he leads the Smithsonian, the staff can’t help but worry that their work will become politically expendable.
To restore integrity to the Smithsonian, Clough must go.

Click here for the piece. The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott called for Clough’s resignation last month. MAN’s complete “Hide/Seek” coverage is here.

Posted in Hide/Seek | No Comments »

January 31, 2011, 7:34 am

Weekend roundup

  • I’m on the Los Angeles Times’ op-ed page today, explaining why Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough must go.
  • Holland Cotter is in top form as he reviews George Condo at the New Museum.
  • Speaking of same, Ken Johnson on Ursula von Rydingsvard at Sculpture Center.
  • LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has a new ‘reading Los Angeles urbanism’ project that’s well worth checking out and ‘joining.’ I have about a quarter of Hawthorne’s picks in my bookcases. Anyone who cares about art or architecture’s place in American life should have, er, at least that many.
  • Christopher Knight: How will Egypt use King Tut for political purposes now?
  • Hyperallergic has been the best place for aggregation and coverage of the threats to Egypt’s antiquities.
  • Washington Post freelance critic Jessica Dawson pens her final piece. She’s leaving journalism for the Hirshhorn.
  • Lessons in leadership: Before a single member of Congress threatened the Smithsonian’s funding, Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough censored an exhibition. (At which point: An apparently emboldened member of the House Appropriations Committee threatened the Smithsonian’s funding.) After a specific threat to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities — the House Republican Study Committee called for the elimination of funding to NEA and the NEH — NEA chief Rocco Landesman said this to the NYT: “I think we have to see what comes out in the away of actual legislation. I’m optimistic that the NEA and the NEH are going to be OK.”

Posted in Hide/Seek, Weekend roundup | No Comments »

January 27, 2011, 11:20 am

Hirshhorn board “deeply troubled” by Smithsonian censorship

Just days before an important Smithsonian Institution board of regents meeting next Monday, the board of trustees of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has released a statement in response to Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough’s censorship of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Read it here, on the Hirshhorn’s Smithsonian-hosted website. The museum is also encouraging comments about the statement/issue on its Facebook page. This is apparently the first response to Clough’s actions from a Smithsonian art museum. Here’s the toughest part:

The attempt by any individual or group to restrict the content-not only artistic, but cultural, historical, and scientific-that may be shown in an institution that serves the public as a whole is counter not only to the founding American principle of freedom of thought and expression, but also to the spirit of inquiry at the core of the Smithsonian’s mission. Hence we are deeply troubled by the precedent the Institution’s leadership has set with its decision. We believe that bowing to pressure with regard to the works on view in its galleries harms the integrity of the individual Smithsonian units and the Institution as a whole. If dissension arises over the presentation of a piece, then rather than remove it, that is the very moment to initiate conversation so that all perceptions may be heard in an effort to create greater awareness and understanding.

So far no Smithsonian art museum director has publicly addressed Clough’s decision. (I understand that in off-the-record events with Smithsonian staff that nearly every art museum director has expressed outrage at what Clough did.) I’ve offered MAN Q&As to several Smithsonian art museum directors. None has yet responded to the offer.

Also: There’s one passage in the statement that bothers me: “This decision raises crucial questions-for us, for our visitors, artists, museum supporters, and colleagues-about the role and responsibility of publicly supported museums to engage with complex and sometimes sensitive topics.“  Gays and lesbians are not a ’sensitive topic.’ They are humans and Americans. That there have been gays and lesbians who have contributed to  our nation’s history and to the history of art is simply part of our story.

Posted in Breaking news, Hide/Seek | 6 Comments »

January 24, 2011, 12:28 pm

Debunking Clough’s spin, part two

One of the constants in Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough’s response to the general hue and cry about his censorship of “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery has been this: Only the art world is complaining. Clough’s suggestion has been that art lovers are whiny whiners who should grow up and understand what men have to do.

Last week, Clough told the New York Times’ Kate Taylor: “[I]n the interest of that exhibition and this institution and its legacy and maintaining it in the strongest possible position, I think I made the right decision — in that context. I’ll let the art world debate it in another context.” By the time Clough spoke in Los Angeles last week, he’d softened that line to this: “There is damage in the arts community, and it’s part of my job to reach out and say, ‘What can we do to restore your faith?’ ”

I understand why Clough is trying to ‘localize’ the damage he created by presenting it as of interest to only the art world. However, a closer look at the who is criticizing Clough the loudest reveals that if Clough’s line is mere spin.

The first critic to call for Clough’s resignation was not an art critic, it was Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post. New York Times columnist Frank Rich called out Clough’s Smithsonianized “gay bashing” on his paper’s op-ed page. In The Atlantic, national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg complained about Clough’s censorship. Also at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has consistently attacked Clough’s error: “What on earth is G. Wayne Clough doing as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution if it isn’t defending the curators he hired and freedom of expression?”

I think Clough’s spin,– full of it’s just those people-ism — is unnecessary, unfortunate and, sadly, intentionally divisive. As I noted here, whether Clough likes it or not — and he obviously does not — he’s an art guy now. About a third of the Smithsonian is art museums.

Previously: Debunking Clough’s spin, part one: About threats, the federal appropriation.

Posted in Hide/Seek | No Comments »

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