Fried at Last

Everything you hate about identity politics figures into the cancellation of Michael Fried.

Readers of Dissident Muse Journal are familiar with the complaints that reasonable, sane, small-L liberal people have with the mainstream art world. Jews getting torn down for being white. Women in woman-dominated museums using their power to enforce the boundaries of allowable opinion. “Diversity” coming to mean nothing more than the reflexive elimination of white men from programming. The greatest figures of the field getting hit in the neck for things they wrote decades ago. Cancel culture more broadly.

There are some other objections that your reporter has not had the opportunity to opine upon. Asians getting torn down for being white-adjacent. Women in woman-dominated workplaces using their power to assassinate each other professionally.

This story has it all. It was reported—credit where it’s due—with something resembling competence by Hyperallergic. Hyperallergic is running the most antisemitic program that they can get away with as a New York City art publication, and my remarks to that effect need to supplemented with their recent pseudo-journalism covering for art-world Jew-haters. They also suppressed any consideration of race in the item in question, because doing so would draw attention to the phenomenon of woke racism. But they broke the story, which is, in outline:

1. In 1965, Michael Fried curated “Three American painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.

2. In 1967, Artforum published Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.”

3. In 2018, an art historian named Christa Noel Robbins published private correspondence from 1967 between Fried and his editor at Artforum regarding “Art and Objecthood.” Therein Fried referred to minimalism as having a “faggot sensibility.” Robbins’s article, “The Sensibility of Michael Fried,” appeared in the journal Criticism.

4. As late as 2023, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Deputy Director and Chief Curator Eik Kahng was working on an exhibition titled “Three American Painters: Then and Now,” a extended consideration of the 1965 exhibition that included Fried’s subsequent work and issues pertaining to the present. In November SBMA director Amada Cruz told Kahng to stop working on the exhibition because “it was under consideration for its lack of diversity.”

5. This month Cruz canceled the exhibition, three months before it was due to open, with 62 loans arranged. Cruz also eliminated Khang’s position for “redundancy” and appointed herself Chief Curator.

Which is an interesting way of thinking about redundancy. “You know what? Your job is redundant with mine, so I’m going to terminate yours and give myself your title.”

Cruz’s stated rationale for the cancellation was “the Museum’s mission, budget, relevance, and audiences,” which is the sort of corporate twaddle that we heard out of Matthew Teitelbaum and Kaywin Feldman regarding the Guston cancellation. More convincing was the attestation from several exhibition participants and a board member at the museum to Hyperallergic, given on condition of anonymity, that Fried’s remark from 57 years ago figured into the decision not to run the show.

A person who knew about the November 2023 exchange between Cruz and Kahng pressed Cruz for her motivation, to which she replied, “I think this project is more suited to an academic institution. We serve a broader audience at the Santa Barbara Museum. I have suggested to Eik that she offer it to a university gallery.”

Maybe the most irritating part of all this was the statement that Robbins made to Hyperallergic, in response to that proposal from Cruz.

A show that properly historicized the generative value of Fried’s criticism, while still acknowledging the very real occlusions embedded in his approach to art’s history, would be brave. Such a show could very well present as overly ‘academic,’ if, by that word, we mean carefully thought out, properly historicized, and willing to acknowledge and discuss that which is most controversial in our cultural landscape. But in our current moment bravery seems to be in short supply in the museum world.

Clearly, but the feckless ninnies scurrying around academia are hardly in a position to say so. Even Robbins, before proceeding to pad her CV at Fried’s expense, admits that the item she found may not rise to the level of art history. This is from her 2018 essay:

We might classify my reporting on the March ’67 letter as amounting to little more than gossip—a kind of “‘idle’ curiosit[y]” or “unsanctioned knowledge,” as Gavin Butt characterizes this particular discursive form. Fried himself might so classify it, dismissing the letter’s casualness and pointing to its “informality” and intimacy as evidence that it lacks a requisite “seriousness”—a term Fried used with some frequency, following his close friend Stanley Cavell, in order to make aesthetic and moral distinctions among artistic activities. In other words, it is easy to dismiss this private exchange as merely anecdotal and, as such, hardly worthy of the serious consideration of an art historical study. But in doing so, we overlook the value of what Jane Gallop in Anecdotal Theory calls the “occasional” or “the event, the moment,” the lived space wherein theory first takes form. When Fried deploys homophobic language in an explication of his theoretical intervention into contemporary art’s most recent developments, the statement needs to be regarded as a crucial piece of evidence of how everyday habits of thought actually shape the official discourse of art history. One of the results of allowing such “anecdotal” details into our theoretical and historical considerations of late-twentieth-century modernist discourse is to provide an empirical grounding for what scholars such as Amelia Jones, Anne E. Gibson, Douglas Crimp, Marcia Brennan, Caroline A. Jones, and a host of others have been claiming for some time now: namely, that the history of modernist art in the US is a history of exclusions. Beyond this empirical confirmation, however, the letter raises an important question about how and why a critic’s personal history, their sensibility, should matter to the discourses they shape, including our own.

On it goes like that for 22 dismal pages, with Robbins saying in essence that her treatment of Fried may in fact be mere gossip, but since it can be plugged into a broader denigration of modernist art, she will. This, from later in the essay, has not aged well in light of current events:

It hardly seems to matter that the majority of the scholars I’ve cited object to Fried’s moral agenda. Scholars’ ongoing engagements with [“Art and Objecthood”] only extend its reach and demonstrate our indebtedness to its logic. In light of this deeply structural influence, the letter to Leider, as an archival document of Fried’s thinking as he was writing this foundational essay, needs to be taken seriously, and not simply because it says something about Fried. It needs to be taken seriously because it says something about those of us who continue to engage the essay’s terms, about our continued alignment with, to return to Foucault’s language, “the possibilities and the rules” that “Art and Objecthood” enables in our own writing. In this essay I take a close look at those possibilities and rules, not to combat them but to understand them more fully in light of Fried’s explicit naming of their moral underpinnings.

Now that the history of exclusions, as she puts it, includes the cancellation of Fried, it’s time to question the moral underpinning of Robbins’s essay, which even by her own admission originates in an act of gossip. “Gossip slays three people,” says the Orchot Tzadikim, “the one who speaks gossip, the one who listens to it and the one about whom the gossip is said.” We who would protect ourselves from slaying must reject it upon hearing—Robbins’s article is an erudite hit job with no substantive potential except the one that we’re seeing now, as ammunition for cancel culture. The essay is a shame, its publication in Criticism was a shame, and its influence on Cruz may in fact be evil. Robbins would do well to hold her tongue about Cruz’s bravery and try expressing some contrition. Let’s put Robbins’s sensibility on the table, and Cruz’s too: Multi-million-dollar budgets, institutional power, and important cultural patrimony have been placed in the hands people who are, functionally, spiteful adolescent girls.

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Here’s something that would have been brave: asking if there was indeed a milquetoast aspect to the minimalist project. Clement Greenberg, in 1968, wrote this about Anne Truitt, also addressing sensibility:

Had they been monochrome, the “objects” in Truitt's 1963 show would have qualified as the first examples of Minimal Art. And with the help of monochrome the artist would have been able to dissemble her feminine sensibility behind a more aggressively far-out, non-art look, as so many masculine Minimalists have their rather feminine sensibilities. But Truitt is willing to stake herself on the truth of her sensibility, feminine or not, and this she does in her painting.

I’m open to the argument that this was unfair to the minimalists, but not from the standpoint that heterosexual virility is patently bad, because I could get Chat-GPT to write that essay for me, and Criticism would publish it. That the younger Fried’s distaste for gay men may have dovetailed with his distaste for theatricality in visual art strikes me as an accident of personality. Robbins focused so exclusively upon the manner in which Fried corresponded with his editor that she neglected a far more interesting and important question, whether Fried had seen something correctly about minimalist art. But that would require the questioner to value what may be true over what may be said, and as was recently pointed out to us, in our current moment bravery seems to be in short supply.

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As I’ve written previously, the regime that would declare the use of “faggot” a crime lost the privilege to do so after October 7, when said regime excused—and in many cases expressed—calls for worldwide violence and genocide against the Jews. Michael Fried writing privately to a colleague about minimalism in terms that grate on modern ears is nothing compared to what just happened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The statement from David Mirvish is incontrovertible: “A gift has been taken away from the people of Santa Barbara, a gift to have their own judgment and experience.” Say what you will about Fried, what he wrote to his editor—in 1967, for pity’s sake—does not subsequently call into question his ability to function in his profession. In contrast, it is warranted to ask what other failures of integrity crop up in Robbins’s work and whether she’s fit to continue as a professor. As for Cruz, such questions need not even be asked—she’s obviously toxic.

Fried contributed a blurb to Aphorisms for Artists, and I think so highly of it that I asked to have it put it on the front cover of the book. As far as I’m concerned it will stay there until the end of time. At the top of the back cover there’s another blurb from Laurie Anderson. It was reported this week that Anderson was unable to come to an agreement with the Folkwang University of the Arts regarding her would-be appointment as its Pina Bausch Professor, as she had attached her name to a 2020 letter supporting Palestine. That sounds like cancel culture from the “other” direction, but it’s not. Here and there, the DEI regime is trying to save itself by finally including Jews. That isn’t going well, because antisemitism is a feature of DEI, not a bug. All that said, Laurie Anderson’s blurb is also staying right where it is.

Eventually everyone who has done something interesting in the arts will be on some kind of shit list. When that happens, the converse will also be true, that everyone in good standing in the regime will be boring apparatchiks. It’ll be like the separation of the sheep and the goats in Matthew, except that the god is false and you should be rooting for the goats.

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