Here Some Belong

Chanukah at the MFA Boston in the aftermath of Philip Guston Now.

Philip Guston, Open Window II, 1969, ©The Estate of Philip Guston/Genevieve Hanson, courtesy Hauser & Wirth and a private collection, source

In the week that I spent writing my review of of “Philip Guston Now” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, two pieces regarding the exhibition appeared in the New York Times. The first, Holland Cotter’s review of the show, I deliberately avoided because I don’t want other critics working on the same assignment to influence my thinking, and also because I knew that it was going to make me even angrier. That, as I discovered later, was the right call:

The ingrained expectation of almost anyone coming to a traditional museum is, still, that any artist given a solo show will be white and male, unless advertised otherwise. My initial objection to the Guston show was that it’s yet another confirmation of that reality.

Yes, Cotter’s solution to the problems associated with the Guston exhibition is to stop giving solo museum exhibitions to white men.

The other piece I didn’t learn about until after I filed. It was a follow-up on earlier coverage of the associated flap, under the headline “Delayed Philip Guston Show Opens, With a Note From a Trauma Specialist,” by Marc Tracy and Robin Pogrebin. The reporting was gentle to those involved, as expected, given that the current mandate of the Times is to assist with damage control when progressives reveal themselves as clowns and liars.¹

Tracy and Pogrebin tried to craft a sympathetic narrative for the museum directors involved in this exhibition, giving each the opportunity to defend himself. “We never were going to cancel or censor, and we haven’t,” said MFA Houston director Gary Tinterow, having already agreed with his colleagues to cancel the 2021 start of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and thus censor it until the time of its eventual display. MFA Boston director Matthew Teitelbaum told the Times, “This isn’t about the acceptability of Guston, this is about the hospitality of the museum,” having deemed Guston unacceptable until some future date.

Conspicuously absent from the article is Tate Modern director Frances Morris. She has offered few public comments about the incident, despite being responsible for the suspension of curator Mark Godfrey, who spoke out against the cancellation. Note that the only museum professional to lose his job over this controversy was a Jew who wanted “Philip Guston Now” to take place as planned.

The article painted an especially kind gloss upon NGA director Kaywin Feldman, detailing the steps she took to consult with museum staff that informed her decision to prevail upon her colleagues to cancel the 2021 debut of the show and delay it for as long as three years. “I’m a white woman of privilege,” she mewled to the Times. “Just because I have a degree in art history doesn’t mean my feelings matter more or less than those of our wonderful security officers.”

I didn’t buy this portrayal, but it presented me with a professional problem. I was under the impression that museum staff had complained to NGA leadership about the display of the Hoods, and I conveyed that impression in my review. I also lay the bulk of the blame for the delay at the feet of Matthew Teitelbaum. It turned out that Feldman ginned up this entire problem on her own. No one had approached Feldman. In the wake of the George Floyd killing, she took it upon herself to interview black staff at the NGA until she found some who said that they wouldn’t feel comfortable about the display of Guston’s Hoods. For the Times’s benefit she cited an unnamed “Black colleague” who told her, in her words, “Looking at more Klan imagery is like cutting another wound in my arm and pouring salt in it. I’m willing to do that, but it needs to be for a bigger reason.” (A bigger reason than what, and what reason would be sufficient, was left unexplained.)

It occurred to me to send amendments to my editor. I decided against it. For one, I was exhausted by the whole affair. (I still am.) Secondly, the museums had been acting so cagey for so long about their motivations for disrupting the planned course of the exhibition that any faulty speculations in the germane reporting were ultimately their fault. If they’re going to conduct themselves with such haughty opacity, leaving the rest of us to guess what on earth is really going on until regime journalists reveal a few details after the art has been hung, then they deserve the ensuing misunderstandings.

Interestingly, the Tracy & Pogrebin report reveals that Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter, doesn’t buy into their narrative either. It quotes her saying, in contrast to the cancellation being a judgment on Guston, that it “was more an issue of the institutions themselves, the museums’ perceived vulnerability in light of all the demonstrations and petitions and other forms of discontent with American museums.” That word “perceived” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

The Times would have us forget that Feldman previously told the editor of Hyperallergic that Guston had appropriated black trauma to make his Hood paintings, and that Darren Walker, the director of the Ford Foundation and the source of $1 million of funding for “Philip Guston Now,” characterized the paintings as “incendiary and toxic racist imagery.” Instead they quoted Walker to say, “In the future when museums mount shows like this, people of color need to be consulted. You’re not asking their permission, you’re not asking their expert advice, you’re just being empathetic to the people who will be affected.”

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One affected ethnic group that was not empathetically consulted, and whose input seems to have been malignantly disregarded, was the Jews. As I stated in my review, the delay of the exhibition and the stipulation that it could not be shown without the belated supplementation of black curators established an economy of racial credibility in which Jewish pain is worth less than black pain. But in fact it’s worse than that. In essence, the directors took a position that Jews need black permission to be considered human. The possibility that the Jews have a relationship with this body of work that can be explored independently of the black experience in America was totally disdained.

Some observant person will ask: Teitelbaum, Tinterow, Feldman, Morris - don’t the directors represent the Jewish perspective? The answer is no. When they capitulated to progressive racial fixations, they joined the New Blue Bloods. So did Darren Walker, who is black. Feldman refers to herself as “a white woman of privilege,” not the child of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When color categories of race came into common usage, the Jews were black. They became white by assimilating into the WASP power structure, a process that began in earnest when James Bryant Conant eased quotas upon Jewish students at the former WASP stronghold of Harvard in the late 1930s. The new admissions didn’t Jewify Harvard as much as Harvard WASPified an elite tier of Jews.²

When over the decades since then Protestantism and English ethnic origins lost their cultural energy and whiteness became a liability, WASPs were increasingly obliged to associate with other races and religions. But new admissions to honorary WASPdom had to display fealty to an updated form of Social Gospel, what Murray Rothbard once described as “the mantle of evangelical cum secular power.” Other peoples and faiths now belong to the cohort, but the same kind of blue bloods retain control, a class of educated overlords who justify their retention of worldly authority through rhetoric that they’re more humble, virtuous, and concerned about the common people than the rest of us.³

The Judaism of the Jewish members of the New Blue Bloods is not the salient marker of their existence. There are in fact two distinct cohorts of whites in America, Blue Whites and Red Whites. Blue Whites are the supporters of the New Blue Blood order. The Red Whites are everyone else. Whiteness, conceived as a liability, is a trait of Red Whites. This is what the columnist at the Los Angeles Times was trying to express when she called Larry Elder the “black face of white supremacy.” Black opponents of the New Blue Bloods fail into Red Whiteness. Blue Whites, by the alchemy of their alliances and through confessional rituals such as workplace diversity training sessions, join the community of people of color and are lifted out of racial sin.

Jews favorable to the New Blue Bloods are Blue Whites and thus are somewhat exempted from the liabilities associated with Red Whiteness. This was the whole point of the New Blue Blood project in the first place: to protect configurations of power that arose under WASPism from being pulled apart as progressives increasingly came to believe that whiteness is the source of irredeemable evil. The museum directors benefit from those configurations of power, so they have to be the best Blue Whites they can be.

Jews indifferent or hostile to the New Blue Bloods are considered Red Whites and condemned. Blacks can assault Hasids every week of the year and the New Blue Bloods will never declare it a racial emergency.⁴ Key to the Blue White catechism is that whites only ever perpetrate racism and racial violence; they are never its targets. Pointing out that anti-white hate crimes rank as the second-largest category of hate crimes with anti-Jewish ones in third place,⁵ that Jews are overwhelmingly the majority target of religiously motivated hate crimes while prosecutions for them are dwindling towards zero, and that police violence slightly disfavors white victims compared to black ones, is a sure way getting yourself categorized as Red White.

The impossibility for the Blue Whites to contradict that point of faith in the months after the George Floyd killing is why the directors delayed “Philip Guston Now.” I have no doubt that they would have canceled it if they could have gotten away with it. Even the three-year delay they initially suggested got them in trouble, not only with the relatively few defenders of artistic expression remaining in the art world, but with progressives who demand that Blue Whites perform regular acts of public penance in order to maintain their status as Blue Whites. This was stated explicitly in the open letter at the Brooklyn Rail, which read:

These institutions thus publicly acknowledge their longstanding failure to have educated, integrated, and prepared themselves to meet the challenge of the renewed pressure for racial justice that has developed over the past five years. And they abdicate responsibility for doing so immediately—yet again.

And:

Rarely has there been a better illustration of “white” culpability than in these powerful men and women’s apparent feeling of powerlessness to explain to their public the true power of an artist’s work—its capacity to prompt its viewers, and the artist too, to troubling reflection and self-examination. But the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience. And they realize that to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else.

Note the quotation of white before culpability but not supremacy. They too are trying to get at the difference between Blue Whiteness and Red Whiteness as primarily behavioral in nature, but haven’t summoned the needed distinctions.

The supposed impossibility of white racial victimhood also explains Kaywin Feldman’s revolting comment that Guston appropriated black trauma. If it were true, it would neatly explain how a white artist would have been able to address racism in his painting - it came from outside his own experience. That further avoids the consideration of whether Guston had always and by all people been considered white (as a Jew, he had not been), and further, whether our current use of such categories is durable, sound, or valid retroactively.

But it wasn’t true. Whites can be the victims of racism. And they are the victims of hate crimes for being white, not as often as blacks are for being black but more than anyone else for being who they are. Who is considered white shifts according to political interests, which non-whites have as much as anyone. Guston had indeed been a target Klan marauding, with police approval.⁶ But it became impossible to say so.

That is, it became impossible for the Blue Whites to say so and not be branded Red Whites. Here’s where the additional black curators came in. As had already been pointed out by Godfrey and Mayer, plenty of people of color and blacks especially had been consulted in the original curating of the exhibition. The MFA Boston’s inclusion of Terence Washington added nothing to the scholarship that I can discern. He made no observations that hadn’t already been made by the curators and contributors already involved. But Matthew Teitelbaum had to bring on a black curator conspicuously to make the extant points, because it was the only way he could preserve his own status as a Blue White. Had he not done so, he or his white curators would have had to point out that Guston was a victim of racism, just as Jews had been throughout America and Europe for most of their recorded history, and that would have made him a Red White. With Washington saying it for him as his personal appointee, or even Washington merely lending his name to the effort at Teitelbaum’s invitation as white curators said it themselves, Teitelbaum was safe.

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Soon it will be Chanukah at the MFA Boston. The annual Chanukah festivities at the museum are the one time of year when the work of living, Massachusetts-based Jewish artists is allowed in the building. The organizer is not the MFA itself, but JArts. This year is particularly poignant in that one of the featured works is a polyptych by Joshua Meyer, whose work has been deeply informed by Guston.

Guston’s radical approach to white supremacy was empathy. He isn’t just asking about politics, he’s asking about human nature. He is trying to imagine the life of a Klansman from the inside out. Sometimes these paintings are funny, sometimes they are not. Art has an ability to hold competing truths, and Judaism loves this complexity, too. We love to answer a question with a parable—from Chassidic tales to Kafka and Midrash—so we can enter and engage. He’s exploring his own inclinations. He’s asking about his own relationship to evil. What can save us, if not empathy? When the show was first canceled, my first and last thoughts were that now is actually the time when we need Guston’s art the most.

Was this the idea of JArts? I won’t embarrass them or Meyer by asking. If I had been in charge of JArts I would have demanded an apology from Teitelbaum to the Jews of Boston before going forward with this program, but that among many other reasons is why I’m not in charge of JArts.

The MFA Boston rebranded a few months ago. Its new logo is undistinctive relative to that of any other art institution, and for some reason features a ligature that makes it look like the F has shoved the A into the B. Maybe saddest of all, Teitelbaum debuted it with the message that it was meant to convey the new tagline for the museum, “Here all belong.” It intones all the hoary refrains of greater humility, superior virtue, and deeper commitment to humankind.

Where many worldviews meet, new ways of seeing, thinking, and understanding emerge. The conversations we inspire bring people together—revealing connections, exploring differences, and creating a community where all belong.

But after “Philip Guston Now” it’s an impossible claim. Some belong, some of the time, under certain conditions, on particular occasions, by the permission of some granted to others. It will remain that way until New Blue Blood power is dismantled.

1. See, for more recent instances, its abject water-carrying for Sam Bankman-Fried, and its burial of Matt Taibi’s revelations about the Biden campaign’s collusion with Twitter to censor a legitimate exposé of Hunter Biden as a drug-addicted, whoremongering wastrel.

2. Tinterow has an MA in Art History from Harvard. Further examination of the effect of Conant’s decision to allow Jews into Harvard is explored by Scott Alexander.

3. The quintessential New Blue Blood at the moment is the Taiwanese-American mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu. Wu studied under Elizabeth Warren at Harvard, and eventually graduated with a JD from Harvard Law. She couched her incoherent Covid-19 mandates in the language of public concern: “There’s nothing more American than coming together to ensure we’re taking care of each other,” she said at the time. One of her first controversies involved her shaking down of North End restaurants (that is, the Italians) to start paying for allowances, like parklets, that they needed to survive during the pandemic. Secularization and racial diversity of the New Blue Bloods aside, given the first opportunity, she lapsed into the ultimate WASP stereotype and attacked the Catholics.

4. Black Israelites and people like Kanye West, when they say that blacks are the real Jews, are at once trying to knock Jews into Red Whiteness and deprive them of ethnic Judaism so they have no path to racial redemption as people of color. The same impulse drives Whoopi Goldberg’s contention that the Holocaust is white-on-white violence. If the Holocaust has a racial component, and Jews are white, then whites can be the target of racism, and blacks would therefore have to share some of their claim to racial victimhood with whites. That there may also be Blue Blacks and Red Blacks is beyond the scope of this essay.

5. Greater than those against, in order, gay men, Latinos, aggregated LGBT, aggregated other races, Asians, and transgenders. The widely reported explosion of anti-Asian hate crimes increased their numbers to less than half that of those committed against Jews, a third of those committed against whites, and a tenth of those committed against blacks. Multiple recent attempts to portray the majority of anti-Asian violence as perpetrated by whites was demolished by Diane Yap at City Journal. I mention this to say that if any of these items surprises you, consider diversifying your media consumption.

6. Julia Friedman has argued convincingly that Guston’s story cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the inspiration he took from Isaac Babel, and Babel’s attempt to comprehend his oppressors.