Prelude to a Boondoggle
A response to "To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways."
I have been suspecting for several weeks that the financial state of the museums is much worse than they’re letting on. There has been a string of bad news stories about the Boston arts scene, to pick the one I follow somewhat, since last fall: New Repertory Theatre to Close Doors After 40 Seasons, The Boston Symphony In Trouble, With plenty of empty seats to fill, some theater companies are in a fight for survival, Amid ratings challenges at GBH, external investigation probes workplace culture. Is this downturn somehow missing Boston’s museums, or are the problems not yet disclosed? My insiders can tell me nothing.
Here in New Hampshire, two museums have closed in the last three weeks, the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and the Museum of New Art in Portsmouth. More bad news, to be sure, but perhaps not a museum-specific trend. The dire financial situation of the colleges, particularly in New England, is well known and previously discussed. MoNA only put down roots in 2021, and could have failed due to the typical juvenile mortality that endangers all startups.
Nevertheless, I regard a recent item from the New York Times as a tell. “To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways” was written by Laura Raicovich, former director of the Queens Museum and the author of Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, and Laura Hanna, an artist and one of the founders of Debt Collective, a product of the Occupy phenomenon that advocates for various kinds of debt abolition. They argue that museum operations should be treated as civic works.
[W]e need to stop treating museums, theaters and galleries like sacred spaces that exist in some rarefied realm of public life. And we need to start treating them—and funding them—like interstate highways, high-speed internet and other infrastructure projects, using money that’s earmarked to maintain the country’s infrastructure.
“Need” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. In any case:
[P]olicymakers in Washington… could do this by tapping into abundant appropriations that already enjoy bipartisan support…. Of course, a shift to considering the arts as part of our national infrastructure won’t be easy, either conceptually or practically. The mechanics of reallocating a small fraction of federal infrastructure dollars for cultural institutions would have to be mapped out, advocated and then put into legislation…. But other industries are already subsidized by the federal government directly, as with the farm subsidy, developed during the Great Depression, which supports agricultural corporations to the tune of more than $10 billion a year.
I’m going to make three brief arguments against this, one libertarian, one conservative, and one progressive. All but new readers (Greetings!) will know which ones I endorse and to what degree, but I intend to demonstrate that this proposal only makes sense within the worldview evinced by these Lauras.1
The libertarian counterargument is that the government has no money.
This is not the philosophical libertarian argument that the government has no money because all they possess is expropriated from the productive economy at proverbial (although if you resist, actual) gunpoint. The government has no money in the conventional sense. It is in a record $34 trillion of debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2034, it will borrow another $20 trillion, at which point a quarter of all federal tax revenue will be consumed by interest payments on that debt. Interest obligations will be a larger category of federal spending than the military.
We are (in theory) neither in a recession nor (in theory) a war that would justify the outsize deficit spending that’s driving the debt. This is the routine operation of the government—the “abundant appropriations that already enjoy bipartisan support,” as the Lauras call it. They are bipartisan in the sense that neither party has a shred of fiscal discipline and both have incentives to load the budget with pork. They are abundant in the sense of morbidly obese, with several analogous effects—carrying this kind of debt makes the economy sclerotic and vulnerable to shocks.
The only way to put this right is to reduce spending, radically, now. Including the museums in federal expenditures is opposite to the needs of national survival.
In pointing to agricultural subsidies as a potential model for museum funding, the Lauras could not have picked a more apt example of the corrupting touch of government involvement in the economy. As J.D. Tuccille commented last March, on the most recent appropriations bill in that sector:
In many ways, the farm bill up for consideration this year in Congress embodies all that is wrong with American lawmaking. It's a massive piece of legislation, combining unrelated matters to commit the U.S. government to spending mind-bending amounts of money at a single go. Passed roughly every five years, farm bills are less about legislating in any deliberative sense than they are about lawmakers packaging a trillion-plus dollars of goodies and committing taxpayers to fund them for years to come—and then doing it over and over again.
That noted, bushels of corn can be measured, at least. If the output of the proposed subsidy is the grand purposes of art, there will be no end to the potential for abuse of public funds, as nothing material will need to be shown for the expenditure.
The conservative counterargument is that Americans should not be made to fund the culture war that the elites wage on them.
The Lauras, in lamenting the ineffectiveness of what they call the “beleaguered and consistently underfunded” National Endowment for the Arts, note, “Bad-faith actors earn political points by identifying the most controversial art exhibit in the country and using it as a cudgel to make all funding untenable.”
Political backlash over several N.E.A.-funded initiatives, including a 1989 exhibit of the photograph “Immersion (Piss Christ)” by Andres Serrano, who had received a small N.E.A. grant, led to attempts to defund the agency.
It was beyond the scope of the op-ed to recall the whole saga of Serrano, Mapplethorpe, and the NEA Four. But I have the book that Lynne Munson wrote about it, and she sums it up:
Over the decades the agency revised its Visual Arts Program in ways that diverted funds away from painters and sculptors and toward artists working in more trendy mediums, including video and performance art. Gradually what took hold was a commitment to pursuing the cutting edge, a preference reinforced by the fact that peer panels came to be dominated not be artists but by critics, curators, and art administrators who package and promote art movements for a living. By the mid-eighties it was almost impossible for an artist who was not working in the postmodern mode to receive an NEA grant. In 1995 the exclusion was virtually systematic, with nearly all of the fellowships going to artists whose work was intended primarily to serve as a social critique.
Of course, none of that social critique was conservative. Speaking of bad faith, the Lauras claim that museum appropriations would “benefit crucial venues across the country, from the Headliners Music Hall in Louisville, Ky., to The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. — small and midsize venues and institutions that ensure a thriving cultural identity in every corner of America.”2 You can almost smell the apple pie.
But if you look at the Queens Museum, which one of the Lauras used to direct, the current exhibitions are of Aki Sasamoto, sonia louise davis [sic], Emilie L. Gossiaux, and Caroline Kent. One is white, none are men, and the oldest was born in 1975. The white woman is blind. It is stereotypical progressive identitarian arts programming from one end of the building to the other.3 Four years into a nationwide effort in the arts and beyond to implement programs of “inclusion” that pointedly excluded them, and painfully aware of the progressive capture of the arts institutions, conservatives have no reason to trust that funds obtained by the proposed appropriations would be spent equitably.
The progressive counterargument is that the museums are an oppressive exercise.
On the occasion of last fall’s revealed mismanagement at the British Museum, Jason Felch took to the New York Times to opine,
The universal museum, a relic of the Enlightenment, was never truly universal: Virtually all universal museums reside in Western cities, far beyond the reach of many of the communities from which their objects were taken. And there is nothing enlightened about hoarding the world’s culture in storage, unseen by many and often, apparently, unsafe.
The idea has been in the air for several years. Hannah Baker:
As a reformed art historian and a White woman who likes to look, I know that the museum and its accompanying conversations can be stimulating and engaging for viewers. I move through museum spaces quite freely; I find deep pleasure in their halls. But that pleasure comes at a price I am no longer willing to pay. In order to move with intention, to create a caring and loving space for engaging with art, I ask myself and my peers to think deeply about what we are protecting when we protect the museum…. I am for the elimination of the violence that the museum has consistently deployed against Black bodies, Brown bodies, gender non-confoming [sic] bodies, colonized bodies, queer bodies, immigrant bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, as well as violence against the cultures that these bodies create and move through.
Baker opens her piece with a quote from Dr. Porchia Moore, “Today is a good day for museums to die.”4 Moore, Department Head and Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Florida in the School of Art + Art History and the Critical Race Futurist5 for The Incluseum, told an interviewer in 2021,
I love that museums are undergoing all of this transformation and change. If you look at the last year, you see over a dozen open letters from museum professionals calling out institutions, stating these institutions are racist, they uphold white supremacy, they’re violent in ways that create all kinds of harm, they’re triggering, and they’re not paying people what they deserve.
A legally neutral mechanism for public museum funding like the one proposed by the Lauras would have the same drawbacks as colorblindness. Undeserving organizations committed to their underpinnings of white supremacy would be funded along with deserving ones that are trying to uproot them.
There is also a progressive argument that public funding should prioritize basic human needs: education, healthcare, affordable housing, and environmental protection. One of them, Alan Harrison, who cited my work recently, goes as far as arguing that the making and preservation of art are not valid charitable purposes. He characterizes a recently passed sales tax for the arts in his home of King County, Washington as “the old ‘free turkey on election day’ grift.” It’s safe to suggest that he would regard the Lauras’ strategy likewise, and magnified.
If the worldview of the Lauras is none of the above, what is it? In a word, parasitism.
revealed an interesting item in his objection to the Lauras. When one of them stepped down from directing the Queens Museum in 2018, the Times reported:[S]ome board members had objected to her decision to close the museum on Donald J. Trump’s Inauguration Day. The museum instead invited members of the community in to make protest posters, buttons and banners.
In addition, Ms. Raicovich said, she recently proposed to the board that the museum — in collaboration with other institutions — consider becoming a kind of sanctuary space that connects immigrants with social services. “It was made very clear to me that that was not something that was of interest,” she said.
The Lauras are obviously progressives, but that progressivism is downstream of a temperamental parasitism. You can plug people like that into any system from Maoism to monarchism and they will figure out some way to climb the power structure. In this case, the Lauras are looking at the American congressional appropriations system the way that Tom looks at Jerry.
Not content with the museums as a political monoculture, they would turn them into instruments of activism. But the boards and donors (typically the same crowd) are standing in the way.
The Lauras know that the institutions are basically captured. They also know that dollars are fungible. Hence this scheme: hook the museums up directly to the taxpayers in the name of leaking roofs, transfer those financial obligations to the programming, and quietly bend the programming until it reflects their worldview. Now they’re better insulated from the donors—the money will come in one way or the other. When the recession finally hits, which one day it will, they can count on Congress to respond by increasing spending as it always does, even as the donor base contracts.
One wonders if they know that something is coming.
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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in. For future titles, see the ASBC schedule.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon or B&N.
It is tempting to turn “Laura” into a metonym for these big-idea, oily, midwit managerial types, but Hillel warns us, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another,” and my wife’s name is Karen.
Every corner of America from Kentucky to Delaware!
And upon it too, where one Glori Tuitt has painted a mural titled Black, Trans, & Alive (Qweens Song).
I excoriated Baker’s piece at Artblog.net. Causally or coincidentally, she never wrote anything for Hyperallergic again.
I don’t know what it means either.
Couldn't we just paint cool stuff on all the highways instead?
Excellent.