The Silent Backlash

The anti-woke backlash in the art world will come not with a conservative bang, but with a nonpartisan whimper.

One of the reasons I don’t subscribe to the left-right paradigm in politics is that the “left” has no idea how to locate the center. This results first of all in a worldview in which the right, the far-right, the alt-right, the libertarians, the reactionaries, and the fascists are all lurking in the same dark space beyond the vaunted center. It secondly results in an idea of the center that would be unrecognizable to self-described centrists. Once you accept the left-right metaphor, you inherit the associated assumptions, most of which are wrong.

For instance, take the museum world.¹ The “left’s” idea of a reversion to mean in the museum world is the total exclusion of libertarian and conservative viewpoints from the cultural sphere, with most exhibitions espousing progressive nostrums but occasional art-for-art’s-sake shows thrown in for the normies.

The “left’s” idea of victory, the defeat of the “right” and the conversion of the center to its own views, is the above exclusion of libertarian and conservative expression, absolutely every exhibition presented through the lens of progressive priorities, board leadership wrested away from the wealthy donor class (who would nevertheless be expected to give anyway), and remedial underrepresentation of white male artists in exhibition and collection efforts until the time that America’s moral accounts are balanced regarding the races and sexes, that is, indefinitely. Until then, according to the “left,” fascism remains a constant danger.

Insane as that may sound, it is the only way to comprehend a recent Ben Davis essay, “Is the Art World Entering the Age of ‘Anti-Woke’ Backlash? Here’s Why Today’s Reaction Will Look Very Different From Decades’ Past: How today's tech bro-powered vibe shift might represent a different kind of backlash than we saw in the 1990s.” (They’re not known for their concision at Artnet.)

This was an assignment given to Davis to comment upon the Burns Halperin Report. Charlotte Burns is the proprietrix of Studio Burns, which “creates and commissions original (and exciting) editorial,” by its own description. Julia Halperin is the Executive Editor of Artnet News. In their introduction to this year’s iteration of the report, they relate,

When we started the Burns Halperin Report in 2018, we had a clear goal: to use data to track whether the mainstream art world really was providing overdue recognition to Black American artists, as was the dominant media narrative at the time. If that were true—in the middle of the Trump presidency—then the art world represented some kind of utopian alternative to the rest of society. If it was not true, we figured, we should stop repeating it.

What we found was that a few high-profile exhibitions and auction results obscured a far more entrenched system of racism and sexism that was not changing anywhere near as quickly as the triumphant headlines suggested. In fact, it was barely changing at all.

The report is sponsored in part by Swiss financial behemoth UBS.

In addition to compiling data, the progressive white women crafting their eponymous report commissioned fifteen other authors to comment upon them (the data, not the progressive white women). They also broke up their own contributions into several components. The whole shebang is published at Artnet as well as the site of Studio Burns. Titles include “Art Collectors Have Become Increasingly Risk-Averse. It’s Their Loss—and Ours,” “Here Are 5 Concrete DEAI [Diversity, Equity, Access, Inclusion] Policies Other Industries Have Used Successfully That the Art World Would Do Well to Consider,” “Monolithic Museum Collections Are Like Climate Change—It Will Take Generations to Undo, But We Must Start Now,” “These Two Museums Sold Art by White Men to Buy Work by Women and Artists of Color. Did It Actually Tip the Scales?,” and “Dear Billionaire: An Open Letter to Museum Patrons.”

That last item is by Nizan Shaked, a professor of contemporary art history and museum and curatorial studies at California State University Long Beach. If you need an example of how progressive academics see their place in the cosmos, look at how Shaked writes to her hypothetical billionaire addressee:

I know that you are accustomed to owning your individuality. But today, you, too, are a statistic: a representative of a class. Take it as a cultural experience—learn how it feels to be lumped into a group. I am not trying to be rude, dear Billionaire. Surely you agree that we cannot rely on the will of individuals to do good in a system historically designed to make a few rich and the majority of us varying degrees of poor.

Median faculty salary at CSU Long Beach is $95,567. I think of that as no degree of poor whatsoever.

Returning to Davis, I would welcome an anti-woke backlash. But my idea of the center at the museums is the exercise of high levels of connoisseurship by art experts working in an atmosphere of curiosity and humility. That does not entail the banishment of political expression, even from the progressive fringes. But it does favor nuance over polemics, emphasizes the judgment of art over that of persons, and concedes on occasion that views outside of the progressive ethos exist and are valid.

A proper anti-woke backlash would punish art-worlders for straying so far from that center. It would entail the summary removal of the four museum directors associated with the “Philip Guston Now” debacle. It would restore the docent program at the Art Institute of Chicago and oblige the bureaucrat most clearly responsible for its cessation to step down. The organizers of the Obama Portraits Tour would be savagely mocked as Democrat party apparatchiks, and Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald characterized rightly in the press as two of the least interesting African-American artists working today. Myriad efforts at the museums to malign the Western canon would be blasted with such vehemence that they would never be repeated.

Of course, nothing of the kind is happening. Davis’s early indicators of an imminent anti-woke backlash are Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and Peter Thiel’s funding of the New People’s Cinema Club, which is “dedicated to promoting and developing transgressive and discounted art and film.” (I hadn’t heard of it either.) He believes that this backlash will be fueled by “techie libertarianism,” which “seems to be mutating into a turbo-charged Nietzschean neo-monarchism, militantly hostile to traditional liberal institutions, creating a new political bloc with the alt-right trolls.”

If only. The “turbo-charged Nietzschean neo-monarchism” is described in a Quartz article from 2017 on the Dark Enlightenment, which was basically over as a phenomenon by the time the progressive press learned about it. The “militantly hostile” link directs to hand-wringing about Thiel and Musk; Thiel’s alliances are always uncertain, but Musk is the one of the moment’s foremost proponents of free speech, which may no longer be a progressive value but remains a liberal one. The bit about “a new political bloc with the alt-right trolls” links to a New Yorker profile of Vivek Ramaswamy. This is twaddle: the alt-right came to an inglorious end when Milo Yiannopolis quit Breitbart, again in 2017, and Ramaswamy has nothing to do with the associated impulses that dispersed into the political hinterlands thereafter. Again, to certain “leftists,” everything on the “other side” of “center” is an uncharted swamp of evil.

What is happening? Let Davis tell you:

Blue-chip galleries added Black artists to their programs, important overlooked female artists have been rediscovered at a brisk clip, museums shook up their schedules, and biennials reversed polarities so that the once-drastically overrepresented white Euro-American male demographic has been rendered a near non-presence in almost every such recent survey, from New York to New Orleans, and from Arkansas to Italy.

Nevertheless² the associated arc of history, when it manifested in times past, didn’t run exponentially all the way to Racial Equity Communism. Instead, as Coco Fusco recalls in Davis’s essay, “In the art world of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s there was a shift away from the moral argument about empowerment and civil rights, which was widespread in the 1980s and early ‘90s, to an emphasis on visual talent and success.” Which is a plateau, not a backlash. I suppose that’s the side effect of progressivism for some people - if you’re not progressing, you’re dying, or feeling like you are. If things are changing slowly, as Burns and Halperin have documented, they’re “barely changing at all.”

Davis entertains a theory of a thirty-year cycle of activism and anti-activism that coincides with the 1960s, the 1990s, and the 2020s. He ponders what the 2020s iteration won’t look like, but offers little as to what it will look like. Nothing at all would have to happen for him to be proven wrong.

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I have long insisted that the best way to predict the future is to see the present clearly. Let’s consider what’s going on now.

The yield curve is inverted. As explained in a recent New York Times piece, longer-term treasuries typically return higher yields than shorter treasuries. The converse exposes pessimism about the economy that historically indicates recessions with considerable though not perfect reliability. The author’s interlocutor estimates the chances of a recession occurring in the next twelve months at 95%.

Arts philanthropy has trended upward past pre-pandemic levels. The Arts Consulting Group has the numbers: $23.5 billion in contributions from all sources for 2021, compared to $21.6 billion in 2019, discounting the calamitous and atypical year of 2020 ($18.4 billion).

Museum attendance, however, continues trending downward. Seph Rodney reported on this in 2018. There are caveats: the numbers are not gathered very often or sifted finely and are hard to population-adjust. But it’s clear that they’re not positive. Museum attendance recently looked like it was on its way to return to sinking pre-pandemic figures, but leveled before it could get there.

Conservative power in the US is shambolic. The results of the most recent election should have been a massacre of the Democrats, after their perpetration of deeply divisive policies under an unpopular president. Instead Republicans barely succeeded in flipping the House, which would be a typical outcome for a midterm.³ Conservatives penning the relevant post-mortems are not clear about why the results were so disappointing for them, which itself signifies a lack of forward momentum.

The museums can be as woke as they want without consequences. Possibly the only remaining vestige of conservatism in the museums is the inclination to preserve the objects in the collection (as opposed to, say, allowing precious artifacts to be turned into marker boards by the public). The enjoyment of art qua art is seen as reactionary by many progressives, but that is only because it transcends politics, and transcendence is not an option for those who believe that all art is political.

Christopher Bedford used up his allotment of goodwill at the Baltimore Museum of Art by taking advantage of temporarily relaxed AAMD guidelines to propose the sale of a Clyfford Still canvas, one that had been donated to the museum by Clyfford Still himself, in order to pay for raises for staffers of color. This appears to have cost him his job at the BMA, but not his reputation. He is now the director of SFMoMA as of this past June.

I recently tried to ascertain whether there were any long-term consequences of the elimination of the docents at the Art Institute of Chicago, and found none. The museum responded to the controversy with a campaign of lies, froze the entire volunteer program, and went ahead with what they were going to do anyway. One of the few docents to put her name on the record in opposition to the plan to ax the docents lists her current position on LinkedIn as a contract worker at AIC. That’s what they wanted, to get rid of the volunteers and replace them with paid employees whom they could order what to say, and fire for not saying it.⁴

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A veterinarian once said to me that when it comes to the domestic feline, cowards outlive warriors. So it is with museum professionals. As I’ve already discussed, much of the museums’ behavior regarding “Philip Guston Now” can be explained in terms of MFA Boston director Matthew Teitelbaum trying to save his bacon. Teitelbaum may be a feckless nincompoop, but he knows how to assess the threat environment. Say what you will, he still has his job. Mark Godfrey does not.

So it’s interesting, in light of the above, that his latest move is to try to pass off the tagline “Here All Belong” as pertaining somehow to the MFA Boston. That speaks to the probability, given all possible threats, that the greatest danger to the institution is declining attendance.

The 2019 Annual Report for the MFA Boston recorded that its fiscal year attendance was 1,351,000.⁵ The report for FY21, the latest available, estimates attendance at 201,000. That’s an 85% drop. Obviously the federal and state responses to the pandemic account for much of that decline. It would surprise me if the FY22 numbers were not significantly higher. But they undershot a budgeted attendance of 230,000, and the report authors recommended a FY22 attendance budget for 600,000, which is less than half of what it was a mere three years prior. It remains to be seen by the public whether it was met.

The answer to Davis’s titular question is “no.” As long as the museums avoid going so woke that they get sued, as did Oberlin College, no one is ever going to do more than complain about their progressive excesses. I can attest from experience that the museums don’t care. Given the state of conservatism it’s hard to see anyone so much as organizing a protest. The billionaires are going to ignore the Nizan Shakeds of the world and continue to give.⁶ The remaining docent programs around the country are toast. That will reduce the quality of the educational programming but have no further effect as far as the rest of the decade is concerned.

What may happen instead is that former museumgoers decide quietly that the museum is not for them. The impetuses could range from progressives finding the historical objects too problematic to conservatives growing weary of getting harangued by wall labels. Maybe the normies will tire of culture war. Maybe visitors with fond memories of docents will miss them. When, not if, the recession comes, they will forego $27 museum admissions and do something cheaper and less vexing with their time.

It will be a backlash of indifference. People may stop caring en masse. The museums would persist, propped up by the billionaires, more woke than ever, implementing every conceivable DEAI measure, acquiring every permutation of historically demographically underrepresented artist available. But they would be forgotten from the cultural conversation as they emptied of visitors. For the museums, that really would be like dying.

1. Please.

2. There you have it from the horse’s mouth: white men really are getting shut out nearly to the point of exclusion in contemporary surveys. And not just in the surveys, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.

3. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who ordered some of the most incoherent pandemic restrictions in the country (at one point gardening aisles were closed in the hardware stores on her command) while haughtily exempting herself from inconvenient restrictions, was sent back to Lansing. Someone literally tried to kill New York governor Kathy Hochul’s opponent and not even that garnered him enough sympathy or damaged her enough for him to beat her.

4. Note that this belief in the value of hierarchy and a just-do-your-job attitude about employment is now the progressive position at the museums. This is the other chief reason that I reject the left-right metaphor. Progressivism and conservatism overlap on basic premises regarding the use of power, they just plug different priorities into them. Sometimes even the priorities aren’t all that different.

5. The FY19 report boasts that such a figure had not been seen since 1999. On its face that sounds like good news, although it indicates that it had been near-level or worse than that for thirty years, during which time the population of Boston grew 10%.

6. Given that UBS sponsored the Burns Halperin Report, Shaked is effectively on the billionaires’ payroll.