The Wages of Vulgarity

In which the curse of a long-gone 18-karat gold toilet revisits her who issued it.

The White House has maintained a long tradition of borrowing works of art from the nation’s museums. A new administration enters office, the First Family gets a tour of the facilities with the curators, selections are made of works to decorate the East and West Wing, and the press engages in rudimentary but well-meaning acts of art historical interpretation regarding the choices and what they say about the priorities of the administration. Typical of that last item is this piece on the Obamas in the New York Times from 2009.

The Obamas’ taste in art is as broad as abstract canvases by Josef Albers, American Indian scenes by George Catlin and paintings by little-known figures like Alma Thomas, the African-American Expressionist painter. Works by those artists were among some 45 pieces that the first couple borrowed from several Washington museums to decorate their private White House residence and the West and East Wings, the White House press office announced on Tuesday.

It is a big, wide selection of mostly modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures that also includes works by Mark Rothko, a lead relief titled “0 Through 9” by Jasper Johns, bronze sculptures by Degas and still-life canvases by Giorgio Morandi.

This used to be one of the classier things that went on in American civic life, and served as an opportunity to lay aside partisan hostilities in favor of the our shared commitments to human betterment and the fruits of civilization.

That tradition was slapped in the face in 2017. The Trumps put in a request for Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 canvas in the collection of the Guggenheim, Landscape with Snow. Nancy Spector, chief curator, responded to the White House liaison that it was unavailable, as it was subject to stringent restrictions on travel by conditions set by the donating estate. She added, however:

Fortuitously, a marvelous work by the celebrated contemporary Italian artist, Maurizio Cattelan, is coming off view today after a year’s installation at the Guggenheim, and he would like to offer it to the White House for a long-term loan. It is a solid, 18k gold toilet that was installed in one of our public restrooms for all to use in a wonderful act of generosity. The work beautifully channels the history of 20th-century avant-garde art by referencing Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal of 1917. We would be pleased to help facilitate this loan for the artist should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House.

Spector, along with most of the rest of the art world, had been voicing her opposition to Trump on social media since the announcement of his candidacy. When time came for the toilet, titled America by the artist, to be removed from display, she took to the Guggenheim blog to opine:

…it was the Trump reference that resonated so loudly during the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. When the artist proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril….

Cattelan’s “America,” like all his greatest work, is at once humorous and searing in its critique of our current realities. Though crafted from millions of dollars’ worth of gold, the sculpture is actually a great leveler. As Cattelan has said, “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.” Art-wise, the work reached a certain pinnacle of acceptability—or notoriety—when it was featured on the cover of the New York Post (September 15, 2016) with the headline, “We’re #1 (and #2!),” and an article titled, “The Guggenheim Wants You to Crap All Over ‘America.’ ” However, Cattelan’s anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim.

The offer of the Cattelan toilet, while couched in politely bureaucratic language, was obviously a dig at the new president. Most of the art press at the time responded with glee. “Sit on This! The Guggenheim Basks in the Reflected Glory of Its Golden Riposte to Trump’s Van Gogh Request,” tittered Brian Boucher at Artnet News. I was perhaps alone in the world when I remarked at The Federalist that Spector owed her curatorship to the largess of prominent fiscal conservative David Stockman, and that “Trump may be a vulgarian, but I’ll take an honest vulgarian over a vulgarian tarted up in trappings of high culture.”

Five years later, Spector is out of the Guggenheim. An October article at The Atlantic goes into the sordid details, asking in its subhead, “A museum curator was forced out of her job over allegations of racism that an investigation deemed unfounded. What did her defenestration accomplish?”

In summary, Spector invited one Chaédria LaBouvier, described as an “independent Basquiat scholar,” to participate in a proposed exhibition built around a painting about which LaBouvier had become a specialist, Basquiat’s Defacement from 1983. Once involved, LaBouvier grew increasingly belligerent, and took her accusations of institutional malfeasance and racism to social media. A third party investigated and found no wrongdoing, but the accusations could not be cleared in the atmosphere of hot rhetoric and presumed guilt that typifies contemporary race politics. The museum had few credible options except to remove Spector, which it did.

Helen Lewis, in researching the Atlantic piece, reached out to LaBouvier for her comments. Please take my advice as a critic with journalistic responsibilities - no matter how angry you feel, never speak to a reporter like this:

In August, I sent an Instagram message to LaBouvier asking if we might speak for this article. In her reply, LaBouvier castigated The Atlantic for not having covered her Guggenheim exhibition or its fallout. “Where were you in 2019 or 2020?” she asked. “Fuck you and your arrogance.”

LaBouvier followed up by email, copying the executive editor at the magazine. “I am not interested in participating in a piece that through lack of expertise, thoroughness, research or fortitude will resign me as a footnote and amplify a glorified publicity stunt,” she wrote, calling me “another example of a clueless, rapacious White woman.”

“I am so tired of scavenging journalists attempting to speak for me, or depict me. I am nothing if not direct, and I have always said it from my chest, and with my name on it.” She closed with a warning: “Should you fuck this up—which you will—I will be on your ass like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm at a KKK rally.”

Do so, and that is how you will be remembered until the end of time.

By the way, in 2019, the Cattelan toilet, America, was stolen. It was never recovered, and most speculations assume that it was melted for metal. This too could be interpreted in politcal-artistic terms, but I will refrain.

Lewis tries to present Spector as the victim in this scenario, and not unreasonably.

According to a statement from the Guggenheim’s board of trustees published on October 8, investigators found “no evidence that Ms. LaBouvier was subject to adverse treatment on the basis of her race.” (The Guggenheim declined to provide the full text of the investigators’ report.) It didn’t matter. A separate statement from the board, issued the same day, revealed that Spector was leaving the Guggenheim, ending an association dating back 34 years. A line had been drawn. In the media, the words Guggenheim and racism would no longer be placed in the same sentence.

When Nancy Spector left the Guggenheim, she lost more than her job. She lost her professional reputation. She lost friends. And she lost the rest of her career. She had taught intermittently at Yale’s school of art since 1994, but has not been invited back since leaving the Guggenheim. Now in her 60s, Spector cannot easily rebuild the life she once had.

I would nevertheless add that Spector had been paving the way for LaBouvier for years. One does not arrive overnight at the lethal levels of mistrust and despondency that Lewis discovered when she asked those knowledgeable about the Guggenheim flap to comment:

Enough time has passed for many of those who were uneasy about what happened that summer to reflect on those events, and their role in them. One former Guggenheim colleague told me that she thought about what happened to Spector every day—but that she was too afraid for her future career to speak on the record. Another source told me he was taking the risk of speaking with me because a friend had been forced out of a job, in another industry, and had later killed himself.

On the contrary, Spector had made highly prominent statements to the effect that political opponents are moral enemies, not just competitors for worldly power, but the embodiment of evil and ignorance. Emmett Rensin tried to warn his fellow progressives about “The smug style in American liberalism” in 2016.

We have long passed the point where blithe ridicule of the American right can be credibly cast as private stress relief and not, for instance, the animating public strategy of an entire wing of the liberal culture apparatus…. Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn.

Not only did Spector and her kind ignore him, Rensin was turned out of Vox in a matter of months. Now not even Spector has the social capital to withstand the kind of scorched-earth antics that have become permissible in ostensibly professional settings in the arts, as retold by Lewis:

LaBouvier felt disrespected by the Guggenheim’s desire to edit sections of the essay she had prepared for the exhibition catalog. Months later, in a curatorial meeting, Spector told her staff, “Where it really went downhill is when she turned in her essay.” According to a leaked transcript of the meeting, another curator seconded Spector’s account, describing the work as “poorly written” and lax in its scholarship. They told LaBouvier it would need to be reworked extensively, and suggested she could be credited as a co-author, alongside Spector and another curator. LaBouvier was insulted—“I said fuck no & fought back,” she later tweeted. She met with Fab 5 Freddy, trying to persuade him to withdraw his interview from the catalog. He tried to talk her down, he told me. He didn’t think the issues she raised were “as serious or as big or as problematic as she made [them] out to be.” He urged LaBouvier to focus on the importance of the exhibition to Basquiat’s and Michael Stewart’s legacies, and what it would mean to have a museum as powerful as the Guggenheim address the subject of police racism.

Again, please take my advice as a critic with journalistic responsibilities - consider alternatives when you’re inclined to answer your editor’s change requests with “fuck no.” On Twitter. Good Lord.

Fab 5 Freddy comes out as the hero of this story, for valiantly if in vain trying to steer LaBouvier toward goodwill and higher, common purpose. Spector does not - not because she doesn’t deserve goodwill, or to be made the beneficiary of a higher, common purpose, but because she denied goodwill and recognition of a higher common purpose to the Trump family in 2017. Spector and many other thoughtful people find Trump personally and politically odious. He and his family remain children of God and citizens of the country. They were not asking her for political support, they were asking for a van Gogh. She could have offered them a different one.

Now she and the Trumps are on the same side, beyond the acceptable circle of people with whom her former colleagues in academia and the museum world can safely associate. To answer the question in Lewis’s subhead, the sacrifice of Spector temporarily satiated a political beast that she helped nurture. It will grow and return to demand ever-larger meals. Thus are the wages of vulgarity.