Barbarians At The Met
Facing a potential shortfall of $150 million because of the pandemic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun conversations with auction houses and its curators about selling some artworks to help pay for care of the collection.
“This is the time when we need to keep our options open,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director, in an interview. “None of us have a full perspective on how the pandemic will play out. It would be inappropriate for us not to consider it, when we’re still in this foggy situation.”
Naturally, the museum still has the cash to participate in the Great Awokening:
Even as the Met is re-evaluating its collection for works to sell to pay for collections care, the museum is also trying to bulk up its holdings in neglected areas such as works by women and people of color.
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and a reckoning around race nationwide, as well as inside the museum, the Met in July issued a letter committing to a fund of $3 million to $5 million “to support initiatives, exhibitions, and acquisitions in the area of diverse art histories.”
The Met also pledged to establish within the next 12 months acquisition endowments of $10 million to increase the number of works by artists of color “in our 20th- and 21st-century collections.”
There is always money for Diversity™.
In the December issue of New Criterion, James Panero published a fantastic essay about how wokeness is unmaking the Metropolitan Museum. Panero loves the Met, and sings its fulsome praises. However:
If 2020 has revealed anything, it is the contingent nature of seemingly permanent things. The Met is an ocean liner of culture, one that conveys the world to America’s port. Over its history, the institution has more than proven its seaworthiness as a vessel that mostly stays true to course, not easily affected by prevailing winds or swamped by rogue waves. But even our mightiest institutions can take on water and list. Our institutions can also be easily scuttled from within, perhaps under the mistaken impression that they ride too high in the water, or simply that the ocean would be better off with a new addition to the sea floor.
More:
There has never been a moment of lower confidence in American museums than now. Against a backdrop of alarming cultural convulsions, the Met has not shown itself immune to political upheavals. In recent years our great public treasure house has presented its abundance as an embarrassment of riches. Now its hand-wringing, false confessions, and aesthetic effacements have begun to cast a pall over the very idea of its encyclopedic mission.
Panero writes about the history of the Met, and how difficult it was to build the museum’s collection. It has been the work of generations. But now, it is in peril, because of the fevered radicalism that has overtaken the world of culture. Until reading Panero’s piece, I had no idea how widespread the insanity had become at major museums. The Met’s leadership appears to be joining the mob.
One final episode well illustrates this danger. In June, Keith Christiansen, the museum’s chairman of European paintings, posted to his personal Instagram feed a print featuring Alexandre Lenoir, a figure who tried to save monuments during the French Revolution. “Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis,’’ Christiansen wrote. “How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve?”
The post came at a moment of national riots that had quickly moved beyond the dismantling of Confederate monuments to the indiscriminate destruction of any and all public works. “And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir,” Christiansen continued, “who realized that their value—both artistic and historical—extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.”
A member of the Metropolitan staff since 1977, Christiansen well understood that the encyclopedic museum, including his own, is the direct descendant of Lenoir. From the French Revolution, coming out of the American Civil War, on through the Monuments Men of the Second World War, collecting institutions have saved culture from the forces of destruction. “The losses that occur” when major works of art are destroyed by “war, iconoclasm, revolution, and intolerance,” as he explained, are the enemies of art history, diminishing our “fuller understanding of a complicated and sometimes ugly past.”
Christiansen was denounced for daring to compare Jacobin-like terror to the Jacobin Terror. This fall, he was among the 20 percent of Met staff to announce their retirement, to resign, or to be pushed out.
It’s worth considering along with Damon Linker’s new column about the Princeton classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and his campaign to destroy the field of classics in the name of anti-racism. Linker correctly views Padilla’s crusade as anti-intellectual. Excerpt:
The saddest passage of the profile is the one where Padilla “cringes” at the memory of “his youthful desire to be transformed by the classical tradition,” a longing he now sees as nothing more than a craving to be assimilated into a “system of structural oppression.”
But the classical tradition is so much more than this. It is, for one thing, an enormously important window into the foundations of our civilization. Are there morally disturbing aspects of this civilization? Of course. (Has there ever been a civilization in human history about which we could say otherwise?) But there are good things about it, too. If we want to understand ourselves, good and bad and everything in between, ancient Greece and Rome is where we need to start, at the beginning of the long, immensely complicated story that eventually wends its way down to us. To cut us off from that story, or to reduce the image to just one thread in the tapestry, is to condemn us to ignorance about ourselves.
Talk of the dangers of ignorance raises the possibility of achieving its opposite — knowledge and wisdom. And that’s the second and arguably even more important case for studying the classics with an eye to more than compiling a list of moral crimes.
Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Cicero, Livy — to become conversant in the writings of these authors and learn about the worlds in which they lived is to be placed into conversation with some of the greatest minds about some of the most monumental events in human history. It is to become culturally literate on the highest levels. It is an education in how to think, in how to achieve self-understanding and a salutary humility about our own vaunted superiority. It is to learn how to begin liberating ourselves from our own prejudices.
Whereas refusing to read these authors and learn about their worlds — or to do so merely in order to melt them down in the moral acids of our own unexamined certainties — is to close ourselves off both from our own past and from the possibility of living a fully self-aware life in the present.
That there are people in our time who see little value in the study of the classics is hardly surprising. There have always been those who care little for learning, or who value it only for its usefulness in advancing practical projects. But that such a crude form of philistinism has begun to gain a foothold in the very institutions tasked with preserving and passing on our classical inheritance is troubling. It’s a sign that present-day political concerns and obsessions have begun to intrude on and badly distort the work of the university.
We are living through a period of convulsive iconoclasm, in which the men and women who have the responsibility to shepherd our cultural institutions are opening the gates of the city to barbarians, and joining them in sacking our collective heritage, our civilizational patrimony. The people with the power to save these institutions — our great universities and museums — from this sacking are the wealthy and influential. So where are they? Are they too backing the barbarians, as a way to process their felt guilt over their wealth and influence?
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