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Soft Totalitarianism At The Art Gallery

Four major museums cancel important exhibition out of an abundance of wokeness
Philip Guston exhibition

In doing Live Not By Lies interviews this week, I’ve been asked to describe the difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. One way to look at it would be to consider the difference between George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The late, great media critic Neil Postman, in the foreword to his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death, wrote:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

There’s a slightly different way to view soft totalitarianism. In a hard totalitarian society, the state would close down an art exhibition, or not allow it to be mounted in the first place, because it offended against the ruling ideology. The state would throw the museum director into prison.

In a soft totalitarian society, the museum director would cancel the exhibition without the slightest pressure from the state, because he feared offending against the ruling ideology, which he would have internalized.

This has now happened, at the highest levels. Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee brings the news, and rightly condemns these cowardly museums. Excerpts:

The catalogue was published. The loans secured. Everything was in place. But four illustrious museums — the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Tate Modern in London — have together decided to postpone, to 2024, a major exhibition devoted to the work of one of America’s most critically acclaimed and influential artists.

Why? Because they want to protect the public from having to interpret Philip Guston’s art (which includes cartoon-inspired depictions of figures wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods) for themselves.

Never mind that Guston, who was Jewish and died in 1980, had a powerful record, going back to his youth, of anti-racist actions and imagery. Never mind that two of today’s leading African American artists, Glenn Ligon and Trenton Doyle Hancock, have contributed essays to the catalogue (Ligon even praising Guston in his essay as “woke”). And never mind that it’s absurd to require artists to pass such litmus tests in the first place.

Call me naive, but I didn’t anticipate this. Yes, I can see all the forces in the culture leading to it. But the decision is simply wrong — and a legitimate cause for outrage.

More:

In the art world, the culture war is playing out as a question of how big a role art can and should play in bringing about certain kinds of social change. Many on the left want our idea of art to become so instrumentalist — so subservient to political imperatives — that they are willing to jettison large parts of what art means to people who love it and truly need it. I am referring to its ambiguities, its contradictions, its connection to the richness and freedom of our inner lives, to beauty and pain, and its ability to speak to confusions within and without. I’m talking about all the things you find in Toni Morrison, in Frank Ocean, in Anton Chekhov or Alice Munro, in Shostakovich or Duke Ellington, in Romare Bearden or Philip Guston.

This Guston decision feels big — like the first significant marker in an accelerating attempt not so much to respond to the “public discourse about art” as to alter our whole conception of art.

But it’s not actually a first, is it? We’ve seen it before, in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia and in many other places where those in power, or those fearful of power, thought they could control the human heart and bend society their way by restricting what we see and how we express ourselves.

Such people are always wrong. History continuously proves them so.

What is at stake is not just the arts, or even the human heart. What’s at stake is also political, in the immediate sense. I’m talking about the upcoming election. Because nothing invites a backlash from reasonable people on the left, in the center and on the right — people whose votes Democrats will need if they want to beat President Trump — more than the left’s efforts to control and foreclose upon free thought.

Not to see this is the worst kind of political naivete.

Read it all. 

This is what the Left is turning our universities and leading cultural institutions into! The government is not making these museum directors, university presidents, and so on, do this — they’re doing it of their own initiative, because they are gutless, servile ninnies who are not worthy of the institutions that they lead. In Live Not By Lies, I explain why this kind of thing is a four-alarm fire. Excerpt:

This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

As part of its quest to define reality, a totalitarian state seeks not just to control your actions but also your thoughts and emotions. The ideal subject of a totalitarian state is someone who has learned to love Big Brother. Back in the Soviet era, totalitarianism demanded love for the Party, and compliance with the Party’s demands was enforced by the state. Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit.

As Sebastian Smee, to his credit, understands, these woke museums are destroying the essence of art, and of the public’s relationship to art. And for what? To avoid hurting people’s feelings? To avoid the possibility that someone might see these paintings, and think a forbidden thought?

I repeat: this is not a downtown Manhattan gallery shutting down an exhibition out of woke piety. This is the National Gallery of Art. This is the Tate Modern. This is the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. If those institutions lack the courage to show paintings of a left-wing artist whose works were completely unproblematic the day before yesterday, what kind of signal does that send to smaller institutions? What does it say to the rest of society about what art is for?

If Guston is cancelled, who’s next?

Notice that the Bad Orange Man did not order the cancellation of a major art exhibition. These museum boards did it to themselves — and to the publics they are supposed to serve. But look, readers, this is another sign of the times — and another reminder that if you think totalitarianism is only something that the state can impose, you’re wrong. In Live Not By Lies, in the section about China as the model for our Western future, I write:

“China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state,” writes journalist John Lanchester. “The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalized the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalization is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behavior, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.”

In this case, the museum directors have not internalized the state’s demands, but have indeed internalized a slavish left-wing ideology that teaches them to intervene against themselves. We don’t need a soft totalitarian government to get involved when the leaders of cultural institutions are eager to live like slaves.

I’m not sure about the Tate Modern, but I know that those three US museums have many corporate patrons. What do they think about this? Do they support it? I hope Sebastian Smee and other arts journalists will force them to go on the record. If they are not protesting this utterly irresponsible decision, it will tell us something important about woke capitalism, and the kinds of society the wealthy corporate patrons want.

UPDATE: I think it’s important to point out that the President of the United States doesn’t have anything to do with this kind of thing. We do not live, and should not want to live, in a society in which the president can tell art galleries what they can and can’t exhibit. This lunatic norm stands to be freely adopted by museums — as is, and as should be, their right. But it’s still weird and destructive and yes, sort of totalitarian.

UPDATE.2: Reader Jonah R.:

None of this surprises me, because the big galleries are the equivalent of universities, where institutional thinking is rewarded.

But it also means that they don’t represent actual, working artists. I’m going to offer a suggestion: Look into your local art center. They almost certainly offer a catalog of classes for the public where very little of the curriculum is woke. Instead you can take classes in drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, and possibly even sculpture. Sure, there will be a few nuts and political obsessives, and some artists will be making garbage, but a majority of the artists will be teaching fundamental skills and will be creating work that, whether you like their specific approach or not, is attuned to or at least searching for beauty. You’ll meet members of the regional watercolor society who make beautiful plein air landscape paintings. You may even meet a few out-and-proud conservatives and libertarians, especially since small-time, working artists are essentially owners of very small businesses.

Most big museums and galleries may be sterile and woke, but art’s not dead. Go buy a print or a ceramic mug or something from your local art center. They’re the Dark Age monks who are keeping both the technical skills and the passion alive, and your purchase supports that.

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