Woke Ideologues Are Taking Over American Art Museums

Those exhibitions are engines of scholarship, opportunities to advance our knowledge of a particular subject. They are the primary means by which the public has learned the history of art. So it’s no exaggeration to say that art museums have played a role in the intellectual and cultural life of the nation on par with that of colleges and universities.

Like higher education, art museums face a crisis of purpose. They are now widely seen as shameful relics of the era of Western colonialism, whose proper social role is to advance a progressive agenda. The doctrine of art for art’s sake, the idea that aesthetic values alone should guide their operations, is increasingly taking a back seat to political ideology. As a result, they are undergoing the greatest transformation since the 1960s, when the art museum as we know it—popular, populist and a must-see destination—came into existence.

The art museum is a creation of the Enlightenment, born of the desire to understand the world through the collection, classification and display of its specimens and artifacts. They were built with the belief that cultural treasures belong not to the elites but to all citizens and should be available for everyone’s edification and enjoyment. America’s first museum boom occurred between the Civil War and World War II. Those institutions are triumphs of nationhood and democratic culture. The former, because museums grew out of the belief that this country could never be taken seriously on the world stage unless it had art museums to equal those in Europe. The latter because, particularly since the 1960s, they have brought the greatest quantity of the greatest artworks to the greatest number of people.

In their early days, art museums were disorganized and often contained works of dubious quality—sometimes outright fakes. Starting in the early 20th century, a process of professionalization began, at the center of which was connoisseurship. Aspiring curators trained by closely studying individual works of art—their appearance, style, physical makeup and history. They acquired a discriminating eye that allowed them to determine a work’s authenticity, authorship, artistic quality and historical significance. Harvard once offered a graduate course in connoisseurship that produced some of the country’s greatest museum directors, among them

Alfred H. Barr Jr.

, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art.

You can see connoisseurship in action on “Antiques Roadshow.” But in too many museums, connoisseurs have been replaced by commissars—ideologues for whom aesthetics is less important than ensuring we view art through progressive lenses. This tendency had long existed, but in recent years the “great awokening” made it dominant.

The nature and extent of this transformation can be measured by comparing statements by two directors of the same institution 15 years apart. In 2005,

Philippe de Montebello,

then the head of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote an op-ed for the Journal titled “Why Should We Care?” His answer: “Works of art, embodying and expressing with graphic force the deepest aspirations of a time and place, are direct, primary evidence for the study and understanding of mankind.” Fast forward to 2020, when the current director,

Max Hollein,

told the New York Times: “There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy.’’

The politicization of art museums is so pervasive that the there is hardly an institution or aspect of museum practice exempt from it. It’s now commonplace for labels accompanying portraits as disparate as those from colonial America and 18th-century France to include information about the sitter’s connection to slavery, no matter how tenuous.

Last year Boston’s

Isabella Stewart Gardner

Museum put on an exhibition of mythological paintings by the great Renaissance painter Titian built around one in its collection titled “The Rape of Europa.” It shows Jupiter, who has turned himself into a bull, abducting Europa, who is sprawled across his back and holding on for dear life.

This was the first time in some 500 years that this group of paintings, commissioned as a series, had been seen together, and the Gardner’s is considered the greatest Renaissance painting in America. Yet the museum turned the exhibition into a #MeToo moment. It commissioned contemporary artists to create works and scholars to write commentary that would, as it said, “engage with questions of gender, power and sexual violence” that are “as relevant today as they were in the Renaissance.” It even created a support page on its website for anyone “triggered” by the exhibition.

Last fall the Baltimore Museum of Art staged a major exhibition of work by

Henri Matisse,

among the greatest of all modern artists. One of his recurring themes is the “odalisque”—a female studio model costumed, sometimes quite minimally, in Middle Eastern garb and posed in a setting intended to evoke a harem. In the wall texts the museum made sure visitors understood that this made Matisse both a sexist and a colonialist.

The commissars don’t hesitate to bite the hand that feeds their institutions. In 2020 the Met commemorated its 150th anniversary with an exhibition celebrating its many treasures and the donors who’d helped the museum acquire them. Of the latter, two of the biggest were department store owner

Benjamin Altman

(1840-1913) and sugar magnate

H.O. Havemeyer

(1840-1907). After outlining their contributions to the museum, the wall texts informed visitors that the fortunes that had made these generous acts possible had been built on, respectively, “intolerable” and “harsh” labor conditions.

One of the notable features of this revolution is that it is coming from within as well as without. Exhibit A is the remarkable article penned for the British magazine Apollo in 2018 by

Kaywin Feldman,

now director of the National Gallery of Art. At the time, she was running the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and her article included a list of her museum’s eight core values. At the top was “gender equality.” The list continued in a similar vein until finally getting around to “essentialness of the arts” at No. 8. The director of one of the country’s leading art museums placed art at the bottom of her list of institutional core values.

Outside the walls this agenda is being advanced by professional bodies such as the American Association of Museums, the media and the big foundations, which are so committed to progressivism that no museum can hope to get a grant unless it toes their line. In 2019

Darren Walker,

president of the Ford Foundation, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Museums Need to Step Into the Future,” in which he described them as “contested spaces” where on one side you have “trustees who benefit from a distorted economic system that protects and promotes inequality” and on the other “people whom the system excludes and exploits.” Two months after it ran, Mr. Walker was voted onto the board of the National Gallery.

To reprise Mr. de Montebello’s question, why should we care? Because the tax dollars that support these institutions are intended for heritage preservation and disinterested scholarly inquiry, not political tub thumping. And because the public is being cheated out of an experience only museums can provide.

What happens when we look at a work of art? There’s no one answer to that question, but an almost universal response is wonder. Take a familiar example: Michelangelo’s statue of David in Florence. Standing in front of it, you don’t need any art background to understand that you’re looking at something that started life as a large boulder; that it was fashioned into one of the world’s greatest masterpieces using the most rudimentary technology, a hammer and a chisel; and that this was accomplished by someone who didn’t own an iPhone or attend an Ivy League university.

You are astonished. How did Michelangelo create something of such visionary conception, breathtaking beauty and surpassing technical accomplishment? How could any mortal have done so?

At that moment you are placed in an altered relationship with the past, your own time and, hopefully, your sense of yourself. You realize that high-functioning, supremely talented people walked the Earth before you did. And you begin to wonder whether, your comfortable assumptions notwithstanding, the present era really does represent the pinnacle of human achievement. You might even feel a little humbled.

At the same time, the idea that you’re staring at a rock quickly falls away as you are pulled out of your everyday world and into the imaginative universe Michelangelo has created. What’s over there that’s caught David’s eye? Why is his brow furrowed? How is it that he appears simultaneously both tense and relaxed? On and on. It’s a unique and wonderful experience, one only art can deliver.

The new ideological approach upends all that. Art’s richness and complexity is reduced to a few crude slogans. Works of art, springboards to the great epochs of the past, are turned into fields on which to fight the battles of the present. The past itself, revered since the Renaissance as a source of inspiration and a standard of excellence, is portrayed as fatally, even irredeemably flawed. Driving all this are the commissars, who have arrogated to themselves the status of superior beings, entitled to pass summary judgment on artists, art, its institutions and supporters. There is no humility, only moral vanity.

On Sept. 13, 2001, the Met reopened two days after the attack on the World Trade Center. The next day the New York Times reported that by 4 p.m., 8,270 visitors had passed through its doors, “more than normal for this time of year.” Those people didn’t come to be lectured about colonialism, gender equality and the rest. They came to connect with beauty, the creative imagination and our common humanity. We need to insist that our art museums revert to that aspirational, Enlightenment-derived mission. Otherwise something precious and irreplaceable will be lost.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Arts in Review editor. This is adapted from a talk he gave at the Bohemian Grove Club in July.