Eek, The Public Might Have To Think!
For themselves and everything!

Art critic Sebastian Smee writes in the WaPo about the latest race-panic-driven hysteria -- this particular hysteria hitting the art world:

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, including 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.

Consider the rationale: In a prepared statement, the leaders of these four museums, Kaywin Feldman of the NGA, Matthew Teitelbaum of the MFA Boston, Gary Tinterow of the MFA Houston and Frances Morris of Tate Modern, said they had decided that the Guston show should be postponed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted."

I have read some unfathomable doublespeak coming out of museum PR departments in my time, but this is by far the most ludicrous. The show is titled "Philip Guston Now." The idea that work with a powerful message of social and racial justice -- as they themselves put it -- should have to wait until some future when they think our current tumult and confusion has been magically cleaned up is truly Orwellian.

He's absolutely right.

This:

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.

...We've seen (this) 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.

...When, in the future, people look back on this truly dismaying decision, I'm pretty sure they will shake their heads. How, they will ask, could the well-meaning leaders of these four major museums be so spineless, so patronizing and so wrong?

They are serving their tribal masters rather than their mission.