Woke Ideologues Are Taking Over American Art Museums
Wall Street Journal | Eric Gibson
The the WSJ’s Arts in Review editor, Gibson, writes that “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… 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.”
“A creation of the Enlightenment…[museums] 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..triumphs of nationhood and democratic culture.”
Today, “connoisseurs have been replaced by commissars—ideologues for whom aesthetics is less important than ensuring we view art through progressive lenses…The politicization of art museums is so pervasive that the there is hardly an institution or aspect of museum practice exempt from it…”
Why should we care, Gibson asks. “Because the tax dollars that support these institutions are intended for heritage preservation and disinterested scholarly inquiry, not political tub thumping.”
“Works of art, springboards to the great epochs of the past, are turned into fields on which to fight the battles of the present,” Gibson argues. “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.”
