Much Ado About Nothing: the Right's Response to the Obama Portrait

There are times when I think conservative media likes to invent controversy. Monday's orchestrated postings around 11:00 AM is one such instance.

The manufactured “outrage” at two of Kehinde Wiley’s models from 2012, posing as Judith, holding the severed heads of young white female stand-ins for Holofernes, is tiresome. But I guess it needs some deconstructing.

First—By the numbers:

1. Per Wiley’s website, the two paintings in question are 2 of 35 paintings he produced in 2012. 
2. They are the only 2 paintings on his website that feature disembodied heads. 
3. There are over 200 paintings featured on his website.
4. That is not his full output. 
5. Meaning that w-a-y less than 1% of his painted output involves severed heads.

Second—Process:

1. Wiley works with his models to choose a pose. 
2. That typically means he gives them a bunch of books and they choose poses. 
3. No young white women were actually beheaded during the production of the paintings.

Third—Meaning:
As my name probably betrays, I’m a white male, which has entitled me to certain privileges. For instance:

1. When I am stopped by a police officer (which is seldom), I don’t fear I am going to get shot for no reason. 
2. If I am shoveling my driveway, I don’t worry about getting harassed by the police. 
3. If I’m locked out of my house and need to break in, it’s unlikely I’ll get arrested for doing so. 
4. If I’m shopping in a store, and I happen to be wearing an item the the store typically sells, I don’t get charged a second time for the merchandise. I also don’t get followed around the store.

I could go on.

I also am not an ancestor of American slaves. No member of my family has been denied the right to vote, own property, or run a business based on their skin color. There is no record of anyone in my family being lynched, tortured, murdered, or raped because of their skin color.

Again, I could go on.

I also don’t go around not finding representations of me. if I am looking for a toy/doll for my kids, I have no difficulty finding a white toy/doll. If I am looking for children’s books, I don’t have difficulty finding white protagonists for my kids to read about. If I am looking for role-models for my children to look-up to, I don’t have difficulty finding white people in a-n-y profession to point to and declare, “see, some day you can be that too.”

I don’t know what the weight of any of that feels like, and I don’t carry that burden on my shoulders daily. But the two women that Wiley painted: they might. So if they want to be painted into a fictitious fantasy that symbolizes a turned tale of racial power, without it actually killing anyone, let them. It doesn’t make them racist. It doesn’t make Wiley racist for painting it. And it doesn’t make President Obama racist for choosing Wiley to paint his portrait—with or without an imagined sperm on his head.

It might open up a dialog about institutional racism, and the historic oppression of a populace. To some extent, that is what the book Judith is about.

By saying Wiley should not have painted those two paintings is saying that Wiley is not permitted to engage that discussion: no matter how indirect or inarticulate that attempt may be perceived.

And to say the 44th President cannot have Wiley paint his portrait because of those two paintings—the 44th President who was the daily recipient of racial epithets—is ridiculous. It’s also irrelevant. There was nothing he could do during his 8 years in office that would have pleased the racist critics, and the very act of having his portrait painted—even in the most staid of depictions—would be dissatisfactory to them.



By the very nature of the painting, and its stark break from tradition, there are many reasons people can dislike Wiley's unfamiliar approach to presidential portraiture, or President Obama's choice to use Wiley. I don't agree with the negative criticisms, but I understand those perspectives. Needing to invent some "hidden racist agenda" to dismiss the painting is weak tea, and for most of those parroting the criticism, probably a way to mask your own racism.

A New White House Curator: Missed the Peg

With the Obama-mania yesterday (at the National Portrait Gallery's unveiling of their portraits), I thought it best to make an tangential post that cannot be parked anywhere else except on this feral blog.

The White House has a new curator. Allegedly.

Last May, several news outlets reported the retiring of William Allman after a his many decades of service in the Office of the Curator. He had been appointed to the position of curator in 2002, and as the reporting indicated, had expressed intention to retire in 2016, but stayed on an extra year. There was no mention of his successor in any article that I could find. That struck me as curious. (Spoiler alert: it's probably not that curious.)

In the run-up to yesterday's unveiling, I started reviewing past articles about the Curator. In short, from Lorraine Waxman Pearce's appointment in 1961, through Rex Scouten's retirement in 1997, there is a solid record of who is curator, and when. When Pearce resigned, her successor (William Voss Elder III) is named in the same article. Lather-rinse-repeat through Clement Conger's departure and Scouten's ascension.

However, when it came to Scouten's retirement, articles covering his departure never mention a replacement. Only months later does Betty Monkman's name appear in an article with the title Curator. The same is true of Monkman's retirement in 2002: articles covering her retirement do not mention William Allman as her replacement.

So, here we are today: 9 months after the retirement of Allman, and the only mention of Lydia Tederick as White House Curator is a celebration announcement on Facebook, posted by the White House Historical Association on Oct. 27, 2017. 

Whether it's an issue of the White House not sending out P.R. about the last three Curator appointments, or it is newspapers not caring to publish them, I don't know. Perhaps those news articles didn't get scanned into ProQuest's archives.

Regardless, any legitimate peg for such an announcement has long passed. Still, it's nice to have a record of the appointment: somewhere: other than Facebook: or my blog, for that matter. 

My Letter to the SF Chronicle

Last week I sent the below letter to the editors of the SF Chronicle, and their art critic Charles Desmarias, in response to an editorial by Michael O'Hare, who proposed museums sell off the bottom 1% (in value) of their collection to fund free admissions.

Yesterday, Desmarias was kind enough to include a reference to my letter toward the end of his OpEd responding to O'Hare. However, since my full letter didn't make it into print (that I know of), it is below. 
===================================

I’m all for a good “let’s sell off the artwork to save the art museum” argument as the next guy. Unfortunately they are never good arguments. Michael O’Hare’s editorial from Jan. 12 is no exception.

His old essay supporting deaccession, repackaged for your paper, infuses recent deaccession news at the Berkshire Museum and admission increases at the Metropolitan Museum to support an argument that art museum attendance would improve if art museums were free. (The Met, I should note, had record attendance years in 2015, 2016 and 2017, when admission was still "suggested.")

Attendance doesn’t exist in the vacuum of admission costs, of course. His argument ignores the numerous plausible causes that have disenfranchised an arts audience over the last 50 years: Cuts in art criticism in collapsing pulp media outlets;  Arts curricula cut or eliminated from K-12 education; Cuts to the NEA; President Obama's disparaging joke about art history majors.

Clearly O'Hare has glommed onto the outrage of The Met's aim to charge out-of-towners $25 to visit the museum, which holds millenia of masterworks that only exist in one location. That does seem like a steep price. Never mind people pay $18 to watch predictable 2-hour long super-hero movies in New York (which are available in theaters everywhere, and on-demand next month).

So, let’s drill down into O’Hare’s bar-napkin economics argument on how to raid museum basements to increase their attendance, why it doesn't work, and to where he contradicts his own argument.

O’Hare’s revisited premise of selling 1% of the value of a museum’s collection currently leans on a thought experiment that The Met sell off 9 works to endow free admission forever: 9 works by the likes of Picasso, Gauguin, and Rembrandt. The free admission will increase attendance, he claims, citing how attendance rates soared in the UK when they made their museums free. UK museums are supported by the government, not by fire sales from the collection. Conversely, two Baltimore Museums (which are not government funded, nor purging artworks) experienced a drop in attendance after they eliminated admission fees. Baltimore is not mentioned in O’Hare’s editorial.

The 1% figure is pulled from the $35 billion assessed value of the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). 1% = $350 million. O'Hare suggests selling all the bottom 1% of the collection, "which no one ever sees," to nearby institutions that would want them: Museums, O’Hare presumes, that would be eager to have them! Museums, that we can assume, like Baltimore, are also experiencing attendance issues (and, let’s speculate larger attendance issues, since they lack Chicago’s density and tourism appeal).

What treasures lurk in the bottom-valued 1% of the AIC collection? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe purchase prizes from area exhibitions in the 1930s and 40s? Some Roman coins with eroded reliefs? A calotype left in the sun too long? It's not to say any of those are booby prizes. But their greater value likely resides in how they support the collection as objects of curatorial and conservation research, or how they reflect the history of Chicago and the Art Institute more specifically. Exhibited anywhere else: those works might seem out of place.

Alas, this 1% recipe, O’Hare admits, might not work everywhere. It might not work for San Francisco museums, he suggests. San Francisco: a relatively big city, in an area of dense population, where tourists tend to go. If it won’t work for San Francisco, then it certainly won’t work for scores of museums in smaller markets like Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Omaha, Davenport, or Toledo.

What could work for The Met, or the AIC, won't work many other places. And since The Met isn't having an attendance issue, it's an unnecessary argument to begin with. O’Hare’s bar-napkin economics exercise must have been after a few too many.