Decolonizing the art museum: In the New York Times, Olga Viso, who helped remove Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold (with the artist’s approval) from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last year because Native Americans said it offended them (even though it was intended to critique the use of the death penalty on minorities), says museums need to do more to “reconceive their missions at a time of great societal reckoning around race and gender.” So, when people protest a work of art because of a misunderstanding, instead of defending it, curators should remove it because, well, “public education” is “simply not possible because of the continuing historical trauma about an unreckoned-with colonial past.” To “remain relevant,” Viso argues, museums must “embrace this form of dialogue.” (Cough.) If they don’t—how to put it?—“position themselves as learning communities” (because “public education” is impossible), they “run the risk of becoming culturally irrelevant artifacts.” (Is there anything sadder than a culturally irrelevant artifact?) “Now is the time to be open to radical change,” Viso writes, with the passion of a freshman and the vocabulary of a sophomore: “The next wave of decolonizing America’s art museums must succeed, because to lose our capacity for empathy in a democracy is not an option.” Hear, hear! But wait. Let’s not stop there! Aren’t museums themselves colonial inventions? Newspapers, too, methinks. How about we take decolonization to its logical conclusion to preserve this great nation of ours?
Is Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags the “the greatest English novel of the Second World War”? John Rossi considers.
Why does everyone hate Richard Nixon? He isn’t cool: “He was often deceitful and in crucial respects unprincipled, but hardly less so than his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, whom many modern biographers have gone out of their way to praise on the grounds that he expanded the American welfare state, though the empirical evidence of its success is lacklustre at best. Nixon had his enemies spied on and used federal agencies to bully them, but other presidents, before and since, have done the same, and in any case hatred for Nixon long predated post-Watergate revelations of his paranoid vindictiveness. John Farrell, in Richard Nixon: The Life, comes close to the answer when he observes, near the beginning of his account, that ‘there is cool and there is square, and Richard Milhous Nixon was nothing if not square’. Coolness – the quality of appearing self-possessed, at ease with oneself – became an essential part of democratic politics with the rise of television. That happened roughly from the time Nixon was urged to run for Congress in 1945 (where Farrell’s book begins) to the time he was defeated by John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential contest.”
Michael Dirda reviews Christopher Buckley’s The Judge Hunger: “To call Christopher Buckley’s The Judge Hunter civilized, light entertainment must sound almost damning just now. We live in an age of passionate intensity, when the ideal of moderation seems as dead as Aristotle, when everything must be ‘game-changing’ or contribute to our national ‘conversation’ about this or that. These days, even the most unlikely issues quickly grow ‘divisive,’ then ‘toxic,’ while political, religious and racial intolerance is both widespread and relentless. Our world is certainly no welcoming place for those of an easygoing, live-and-let-live disposition. Yet were things so different or any better in earlier times?”
Ange Mlinko on Maureen McLane: Is she “a Romantic poet out of time”?
The National Catholic Reporter has a few more (unconfirmed) details on Gregory Wolfe’s firing at Image. In an email to the Reporter, Wolfe accused the publication of “reporting secondhand accusations that are untrue” and added that he would issue a public statement “when he has received answers from questions that he has posed to the Image board.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Daily Beast, Allison McNearney writes about Melville’s lost novel after Moby Dick:
“During the winter of 1852, he wrote to his friend that he was beginning a new novel based on ‘the story of Agatha.’
“It was a story he had heard while vacationing on Nantucket. There was a woman, he was told, who had married a sailor only to be deserted by him. It was perhaps the perfect tale of romance and desperation for the writer to tackle at that time.
“‘As a man abandoned by his public, Melville may have been disposed to be sympathetic toward another loving, responsive young person wrongly abandoned,’ scholar Hershel Park wrote in the second volume of his biography of the writer. ‘At the same time, the sort of shame Melville was suffering for in effect mortgaging Arrowhead [his farm] to a second creditor may have disposed him toward a young sailor who came ashore and took on a commitment which he was not prepared to honor, only to suffer remorse when he came to understand the significance of the rules he had violated.’
“He made quick work of the tale, Isle of the Cross. By June 1853, he was taking it to New York to show it to Harper & Brothers. But, not for the first time, the publisher was not interested. And that is the last the finished manuscript was seen.”
Photos: France, 1918
Poem: John Westbrook, “A Country Funeral”
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