A recent, provocative Conversation essay argues that museums can help rebuild trust in a divided America. The claim rests on a reassuring premise: museums remain among the nation’s most trusted institutions, uniquely capable of fostering dialogue and civic repair. The problem is not that this vision is misguided in theory. It is that it no longer describes how most elite museums actually behave.
Trust is not a sentiment. It is experienced through tone, framing, and whether visitors feel invited into inquiry or ushered toward conclusions. By that standard, many of America’s most prominent museums are not rebuilding trust. They are narrowing their audience while insisting they still speak for the whole.
Consider the Whitney Museum. In 2017, it mounted An Incomplete History of Protest, an exhibition that explicitly framed art-making as “essential to challenging established thought and creating a more equitable culture.” The wall text did not invite visitors to consider whether art and activism exist in productive tension. It simply asserted that artists “see their work as essential” to political struggle and positioned the museum as their institutional champion. The same year, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till sparked demands not for dialogue but for the work’s destruction, with an open letter declaring that “contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution.” The curators responded that they had “invited these conversations intentionally” — the language of facilitated dialogue deployed to frame a predetermined moral pedagogy.
The New Museum’s 2018 Triennial made the institutional posture even more explicit. Titled “Songs for Sabotage,” it was described by the museum as “A call for action, an active engagement, and an interference in political and social structures.” Works throughout were accompanied by lengthy didactic panels dissecting political references — not inviting interpretation but directing it. The Museum of Modern Art of New York City has followed a similar trajectory. ARTnews reported in 2017 that “MoMA has made a more concerted effort of late to be political with its collection.”
That is not civic trust. It is ideological curation.
What makes this transformation corrosive is that museums historically derived legitimacy from aesthetic restraint and interpretive humility. Their authority rested on an implicit bargain: we will preserve, present, and contextualize — but we will not instruct you on what to think. Visitors were trusted to encounter beauty, difficulty, and history without being morally managed. That bargain has been quietly abandoned.
The 2019 Whitney Biennial revealed the contradictions this produces. Warren B. Kanders, the museum’s vice chairman, owned Safariland, a company that manufactured tear gas used against asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, protesters in Ferguson, and demonstrators in Gaza. When Hyperallergic reported the connection, over 100 Whitney staffers signed an open letter demanding the museum establish “a clear policy around Trustee participation.” The activist group Decolonize This Place organized nine weeks of protests. Eight artists withdrew their work from the exhibition.
The museum’s response? Director Adam Weinberg offered only that “the Whitney respects the opinions of all the artists it exhibits and stands by their right to express themselves freely.” The institution that had framed itself as essential to social justice treated the controversy as a matter of respecting diverse “opinions” — even as one of the withdrawn works, Forensic Architecture’s Triple-Chaser, had used its Biennial slot to document Safariland’s global operations. The museum was hosting art that directly implicated its own vice chairman while refusing to act on the implications.
Kanders eventually resigned, framing himself as the victim of a “targeted campaign of attacks.” But the episode exposed the deeper problem. The Whitney could not claim both moral authority, the standing to tell visitors what art means politically, and institutional neutrality on the financial arrangements that made its exhibitions possible. You cannot mount “An Incomplete History of Protest” while your board profits from the tools used to suppress protest.
This is the bind elite museums have created. They have claimed the mantle of moral instruction without accepting the accountability it demands. They want the prestige of political relevance and the insulation of institutional decorum. The result is not civic trust but institutional incoherence.
Yet counterexamples exist. The Frick Collection remains committed to an older institutional model. Its exhibitions are spare, its wall text restrained, its curatorial voice interpretive rather than moralizing. Visitors are not instructed how to feel. The Frick does not posture as a civic savior — and precisely for that reason, it remains broadly trusted across ideological lines. Its approach is not apolitical but pre-political: it understands that museums earn legitimacy not by signaling righteousness but by cultivating distance, wonder, and freedom of interpretation.
This contrast exposes the flaw in The Conversation essay’s argument. You cannot rebuild trust across differences by narrowing interpretive boundaries. You cannot host dialogue while insisting on predetermined conclusions. And you cannot claim neutrality while operating as an advocacy institution.
Trust in museums was never built through facilitated conversations or empathy workshops. It was built through restraint — through the sense that one could enter a museum without being judged, instructed, or sorted. That experience invited reflection precisely because it did not demand assent.
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If museums truly wish to rebuild trust, the path is harder than issuing statements or hosting panels. It requires institutional humility, separating education from advocacy, tolerating disagreement without moralization. Very few elite museums are willing to do this, because restraint costs prestige. Foundations reward alignment. Critics celebrate institutions that “meet the moment.” Boards are populated by donors who expect affirmation. Curators build careers by articulating political significance. The entire ecosystem prizes ideological clarity over interpretive humility.
The tragedy is that museums could have been among the last shared civic spaces in public life. But shared space cannot survive ideological certainty. Until elite museums relearn that lesson, they will not rebuild trust in a divided America. They will simply curate division more elegantly — and mistake confidence for civic repair.
Samuel J. Abrams is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on questions of related civic and political culture and American ideologies.
