"[T]o an almost comical degree, this revised version of the exhibition exemplifies a conflict between an old idea of art as an index to everything that is profound, slippery, enigmatic and unknowable and..."

"... a new conception of art museums as places peddling 'wellness,' promoting the appearance of wokeness and finding institutional purpose in the culture of therapy. 'Philip Guston Now' frames Guston’s profound and complicated oeuvre with patronizing wall labels. At the entrance to the exhibition and on the museum’s website, we are offered an 'Emotional Preparedness' statement by health and trauma specialist Ginger Klee, MS, LMFT, LPCC. Patrons are also offered an opportunity to exit the exhibition ahead of the gallery showing some of Guston’s cartoonlike images of crude, deliberately pathetic figures with Ku Klux Klan hoods.... Only on my second walk through the show, when I made a conscious decision not to read anything, did I remember how much I love Guston and his hectic, overbearing, goofy, maudlin, self-mocking, mute and reliably perverse view of the world. In a time of cant, where almost every cultural product is advertising something and defending preemptively against something else, Guston’s generous art is liberating."

From "In long-awaited Philip Guston show, great art comes with a warning The ‘Philip Guston Now’ exhibition, controversially postponed in 2020, has opened at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts" by Sebastian Smee (WaPo). 

Here's my post from September 26, 2020: "4 major museums have postponed a retrospective for a highly respected painter — Philip Guston — because some of the paintings have images of the KKK." My reaction at the time:

"But the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience."

"And they realize that to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves—about their class and racial foundations. For this reason, perhaps, those who run the museums feel the ground giving way beneath their feet. If they feel that in four years, 'all this will blow over,' they are mistaken. The tremors shaking us all will never end until justice and equity are installed. Hiding away images of the KKK will not serve that end."

From "Open Letter: On Philip Guston Now" (Google docs), via "The Philip Guston Show Should Be Reinstated/An open letter, signed by nearly 100 artists, curators and critics, accuses four museums of 'hiding away' from controversy. A long postponement is an admission these institutions are not up to the job" (NYT). We talked about this controversy on the blog a few days ago, here.

The NYT art critic Jason Farago writes:

For as the artists suggest in their open letter, the reason to reinstate “Philip Guston Now” is not, or certainly not only, because he passes some anti-racist litmus test. It is to continue and accelerate the transformation of our museums into institutions that can do justice to the work of all artists and the experiences of all publics. A museum unequipped to exhibit Guston will never be able to show truly “problematic” artists like Paul Gauguin or Francis Picabia — but just as inevitably it will fail [Matthew] Barney’s mythopoetic melding of bodies, [Joan] Jonas’s culturally hybrid meditations on gender and climate, [Adrian] Piper’s exacting probes of self and stereotypes.

Barney, Jonas, and Piper are all signatories of the open letter. The NYT critic says, "Really, a museum unequipped to exhibit Guston is barely a museum at all, or else only a museum in the most derogatory sense: a dusty storehouse of dead things." And then he suddenly, in his last paragraph, talks about... can you guess?

4 major museums have postponed a retrospective for a highly respected painter — Philip Guston — because some of the paintings have images of the KKK.

I'm reading "Delay of Philip Guston Retrospective Divides the Art World/;Philip Guston Now' has become Philip Guston in 2024, after four museums postponed an artist’s show that includes Klan imagery."

There's no reason to think Guston liked the Klan. It's for the viewer to gaze on these painterly cartoons...



... and wonder what the hell is this supposed to mean? or just to think hmmm, there's that or whatever you think in a museum... those bastions of white supremacy!

Maybe you think, yeah, this is all cute fun or mysterious ambiguity for elite white folks but it's all made possible by an unexamined sense that black people don't matter.

Okay, but maybe Guston meant to say that — to draw you in and then challenge you to confront your impulse to accept the KKK when it's painted and in a museum.

From the NYT article:

This week, the directors of those museums released a joint statement saying that they were “postponing the exhibition 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.”...

Darby English, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a former adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art, called the decision “cowardly” and “an insult to art and the public alike.”

And Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern in London who co-organized the exhibition, posted a searing statement on Instagram saying that the decision was “extremely patronizing” to audiences because it assumes that they are not able to understand and appreciate the nuance of Guston’s works.

Nuance! I saw people in my town tear down a statue of a young man who died in battle fighting against slavery, and Godfrey is criticizing the museums for failing to credit the public with high-level discernment! Of course, it's irksome for museums to over-explain the works of art, but the museums are rightfully afraid of destructive attacks on the paintings. I know the official statement is that the works need to be presented more "clearly" — what? with lots of wall cards saying the artist opposed the KKK? — but the real motivation must be a fear of violence and destruction.