By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 31, 2009
At the height of the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" scandal in 1999, Arnold Lehman wore a bulletproof vest. The museum director also avoided taking the subway, regularly changed his route to and from work, and avoided appearing at rallies in support of the controversial exhibition of contemporary art. Because of public and media outrage at a handful of paintings, including one of the Virgin Mary that some Catholics thought was offensive, Lehman had been advised that his life was in danger.
With New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani deeply engaged in the conflict and doing everything he could to withdraw the museum's city funding, with the Catholic League organizing demonstrations, and the tabloid media spurring on the frenzy, it was one of the most contentious chapters in the culture wars that had roiled the museum world for more than a decade. And it seemed to many observers like those wars would continue indefinitely.
"All is not quiet on the cultural front," wrote Stephen Dubin in "Displays of Power," his 1999 survey of museum controversies. "As Americans begin a new century, they can expect to witness more of these struggles over representation."
But a funny thing happened. Over the past decade, small controversies occasionally unsettled the museum world, but they went away quickly, and few gained enough traction to become national issues. After almost a half a century of polarizing and contentious debate -- dating back at least 40 years to a show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Harlem on My Mind," which ignited the modern era of museum conflict -- a strange quiet has settled over the museum world.
Nothing in Washington has risen to the level of angst felt by the Corcoran Gallery in 1989, when it canceled an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. And old wounds seemed have healed: The Enola Gay, the center of a bitter 1995 controversy about the atomic bomb, went on display permanently at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003 with very little protest. Even the National Endowment for the Arts, which had its budget slashed during the late 1990s, slowly began to reconstitute itself and stayed out the limelight of controversy.
What happened? Was it a cultural or historic change? Self-censorship or a more subtle shift in what museums were exhibiting? Did audiences grow up, or were they just inured to radical art and provocative historical revision?
Dubin agrees that the landscape has shifted since he published his book a decade ago.
One factor: "From 1989 to 2001, we had no external enemy," he says. The country could turn in on itself, fight internal battles and wrestle with the telling of history. It could dissect privilege and exclusion, look for scapegoats and pass around the mantle of victimhood. But the appeal of what Dubin calls "symbolic" politics diminished as the country reengaged with what seemed to be the life-and-death politics of terrorism and threats from abroad.
There is widespread acknowledgment among museum professionals that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, had something to do with the change. But many (including Dubin) see a broader cause: Museums have changed the way they do business -- and audiences have become less sensitive.
Even William Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, one of the main actors stirring the controversy over "Sensation," agrees with part of this assessment.
"I don't know that there as been a change of heart in the artistic community, but our society has become so coarse that it doesn't leap out at us anymore," he says.
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Since 1999, museums have grown and diversified. The Internet has become a central force in how Americans communicate. The status of gay people -- who were caught in debates over Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs and performance artists funded by the NEA -- has become more secure and less controversial. The NEA changed its focus and built considerable goodwill on Capitol Hill. And Sept. 11 didn't just reintroduce the country to external enemies, it sent audiences and curators in search of more profound and lasting nourishment from cultural organizations.
"Art museums have two central roles they can serve when the world is going to hell in a handbasket," says Janet Landay, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors. First, she says, they show us the best of what mankind has created. And second, they offer consolation.
That doesn't mean that museums got out of the controversy business. Some museum leaders make a distinction between showing controversial material -- which they argue still happens -- and generating controversy, which seems not to happen as reliably as it once did.
Less than two years after the "Sensation" debate, the Brooklyn Museum presented a show of African American photography that again earned it the ire of Donohue's Catholic League. The show included a photograph by Renée Cox, entitled "Yo Mama's Last Supper," which displayed the photographer naked, posing as Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.
"After the furor over the 'Sensation' exhibition," Donohue wrote to the show's curator in February 2001, "the officials at the Brooklyn Museum of Art must have known that 'Yo Mama's Last Supper' would offend the sensibilities of many New Yorkers."
But even before Sept. 11, something had changed in the cultural landscape. Despite some buzzing in the press, Donohue's group failed to turn Cox's photograph into a wider symbol of blasphemy or artistic outrageousness.
"I think the media was much less interested in the issue, at that point," Lehman says. But there were other factors. Giuliani, who in 1999 was eyeing an open U.S. Senate seat, was facing the end of his term-limited run as New York's mayor. Many African Americans embraced the exhibition despite the charges of sacrilege leveled against Cox. And the museum placed the controversial photograph in a separate room from the other material.
"It was a furor, but the furor was over quickly," Lehman says.
Another episode, at the Jewish Museum in New York, demonstrates how quickly museums were adapting to the lessons of the previous decade of crises. In January 2002, months before the opening of an exhibition called "Mirroring Evil," which featured 13 young artists reflecting on Nazi imagery, the museum found itself under assault, in the media and from Holocaust survivors and others who thought the show was disrespectful and unserious in its concentration on Nazi symbolism rather than Jewish suffering. It was dubbed "the next art-world 'Sensation,' " but events developed rather differently.
The Jewish Museum anticipated strong reactions to "Mirroring Evil." The staff was prepared for controversy, and as the March opening approached, the museum added public panels and forums to their schedule, and hired an on-site facilitator to organize daily public conversations with museum visitors. They also moved four of the most controversial works to a separate room and put up a warning: "Some Holocaust survivors have been disturbed by the works of art shown beyond this point . . ." It was, literally, an escape valve, and it was part of a strategy that worked. Joan Rosenbaum, director of the Jewish Museum, said the controversy died down quickly.
"That was the surprise part," Rosenbaum says. "It quieted down within a few weeks after the show opened, once people saw the work and engaged in the interpretive process. It wasn't as scary as they thought from the articles and statements by people who had never looked at the work." At the time, the Jewish Museum lost a few of its 12,000 members but weathered the crisis, with support from its board.
If there was a detectable cooling of passions by 2002 (though perhaps not apparent at the time), the detente became even more pronounced as the decade wore on.
In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution was forced to cancel an exhibition about the atom bomb and the Enola Gay, the B-29 that helped end World War II, when veterans groups complained about the questions curators were asking: Was it necessary? Was it part of an emerging Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union? Were the Japanese making peace overtures?
This newspaper helped make it a national and rancorous debate, with Congress involved, and a deep fissure developed between generations that disagreed about whether to open up the historical question. But when the Enola Gay went on permanent display at the Udvar-Hazy center near Dulles International Airport in December 2003, there was hardly a peep, according to Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas.
When the Smithsonian opened its National Museum of the American Indian in 2004, it was built around a curatorial style that emphasized ethnic self-description with little deference to established anthropology. It became perhaps the most postmodern museum in Washington, and a decade earlier it might seemed a radical exercise in identity politics or post-colonial thinking. But the public, which happily soaked up the festivity of the event, didn't engage with the radical curatorial concept, and critics who might have had field day with it were mostly silent.
"That discussion was maybe more in the academic and museum world than it was in the public," St. Thomas says. "What the public saw was this very attractive and unusual building and what they remember is a procession of 20,000 Native Americans heading towards the nation's capital."
Even the NEA, which had been the flashpoint for so much controversy in the 1990s, successfully maneuvered around trouble during the Bush administration. The organization adopted a more proactive strategy of engaging with Congress and defusing its critics. Brief protest (from conservatives and gays) in 2004 over an NEA-funded musical at La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego -- which dealt with social issues raised by Andrew Cunanan, a gay playboy and spree killer who shot Gianni Versace -- went away almost immediately in part because the NEA addressed the conflict quickly and directly. A letter from then-NEA spokeswoman Felicia K. Knight to the Washington Times rather dryly observed that murder and crime play an important role in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," as well other important dramas. The agency, according to Knight, had successfully adopted a new strategy: "We were not going to take the bait from the left or the right, but make the case about the art."
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Few museum professionals willingly use the word "self-censorship," and those who do say self-censorship is a complex process, not always a conscious one, and not necessarily a bad thing. After Sept. 11, a turn to more unifying and less contentious exhibitions was natural for many museums, especially those that viewed their role as community or civic centers. Influential museum designers were also advocating more family-oriented approaches, which meant a shift in subject matter.
But the art world was changing, too. Artists were becoming more attuned to the market, more engaged with the production of collectible objects. The country was also prosperous, and prosperity reinforced a view found across the full spectrum of U.S. society (in the administrative offices of museums, especially): that it was good to take business and professionalism more seriously.
Was that the same as self-censorship?
"I think the phrase self-censorship is much too simplistic," says Michael Conforti, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. Museums, he says, reflect the values of the artists and society, and today, "those value systems may not be value systems associated with a cultural critique, as they were in the 1980s and '90s."
Many museum leaders cite the effects of cable television and the Internet when explaining the recent lull in debate. Cable television lowered the bar for what was considered obscene or outrageous in a much broader way than anything in an art museum could. And the Internet helped eliminate the middlemen -- the press and the social activists -- who often presented information about museums in inflammatory ways.
Dubin, author of "Displays of Power," points to another curious Internet phenomenon: He can't think of a single major art controversy generated by the Internet or e-mail. Unlike in the political world, where e-mail petitions and news alerts are a vital part of the daily fracas, in the world of museums the Internet may help lessen or divert conflict.
"Just giving people a platform means it's not coming out elsewhere," says Landay of the AAMD, who points out that, parallel to the way in which the Internet opened new forums, museums have become more open forums themselves. New museums specialize in groups or topics that were not always well served by established institutions, and the grand old museums that once dictated much of the cultural dialogue have become more attentive and diverse in what they present.
"I think we have a much broader sense of public interest," she says.
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What other factors could be behind this cultural trend (if this is even a trend and not an aberration)?
Maybe:
Audiences got smarter. People simply got tired of the debate. As art and history museums learned to adapt, controversy shifted to other sites: debates over monuments and memorialization and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, or debates about science, evolution and global warming.
Because it's also possible that the museum controversies of the '80s and '90s simply weren't as important, damaging or profound as they seemed at the time. In retrospect, it almost seems like a ritual dance or game, with two willing actors.
Lehman says that if nothing else, "Sensation" helped his museum build exactly the audience he wanted: His museum, he says, now has the "single youngest audience for a general fine arts museum" in the country, and the most diverse audience.
And Donohue of the Catholic League, which still posts regular alerts about offensive art on its Web site, says he works hard to avoid the unintended consequences of controversy.
"Artists more than anybody will call me up and ask me to sound the alarms," he says. But he's become selective about which art he condemns so as not to build up an artist's reputation.
"If it's in some dump in Seattle, why would I draw attention to it?" he says.
Of course, it's possible that it can all come roaring back again. When the Obama administration announced the nomination of Rocco Landesman as the new head of the NEA, the New York Times reported it this way: "Choosing Mr. Landesman, 61, signals that Mr. Obama plans to shake things up at the endowment." That sounded good to some in the art world, and ominous to administrators worried about adding political instability to the economically parlous arts community.
Controversy built audiences, and it helped savvy artists, activists and politicians further their careers. Among people who equate controversy with substance, there is even a palpable longing for little bit more of the bad old days.
If museums become thoroughly professionalized, if artists are domesticated by the market and audiences bored by pandering, the creative impulse, the critical gaze and the audience appetite will turn elsewhere. Museums will wither, or new sparks will fly.
But at the moment, it seems the change is more fundamental than a mere swing of the pendulum. As so often, years after an acrimonious argument, it's hard to understand what the fuss was about.
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