Magic Mozart

In his 1952 talk “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C.S. Lewis noted how the best stories for children arise out of “where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say.” Rather than looking to “regale the child with things calculated to please it but regarded by yourself with indifference or contempt,” Lewis continued, “everything in the story should arise from the whole cast of the author’s mind. We must write for children out of those elements in our own imagination which we share with children.”

Die Zauberflöte shares such an affinity across ages like no other work of art for this reason. Weaving together Mozart's music (and his final opera) with Emanuel Schikaneder's libretto, the celestial 1791 work—with its mystical-comedic story of the prince Tamino, the princess Pamina, the Queen of the Night, the high priest Sarastro, and a bird-catcher Papageno—is perhaps even more attuned to the free-floating associations of children than the earth-bound expectations of adults.

Robert Brubaker as Monostatos and Janai Brugger as Pamina in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera's magical English-language adaptation of The Magic Flute, which returns as this year's family-friendly Met holiday run through January 5, and is so titled to distinguish it from the Met's same production in German, stays faithful to the original by following Lewis's canon to create for all ages “out of those elements in our own imagination which we share with children." Here young singers Janai Brugger and Ben Bliss are the princess and prince, Christopher Maltman returns as the bird-catcher Papageno, with Anthony Walker in the pit. This year, the Met Opera has also released An Illustrated Synopsis of the opera that will help adults as much as children understand the shifting loyalties of this fanciful story. 

Much was made of Julie Taymor's puppetry when this production premiered in 2004, and the attention was justified. Her neoprimitive, cargo-cult-like costumes and props are so affecting because they give us imaginary access to how these transporting creations are crafted and operated. In a similar way do the live singers and orchestra create the underlying magic of opera through their own analogue technologies—in particular the astonishing range of the human voice, which we experience pushed to the highest limits in the coloratura of the Queen's aria of “Here in My Heart" (Der Hölle Rache) and the lowest depths in Sarastro's “Within Our Sacred Temple” (In diesen heil'gen Hallen).

Christopher Maltman as Papageno in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Beyond Taymor's staging, more should be made of the poet J.D. McClatchy's English translation, which stays true to the spirit of the German original while adapting to modern ears. “The word magic is not in its title by accident," he wrote in his translator's note. Last year McClatchy gave us a new translation for the Met's family Barber, and here we find similar tuneful delight in his phrasing:

You know the secret of its power.
My father in a moonless hour
Once fashioned it from ancient oak
By lightning flash and thunderstroke.
Now take the magic flute and play
To guard us on our dangerous way.  

An off-note of the production continues to be George Tsypin's aluminum and plastic sets. Their machine-like look may have been intended to contrast with Taymor's handmade costumes. Instead they come off as incongruous banquet-hall kitsch.

A scene from Mozart's The Magic Flute. Photo by Ken Howard.

A even greater flaw is in the extreme cutting of the production. With a length that can extend beyond three hours, Die Zauberflöte can undoubtedly benefit from some judicious editing to achieve a more family-friendly length. Yet here the foreshortening conflates too much of the opera's feeling of dreamy somnambulance in order to keep the production under two hours. Gone also is the necessary pause between Acts I and II. It might be assumed that the expeditiousness appeals to the family demographic, but such assumptions cut against Lewis's edict to let the work, and not the market, speak to the audience on its own terms.

Plus, without an intermission, what opportunity is there to purchase that promised bar of Toblerone?

Modernism & Mexico

HUMANITIES, Fall 2016

Modernism and Mexico: When artists painted more than one revolution

The Mexican Revolution of 1910, which ended the 35-year presidency of Porfirio Díaz, is best understood as the first battle of a decade-long civil war that divided the country along economic and geographical lines. The moderate landowner Francisco I. Madero replaced Díaz in Mexico City in 1911—only to be ousted, imprisoned, and murdered two years later in a short-lived military coup by Díaz loyalists. Meanwhile, followers of Francisco “Pancho” Villa from the rural north and of Emiliano Zapata from the populist south pressed their own campaigns against the chaos, leading to a period of continued turmoil and bloodshed in which as many as 1.5 million people perished.

In a similar way, the modern art of Mexico, with a history that is often associated with the country’s Revolutionary period, was not so much a scene of swift united insurrection but, rather, an era of protracted conflict—a period, like the art that emerged from it, that remains little understood north of the border. Informed by this perspective, “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950,” an expansive exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, delves deeply into los tres grandes, “the three greats,” of Mexican mural painting—José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), Diego Rivera (1886–1957), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974)—but also unearths the many counterforces and divergent influences that ultimately enriched the country’s modernist legacy.

“In this environment where everything was moving and changing,” writes the Mexican scholar Renato González Mello in one of the fourteen essays for the exhibition’s expansive catalog, “the role of the artist was not so much to engage in laboratory experimentation, but rather to collect the scraps from this ever-changing social, political, and industrial world in order to build something that made sense.”

Mexican modernism was also about more than murals, which are often its only recognized manifestation abroad. “The dominance of muralism has obscured from the art-historical record practices such as ‘Estridentismo’ [also known as ‘Stridentism] that made cultural circles hum with competing visions,” the art historian Lynda Klich notes of one of the country’s modernist countermovements. Here was an international, vanguard style represented by the poet Manuel Maples Arce (1900–1981) and the painter Ramón Alva de la Canal (1892–1985) that was often at odds with the localism of the muralists and the folk art traditions advocated by artists and teachers such as Dr. Atl (1875–1964), Roberto Montenegro (1885–1968), and Adolfo Best Maugard (1891–1964). “The postrevolutionary environment fostered many artistic dialogs, including the Estridentistas’ own interrogation of what it meant to be both modern and Mexican at this time,” says Klich.

“For many years,” says Matthew Affron, the exhibition’s curator at the Philadelphia Museum, “the received story of modern Mexican art was dominated by los tres grandes . . . Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, though standard accounts also had room for [Rufino] Tamayo [(1899–1991)], who positioned himself as the muralists’ competitor. The popular ascent of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) came in the 1980s. Only in more recent times have the diverse achievements of the broader modernist artistic community been examined in greater depth.”

With more than three hundred objects—including paintings, drawings, photographs, woodcuts, and publications—“Paint the Revolution” goes far beyond the political “painted revolution” many of us associate with the famous muralists.

One point of tension was just what should be “modern” and “progressive” about Mexican art. “This exhibition alters our idea of what modern is,” Affron tells me as he opened his show. The Mexicans “might also change our understanding of what is progressive art and what is regressive art,” he adds. For one, they “complicate our ideas of realism. There are elements of murals that speak to masses, but there are also elements that are much more coded. There is an interesting dialog between an art which wants to speak to many publics at once, a wide public, and an insider public.” Drawing directly on the esoteric influence of symbolism in late nineteenth-century Mexico City, there known as “Modernista,” for example, even in its most realistic and didactic forms the art of the Mexican modernists “dislocates what is looking forward and what is looking back. This quite elite streak in modernism, that doesn’t end.”

This more cosmopolitan, “decadent” influence of Mexican art was picked up by a movement known as Contemporáneos, with artists such as Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, who cultivated a connection to Oscar Wilde and André Gide “as a strategy for publicly representing their own homosexuality,” writes the Philadelphia Museum’s Mark A. Castro, “creating a counterpoint to the hypermasculinized images of celebrated revolutionary leaders such as Francisco (Pancho) Villa and Emiliano Zapata.” Connecting in the 1930s with the Surrealist exiles from Europe, the Contemporáneos sought a pure, art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, free of political compromise and dedicated to personal visual language.

After the Contemporáneos criticized the murals of Rivera for turning art into a “political-social instrument” for the state’s agenda, Rivera lashed out at them in 1934 as “pimps of the bourgeoisie” in an article he called "Arte puro: Puros maricones" (Pure Art: Pure Faggots), while caricaturing two of their artists in his mural panels. Orozco also derided them as los rorros Fachistas (Fascist Gay Boys) in a drawing for the publication El machete. “For the muralists,” writes the art historian Mireida Velázquez, “the revolution had signified the possibility of renewing Mexican culture; for the Contemporáneos, it represented a period of barbarity that had broken the balance established under Porfirio Díaz.”

Another point of tension was between the Marxism of muralists such as Rivera and the capitalism of their American patrons, who repeatedly lavished them with major projects. After Edsel Ford brought Rivera to the Detroit Institute of Arts to paint his most famous and brilliant stateside mural over eleven months from 1932 to 1933, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned him later that year to paint a mural of similar scope in the lobby of the new RCA Building at Rockefeller Center—even after Rivera had included a not-so-flattering portrait of Rockefeller’s grandfather in the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) murals in Mexico City. Their diverging views came to a histrionic head as Rivera departed from his original proposal and included a portrait of Lenin in his RCA lineup. Rockefeller objected, and the New York mural was destroyed—only to be reproduced back in Mexico City.

“None of them was a dupe,” says Affron. “They all knew what was going on. It cannot be an accident that during the Great Depression this American art with ancient sources, not European, a moral art, came to the attention of such a varied public. Rockefeller and the Fords understood that as patrons during the Depression they had a certain responsibility. Rivera fit the bill, but it wasn’t an easy relationship.”

Despite the mural controversy, Affron says, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller purchased Rivera’s May Day drawings and gave them to the Museum of Modern Art. “This is not a simple story. They were all living in a situation of shifting political sands.”

With repeated overtures and allusions to art history, from the Old Masters to indigenous abstraction, the Mexican modernists drew on a diverse inventory of sources that looked both forward and backward, local and international. “One of the ideas we try to hit people over the head with,” says Affron, is that “no matter how nationalist this Mexican art was, it was just as internationalist, and this is the great surprise to many people.” After training in Mexico City’s National School of Fine Arts, for example, a government scholarship brought Rivera to Montparnasse in Paris, where he lived at its moment of greatest modernist ferment from 1911 to 1921, in fact missing the direct experience of the Mexican Revolution. Instead, he became immersed in the circle of modernists around the studio building of La Ruche, a group that included the painters Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani and the poet Max Jacob. According to Mexican scholar Dafne Cruz Porchini, Rivera was also steeped in mystical beliefs as a member of a Rosicrucian order—a reason why hidden, subterranean forces can often complicate the political messages of his murals.   

Portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán, 1915, by Diego Rivera (Fundación Televisa Collection) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This all helps explain why one of Rivera’s earliest paintings now on display in “Paint the Revolution,” Portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán (1915), mixes Analytical Cubism with the Hispanism of a matador’s hat and the Mexicanidad, or “Mexicanized,” pattern of a native blanket for this depiction of a writer Rivera portrayed sitting in his Paris studio. For an artist today identified as one of Mexico’s big three muralists through a native, political, “revolutionary” style, Rivera was most influenced by this period of European high-modernist expatriation. As compared with Rivera’s revolutionary theories developed abroad, the muralist Orozco experienced the bloody revolution of Mexico first hand—one reason his work tended to focus on the disasters, rather than the aims, of war.

Beyond his contemporary influences, Rivera increasingly looked back—to Cézanne, to El Greco (whom he studied in Toledo), and finally to Italy, where Renaissance fresco initially sparked his interest in muralism. Rivera’s European influences, in fact, put his work at odds with the muralism of Siqueiros, who attempted to radicalize not only his content but his medium.

“Rivera’s mural art is a modern adaptation of an historical medium—the Mexican government financed his trip in 1921 to Italy,” says Affron. “But by the 1930s Siqueiros was loudly denying that fresco was a good way to go. He thought it was an historical anachronism, an elitist medium.” So as Rivera looked to historicized techniques in designing his murals for classical buildings from Mexico City to Detroit—trompe l’oeil frames, grisaille, illusionistic banners, and other traditional academic techniques—Siqueiros began experimenting with spray paint, synthetic pigments, and unorthodox spatial perspectives. These innovations came together in Siqueiros’s dizzying Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939–1940), which he painted in the stairwell of the new modernist headquarters of the Mexican electricians’ labor union and is reproduced in a special installation in “Paint the Revolution.” 

This brings up a question for any exhibition on Mexican modernism: how to treat its most well-known component. “When I would speak about the exhibition, I’d say, I know what you are thinking: What about the murals?” says Affron. “The stumbling block of any exhibition of this kind is that the most famous artistic examples are bound into the walls in which they are painted.” For two major murals, Affron and his colleagues at both the Philadelphia Museum and in Mexico found a solution in high-definition video technology deployed on site. These films are used to reproduce the work as scanning projections for Rivera’s Ballad of the Agricultural Revolution (1926–27) and Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution (1928–29) from the SEP in Mexico City, and Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization (1932–34) from Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“It was important to us that all of the digital simulations find a way to really show they exist in architectural spaces and can only be seen in time and space,” Affron tells me. “I cared a lot about that. You must give people an equivalent version of the experience. We have a whole team here working in information technology and interpretation, and they worked with the curatorial department. Then we had to hire a very specialized team in Mexico City. You get a level of clarity and quality, and the solution was totally innovative. No one has seen it done this way. It really required everybody’s brain to add something that couldn’t be added by other means.”

Without any murals of its own—unlike its partner institution, the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, which features murals by all three greats, including Rivera’s recast Rockefeller Center work—the Philadelphia Museum might not appear to be the first institution to choose to take on such a large-scale Mexican exhibition. But, in fact, the institution’s commitment to Mexican modernism runs as deep as any American museum’s.

Trained as an engineer in Austria, René d’Harnoncourt moved from Paris to Mexico in 1926 to try to live as a painter, but he soon established himself as a dealer and curator, first in Mexican antiquities and then for the modernists. In 1930 he organized the first exhibition of Mexican art in the United States at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With its grand building’s opening in 1928, the Philadelphia Museum also first looked to the Mexicans, and d’Harnoncourt, to fill out its modern collection, decades before such great modernist bequests as that of Walter and Louise Arensberg, which included Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), enriched its collection in the 1950s.

Then, in 1943, the Philadelphia Museum organized “Mexican Art Today,” arguably the most significant exhibition of Mexican art in the United States in the twentieth century and a model for the current show. It also happens that d’Harnoncourt’s only child, Anne Julie d’Harnoncourt, served as the longtime director and later CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from 1982 until her death in 2008. “And to think that Rivera came here in 1922,” says Affron. "And René’s daughter became the director here. These are all examples of why we are the right institution to do this show.”

Today Philadelphia has one of the richest contemporary mural projects of any city. What began as an anti-graffiti initiative in the 1980s, the city’s Mural Arts Program now employs hundreds of artists a year and has become a defining characteristic of the cityscape. Is there a direct connection between this exhibition and what we now see lining the city streets? “I don’t think you can connect them as a cause and effect, but there’s a consonance of ideas,” says Affron of the Mexican muralists and Philadelphia’s contemporary examples. 

“Paint the Revolution” proves yet again how the true revolution of art was modernism itself, which flowered simultaneously across continents in multiple centers of influence. “This story was both local and international from the start,” Affron concludes. “Mexican artists created a modern art that was deeply embedded in international politics and aesthetic currents, but was also rooted in Mexico’s particular experiences, history, traditions, iconography, and institutions. Looking back a century later, at a moment when a global account of modernism is emerging, Mexico between 1910 and 1950 clearly belongs at the center of the story”—with a revolution in style that remains revelatory.

The museum of the present

THE NEW CRITERION

December 2016

The Museum of the Present

What’s a museum? This is a question I have asked more than once in The New Criterion. It’s one this magazine has been asking since its first issue. And it’s one that I wish museums would ask more frequently of themselves. Because the answers are changing—through assumptions that are often unannounced, unacknowledged, and unexplored.

Writing nearly twenty years ago on “the ongoing transformation of the American museum,” the late theorist Stephen E. Weil identified how museums were moving from “being about something to being for somebody.” This is a phrase that has been taken up by critics of contemporary museum culture, but for Weil it signaled a positive change, a momentous redirection he traced back to the cultural revolts of the 1960s. The museum of the past, he said, was content to care for the “oldfashioned satisfaction,” “aesthetic refreshment,” and “pleasure and delight” of its permanent collection—or what the museum director Barbara Franco derided as the “salvage and warehouse business.” Through new evaluation standards tied to continued tax-exempt status, Weil argued, the museum of today “is being told that to earn its keep requires that it be something more important than just an orderly warehouse.” In other words, through historical inevitability and government coercion, Weil concluded, the museum of tomorrow must come to see itself not as the steward of a collection of objects but as “an instrument for social change.”

Twenty years on, the prophecy is coming true—but with increasingly ominous and destructive results, especially for collecting museums. In 1997 the Brazilian museum director Maria de Lourdes Horta envisioned how “a museum without walls and without objects, a true virtual museum, is being born” to be “used in a new way, as tools for self-expression, self-recognition, and representation.” Or as Neal Benezra, the director of sfmoma, more recently observed, “times have changed. Back then, a museum’s fundamental role was about taking care of and protecting the art, but this century it’s much more about the visitor experience.”

Over the last few decades the American museum has only been too successful at turning this vision into reality. By the numbers, museums have become thriving enterprises, competing and ballooning into what we might call a museum industrial complex. Today there are 3,500 art museums in the United States, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000. At the same time, and hand in hand with these numbers, billions of dollars have been spent on projects that have largely focused on expanding the social-service offerings at these institutions—restaurants, auditoriums, educational divisions, event spaces—rather than additional rooms for collections. At the present rate, the museum of the future will virtually be a museum without objects, as new non-collection spaces dwarf exhibition halls with the promise that no direct contact with the past will disturb your meal. As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum once advertised, the museum of the future will finally be a café with “art on the side.”

The museum of the past focused on its permanent collection. The museum of the present forsakes the visited, and its own cultural importance, to focus on the visitor. From offering an unmediated window onto the real and astonishing objects of history, the contemporary museum increasingly looks to reify our own socially mediated self-reflections. This it does not learn from history but to show the superiority of our present time over past relics. The result is a museum that succeeds, by every popular measure, in its own destruction—a museum that is no longer an ark of culture, but one where the artifact at greatest risk is the museum itself.

Executive Editor James Panero discusses the character and trends of contemporary art museums.

The American art museum was born in the nineteenth century, a century later than its European counterparts and largely as an answer to those institutions, but with a unique American quality tied to its permanent collection. Unlike in Europe, where museums were either created out of revolutionary turmoil or acts of government, almost all American institutions were founded and supported by the free will of private individuals. The treasures these benefactors bequeathed became not only public objects of secular devotion but also tokens of the idealism behind the institutions that maintained them. As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent our civic virtues. The aesthetic education offered through their permanent collections was not just about history and connoisseurship. It was also about how hard work can become an expression of virtue by gifting objects to the public trust. It’s truly an astonishing American story: no other country has seen such private wealth, accumulated through industry, willingly transferred to the public good.

But it wasn’t long into the twentieth century before some American museums began to attack their own cellular structure, usually in the pursuit of progressive social change. These assaults were most manifest in the physical transformations and deformations of institutional buildings. Now, in many cases it should be said that the changing appearance of our museums was benign. Rather than malignant tumors, they signaled healthy growth through evolving architectural styles. The dozen or so buildings that make up the Metropolitan Museum of Art have created a unified whole out of an assembly that range from Gothic Revival to Beaux-Arts to modern. These diverse structures complement one another and work to complete the museum’s founding vision.

In contrast, consider the history of the Brooklyn Museum—born in 1823 nearly a half century before the Met and a manifestation of rising civic confidence in a borough that was once America’s third-largest independent city. In the 1930s, a progressive director by the name of Philip Newell Youtz launched an assault on his nineteenth-century museum from which this great unfinished institution has never recovered. Believing that the “museum of today must meet contemporary needs,” Youtz attacked the museum’s 1897 home designed by McKim, Mead & White on Eastern Parkway and vowed to “turn a useless Renaissance palace into a serviceable modern museum.” Praising the educational practices of the new Soviet museums, he undertook the transformation of the Brooklyn Museum from a temple of contemplation into a school of instruction, where the arts were put in the service of progressive ends and funding would derive from the state rather than private philanthropy. Youtz sought to transform his institution into a “socially oriented museum” with, as he stated, “a collection of people surrounded by objects, not a collection of objects surrounded by people.” He even hired department store window-dressers to arrange exhibitions and transform his collection into a parade of teachable moments.

Beyoncé Knowles with Apollo killing the Python snake at the Louvre.

Youtz then turned his programmatic assault into a physical one. Historians may question the ultimate motivation behind his demolition of the Brooklyn Museum’s exterior Grand Staircase, which once resembled the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was meant to elevate the museum-goer from Eastern Parkway into the refined precincts of the museum. What is not in doubt is Youtz’s belief that his iconoclasm, pushing the museum lobby down to street level, “improved” upon the McKim, Mead & White design. Continuing in this way, Youtz went about mutilating much of the museum’s ornamental interior.

In this example, we can see that a progressive strain agitating for a more “socially orientated museum” long predates the 1960s. But since the 1960s, such progressive ideology, combined with what I would call a non-profit profit motive that seeks ever larger crowds, greater publicity, expanding spaces, ballooning budgets, and bloated bureaucracy—a circular system that feeds on itself—has turned the American museum into a neoliberal juggernaut.

The expansion plans that museums now seem to announce by the day may appear to be the evidence of healthy organic growth. But their motivations are just as often closer in ideology to the removal of the Brooklyn Museum’s Grand Staircase—efforts at distancing the present from the past.

There are many examples. The 70,000-square-foot $114 million new wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened in 2012, is but one. Designed by Renzo Piano, the building, which required the demolition of Gardner’s historic carriage house, now serves as the only entrance to the institution and connects with the original museum through a glass-enclosed airlock. The addition offers a Kunsthalle for new art, eateries, shops, a greenhouse, a visitor “living room,” and apartments. All are attractive, but for what end? A greenhouse to cultivate new interest? A hundred-million-dollar engine to generate new donors—even as streaks of rust still stain the museum courtyard? I would argue that the expansion primarily serves to quarantine the original museum’s antiquity behind an architectural filtration system. With the anointment of “Renzo’s oil,” the museum shifts its focus from what is left of its collection onto the visitor experience. As the Gardner’s director explained to me at the time of the opening, finally those people in their cars on Fenway Park Drive will recognize the Gardner as a museum, because here is Renzo Piano. Nevermind that the Gardner’s fanciful palazzo has been a signature of the Boston streetscape since 1903.

Back in New York, the Whitney, a museum with a vastly different history, relocated in 2015 from the Upper East Side to a flood zone along the Hudson River with results that are surprisingly similar to the Gardner’s. We have heard the modern museum referred to as a “white box.” Designed, again, by Renzo Piano, here is the museum as sky-box, an institution built as much to be looked out of as looked into, a place where see-and-be-seen has moved from the periphery to the main event. As opposed to the Whitney’s former fortress of solitude on Madison Avenue, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, the new museum metaphorically explodes, reprocesses, and repackages its own history through a giddy, irrational space for spectacle and an incinerator for its dusty, unwanted past.

This may be one reason why the institution has been rechristened as, simply, whitney, dropping the words “museum,” “American,” and “art” from its branding. Yet while Piano increased the Whitney’s floorplan from 85,000 to 220,000 square feet, just 50,000 of that is going to indoor galleries, up from 33,000 on Madison Avenue. The rest goes to multi-million-dollar views and a circulation system that forces the museumgoer outside onto a fire escape turned against the skyline, which like Piano’s Pompidou treats the museum as an institutional theater.

Do all of these initiatives really turn museums into instruments of “social change”? Do they merely justify bigger budgets and higher ticket prices? I would argue that by mediating our experience through ever more gauzy filters they in fact blunt the true radicalism of our direct encounter with the objects of history. Rather than “decentering us at a radical moment of unselfing,” as the director James Cuno once observed, today’s institutions promote “museum selfie day” and roll out every trick at recentering the experience of the museum around you. What better way, after all, to reap the benefits of hashtag advertising while entertaining the egocentrism of your turnstile clientele.

But why not? What is so wrong about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent promotion of “nail art sessions by Lady Fancy Nails” as it did around the show “Manus x Machina”?

Or what about a promotion by the Art Institute of Chicago that offered a “full-size replica of Van Gogh’s painting The Bedroom” available for nightly rental on AirBnB.

Or how about this season’s “Met Workout,” a museum-sponsored event that advertises: “Goodbye SoulCycle, hello Vermeer and Picasso. You thought just trying to stroll through The Met collection was a workout? Try doing stretches in the shadow of Diana or squats while pondering the shapely poise of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X.”

Maurizio Cattelan with his sculpture America t the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

This fall the Guggenheim museum installed a working gold toilet designed by the neo-Dadaist Maurizio Cattelan in one of its bathrooms. The facility, which requires a special guard and janitor, attracts hour-long lines that snake up the rotunda. This interactive Duchampian sculpture, the most shared golden toilet on the internet, is called America (how original), but it might just as well be titled “the museum.” The provocation is presented as an inside joke, but it ultimately degrades the institution itself for one more social-media share. A golden toilet is an appropriate symbol for the museum fully dedicated to the visitor experience.

The problem is that such promotions, by converting the museum from a temple of culture into a cathedral of the self, spend down its reserves of virtue. The Instagram age has little need for more venues for “self-expression, self-recognition, and representation.” Our times yearn for a real, unmediated engagement with the objects of the past that only a traditional collection-based museum can offer. This may be one reason why we saw a widespread uproar over the recent rebranding of the Metropolitan Museum. It wasn’t so much over its lackluster typography and a spendthrift rollout at a time of operational shortfalls. It was that so many people deeply admired what the museum’s traditional brand had come to represent.

There are many counterexamples to this story—museums that resist progressive currents and reaffirm their original collection mandates. Increasingly I draw encouragement not from too-big-to-fail institutions but from those tributaries and backwaters of our museum mainstream—from New York’s Hispanic Society, for example, preserved in amber on 155th Street and Broadway, to house museums like the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights, where Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote parts of Hamilton while sitting in Aaron Burr’s bedroom. Museum trustees still have the power to redirect their resources away from artless atriums and administrative bloat to true collection access through initiatives such as the visible storage centers sponsored by Henry R. Luce.

But I suspect we have only seen the proverbial tip of the iceberg now in the path of the museum at full speed. Museums may assume that new buildings and hashtag diplomacy will insulate them from the most destructive progressivist mandates, but these are just openings for a new generation of cultural leaders, contemptuous of the permanent collections of robber barons, to undermine their stewardship. Already, ill-adventuring museum directors such as Thomas Hoving have shown us what could be done through deaccessioning when, in the early 1970s, he began liquidating bequests over the objections of his curators to enhance his own discretionary spending. Now look for a further loosening of deacession standards.

For a generation, museums have chased after the numbers, with blockbuster exhibitions and amenities that have indirectly ceded curatorial control to the turnstile. The government now looks to accelerate this abdication of leadership through “reenvisioning our grant programs,” as the National Endowment for the Humanities announced this year.

If the museum visitor now expects to receive the keys to the collection, backed by government mandates, there may be little hope to save the museum from populist whim. In October an activist group called “Decolonize This Place” continued its targeting of museums by storming the rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History. Chanting “Respect! Remove! Rename,” they then covered the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt and demanded “that City Council members vote to remove this monument to racial conquest.” At one time this might have seemed like an extreme suggestion, but given the current iconoclasm on university campuses, the protesters know they are part of a populist insurgency. This is the end result of the “museum for somebody”: a museum without objects that is ultimately objectless—a museum for nobody.