TAKEDOWN

A broad-ranging account of arts activism.

Should Paul Gauguin be canceled? After all, New York Times arts and culture writer Nayeri notes, he “behaved as if the women and young girls he came across in Tahiti were exotic fruits, there for the picking.” It’s a question that cleaves a sharp division among camps: those who, particularly in Paris, resent the New York Times criticizing French curatorial mores and those who are quick to apply presentist standards of behavior to the past. There’s social justice, and there’s censorship, and sometimes the line between is difficult to discern, though Nayeri contrasts the top-down censorship of state and church with the bottom-up censorship of those who protest injustices based on ethnicity, class, gender, and culture. The author argues that the largest artistic institutions have been playing catch-up. Whereas not long ago one would have to search to find a woman or person of color headlining a show, lately curators have been engaging in provocative installations in which, for example, a work of Picasso is paired with a work by Black American artist Faith Ringgold that features echoes of Guernica, but now visually commenting on the race riots of the late 1960s. “As MoMA explained, this particular display was a way to depart from a purely historical, step-by-step presentation, and start a transgenerational dialogue,” writes Nayeri. Some of the come-lately efforts seem a touch feeble, some a touch desperate, as when, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, curators all over the U.S. and Britain scrambled to remake their exhibits to be more inclusive. Make no mistake, writes the author, inclusion is still lacking. Upon revisiting Ernst Gombrich’s canonical The Story of Art, she writes, “I couldn’t find a single woman artist, even though his book starts in prehistoric times and leads all the way up to American art of the 1950s.”

An eye-opening look at how contemporary political issues find their ways into the hushed halls of museums and galleries.