Museums

The last time Republicans were this mad at the Smithsonian Institution was in 1991. Then as now, America’s national museum system was gearing up to celebrate a major date: in that case, the quincentenary of the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. Senators threatened spending cuts, accusing Smithsonian officials of having a “political agenda” with their representations of race and immigration in exhibitions. Thirty-four years later, on the eve of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, Republicans are saying the same things. Donald Trump reworded his predecessors’ criticisms in his own style, suggesting on Truth Social that the Smithsonian museums focus too much on the negative, too little on the positive.

The resignation of Jim Ryan as president of the University of Virginia in June marks the growing momentum of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within US universities. The Department of Justice deemed Ryan’s resignation a step toward resolving its inquiry into UVA’s compliance with the administration’s new policies. Conservatives may be encouraged by news of major institutions like UVA and Harvard rolling back heavy-handed DEI programming. But pure reactionary animus to the excesses of progressive ideology has often gotten conservatives into trouble – not just in education, but in the arts.

New York is gilded in beguiling art. It has an excess of riches and though summer is one of the best times to visit, quenching your cultural thirst can be difficult, as the arts patrons decamp to the Hamptons and watering holes ending in -an. From museums to galleries to street art at subway stations or parks, each borough is a canvas, so much so that it is often an afterthought against a landscape of pavement and honking cars. Will you be uptown for the first Monday in May? While the performances on the Met Gala’s red carpet are an art form in themselves, the exhibit the gala underwrites offers plenty to check out uptown as the tulips bloom on Park Avenue.

I arrived in the city of Figueres early one January morning to visit one of the most popular, and bizarre, art museums in the world, the Teatre-Museu Gala Salvador Dalí. It houses a dreamlike picture that, for the first time since it left over seventy years ago, has made a temporary return journey to Spain. Originally simply titled “The Christ,” the 1951 canvas depicting the giant figure of a man on a cross, shown at an overhead angle hovering over a moody seascape, was painted by the most famous son of Figueres, Salvador Dalí. Through April 30, it forms the centerpiece of a show exploring its creation, history, local connections and symbolism.

The recent events at the British Museum in London will probably prove to be the museum scandal of the year, if not the decade. It was revealed over the summer that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of items had gone missing from its collections in storage, with suspicion directed toward a now-former member of staff. We still don’t know exactly what was stolen, and no one has been formally charged — authorities are still investigating. Nevertheless, the British Museum’s director has stepped down and the press has had a field day generating outrage, albeit with coverage based largely upon speculation and opinion. Amid all the finger-pointing, however, no one seems to be asking why someone would even consider taking property from a museum in the first place.

"I grew up wanting to be an astronaut,” Robert Stein, the National Gallery of Art’s recently appointed chief information officer, tells me. “I studied electrical engineering, and I got a job doing high-performance computing. And then one day, I did a project with an art museum, and I thought, ‘Wait a second, this is an area of the world that needs more technology in order to connect more people together.’ And the rest was kind of downhill from there.” The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC — the NGA — is now ranked the most popular art museum in America.