The National Gallery of Identity Politics

by Roger Kimball,

Forget Monet or Hopper. The art museum’s new director wants to tackle ‘gender equality,’ ‘social justice’ and ‘diversity.’

‘Every thing is what it is and not another thing,” observed the 18th-century British philosopher Joseph Butler. If that seems obvious, you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in the culture. Once upon a time (and it wasn’t that long ago), universities were what they claimed to be, institutions dedicated to the preservation and transmission of civilization’s highest values. Now they are bastions of political correctness, “intersectionality” and identity politics.

Something similar can be said of art museums. Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art. Today, many art museums serve as fronts in battles that have little or nothing to do with art: entertainment, yes; snobbery and money, of course; and politics, politics, politics.

The latest example of this trend is particularly egregious because it involves one of America’s premier institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Obituarists looking to write the epitaph of the American art museum could do worse than ponder the elevation of Kaywin Feldman, currently director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to take the helm of the National Gallery in March when Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director since 1993, retires.

All the announcements of Ms. Feldman’s appointment have breathlessly noted that she will be “the first woman to hold the top job at the museum.” It’s meant as homage, and I hope I will be forgiven if I point out how patronizing are such declarations. In any case, the thing to appreciate about Ms. Feldman is not her sex but her slavish devotion to transforming the museum into a left-wing political redoubt.

In an article for Apollo magazine last May, she began by establishing her anti-Trump bona fides, bemoaning the “psychological toll” that his presidency is “taking on our collective psyche.” That done, she proceeded to assure us that art museums are “intensely political organisations,” adducing not only such global themes as love, death and religion but also “imperialism, colonialism, war, oppression, discrimination, slavery, misogyny, rape, and more.”

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