NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE E aster is a time for resurrection, rebirth, and renewal, so I’m writing about behaviors so dumb, so conceited, so myopic that there’s no place to go but up. We can only hope that the errant among us go back to the moral, political, and economic drawing board, press the refresh button, put the springtime in new springboards, and, when things look hopeless, crack open the Bible.

The Easter Bunny can do only so much. Sometimes Jesus is to be called upon, as he was during the storm on the Sea of Galilee, to rebuke the wind — and windbags — and calm the troubled waters.

I’ll start with a Manhattan story. Manhattan’s cultural pharisees are so blinkered these days, so vain, silly, and decadent that their piety parades look like jokes, except they’re not.

Black Power Naps is a new show at the Museum of Modern Art. “Black people are twice as likely to get insufficient sleep as white people,” the show begins. This sounds like a quackpot CDC study like the ones claiming that masks prevent the Chinese coronavirus. MoMa tells us that “the artists” — Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, neither of whom I know — “trace our culture of constant fatigue back to the use of sleep deprivation to control enslaved people in the US.” A gallery is outfitted with mattresses, cushions, pillows, blankets, and rugs. The artists have designed soothing lights and sounds and a video. It’s “a form of reparations, or repairs, for historical and ongoing injustices.”

Only black people can enter the space.

It’s not the dumbest idea in the world — that would be things such as Cash for Clunkers — but it’s pretty stupid as well as sinister. I’ve never visited a museum that restricts access to a gallery by race. I’ve heard of such things in the Deep South in the ’50s.

Surely some mid-level, young staffer conceived Black Power Naps. Someone living in Manhattan or Brooklyn, educated beyond her intelligence, and at a chichi school, who gets her news from Vox or CNN or Facebook, and whose mother never told her, “Don’t believe everything you read.” Exists in a bubble. She is a racist and doesn’t know it. Black people can’t, in her, his, or their view, function outside segregated spaces. They need safe spaces to sleep. How condescending. And don’t the idiots who developed this project know that sleeping with strangers is a bad idea?

Black Power Naps is in the news this week because Heather Agyepong, a black British artist, was tossed from the space because she loudly challenged another visitor who started to laugh, presumably at the installation, or maybe at someone snoring as loud as a jackhammer. Agyepong complained in a Twitter video that she-who-laughed was white and had said she worked for the United Nations. It’s a failure of screening, but is it too much to imagine that a U.N. worker is racist? Agyepong’s Twitter statement puts me in a skeptical frame of mind.

There was a shouting match that awakened the sleep-deprived, racially segregated folks, and out on the street Agyepong went. The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church is steps away. I doubt Agyepong, not a great artist, sought solace in the Lord. And I think her aggrievement’s a hoax. Art reporters should be embarrassed for covering fake news.

MoMA officials apologized to the ends of the earth, to black people everywhere and to tired black people especially. MoMA did everything to atone short of animal sacrifice. So Old Testament. It promises to “protect the experiences of Black visitors and visitors from Indigenous communities and communities of color.” Staff is to be retrained. Indigenous communities? I guess they might need sleep, too. The installation sounds more promiscuous by the minute.

By the way, the Book of Proverbs warns us about the perils of too much sleep. “Don’t be too fond of sleep, or you’ll end up in the poor house.”

Way uptown, the Hispanic Society’s tiny staff unionized a couple of years ago. The union didn’t go on a silly, ceremonial one-day strike as the Boston MFA union did. They’re now on a proper, close-the-place-down, we’re-out-till-we-win strike. It began on March 27. The Hispanic Society owns the world’s best collections of Spanish art outside Spain as well as a superb manuscript and rare-book library. I love it.

It’s hard to say who’s got more right on their side. The trustees and new director are struggling mightily to raise the tens of millions of dollars required to renovate its long-neglected Beaux-Arts building. This isn’t impossible — Sarah gave birth to Isaac at 90 — but it’s daunting. It’s on Broadway and 155th Street in Manhattan, a promising neighborhood around 1900 when everyone believed that the Upper West Side would continue its elegant procession north.

Alas, it stalled around Columbia University. Today, the Hispanic Society is in a crappy part of town, more South Bronx than Riverside Drive. The well-heeled won’t trot there. Its staff, most long-timers, have valiantly kept the place together. It’s been mostly closed since 2017.

According to the staff, over the years the old-time board promised them free health care and defined-benefit pensions in return for low salaries. It was a handshake deal. Now, a new board is demanding they pay for part of their health insurance. It has imposed a defined-contribution retirement plan. Pay raises offered in negotiations aren’t commensurate with inflation.

In Manhattan, if it’s not on a signed piece of paper, it doesn’t exist, as I once learned the hard way. I’ve always operated via handshake deals, but I’m a dinosaur, though an honorable one. Today, “understandings” or tradition matter not a whit.

The staff at the Hispanic Society is heroic in sticking with the place, some for decades, and stewarding an exceptional collection. They’ve got the patience of Job but, unlike Job, are takin’ on the Man. They’re rightfully aggrieved. Fund-raising has been slow. The place they love has been closed for six years. They’re working in a construction site.

Philippe de Montebello, a former director of the Met, chairs the Hispanic Society’s board. He’s 86. Distinguished he is, but that’s too old to lead the mammoth project the museum faces. Moses made the rock gush water, but Philippe hasn’t brought home the bacon. The director, Guillaume Kientz, is new and young, and he’s never directed a museum.

The Society was set to open its magnificent, renewed Sorolla gallery last week but had to cancel the event because of the strike. This space displays Joaquín Sorolla’s 12-foot high, 200-foot-long paintings of characteristic people and settings from about a dozen regions in Spain. Done between 1911 and 1919 especially for the Hispanic Society, the cycle and its setting at the museum make for one of the great art experiences in America. Canceling bites.

I hope the two sides agree to a contract and get on with the business of fixing and reopening this fantastic institution. I hope philanthropists in New York ditch the obvious, glitzy charities, the ones that are worthy but not needy, and send their checks to the Hispanic Society, one of New York’s cultural treasures.

For a week, I’m in Washington to work on my biography of Allan Stone. I’ve never noticed how many churches there are here, a surprise given that Washington has more liars, cheats, flatterers, false prophets, and thieves per capita than Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell.

I hate to write it, since I’m in Washington and might be monitored, but the Eighth Circle is one Metro stop from Cain’s and Judas’s forever home in the Ninth Circle.

Atonement’s a good thing, though I suspect that, in D.C., self-love means never having to say you’re sorry. One day I’ll write about church architecture here, but this week I learned a bit about the debate over the sites of the new National Museum of Women’s History and the National Museum of the American Latino.

One site is on the south side of the Mall near the Washington Monument. It’s a tiny lot that would force much of the museum building to be underground. The other is near the Tidal Basin and would block the view of blossoming cherry trees and the Jefferson Memorial. Both are part of land designated as a no-build zone by Congress 20 years ago, so it will take legislation to develop them.

Talk about two projects for which prophylactic atonement is needed. The women’s-history museum is estimated to cost about $400 million while the Latino museum is priced at $700 million. Both are a waste of money. While each has good ideas propelling it, I can’t imagine, given our parlous times, lower priorities than two new museums together costing over a billion dollars.

They’re abuses of taxpayer money — both will need lots of federal dough — as well as private philanthropy. Washington has too many museums, and the Smithsonian, which will own and operate these new museums, is too big and too diffuse. The Covid mass hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucination left so much carnage, especially among young people, that dainties like new museums need to be deferred. If our culture is neglecting Latino heritage or women’s history, then existing museums — and America has thousands of them — ought to address the gaps.

Museums for Asian-American history and LGBTQ, etc. history — both massive wastes of money — are in Congress’s long-term pipeline, but the immediate issues are the women’s-history museum and the Latino-heritage museum. Both ought to be deferred, preferably to Kingdom Come. Donors ought to get their heads examined and their priorities aligned with the real world, not their vanity.

“Who’s a woman?” stumps left-of-center Washington. Not even prayer can save these dopes.

Where’s a temple cleansing when you need it?

Michelangelo’s David is in the news. The principal of the Tallahassee Classical School, art reporters and critics write, was fired because an art teacher showed slides of the 1504 sculpture, penis a’plenty, though David’s is on the tiny side. Three pairs of parents complained about immodesty, they-who-hate-Florida say, and out the door the principal went. I doubt she commiserated with Agyepong.

The story is fake news. Florida’s a nice place to visit, but nothing ever dries. I neither love nor hate it. I do hate reading art news that treats the place as a haven for hayseeds. Lady Principal was fired for many reasons, and David’s uncircumcised wee-wee wasn’t one of them. It’s a local personnel issue made national because it’s Florida. Florida is a target because of its good governance and because it’s prosperous. People there seem happy. Let’s not disparage it.

We live in the best country ever, owing to Florida, Iowa, Idaho, and Alabama, as well as the Upper East Side and West Hollywood. That’s our unique, and American, gift from God. Something to think about this Easter.