NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he diversity, inclusion, and equity scam — otherwise called “race explains everything” — has oozed into the museum world, alas. Like the Lernaean Hydra, it’s a compounded, myriad evil.
The Whitney Museum’s new hire as director still strikes me as rich beyond belief. The museum’s longtime director, Adam Weinberg, announced last week that he’s leaving in the fall and, by the by, the new director is Scott Rothkopf, his chief curator, hired without a search. “One of the great things about an internal succession like this,” Rothkopf oozed, “is that we can continue the work we’ve been doing on equity and inclusion.” What he probably really thought was, One of the great things about an internal succession like this is I’ll make a million bucks next year.
“Champagne for everyone” is the kind of equity I like. Everyone gets a couple of glasses, no matter how outsized a failure or galling a mediocrity. But “inclusion”? Hiring an insider — a white man at that — as director without a search doesn’t seem “inclusive” to me. It’s a stunt that belongs in a country club.
At the Whitney, it’s “inclusion for thee, not for me.” The trustees are hypocrites.
I like the Columbus Museum of Art. It has a distinguished collection of American Modernist art and a nice complex of buildings, and it does scholarly exhibitions. Columbus is Ohio’s capital, so the CMA is a cultural anchor for an important city. Nannette Maciejunes has been the museum’s very good director since 2003. She retired this year.
The board announced yesterday that it has hired Brooke Minto as the new director. She’s been the director — for less than two years — of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, founded in 2020 “amid renewed calls for racial justice and the acknowledgement of violence against black lives.” I looked at the BTA’s website. It’s funded by, among others, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and a consulting group called the Woke Coach, which is as awful as it sounds. The BTA convenes conferences and does reports.
As far as I can tell, it’s got two employees. I’m not against the BTA. I don’t believe in race-based hiring, but racism in museums, like antisemitism, is more likely to be found in the boardroom than the staff lounge. An affinity group is a good idea, though “violence against black lives” seems tangential to the real work of an art-museum board.
Minto is not an art historian, though she has an M.A. from Columbia in Modern art and critical studies — a very murky program. She’s a professional fundraiser, having worked in development on an interim basis for the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, in Cape Town, South Africa, and in the fundraising office at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She was the director of development at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. She still works as a managing director of the Advisory Board for the Arts, a consultancy group, though its website has so much gooey la-la language that I’m not sure what it does aside from flatter its clients.
Couldn’t the board find someone better, say, a real art historian who has been a curator? For credibility’s sake, a director of a museum such as Columbus — a serious place — ought to have expertise in at least one part of the collection as well as experience in quality control. Donors with deep pockets and deep art interests want to work with program people who know the field. The director is a tastemaker. I’ve seen more than a few museums hire professional fundraisers as directors. The trustees usually hope for a miracle worker who’ll find so many new donors that they themselves won’t need to give. It almost always ends in tears.
The chairman of the Columbus board, Pete Scantland, made the announcement about Minto. She “perfectly aligns with the museum’s critical priorities,” he said in a museum press release. These include “an inspiring institutional and curatorial vision for a sustainable future.” A sustainable future? That’s thinking we mere mortals can control the weather on our 4-billion-year-old planet. “Forging valuable partnerships” is another critical priority, which is museum-speak for developing the place into a community center. You know, midnight basketball in the galleries. And then there’s “driving the realization of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Those are the critical priorities? Where’s the art? Where’s the scholarship? Where’s the visitor? Scantland owns a business, Orange Barrel Media, that conceives and designs flashy billboards in Los Angeles and New York. He’s a young contemporary art collector and generous to the museum. Where was his sitter during the search-committee meetings?
Putting aside race-based hiring, this is another case of a board replacing a longtime director with a novice it feels it can own and control.
Valparaiso University — it’s called “Valpo” — is a small, and getting smaller, Lutheran school in northwestern Indiana. Like most middling colleges, it’s losing enrollment, in part because of a drop in college-age men and women. Its president and board hope to boost applications by modernizing dormitories. Last year, the board voted to sell three paintings from its art-museum collection. An art handler working at the museum on a day it was closed last year saw a small group taking a tour through the galleries. They had, he said, “that out-of-town look.” They were from Sotheby’s.
The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate, from 1914, by Childe Hassam, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills, from 1930, and Frederic Church’s Mountain Landscape, from 1849, are nice paintings. The O’Keeffe is the blockbuster, but the Hassam’s lovely, too. The school hopes to make $10 million from the sale.
José Padilla is Valpo’s president. He’s a higher-education bureaucrat. He was the general counsel at DePaul University for a few years and the general counsel and vice president of the University of Colorado system for a year before coming to Valpo in late 2021. In the ’90s he worked in the Clinton White House.
He was touted as the school’s first Mexican-American president, as if anyone in Indiana lost sleep awaiting the moment. Our ruling class seems obsessed with shouting its virtue, and diversity now is the king of virtues. Obama had his clingers. Our time has its preeners.
He seems remarkably unsuited as a renaissance maker. Mr. Chips, he ain’t. He’s a lawyer, and, in my opinion and as a general proposition, lawyers aren’t good at running things.
To be fair, though, I don’t think Padilla is behind using the museum collection as an ATM. He doesn’t have much, if any, high-power fundraising experience, but he sounds like a cipher. The board of trustees has surely eyed the paintings for years, seeing not rust-red hills, mountains, or the City by the Bay but dollar signs. Sure, the dormitories need an overhaul. The trustees don’t want to pay for it. They’d rather sell the best things in the school’s art collection. Once the artworks are out the door, though, they’re gone forever.
Richard Brauer, the 95-year-old, retired director after whom the museum is named, wrote to the president opposing the sale as “utterly disgraceful, irreparably, existentially diminishing, unethical, and seemingly unnecessary.” I second the motion. I feel badly for the museum’s brand-new director, Jonathan Canning. He was the curator of the Hyde Collection, a small, quirky museum in Glens Falls in upstate New York, not far from my home. He took the job utterly in the dark about the board’s plan to denude his walls.
The trust that established the museum is clear on the donor’s intent. Income is to be used for “the maintenance and expert care of the collection” or “the acquisition of paintings by American artists.” Want a dorm with a cappuccino bar, soaking tubs, and inlaid cherry floors? Go raise the money. Don’t expect Frederic, Childe, and Georgia to pay for it.
I hope Valpo has at least one well-heeled, right-thinking alumnus willing to sue.