Offbeat Reasons for Gratitude

Why unions, bad management, and a nude artist inspire thankfulness.

E arlier this week I wrote about gratitude in the context of the Addison Gallery’s new director, appointed last week. I was director for years, leaving in 2013, and the museum, which I love, had a long, sad slide. I like the new director a lot. Today I’ll write about a few more random bits of gratitude I felt this Thanksgiving.

Freshly unionized workers at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston went on a one-day strike last week. A year ago, by a vote of 85 to 15 percent, what I call museum creatives — curators, fundraisers, designers, tech types, librarians, visitor-services staff, and the like — formed a union, affiliating with the white-collar culture division of the United Auto Workers. From what I hear about the MFA’s management, the staff had every reason to be aggrieved. Still, I suggested at the time they’d be disappointed.

I hope that the new crop of Norma Raes reflected on their bad choice as they marched in the cold, losing a day’s pay, their work email accounts suspended, no raises on the horizon, no contract, a few percent shaved from their pay for union dues, and, I suspect, a new trend at the MFA toward outsourcing. They’re the enemy now. If the MFA’s management gets serious, which may or may not happen, they’ll have no more special pleading. “Go see your shop steward” will be the new museum mantra. Unionized curators will see their shows ditched. Management is still armed and dangerous.

The MFA staff opted for a wall-to-wall union, which means that workers with vastly different jobs are lumped together. Curators and shop sales associates have little in common. It seems so egalitarian, though, so “We’re all in this together,” “It takes a village,” and “If I Had a Hammer.” I’m reality-based, so I’ll suggest that this type of union invites a divide-and-conquer tactic.

Unionized curators will take the biggest hit. As part of a unionized workforce, they’ve surrendered something precious. Curators will always be the privileged class in a museum setting. They’re the ultimate program people — they know the art and conceive and mount the exhibitions. Trustees and donors know them and want their advice and company. Directors, even if they hate the curators and the curators hate them, both common conditions, tend to come from the curatorial class, so they have at least a smidgen of empathy for them. Curators are far better positioned to make private deals with the director and to get the tastiest perks. In a wall-to-wall union, curators are just one of the pack and outnumbered, too.

I’m grateful I’ve got too much common sense to join a union. And I’m grateful I don’t work at the MFA.

The incompetent Wadsworth Atheneum trustees are at it again. Last week, the board announced a new governance model. It’s been in a cold war with its directors for years. The board likes the prestige of presiding over one of the country’s best civic museums. It likes feeling that it’s part of an exclusive private club. It wants the place to do more and more. It wants absolute control, leaving the director a cipher. Yet it’s a cheapskate board. And for years it’s been packed with petty bourgeois hicks from little Hartford’s burbs.

Having heard from a generation of directors that they need to give more and that rubes from West Hartford, Farmington, and Hartford’s West End best leave running a museum day to day to professionals, the board responded by eliminating the position of director. Not the title, just the responsibility and the power. They’ve split the position in two. A new chief executive officer will take over the leadership, vision, and strategic direction of the museum and supervise all the staff and functions of the museum except for “the artistic direction of the museum.” The new and castrated director will report to the CEO.

What the board has done is simple. It has replaced an empowered, proactive, high-profile, and can-do director, the traditional model, with a chief curator they’ll call the director but, worse, who will be a chief curator with no power. The CEO controls the budget, which means acquisitions and the exhibition program. No one, except a loser, will want the job.

The Atheneum board went the extra mile and appointed a new CEO without a search. And who might this be? A trustee! Jeffrey Brown, a former banker who works in the licensing department of Newman’s Own, the company that bottles salad dressings, cans dog food, freezes pizza, and packages Fig Newmans.

Fig Newmans are my dessert of choice, and at least all of these products are organic, plus Paul Newman was great in Cool Hand Luke, but Brown knows squat about running a museum. In the Atheneum press release, one of his fellow trustees praised Brown for his “unassuming and collaborative approach,” which I translate to mean, “he won’t ask us for money.” If I were a curator, would I want to work at a place run by someone from the tomato-sauce business?

Hiring a trustee for a full-time job is a no-no. It’s fiduciary inbreeding. And Brown’s not even getting off the board! He’ll stay as an ex-officio trustee. Hiring a CEO without a proper, competitive search is a no-no, too. Boards that are both hayseed and hubristic pull stunts like this.

Colt Firearms aside, Hartford was once a corporate-headquarters town with lots of paper pushers. The big corporations are gone, but the paper-pusher ethos survives. Brown is a paper pusher, but so is Gerard Lupacchino, the new board president at the Atheneum. This past spring, I wrote about William R. Peelle Jr., then the board president, after he criticized the museum in the Hartford Courant for failing to be woke enough. I’d say that “a trustee never goes public with gripes” is among the Top Ten Rules in nonprofit governance.

Out the door went Peelle. Is Lupacchino an improvement? He seems worse, if the board’s new leadership plan means anything. He works for a hospital conglomerate as “the senior vice president for experience, engagement, and organizational development.” Aside from “makes six figures and gets a big Christmas bonus,” what does he do? I puttered around the Internet looking for some monumental achievement, some huge instance of philanthropy, something saying “this guy’s extraordinary and out to be chairman of a major board.” Climbing to the top of Mount Washington would do.

No, there’s nothing to be found except a story about Lupacchino’s advocacy of trans rights in the assignment of hospital beds.

I’m grateful I don’t work at the Wadsworth Atheneum, either.

The 35-lot Sotheby’s sale of Harry and Linda Macklowe’s collection of modern and contemporary art was a doozy. The November 15 event made $646 million and history as Sotheby’s biggest sale ever. Macklowe, now 84, is a Manhattan real-estate developer. In 2018, he and his wife noisily divorced after 59 years of marriage.

After so long, what’s the point, I thought, but Harry found a younger woman. The day after they married in 2019, Harry paid for a 70-foot-tall banner with his and his bride’s photos, side by side, hanging from one of his buildings on Billionaires Row for all, and especially for Linda, to see.

For years, Harry and Linda were like George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — toxic but inseparable. Unlike George and Martha, though, they split, and, unlike George and Martha, they’d acquired together a collection of art famous for marquee paintings by Warhol, Picasso, Rothko, and Pollock. They agreed on who would get the houses, the yacht, the bank accounts, and the skyscrapers, but not the art. A judge finally forced them to sell. The November 15 sale is only half the collection. The rest goes on the block in May.

It’s brand-name art with high and middling points. A 1977 de Kooning shows he was in early dementia. A 1983 de Kooning shows he’s getting worse. There’s Nine Marilyns and Sixteen Jackies, with the price per Marilyn exceeding the price per Jackie. Abstraktes Bild, by Gerhard Richter, is a stunner and sold for $33 million. The couple’s Rothko from 1951, green, crimson, lavender, and transcendent, went for $82 million. There were great things by Guston, Agnes Martin, and Frank Kline but schlocky things by Jeff Koons. Lots of Asian buyers were in the mix. Lots of bidders were there for investment values. The sale shows, if nothing else, that after a terrible 2020, the art market’s booming.

I’m grateful to have good taste. Even if I had zillions to spare, I wouldn’t spend $61 million on an end-of-the-road Pollock. It’s a trophy. The game is ostentatious display. I’m grateful I’m not getting a divorce, too.

Since I mentioned ostentatious display, I’ll end with some comments on a performance piece by Carlos Martiel I saw at the Guggenheim on November 10. Martiel is a Cuban artist who lives in Brooklyn. His work that night, Monumento II, is a sequel to Monumento I, a clip of which illustrated the press release I got from the museum publicizing the November 10 event.

In his work, “his lone body endures ritualistic acts, pain, and extreme physical stress that challenges systems of violence, displacement, and immigration,” the museum guide tells us. “These projects act as a commentary on oppressive and racist power structures, cultural hegemony, and global geopolitics.” Martiel would endure “a fixed position in silence for several hours as a form of activism and physical resistance against the abuses of power that affect marginalized communities of color.”

Judging from Monumento I, in which Martiel bound himself with an American flag while lying flat on the floor, I thought this would be another instance of Harry Houdini meets the Flagellants but I was wrong.

Everything looks good at the Guggenheim, and Martiel’s no exception. Putting aside the discreet handcuffs, he’s there, buck naked, large and in charge. His body is Classical Greek perfect. I’m an art historian so every work of art starts as an aesthetic object. He looked so good, and in color and line complemented the architecture so effectively, that whatever political, social, or economic message he sought to convey dissolved into irrelevance. He’s too poised. He’s too buff. The piece is an early Christmas gift to voyeurs.

His performance, rather than an act of protest, is an act of collusion. Martiel has found a schtick playing to affluent, white Manhattan liberals for whom tears over “oppressive and racist power structures, cultural hegemony, and global geopolitics” are part of a preening, cliché-ridden enactment of guilt one moment, virtue the next. The Guggenheim desperately wants to talk the PC talk. Artist, audience, and sponsors align.

Protesting “oppressive and racist power structures, cultural hegemony, and global geopolitics” is protesting a lot, so much so that the act of protest becomes a scattered, nebulous thing. Uncle Sam Wants You is a visually arresting image, too, but we all know his bottom line is the specific act of enlisting. If Martiel is protesting everything, he’s protesting nothing, and we’re left with Studmuffin Comes to the Museum.

I think that, as art, Martiel’s project is beautiful, and I’m not against that, but what he’s doing isn’t new. Baroque Italian art invented the beefcake as martyred saint. Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave, from 1844, the most famous American sculpture except for Mount Rushmore, presents the nude, handcuffed woman as Greece shackled and subjugated by the Turks. Greece fought for independence against the Turks in the 1820s. It was still the poster girl for freedom fights anywhere.

Going a step further, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Slave Market, from 1866, depicts a nude woman on the auction block, prospective bidders in a Cairo bazaar probing her body. It’s salacious to the point of creepy. Powers hoped to cajole viewers to sympathize with the poor, innocent, and oppressed, wherever they are. Gérôme, a French painter of harems, famously aligns viewers not with the woman lot-to-be but with the guys ogling her.

How many people were there to watch a naked black man? I can’t say. I thought about Robert Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit, from 1980, the ultimate objectified black man. Obviously my takeaway isn’t what the museum intended. I’ll comment on the obvious first. Our country is the most successful and prosperous interracial and multiethnic democracy in world history. Martiel is Cuban, not American. What is his take on Cuba, a country run by murderers and thugs?

No one — except me — would walk up to the artist, standing on his plinth. That weird, crowd-enforced, empty circle of space surrounded him. I’m a close looker and made no funny faces to force a smile or frown from him. Yes, it’s all real. And, yes, it’s all a pose and a ruse. Like the MFA staff’s one-day strike, this protest lacks bite. I spent the rest of my time at the museum visiting its great Gillian Wearing exhibition, which just opened, and looking at some shock-and-awe wonderful paintings by Kandinsky.

I’m grateful that no one’s asking me to pose nude at the Guggenheim since I tend to say “yes” to all gigs that pay.