The Smithsonian’s First Amendment Fiasco

Pro-life kids booted, a DA who may be abusing power, Advanced Placement follies, and Brünnhilde in Dresden

I’ m in Dresden for a week of Wagner and the Ring Cycle but in between the vexations of Wotan, Fricka, and the gang, I’ll write about art here. I’m planning a writing trip to Prague, Berlin, and Amsterdam, too. Since I just got here this morning, I haven’t heard a single warble from a single Rhinemaiden and haven’t seen any art, either. So, I’ll focus mostly on art news breaking over the past few days.

First, a story from the Swamp. Museum security shouldn’t harass and belittle visitors. That’s among the Ten Commandments of good museum protocol. The Smithsonian certainly committed a whopper when it tossed a group of high-school students from the Air and Space Museum because they wore hats with a pro-life message.

I’m rarely shocked, but what the Smithsonian did is terrible. And to a bunch of kids, too.

There’s no dispute about the facts. A group of twelve students from Our Lady of the Rosary High School in Greenville, S.C., visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum after attending the March for Life in Washington on January 20. They wore blue beanie hats reading “Rosary Pro-Life.” Two guards and, it seems, a uniformed supervisor told the kids that the museum was a “neutral zone” and they needed to remove their hats or leave.

These kids knew they were in a public building and understood that the First Amendment protected them and their hats. They’re well-educated. The hats expressed an opinion but were also a security measure in making it obvious who was in the group so it could be kept together. The kids said their hats were not negotiable, and out the door they went.

“Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not within our policies or protocols,” said Alison Wood, the museum’s deputy director of communications. Good to know that strip searches are verboten. “We provided immediate retraining to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident.”

What would happen if the security staff of a Smithsonian museum expelled black teens wearing Black Lives Matter caps? Could any of us imagine the conflagration? Every lefty gargoyle belching invective, scolds falling from Savonarola’s underwear, hot for outrage porn, engorged by their own piety? No, we couldn’t. It’s beyond the scope of human imagination. But it would certainly happen, it would be deafening, and the corporate news media would cover it 24/7.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Al Sharpton and the race-pimp chorus would wail themselves hoarse.

I’m not mean, and don’t think the guards should be fired. They’re union, so they’re immune, anyway, barring murder. “Immediate retraining” is a good idea, but so is an outsider investigation. If a non-union supervisor played a part in this, he or she should be fired and directed to Planned Parenthood for simpatico employment.

The bigger problem is the zeitgeist these people absorbed. It might be Washington, or the Smithsonian, or both, but a cult of intolerance, disrespect, and coercion seems to govern places that belong to everyone. Is there a political litmus test for hiring? Evidently there’s one for visitors.

Wagner’s Brünnhilde and her Valkyrie sisters — all eight of them — are beacon lights of integrity. Must they be summoned to clean up the Smithsonian’s act? At least they don’t bully teenagers.

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On February 2, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU) from the Manhattan district attorney’s office returned 14 looted works of art to Italy. The ATU confiscated the objects, worth about $2.5 million, from collectors, dealers, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art following investigations into whether or not they had come to the U.S. legally. There was a homecoming ceremony attended by the Italian consul general and representatives from the Italian Carabinieri, our Customs and Border Enforcement Protection Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.

I’ve written a few times about restitution of looted art. Overall, I’m a stickler. If art’s here in violation of export laws in the country of origin, the art ought to go back. Here, though, my natural skepticism is aroused.

I don’t know what legal authority the ATU has to justify the high-profile raids and seizures. These raids have put the market for antiquities in the U.S. in a deep freeze. I’m concerned about abuse of power. An innocent collector, dealer, or museum, as a practical matter, isn’t going to contest the combined muscle of the DA’s office, Homeland Security, and ICE.

A spectacular ATU raid in 2018 at a New York art fair netted a bas-relief from Persepolis from the fourth century b.c. The DA’s office claimed it was taken illegally from Iran in the ’30s. I happened to be at the fair — a TEFAF show — and was covering it for National Review. It wasn’t exactly shock-and-awe, but seismic waves rattled both the Armory and the antiquity business. The DA’s office eventually returned the thing to Iran. Why are we giving things back to the Iranians, methought. Remember “Death to America”?

The restitution movement has certainly accomplished lots of good but, like most movements, is prone to extremes. The push to send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece is an example. There’s no legal basis for it. It’s entirely sentimental as well as an ego trip for George Osborne, the chairman of the British Museum board.

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I followed the kerfuffle in Florida over the state’s perfectly sensible decision to reject the College Board’s proposed Advanced Placement class in African-American studies. The class is packed with “1619 Project” trash, Governor DeSantis said, and I don’t doubt it. Issues such as reparations, incarceration, and the scam group BLM aren’t presented with scholarly balance, DeSantis and others said. The AP course and test weren’t about scholarship. The name of the game was indoctrination.

Eight or nine years ago, before I worked for NR, I wrote a story on the new AP art-history class. The College Board had just revised its long-standing course, which emphasized the art of Europe and the United States, in favor of a global art class.

The College Board said it globalized the test to erase a hierarchy privileging the West and to emphasize cultural exchange occurring over centuries. PC, yes, but dumbly so.

The global emphasis presented three big flaws. First, by treating the art of the world — for the past 5,000 years — it was overly broad. No decent college art-history class covers world art, unless it’s visual studies, which isn’t art history. There are too many currents, and it’s bound to be a confusing mishmash. It’s art appreciation. Second, a class that broad is bound to be superficial. It’s an assault on discernment and deep thinking. Third, Advanced Placement classes, in my opinion, are a College Board racket to make money. They complicate college admissions, already a toxic cat’s cradle, and help turn the anxiety temperature to boil. All to create more products for the College Board to sell.

For a rewarding art-history class, students need a good professor, a diverse library, a serious, focused research project, and firsthand exposure to art. Call me a radical, but I think college-level courses are best taken and absorbed in college, not on the side in high school. Advanced Placement art history might get students early course credit, but it denies them the edification and pleasure of a class with depth.

As a separate issue, African-American studies as well as women’s studies and gay studies departments don’t seem serious to me. These departments were established willy-nilly in the ’70s into the ’90s to address campus political problems. Their pedagogies are undeveloped, and their departments are often dumping grounds for middling faculty and students who can’t manage to achieve in history or English departments, which have higher standards and better quality control.

Do these programs prepare students for anything? Art history is, after all, history, storytelling, lifestyles of the rich and lordly, a catalyst for refined taste and visual acuity, and a plus for dinner-party conversation. Who wants to sip champagne with someone who shouts her abortion? Or hectors us with Jim Crow 2.0? No one I know. Art history is about beauty, style, and pathos, not grudges.

In any event, Governor De Santis’s bold move bit the College Board hard. It revised its African-American studies AP class faster than a speeding bullet from Chicago, deleting the loudest and most parasitical figures in the spite-and-outrage industry. Strange to say, it also deleted almost all living African-American artists. Art was a big part of the exam.

Long-dead artists such as Jacob Lawrence and James Van Der Zee get plenty of quality time in the revision, but what about Dawoud Bey, Glenn Ligon, Mark Bradford, Howardena Pindell, and Faith Ringgold? Spooked by DeSantis, the College Board seems to have done a hack-job makeover. It’s vital to contextualize living artists. I suggest sending the thing back, not to the drawing board but to the paper shredder.

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I had a lovely walk through old Dresden this morning. Old is new, and new is old here, given the city’s incineration in a series of Allied air raids starting on February 13, 1945. Called Florence on the Elbe, Dresden was — and is — the zenith of German Baroque and Rococo architecture. Over 60 years after the war, under Soviet rule and then as part of a united Germany, the city was rebuilt. It’s splendid.

We’re staying near the Semper Opera House, destroyed in 1945 and reopened in 1985, and the Zwinger Palace, the home of one of Europe’s great Old Master collections. Dresden was the old capital of Saxony, housing a concentration of immense wealth and refined taste. The Zwinger’s art, stored safely during the war, went to Russia as booty. The Soviets returned it in the ’50s to the East Germans, its vassals.

The palace itself wasn’t flattened but still had to be rebuilt. Fate saved a nearby 335-foot-long outdoor wall mural — made of local Meissen porcelain — depicting the margraves, electors, dukes, and kings who ruled the Saxon roost from 1127 to 1904. They’re on horseback and conveyed via 23,000 tiles. It’s magnificent. It was minimally damaged and celebrates the grandeur of the old, gone order.