Many cultural institutions have forgotten their educational mission
The point of criticism is to guide people to books and to objects that are worthy of deeper contemplation
On Election day I went to the Legion of Honor to see the Mary Cassatt exhibition. I quickly realized that the Cassatt exhibition wasn't great. The number one thing I want from a museum is the confidence that these paintings, or these art objects, are worth looking at for several hours. I have taken time out of my day to come here—will that time be rewarded?
In this case, everything about the exhibition bespoke a certain hesitancy on the museum’s part. The exhibit was entitled Cassat At Work, and wasn’t a retrospective of her career—it had a narrow focus on her various methods. The individual paintings also weren’t placed in a way that made it seem like they expected the visitors to linger. The painting from the exhibit advertisements, for instance, did not have great placement within the exhibit. And many of the paintings from the accompanying explanatory video were not actually a part of this exhibit! Looking at Cassatt’s Wikipedia page, I saw that most of the paintings on that page were not a part of this exhibit.
Ultimately, I did not feel comfortable devoting my morning to this exhibit, so I went upstairs to the permanent exhibit.
In contrast, the Legion of Honor's permanent exhibit is extremely confident! It does the obvious thing for a museum to do, which is focus on the history of European painting, beginning with the Renaissance and ending with Impressionism. It's organized in a series of rooms, where each room represents a given time and place. The text is very minimal—a paragraph write-up for each room. Some paintings get their own little paragraph, but not all of them! And that's okay. I felt complete trust that the museum would only give me write-ups that were important.
No painting felt like it was shorted. Even the minor paintings got good placement and were put in places where they spoke to the other paintings in a very cohesive manner. But...I just don't necessarily need to read about each painting. If a painting or painter was important in themselves, the museum told me, but some of the paintings were mostly there as an example of a given style. They were all great paintings, don't get me wrong! But there was some reason for the painting being here that went beyond "this is a great painting."
What I am saying is that the museum was laid out with attention to the museum-goer. It's a museum that is intended for someone like me—a casual museum-goer who decides to start looking at more art! The museum takes seriously its aim to provide a place where the museum-goer can instruct themselves.
As usual, I spent a lot of time with just a small number of paintings. But I think because I experienced such a sense of trust in the museum, I also felt a lot of trust that any given painting was likely to reward my attention. For instance, I sat for an hour in front of this painting by Lavinia Fontana, who was a 16th-century Italian woman painter that I'd never heard of. The museum proudly announced (with a little extra plaque) that she was the first woman painter from before 1700 to be added to the collection. Guess they couldn't afford Gentileschi!
Anyway, this painting depicts an Italian noblewoman and her six children. She is quite young, and the children are all quite young. They're crowded around her—they have a variety of facial expressions. Some look like absolute devils. And the woman has a very achingly sad expression.
I know people don't really smile in older paintings, but...there are certainly variations, and many of these older paintings were much more playful than this one. It definitely stood out as being particularly demon-haunted.
I sat with this painting for a long time, and I felt, I dunno, kind of a connection to this subject, who actually lived, many centuries ago. Her family commissioned this painting, which I assume they hung in their palace. Who knows what they thought about it? I don't know if they liked it or not. In this particular room, most of the paintings were commissioned portraits. The spirit of the subjects haunted the paintings. There was artistry, obviously, but I was also very struck by the fact that each of these paintings was something that a given person deeply wanted, at least at the moment it was painted. They weren't painted speculatively or just for expressive purposes.
I also had a lot of fun in the British room. You know the room I'm talking about! The one with, like, a Reynolds picture in it. The thing is, Britain was not a big center for visual art. Big in literature, big in science and philosophy and math. But...music and visual art? Not so much! Then sometime in the 18th century, they start painting. And the paintings are so British! I mean it's just so strikingly British, and very different from the Continental pictures—people wear a lot of red, and many of the subjects are men, and these guys are so slender and young and dashing. The moment you walk into this room, the difference between them and, say, all the Fragonards and Watteaus in the next room is just immediately apparent. These British guys lived at the time of the court at Versailles, but they were definitely not hanging out at Versailles.
I spent a lot of time with this handsome devil, who was painted by Henry Raeburn. There were several Raeburn pictures. He seems like an incredible painter—would love to see more of his paintings if they're ever in town. The sole paragraph of text told me he was self-taught and would paint directly onto canvas, without any under-drawing, which seems crazy, given how realistic and detailed these paintings look. I guess he was aiming for a certain lifelike quality that he could only get from putting paint directly on canvas, right at the moment of composition.
It seems silly to say it, but...this story the museum tells? This story about the development of European art? This story that (some of us) were taught in school? It's kind of a good story! Every city needs one museum that tells that story!
I was speaking to another non-white writer recently, and the two of us agreed that when we go to a museum and there's a lot of African or Asian or Indian art, we definitely go and look at it, because we feel obligated, but the experience is very different from when the museum has European art. Museums are much more confident in how they explain and describe European art. They tend to have much more cohesive collections, that they acquired with the aim of telling some kind of story and imparting some coherent experience to the viewer.
In contrast, Asian, African, and Indian art collections in the US tend to be the result of these white collectors back in the early 20th century, who bought a lot of stuff, seemingly at random, from all kinds of places. And then they donated it to these museums, and...there's really no story to tell. As a result, museums often put the non-white stuff together in a jumble that really erodes my trust and makes it hard to get anything out of it.
I'm not talking about contemporary art—that's something different. I'm talking about the old stuff. The Legion of Honor and its sister museum, the De Young, are devoted to the old stuff. In my experience, the way museums treat old European stuff is much more tasteful and thought-provoking than how they treat old non-European stuff.
The Legion of Honor and the De Young are operated by the same foundation: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The Legion is at the edge of town, in the Presidio, overlooking the ocean, while the De Young is centrally located, in Golden Gate Park. Many of the paintings in the Legion of Honor used to be housed in the De Young. In 1972, when these two museums merged, all the European art at the De Young was sent to the Legion of Honor, which is what allows the Legion to tell this very cohesive story.
Most of my friends are surprised that I prefer the Legion of Honor to the De Young. The latter is full of African and Oceanic art. I definitely appreciate the effort at diversity. But it’s not a good experience to walk through their collection, and to see a huge number of objects—many of which weren’t necessarily understood by own creators as art objects (they are tools, masks, or religious objects) displayed rather haphazardly, with objects from wildly different times and places all mixed together, oftentimes in one display case.
From my perspective, as someone spending my day at the De Young, it does not make me feel confident about investing my time in any one of these objects. I don’t feel like the museum has taken the care to select objects that are truly worthy of my attention. I don’t have the most educated taste when it comes to art—I take my cues from the institution. But that lack of confidence is just apparent in everything the De Young does with their permanent collection (I made fun of it in a previous post for having a room that seems to be empty).1
I think many museums don’t realize that their credibility is at stake. They think that because they have a big building that is full of old objects, then somehow their displays are going to be meaningful to the visitor.
The De Young’s permanent collection, when I visited, was completely empty. The Legion of Honor’s had lots of people (both times I visited on a weekday morning). I’m sure some onlookers would say this is because of racism: Americans are just naturally more interested in the Legion of Honor’s white artists rather than the non-white ones in the De Young. But, from my perspective, the Legion of Honor told a coherent story. I understood what these paintings were. I understood why they existed. I understood their relationship to each other. And I had some understanding of the society that produced them. This is what allowed me to feel a connection to, say, Bianca degli Utili Maselli and her children—a connection it was hard to feel with the creators of the masks or tools displayed at the De Young.
I’m sure if someone from the De Young read this post, they’d think I was being unfair. But the fact is, every room of the Legion of Honor was devoted to a particular style, this style was usually anchored in a given time and place. In the De Young, that wasn’t the case: you had a room full of objects from New Guinea, one of the most diverse places on Earth—there are more languages spoken in Papua New Guinea (which itself is only half the island) than in any other country on Earth. It is also one of the few places in the world where agriculture developed independently. But this room pretended like all of these objects came from the same culture, when that is quite obviously not the case. To display them together means you’re asking me to see some connection between these objects that I don’t actually believe exists. The apparent confidence of the maneuver (devoting a museum to these objects) is belied by the inherent ludicrousness of the enterprise.
Literary criticism, in my opinion, faces similar credibility gaps. Magazines and journals often seem to assume that merely because they are discussing a work, then that means it’s worthy of our time. Critics assume that just because they know a lot of things, then the reader will find some meaning in their display of knowledge.2
To me, this is a pointless display. The function of the critic is to recommend books to the reading public.
It takes time to read books. It takes even more time to read difficult books. People will not read a difficult book unless they have some confidence that the book has a deeper meaning to impart. And they won’t have that confidence unless some institution they trust tells them explicitly that this book is worth your time.
Critics do not decide which books are worth reading. Critics do not ennoble a book with their attention. Critics merely recognize which books are good and they make the case, using rhetoric, that a given book is worth reading. The critic has time to read 100 books a year—you don’t. The critic’s job is to tell you which ten of those books are actually worth your time.
You might say, “Well, don’t readers have different aims? Who’s to say what is good?”
But when it comes to high-brow literature, the implied aim is self-improvement. Readers want to grow in wisdom and to deepen their appreciation of beauty.
If that wasn’t the goal, then why would anyone read anything that’s not immediately accessible? There is no human being for whom Proust comes easily. You learn to read Proust by reading him. Why make the effort unless you believe in the possibility of gaining some deeper knowledge from this book?
I think critics feel uncomfortable with this idea of self-improvement because it leads to questions like “What exactly is the axis on which art improves us?”
But…it’s right there in Keats, truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Knowing the truth is good for its own sake. People want to know the truth. If people have other goals, and they don’t want to understand beauty or truth through art then…that’s fine. Nobody is holding a gun to their head. But high art’s position in society is not something held in place purely by state or social power. The museum exists because beautiful things are valuable. For the museum to forget this and to start thinking that things are valuable merely because they’re in a museum, well…that’s exactly how they lose credibility.
Currently Reading
Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, a sociological study of how high culture is constituted in opposition to low culture. I have many thoughts, but it’ll probably take a month before I finish.
Six different abridged versions of the Mahabharata, by both Indian and non-Indian writers, which I’m perusing to see which offers the best entry-point to the story.
The end of the eighth volume of the unabridged Mahabharata, which is full of delightful animal fables—one of which inspired my upcoming Thursday tale.
I wrote about this a little bit on Substack Notes and gave examples of three reviews that I felt were unnecessarily cagey about whether the authors actually thought the books were worth reading (the reviews were Ruby on Kushner; Khalid on Everett; and Sehgal on Greenwell).
Interesting post! I hope the de Young isn't similarly blasé about the sixteenth century tapestries (Battle of Pavia) on loan from Naples. I don't know about Cassatt's process, that does sound a little dull, but the tapestries show is maybe the most exciting one of old European art on view anywhere in the country this fall.
As for telling the story of non-Western art (and the same goes for lesser-known areas of Western art), I haven't seen this collection, but you're right about the random nature of what different museums have acquired over the years. Even the Met can't tell the story of Byzantine art or Russian or Scandinavian art. Smaller museums that aspire to be encyclopedic are pretty much in an impossible position, but it would be considered unseemly to acknowledge this, to have a sign at the entrance to the galleries pointing out weak areas in the collection.
There's a separate problem with Indian art. At the Met at least I think the collection is strong enough to create a coherent narrative, but it's dispersed, half of it is in one wing as 'Asian' and the other half is in another as 'Islamic'. The only way to bring these together would be for a director to carve out a new curatorial department.
Recently I was at an "African art" exhibition where sculptures from ancient Egypt and from thr Yoruba were placed next to each other. Its incredibly distracting to have extremely different cultures from time periods thousands of years apart placed in connection simply because they are from the same continent. Maybe there's still a huge lack of art education, but both had small writeups explaining the objects. Curators sometimes just seem to be plain confused.