Today is the day that our biggest art museum, the Metropolitan, will supposedly reopen. I wonder if art museums will survive given that people now have to (a) book in advance, (b) show up at a precise time, and (c) wear a mask. It might be more pleasant to stay home and walk unmasked around the neighborhood and/or be entertained with a screen.
If you want to get back into the art world, let me recommend this Washington Post article on Gaugin forgeries.
It is possible that a real Gaugin is more offensive than a fake one:
And yet, today more than ever, Gauguin is a highly divisive figure.
To his admirers, he was one of the last great romantic adventurers, a former stockbroker who sloughed off bourgeois conventions and voyaged across the world to live out a dream. He was, they say, a visionary artist who was determined to learn from other cultures, and who used his expanded awareness to make some of the most ambitious, original works of the modern era.
To others, however, he was a scoundrel who traveled to French Polynesia and shamelessly stole creative ideas from cultures he barely knew. These critics also see a man who abandoned his wife and family to father children with teenage girls in the South Seas, relationships that he got away with due to his colonial prestige but that can clearly be seen as more sinister today.
Eating organic food and breathing unpolluted air nearly killed Gaugin and he was sick and weak before dying at age 54, but there are a fair number of works attributed to the artist in the year before he died.
A school group at the National Gallery of Art back in 2016. They won’t have to endure this kind of excursion now that they’re all fully virtual!
A sculpture that might have to be canceled:
Related:
- How useful is a closed museum to the Black Lives Matter movement? (Both the Metropolitan and the MFA had devoted their web sites to BLM, but now they are back to business as usual. Does that mean systemic racism no longer exists?)
It’s not COVID-1984 which kills the malls, it’s politicians signaling that they are “doing something” and media aggressively pushing fear porn who are killing malls and quality life of people worldwide.
From what we’ve seen of your recent museum trips, most of them have become safe spaces for various and sundry social justice causes, principally because the curators are all talking to each other in an echo chamber. So they’ve turned museums from places of reflection into displays for the latest theories of the Ministry of Reeducation.