Category: Art/Culture/Movies

“Art Institute of Chicago Ends a Docent Program, and Sets Off a Backlash” (NYT):

Museum officials decided that one area in need of an overhaul was its 60-year-old program of volunteer educators, known as docents, who greet school groups and lead tours.

So last month the board overseeing the program sent a letter to the museum’s 82 active docents — most of whom were white older women — informing the volunteers that their program was being ended. The letter said that the museum would phase in a new model relying on paid educators and volunteers “in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require financial flexibility to participate.”

The new plan calls for hiring paid educators — Ms. Stein invited the volunteers to apply for those positions — and then developing a new program over the next few years. In 2023, she wrote, “unpaid volunteer educators will be reintroduced via a redesigned model” that includes updated protocols for “recruitment, application, training, and assessment.” She offered the departing docents museum memberships.

A number of museums have been trying to address how to get more people of color into the hiring pipeline, in part by removing financial barriers. Organizations like the Minnesota Alliance for Volunteer Advancement encourage nonprofit and government organizations “to engage volunteers who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the communities they serve.” And there have been widespread calls for salary reforms, since systems that rely on unpaid volunteers and interns tend to favor those who can afford to work for little to nothing.

And a 2020 article in Slate headlined “Museums Have a Docent Problem” described what it called “the struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk about race.”

(i.e., Karen is fired)

It might sound bizarre for an institutional that is constantly asking for donations to fire a huge volunteer staff, thus giving the appearance of having money to burn. On the other hand, David Mamet is from Chicago, so it makes sense that a Chicago institution would re-enact the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross in which the real estate salesmen are required to reapply for their jobs. “Put. That. Coffee. Down. Coffee’s for closers. … The good news is you’re fired. The bad news is all of you have just one week to regain your jobs. … First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” (If the parallels are not obvious, see highlighted sections above where docents can re-apply and also where museum memberships (“steak knives”) are offered.)

Here’s the clip, in case you’re wondering about how to resolve any HR issues within our own enterprise …

Remember: “A loser is a loser.”

(I wrote the above post just before Alec Baldwin shot and killed Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust.)

I don’t know how I missed Outbreak during the first 18 months of 14 days to flatten the curve, but the 1995 movie is fun to watch to see what they got right.

The virus in the movie is Ebola, essentially, and it kills previously healthy people of all ages (not at a median age of 82, as COVID-19 kills in Maskachusetts).

The film anticipates my idea of protection camps for the unvaccinated and then asks the reasonable question “Wouldn’t it make sense to kill everyone in the protection camp in order to prevent the virus from spreading?” (How are we going to deal with the unvaccinated, whom we currently blame for all of our woes?)

The remedy for the virus anticipates Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to go big on antibody treatment. It’s a movie, so of course the brilliant Army physician (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is able to develop the treatment and manufacture thousands of doses within hours.

If you love helicopters (and who doesn’t?), you’ll appreciate their central role towards the end of the movie, though you might be doubtful that a guy with 60 hours of training can fly as well as Cuba Gooding Jr. does.

What the film gets completely wrong is the level of resistance to expect from the American people. When the government locks people down they don’t go meekly back to their houses, but have to be forced at gunpoint by an Army battalion. The small-town Californians don’t welcome having their First Amendment rights terminated, but instead insist on what they claim are their rights.

Good News: the movie stars a Biden-supporting actor (for a change!); Bad News: “All the women who have accused Dustin Hoffman of sexual misconduct” (Business Insider, 2017).

Readers: What did you think of Outbreak and what are the differences and similarities between the movie and the U.S. response to SARS-CoV-2?

Related:

• Contagion (I saw it, but don’t remember it that well)

I didn’t know who Dave Chappelle was, but the protests against his latest show made me curious. See “Netflix Loses Its Glow as Critics Target Chappelle Special” (NYT), for example:

Internally, the tech company that revolutionized Hollywood is now in an uproar as employees challenge the executives responsible for its success and accuse the streaming service of facilitating the spread of hate speech and perhaps inciting violence. At the center of the unrest is “The Closer,” the much-anticipated special from the Emmy-winning comedian Dave Chappelle, which debuted on Oct. 5 and was the fourth-most-watched program on Netflix in the United States on Thursday. In the show, Mr. Chappelle comments mockingly on transgender people and aligns himself with the author J.K. Rowling as “Team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term used for a group of people who argue that a transgender woman’s biological sex determines her gender and can’t be changed.

Complaints like the above made me violate my rule of watching only content targeted at 6-year-olds.

I’m not sure that Chappelle is specifically anti-2SLGBTQQIA+. Much of what he said seemed to fall under the general category of mocking white people who don the victim mantle and demand favorable treatment, e.g., being hired for a job. Chappelle doesn’t say whether or not he believes that Americans should be sorted by victimhood, e.g., in university admissions and hiring, but if Americans are going to be sorted by victimhood he doesn’t think that a white woman is more entitled than a Black man nor that a white person who spends his/her/zir/their evenings having 2SLGBTQQIA+ sex is entitled to special treatment when applying for jobs during the daylight hours.

I wonder if part of the reason that white saviors are upset by this show is that Chappelle explicitly pushes back on the value of white saviors. He quotes a Black woman writer friend who, asked whether she was going to knit a pink pussyhat and join the Women’s March of 2017, responded “I hope those white bitches get teargassed.”

Trigger warning: He uses the N-word a lot.

Loosely related… “This Is What Will Make Sex Work in New York Safer” (NYT, 10/17):

When I took my first client as a sex worker in the 1980s, I had no other choice. It was right after the fall of the dictatorship in Argentina. As a young trans woman, I found that sex work was the only way for me to survive, but I faced constant harassment and violence, especially from la policía. So, I left my home to come to the United States, thinking things would be different.

But when I got here, I had no more luck. On top of being trans, now I also struggled with being undocumented and learning English. Once again, I turned to sex work to stay afloat.

Chappelle might point out that an article like this, on the victimhood of a white 2SLGBTQQIA+ migrant sex worker, takes up space and attention that, if one were going to dwell on victimhood, would properly belong to Black Americans. But he wouldn’t say it that way. He would instead mock the interest that white say-gooding Americans have in this kind of story.

Readers: Did you see this show? What did you think of Mr. Chappelle?

Gina Carano was fired by Disney/Lucasfilm for “The love that dare not speak its name” (modern-day version: love for the working class and the politician who promised to cut back on elites stealing from workers).

Here’s a question… suppose that Ms. Carano had followed the traditional path to Hollywood success by agreeing to shower with Harvey Weinstein. And she’d joined Harvey at fundraisers for Democrats and when he was getting “a cultural activism award from Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research” (see “How Harvey Weinstein became one of the most powerful figures in Democratic politics before his career was rocked by a sexual harassment scandal” (Business Insider)). Would she still have her starring role?

(And, of course, as a victim of Harvey’s sex-for-jobs racket, in addition to whatever roles she obtained she would also be able to claim additional cash compensation for having been forced to scrub Harvey’s corpulence in the Four Seasons shower.)

Separately, when will the righteous demand that Gina Carano’s character be replaced with one that can be played by a white male?

Related:

• “See Gina Carano’s tweets and posts that got her fired from ‘The Mandalorian’” (New York Post)
• also from the Post, virtuous (and factual) tweets from Mandalorian co-star Pedro Pascal comparing Trump supporters to Nazis