The art of shushing
Menachem Wecker
I recently had the closest experience I will likely ever have to Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall, irked by the guy pontificating behind him in the movie line, managing to summon Marshall McLuhan to tell the latter, “You know nothing of my work.” When a National Gallery of Art guard came over to tell two friends and me that multiple people had complained we were talking too loudly in the Vittore Carpaccio retrospective, I asked if he knew the museum’s handle recently tweeted “shushing people in a museum” was one of the 2023 “out” items.
Sadly, the scene lacked the triumph of the “Gotcha!” resolution from the film. The guard shrugged, unimpressed. I should have known. Two months prior, a National Gallery docent shushed me and two other friends (who happen to be art critics or museum curation professionals, for what it’s worth) in a different part of the museum, suggesting there is a difference of opinion between the National Gallery twitterer-in-chief and its representatives on the physical ground. It also raises questions about what kinds of spaces museums are and ought to be and what sort of behavior is appropriate therein. How hushed, and how shushed, should we be in museums?
Many museums take themselves far too seriously at times, particularly when enforcing very uninviting policies. They also have uneven records on inclusivity and act in a manner that can suggest they deem some more worthy of inclusion than others. In recent years, museums have sought to roll out welcome mats increasingly, particularly to audiences they have historically excluded. “The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity,” per the museum’s mission statement. But there have been tension points in museums, as in 2019, when black student visitors said Museum of Fine Arts Boston security guards profiled and harassed them. The institution eventually apologized.
Museums display art, which is lively. Art should be discussed. It used to be something people took sufficiently seriously to duel over. It should be debated when necessary, not assimilated passively.
Yet museum “inclusion” policies right now are incoherent, and not just the policy on noise and shushing. Museums are at once becoming more exquisitely moralizing about any imagined discriminatory offense art may cause while themselves discriminating as to which groups’ offendedness matters and which does not.
The National Gallery’s recently closed “Sargent and Spain” show, for example, devoted significant signage to the Roma people merely because Sargent painted Roma people dancing and sitting. Next to the ordinary plaques museums place next to paintings bearing informational text about the date of a work’s creation and suchlike, the paintings depicting Roma subjects had secondary plaques, explaining how members of this group “have been oppressed, marginalized, and subjected to painful stereotypes, both within Spain and worldwide.” They were not written in an informational style but rather in an expositional and emotive one by members of a Columbia University center acting as an “advisory group,” the equivalent of the publishing industry’s “sensitivity readers” but for the visual fine arts. “Dear family, how are you, back home in southern Spain,” one reads, going on to dwell on how “I become angry when non-Roma people romanticize poverty.” Another reads: “We, the Roma women, have stood in the shadows for too long. It’s time for our beauty, talents, and stories to be acknowledged with dignity and agency. Perhaps one day a Roma girl will walk into a museum, see a variety of representations of real-life and inspiring Roma women, and be able to say, ‘I, too, belong.’” You may decide for yourself, I think, if the Sargent paintings next to which these words appear require graduate student guidance to take in in a moral manner.
There are two points to draw from the presence of these plaques, which condescendingly try to tell the viewer how and what to think. The first is that plaques such as this, for any group’s alleged offense-taking, should not exist. And the second is that we learn something about the National Gallery from which artistic subjects it thinks require some advisory group to put up premonitory warning plaques next to paintings over. At the National Gallery, plenty of depictions of antisemitism are much more egregious than any of the Roma people Sargent depicts dancing flamenco. Just within the Sargent exhibit, one might notice that no Jewish group was asked to place a plaque next to its text describing the Synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca in Toledo, Spain, as a reflection of “the diversity of cultures in medieval Spain,” since Christians operate the former synagogue, which Islamic architects built. Such a group would no doubt inform viewers that Christians stole the medieval synagogue after expelling the Jews in 1492, and the church has not returned the former synagogue to the Jewish community. (Muslims built the synagogue because Jews were barred from certain professions. Celebrate a diversity of cultures based on that if you like.)
The National Gallery relates that details in Sienese artist Paolo di Giovanni Fei’s The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (1398-9) “enliven and humanize a sacred event, making it more accessible to a contemporary viewer.” The gallery website identifies two men — who lack halos, and one of whom turns his back on the Virgin — as “two elderly bearded Jews disputing with each other.” No plaque warns about how this plays into any harmful stereotypes or reminds museumgoers that Siena exiled its Jews 50 years before the painting’s creation, blaming them for a plague.
The gallery’s 2020 “Degas at the Opera” exhibit addressed sexual assault, spotlighting depictions of male ballet sponsors lurking backstage, preying upon dancers. It did not even mention Degas’s antisemitism. Poring over the new, three-volume translation of Degas’s letters in the National Gallery’s library, I came upon many hateful passages, such as one referring to a “wandering Jew” as a member of a “terrible race.” That interests me, personally, but there’s no need for a plaque.
Ideally, museums would not engage in prattle about “microaggressions” or how to “make space” (as one of the plaques in the Sargent exhibit reads) and inclusion. Art is too important to let the latest jargon that HR professionals use to stay busy and therefore employed take over its world. But if they are going to, it is hard not to notice that they do it for some groups and not for others. It’s hard not to notice museums’ unclear rules about what loud conversations are welcome and encouraged and whose are shushed. Museums’ efforts at inclusion are themselves discriminatory, partly because they take art and themselves too seriously. Art is simply too important a part of life to bear being controlled by such humorless souls.
Lighten up, galleries. If you love art and think it’s important, like I do, stop trying to control what others think and focusing on the innumerable problems a lifetime of studying art history will reveal within the works and the creators of the art we love. First, just be an art lover, loud and proud.
Menachem Wecker is a culture writer based in Washington, D.C.