In authoring articles for a major newspaper, no journalist—not even a highly regarded veteran like Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page—should be exempt from the exacting scrutiny of fact-checkers, particularly when trying to navigate through territory outside the writer’s usual stomping grounds. In venturing outside of politics (and entering the museum world), Daniel Henninger should have touched base with his paper’s meticulous cultural-news fact-checkers, with whom I enjoyed decades of constructive interactions (the results of which are linked under “Wall Street Journal” in the “Me Elsewhere” section of this blog).
Had he consulted his in-house experts, Henninger could never have committed the two unfortunate gaffes in his “Wonder Land” column of today’s (Thursday’s) newspaper—Democrats Deserve to Lose the Midterm Elections.
Here’s the first of Dan’s missteps that made me wince:
Two years ago, a respected senior curator of American art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was forced out [his link, not mine] for saying something vaguely favorable about “white artists.” An internal museum-staff petition said his removal “is nonnegotiable.” His colleagues around the art world pulled the curtains and said nothing.
As CultureGrrl readers know, Gary Garrels was not a “senior curator of American art” at SFMOMA. His title was “senior curator of painting and sculpture.” (The error may be corrected in the online version by the time you see this.) As I recounted here (in my post extolling Gary’s illustrious tenure), his thoughtless comment, for which he was taken to task by many staffers, was said to be: “Don’t worry. We will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” Failing to do so, he quipped, would be “reverse discrimination.”
It was a dumb comment, especially in these hypersensitive times, but insufficient justification for the demands that this consummate curator resign, due to his use of allegedly “white supremacist and racist language.”
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
It’s misleading for Henninger to state that “his colleagues around the art world pulled the curtains and said nothing” to defend him. In his press-released statement accepting his resignation, Gary’s boss, SFMOMA director Neal Benezra (who later announced his own intention to leave, once a successor, now chosen, was in place), made no reference to the reasons for his curator’s unceremonious departure. Instead, he praised Gary’s contributions in diversifying the collection with works of black, Latino, Native American and female artists: “Works acquired [on his watch] include major paintings and sculptures by Rebecca Belmore, Frank Bowling, Lygia Clark, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Luchita Hurtado, Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, Mickalene Thomas and many others that have already transformed SFMOMA’s galleries and expanded the stories we can tell.”
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
And here’s the second Henninger zinger, addressing the subject of “cancel culture,” which he called (with some justification) “one of the worst phenomena the American left has ever produced”:
Recall last year’s firing of the docents at the Chicago Art Institute for racial reasons. [Docents, who are volunteers, tend to be white and relatively well off.] As the late Bob Dole once asked, where was the liberal outrage? How did the default become that only conservatives called out this stuff? [Dan’s links, not mine.]
As I wrote here, an Art Institute spokesperson whom I had queried “insisted that it was inaccurate to state that its 122 docents had been ‘fired.’” The docent program was being “paused…while we transition to a hybrid model that pairs paid educators and volunteers.” That was fine by me, as someone who has cringed at docents’ mistakes and mispronunciations, overheard during my peregrinations through museum galleries.
Hardest to fathom is what these two cultural contretemps have to do with the title of Henninger’s essay: “Democrats deserve to lose the midterm elections.” Perhaps it’s his column, not the “progressives” he targets, that needs “a mid-course correction.” Where is a copy editor when he really needs one?
Personal Note: Henninger was the first of many Wall Street Journal editors I worked with. I can’t remember the topic of that article and I can’t easily retrieve it from my way-back files. But I do remember him as a kind, supportive colleague.
As I’ve often written: “Reasonable people can disagree.”
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