In my previous post, I promised to transcribe the audio for my un-aired radio interview with NPR‘s Chloe Veltman regarding the messy (potentially art-harming) climate-change protests in art museums. Mistakenly believing that she had sent the audio to me (at my request) for my own use, I had posted my own audio bar with an excerpt from my NPR-recorded comments. I was then told that I couldn’t use the audio bar, but that I could create and publish a transcript of what I had said.
In reading the excerpts, below, you may miss the allure of my mellifluous voice, but you’ll be better able to focus on the substance.
Veltman kicked off the interview by asking for my thoughts about the role of the recent museum protests as a tool for communication.
Here’s my response:
It certainly is getting attention, but I think it’s a tool for miscommunication. I think that it’s going to turn off a lot of people who care about art, who care about culture, and I’m not sure it’s going to convince anybody who is on the fence in terms of climate change.
I think that climate change activism is very important, and I think that vandalism is very deplorable. Certainly exhibitions can deal with topical issues and controversies. That would be all to the good. Museums can express their support for climate-change activism. But they can’t have activists coming in, attacking the art and potentially harming it [as I discussed in more detail here]. What we saw in the videos from the National Gallery in London and from the Barberini in Potsdam was almost vandalism. They said that the art wasn’t harmed. I hope that’s true. But we don’t want that kind of activity to go viral.
Here’s what I said when asked for my reaction to this article by Aileen Getty:
She’s trying to make the point that she comes from a family that benefited from fossil fuel and she supports the protesters. She says that the fastest route to transformative change for rapid, comprehensive climate action is “disruptive activism.” I think she’s wrong. They’re going to turn people against them.
My takeaway from all this is we need better security in museums, because this is starting to go viral and we need to stop it before artworks get harmed. There was a rope that was supposed to be protecting the “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery (London) but they got inside of that rope. Where were the guards to stop that?
They managed to be in there for quite some time to do their thing. We need better measures, such as a new security enhancement that I recently stumbled across in the Arms & Armor gallery at the Metropolitan Museum: If you get too close to certain artworks, a disembodied voice addresses you (and presumably also attracts the attention of a guard), letting you know that you’ve come too close.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
I guess that’s one way of trying to address the new threats that are happening. I don’t like it, but something is needed to stop people from being able to get too close to works, potentially damaging them.
More of my NPR comments that didn’t get aired:
I wasn’t convinced that no soup could get in between the glass and the frame. It dripped all the way down to the floor (as I wrote here). We don’t know for sure whether any artworks were partly harmed. It’s only a matter of time before it will happen, if they keep being allowed to do that [hurl glop at paintings]. I would argue that most people who go to art museums are not going to find this a persuasive act, in terms of getting them to change their views on climate change. They may just be turned off and disaffected by what they’re seeing.
On the question of whether the protests might have an influence on financial support:
That issue is very much on the minds of museum administrators now—whether some money should be rejected as “dirty money.” The Sackler money is the prime example—money that came from members of the Sackler Family who were involved with OxyContin. People are now trying not to use that money [a link to my post on the Met’s removal of the Sackler name from seven galleries].
Photo: Metropolitan Museum
My own feeling is that a lot of the money that came to museums—including the Rockefeller money, including the Getty money—has ties to industry and to not always morally upright businesses. But unless they’ve actually broken the law (or, in the case of OxyContin, misrepresented a highly addictive drug as relatively innocuous), I think that donors should be allowed to give money to museums, as long as they’re not influencing museums to do things that are in the donor’s best interest and as long as the museums have control of the use of the money.
With the pandemic and all of the issues related to that, people are getting edgier, people are getting more violent, people are getting more angry. It’s seeped over into all areas of life, and probably this as well. And that’s part of what worries me, in terms of allowing these protests to continue. I see it as possibly getting more and more dangerous.
The one other point I would make [as I mentioned in my previous post], is that the activists who were at the National Gallery posited a false dichotomy, saying: “What’s worth more—art or life. Is art worth more than food?” No one lives life totally focused on one area at the expense of all others. We can do all of those things. To say that we have to be totally focused on hunger or climate change is an unrealistic goal.
What I’d really like to focus on now is the Met’s bronze cannon (ca. 1550), which I might otherwise have ignored, were it not for the admonitory voice that emanated from it when another visitor ventured too close, ignoring the sign that implores: “Please do not touch.”
Here’s the Met’s online description of that fearsome weapon, pointed towards us as we enter the gallery:
Cast for Henry II of France (r. 1547–1559), this is one of very few royal pieces of ordnance known to survive from the French Renaissance, and among them it is one of the largest and also most profusely decorated examples. Of a type known as a couleuvrine bâtarde (a bastard culverin), it is the third largest of the six calibers Henry prescribed in 1552 for French royal ordnance.
Who knew?
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