Without any asterisks
What about when artists have histories of abusing women? Should we care? Should museums care?
When the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was preparing the wall text in 2014 to accompany an image of the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the museum decided to note that Mr. Mayweather had been “charged with domestic violence on several occasions,” receiving “punishments ranging from community service to jail time.”
Such context is common for controversial subjects in art. But far less so for artists themselves — centuries of men like Picasso or Schiele who were known for mistreating women, but whose works hang in prominent museums without any asterisks.
Now, museums around the world are wrestling with the implications of a decision, by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, to indefinitely postpone a Chuck Close exhibition because of allegations of sexual harassment involving potential portrait models that have engulfed the prominent artist in controversy. Mr. Close has called the allegations “lies” and said he is “being crucified.”
It’s a quandary. If the allegations are false, the postponement is unfair to Close. If they’re true…then what? Should we decide it’s just about what’s on the canvas?
It is a provocative moment for the art world, as the public debate about separating creative output from personal conduct moves from popular culture into the realm of major visual artists from different eras and the institutions that have long collected and exhibited their pieces.
“We’re very used to having to defend people in the collection, but it’s always been for the sitter” rather than the artist, said Kim Sajet, director of the Portrait Gallery, which has a large body of Mr. Close’s work. “Now we have to think to ourselves, ‘Do we need to do that about Chuck Close?’”
It partly depends on what the allegations are, I think. If we’re looking at paintings of people who were abused by the artist, I want to know that. (Balthus’s young neighbor in Paris for instance: we wondered what he did to her.)
“How much are we going to do a litmus test on every artist in terms of how they behave?” said Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, which collects Mr. Close’s work. “Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the 20th century in terms of his history with women. Are we going to take his work out of the galleries? At some point you have to ask yourself, is the art going to stand alone as something that needs to be seen?”
But one is tempted to think that’s easy for him to say.
Whatever museums ultimately decide to do about Mr. Close, some say they can no longer afford to simply present art without addressing the issues that surround the artist — that institutions must play a more active role in educating the public about the human beings behind the work.
“The typical ‘we don’t judge, we don’t endorse, we just put it up for people to experience and decide’ falls very flat in this political and cultural moment,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has Close works in its collection.
Maybe so, but then again this political and cultural moment could have it all wrong – it could be a moment of moral panic and overreaction.
The Floyd Merryweather case at the beginning suggests some alternative to silence or blacklisting: showing the pieces with an acknowledgment of the stains on the character and personal reputation of the artist or subject. It’s certain to do better educational work than silence, and nearly certain to do better than blackiisting. (Not that silence is off the table for trivia, or blacklisting is off it for [e.g.] child pornography done nicely in oils.)
An asterisk for a star artist? Why not.
As long as it’s not Goscenny&Uderzo, of Asterix fame!
Violence and cruelty directed towards people and animals are crimes in many, but not all, jurisdictions.
But as well, artists would likely fear that their images, reputations and incomes would suffer if the truth (ie the proper, undistorted, angels’s view truth) were known.
I for one get very angered by male violence against women, and from an early age I have regarded it as about as cowardly as it gets.
I have absolutely no respect for the perpetrators of it.
So it says it all if violent artists wish to keep their violence secret from their adoring publics out of fear for their reputations, self-images, sales and incomes.
The cowardly bastards deserve everything they don’t want.
Do I watch ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ or ‘Chinatown’ on TV or not? Roman Polanski took flight after pleading guilty to assaulting a 13 year old. A lot of people seem to ignore that fact and continue to refer to him as some sort of cinematic genius. Maybe, but that just makes him a sex offender cinematic genius. I might watch one of his old films on TV but I by God won’t ever spend a dime to see any work created after his conviction.
It would seem that a fair number of artists are bad people. Talent is no excuse for criminal or abhorrent behavior so artists certainly shouldn’t be above the law or moral code but does that taint the art? Is viewing art created by monsters morally related to things like using data from Nazi medical experiments? I don’t know.
Maybe a metaphor shows one option. A few years ago I was involved in an IT project where there was a huge amount of unstructured legacy data. The client wanted all of it dredged up and moved forward into the new system. We declined. We demonstrated to them the cost of that migration. Better to simply put a fork in the past and from this day forward manage the data correctly. Critical data could be used to inform relevant methods moving forward but in the end the client just had to accept that the cost of future business was to abandon some of the past.
Maybe that’s one option for us here. Experience the art of those who came before while accepting that historical actions were bad when viewed through a more enlightened and egalitarian lens, but hold the artists of today (through controlling the commercialization of their art) to the new standards.