To rectify centuries of imbalance, you have to do something radical.” “You don’t just purchase one painting by a female artist of color and hang it on the wall next to a painting by Mark Rothko. “This how you raise awareness and shift the identity of an institution,” proclaimed Christopher Bedford, BMA’s director. In 2020, the Baltimore Museum of Art, for example, will acquire works only by females and will stage only “female-centric” exhibits. The goal is “installations and institutions” that represent “people whom the system excludes and exploits.” The museum establishment hardly needed Walker’s prodding it has already enthusiastically embraced “diversity” as its artistic lodestar. This July, the Ford Foundation’s president labeled America’s museums “guardians of a fading social and demographic order.” Writing in the New York Times, Darren Walker urged museums to “resist reinforcing biases, hierarchies and inequalities” instead, they should “redefine excellence and relevance.” That redefinition entails hiring curators and other staff based on race. “That fraction now exceeds a quarter and is moving toward a third.” Another Journal critic congratulated MoMA for “rethinking its outdated history of modern art, which elevated white, male Americans and Western Europeans above all other artists.” “Previously, only about 1/20th of the art in the museum’s permanent collection was by women,” wrote the Journal’s Peter Plagens. When the Museum of Modern Art opened its renovated headquarters in New York City this October, a Wall Street Journal art critic noted that the new MoMA had been able to “correct, and even make reparations for, its heretofore almost exclusive parade of white male superstars.” Gender and race bean-counting is now the key to evaluating a collection’s worth. Gerhaher’s transcendent performance was a reminder of what is at stake.Ī few markers of our present moment: every arts institution in the United States is under pressure to discard meritocratic standards in collections, programming, and personnel, in favor of race and gender preferences.

While not as cataclysmic as 9/11, the current assault on the tradition that gave birth to those Mahler songs may prove more devastating over the long run. Last month, German baritone Christian Gerhaher’s recital of Mahler songs at Lincoln Center seemed no less momentous.

After 9/11, the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies at Carnegie Hall felt like a triumphant assertion of a civilizational inheritance in the face of lethal attack. Sometimes an artistic experience can assume an elevated sense of urgency due to its context.

Realm grinder arcane brilliance