National Portrait Gallery: Neither Virtue nor Beauty
Art might be many things, but it is not activism. Art ceases to be art when it is used as a propaganda tool by political actors, as it is now being used by Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery.
Ms. Sajet, a Dutch-Australian, who like many of her polite class, rose to prominence by manners and by the favors of affirmative action, not by her aesthetic sense, good taste, or patriotism. Just now in the District of Columbia there are three woman museum director activists, Sajet, Kawin Feldman (National Gallery of Art), and Stephanie Stebich (Smithsonian American Art Museum), well-heeled, high-heeled ladies who took art history classes in college, organized opening parties, enjoyed favors, but who have written nothing of note (or little at all) on subjects art historical because they have neither a scholar’s knowledge nor an aesthete’s taste.
When entering through the noble porch of Sajet’s National Portrait Gallery, you pass by the typical safety wands and measured glances to enter the gift shop, a place of bright colors, invitation to trinkets chosen for Progressive or Liberal ladies. Here you will not find books of serious art historical scholarship, but you will find books seriously to the Left—books of race, class, liberation, books to smash the patriarchy in the prettiest way. And there are pleasing fashions, colorful, feminine scarves and tee-shirts that offer the opinion “Art is Activism”, an opinion as banal as any found-on bumper-stickers. Yes, it seems that Sajet would transform museum visitors into the blue haired NPR devotees yet found in old Volvos.
Exiting the giftshop you enter the museum halls and serious instruction in patriarchy smashing, that angry game played by polite ladies and marauding youth on streets, in buildings, in institutions built by men for love of women and children and God. Yes, streets, buildings, and institutions actually built by strong men of bruised bone, bleeding knuckles, strained muscles, men of will and knowledge and virtue. I can picture these satisfied museum ladies perched comfy in their man-built office chairs spreading, spreading opinions, poor taste, and the privilege of exclusion.
In Spanish and in English you are notified:
“When the Portrait Gallery first opened, 17 percent of the objects in our collection were made by or portrayed women; today, that number has doubled. The recently acquired artworks displayed here signal the museum’s ongoing commitment to highlighting women’s achievements. Although we have made progress toward more equitable representation, there is still work to be done…
From the studio to the synagogue, the darkroom to the courtroom, the people represented by these portraits have transformed the way we see, hear, feel, and understand the world. Without these additions to our permanent collection, what histories would be missing?”
Many. Including the histories now distorted and denied. Notice that the word “object” is not “art”, that the museum is committed to “highlighting women’s achievements”, that the missing histories are the histories of a people devoted to God, goodness, and family. Without exception, the people of the portraits chosen by Sajet are political actors famous by virtue of flesh tone, V-crotch, “first” stickers, persons very much like Sajet, Feldman, and Stebich, persons (for the most part) of little merit who champion agitators devoted to activism, power, and celebrity.
You might know that the National Portrait Gallery shares its building with Stephanie Stebich’s Smithsonian American Art Museum, an institution devoted to patriarchy smashing. Stebich, wife to her wife, Anne-Imelda Marino Radice, a National Endowment of the Humanities analyst, is serious about excluding tradition, family, and God (the ultimate patriarch) from our American Art Museum. Here, a list of the museum’s current exhibitions:
American Art Museum
P. Ball and Robert S. Duncanson: An African American Artistic Collaboration
Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women
Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice
Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour — Frederick Douglass
Carrie Mae Weems, Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me – A Story in 5 Parts (a phantasmagoria of paranoia and prevarication)
The event of this day, 1 June 2024, “Pride Family Day”; of next week, “Conservation Workshop: Caring for Quilts”.
Art might be many things: an altarpiece, a broach, a symphony, a song, a verse, an epic, yet each of these things cease to be art when they become propaganda, tools for political actors, props in leftist narratives, baubles for socialites. Sure, altarpieces to epics retain their aesthetic qualities, as did Wagner’s Meistersinger when performed at Nazi rallies, but it was soiled, cheapened, made filthy in use. Just so, the high works of art exploited by DC’s museum ladies are cheapened by use. And worse, the wages of American citizens are assumed by these ladies to acquire what is for the most part, aesthetic trash, objects of political use rather than art of aesthetic virtue.
Civic art is necessary to civic virtue, this the cause of civic statues, civic museums, civic institutions, and this the reason for citizen funding through government appropriation. When statues, museums, institutions cease to inculcate civic virtue, we citizens should stop our financial and popular support. Political opinion and political activism are not virtues; they are campaigns, propaganda of a Progressive state. Citizens do not owe fealty to the Progressive state, we owe our loyalty to tradition, to God, the true, the good, the beautiful. The collecting patterns and exhibition events of this trio of activist directors has caused Washington, DC museums (our national museums) to become hateful megaphones, soapboxes for the envious and storehouses of the ugly.
National Portrait Gallery
Exhibitions
Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939
Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell
Promotions
Google Arts & Culture: Shaping History, Envisioning the Future: Public Art by Women
Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism
National Gallery of Art
Current and 2024 Exhibitions
In the Library: Latin American Architecture in Circulation
Dorothea Lange: Seeing People
Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper
Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940
The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
Renwick (also directed by S. Stebich)
Upcoming Events
Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women Open House
Michael J Curtis is a sculptor, poet, historian, Artist-in-Residence at the Common Sense Society whose recent books include Classical Architecture and Monuments of Washington, D.C. and Modern Art: An Exhibition in Criticism.
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Kaywin Feldman National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art Petting Zoo: Ms. Feldman’s Sorority Project
