Following the exhibition currently on display at the
taxpayer-funded National Portrait Gallery (“Hide/Seek: Difference
and Desire in American Portraiture”), the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C. is planning several additional exhibitions,
including one in March on art and literature celebrating adultery,
infidelity, and illegitimacy in America and one later in the year
that will compare and contrast adult/pubescent male relationships
in the United States and in ancient Greece. The exhibitions are
part of a ten-month-long exploration of “Cultural Anomalies in
Modern American Life” — referred to by insiders as “Operation
Mainstreaming.”
Of course “Hide/Seek”–type exhibitions are hardly news. In
1989 an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs toured the
country for several months before running into a buzz saw of
opposition just before arriving at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of
Art.
Speaking for the Smithsonian Institution, Mr. Wall Plaque
indicated that its museums must make way for controversial
subjects. Plaque stated flatly that we must be “committed to
showing how a major theme in American history has been the struggle
for justice, so that people and groups can claim their full
inheritance in America’s promise of equality, inclusion, and social
dignity.”
“Hide/Seek,” the first of these exhibitions to be mounted,
opened last October 30. According to Blake Gopnik, art critic for
the Washington Post, the “Hide/Seek” show “surveys how
same-sex love has been portrayed in art, from Walt Whitman’s hints
to open declarations in the era of AIDS and Robert Mapplethorpe’s
bullwhips. Amazingly, this is the first major museum show to tackle
the topic.”
Less amazingly, it received much unwanted publicity just
before Christmas. The first group to object was the Catholic League
for Religious and Civil Rights, which objected to a video
containing an eleven-second clip of ants crawling over a crucifix.
“Why should the federal government underwrite an institution that
uses money to bash [Christianity], when it is unconstitutional for
the federal government to underwrite the promotion of it?” the
League asked. The segment was removed, but Martin Sullivan, the
director of the National Portrait Gallery, got his licks in later
in a National Public Radio interview by referring, if obliquely, to
the League as among “the loudest and nastiest voices.”
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which
provided $100,000 in funding for “Hide/Seek,” threatened to
withdraw all future funding from the National Portrait Gallery if
the eleven-second clip were not restored, which, to date, it has
not been.
After the Catholic League’s protest, others objected to
the exhibition on the grounds that its attempt to mainstream
homosexuality was inappropriate for an institution supported by the
taxpayers.
Following the publicity over “Hide/Seek” and the public’s
learning of the two exhibitions scheduled for later this year (“Sex
without Rules” and “Men and Boys: From Here to Antiquity”), other
groups started gearing up to take on the Smithsonian. A Smithsonian
official defended the exhibitions, saying: “America is a land where
minorities can make it into the mainstream. We believe in, and we
believe in believing in, inclusiveness. Achieving social dignity is
part of the promise of equality.”
The numbers are interesting. While only a small percentage
of Americans are homosexuals (many put the number at around 2
percent), about 22 percent of American married men and 15 percent
of married women are thought to have committed adultery.
“It’s not just a numbers game,” the official said. “It’s
about intellectual freedom, and sharing its fruits with the wider
public. ‘Hide/Seek’ is about same-sex desire. ‘Sex without Rules’
will be about a common form of illicit desire. ‘Men and Boys,’
about a less common form. If you can have the first show, why can’t
you have the others? They all tackle themes outside of the cultural
mainstream.”
That cultural mainstream, especially regarding marriage
(long considered vital to Western civilization) has been
significantly diverted in the last few decades. Recent Census
Bureau data show that in 2009, for the first time, the proportion
of people between the ages of 25 and 34 who have never been married
exceeded those who were married. And the long-term slide in
marriage rates has pushed the proportion of married adults of all
ages down to 52 percent, the lowest count since records have been
kept. The change in marriage habits has been most pronounced among
those who lack a college education. Also, the country’s overall
illegitimacy rate is now 38 percent; the black illegitimacy rate,
72 percent.
The question for Smithsonian officials is: Should they be
a force driving those cultural changes? Should
they use their semi-governmental positions and expend their
reputational capital (and taxpayer funds) to confer—or, more
accurately, try to confer—”mainstream” status on behavior that most
Americans think is aberrant and on notions of history that are
decidedly on the fringes?
Ah, but when they hear the word culture they reach for
their briefcases, and for them the discussion is
over.
* * * *
*
Note to reader: Only the Hide/Seek exhibition referred
in this piece is genuine. The others are fictitious, as are some of
the quotes from “Smithsonian officials” (Martin Sullivan’s quote
and the quote from the plaque on the wall of the “Hide/Seek”
exhibition are genuine). When I showed the piece to several
Washington friends, they were all fooled by my spoof. Even though
“Sex without Rules” and “Men and Boys: From Here to Antiquity” are
outrageous, my friends believed my account, and you may have too,
because those exhibitions are — or would be — of a piece with the
“Hide/Seek” exhibition actually on view. You are ready, and right,
to believe anything about the Smithsonian because you have
concluded, correctly in my view, that it has gone over to the other
side in the culture war. That’s the point of this
piece.
