Woke Barbarians Sack Art Institute Of ChicagoBy Rod Dreher
February 17, 2022
Heather MacDonald is here in Budapest this week. We were on a panel yesterday at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, where she, more forcefully than any of us, brought home to the Hungarian audience how embracing wokeness means the destruction of one’s civilization. I wish the Hungarians all had a copy of her recent City Journal piece on the self-immolation of the Art Institute of Chicago. It starts like this:
In 2012, the Art Institute of Chicago posted a tribute to its volunteer museum educators. “Our docents are incredible,” read the Facebook post. “ ‘To walk through the galleries and see children, led by docents, jumping up and raising their hands to talk is to see the work of the museum at its best,’ ” the entry continued, quoting then–Institute director Douglas Druick.
At that time, the Art Institute was still seeking to expand its docent corps. “We Want You! (To Become a Docent),” announced a contemporaneous article in the museum’s newsletter. The article emphasized the program’s rigor: becoming a docent “was no small task,” the museum advised, involving a competitive admissions process and written, supervised research on the museum’s collections.
Less than a decade later, in September 2021, the Art Institute shut down its docent program entirely and told its participants that they would no longer be allowed to serve the Institute in a volunteer capacity. Henceforth, six salaried part-time employees would replace the 82 unpaid educators. The docents were told to clean out their lockers; as a consolation prize, they were offered a two-year complimentary membership in the museum.
Had the docents been delivering subpar performances? Had the Institute discovered an incurable flaw in their training? No, it had noticed that they were overwhelmingly white. And that, in 2021, constituted a sin almost beyond redemption, whether found in an individual or in an institution.
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The Institute’s chairman, Robert Levy, offered a different explanation in a Chicago Tribune op-ed. The docents constituted a “barrier to engagement,” he wrote. The Institute was choosing to “center . . . our students across Chicago—as we take this unexpected moment to rethink, redraw and iterate.” Sacking the docents was an example of the “critical self-reflection and participatory, recuperative action” that is required for the Institute to remain relevant to “changing audiences.”
This euphemistic phraseology, too, requires translation. Put simply, the Institute terminated the docents because they were, as Rondeau put it in Iowa, “99 percent white females.” “Centering” Chicago’s students means not subjecting them to the trauma of learning about art from white females volunteering their time and energy. (Rondeau’s “99 percent” estimate was too high, but the hyperbole was born of shame and frustration.)
The Institute has thus reinforced the consensus among the nation’s elites that racial divides should be deepened rather than dissolved. Using white docents to serve “urban schools,” Rondeau said in Iowa, creates a “disconnect between the voices [that students] hear for interpretation and the population we’re trying to serve.” Never mind that the docents were connecting to students through the language of art and perception. Their voices are irredeemably white, and thus a barrier to engagement.
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The new antiracism mission of museums is not an outgrowth of the democratic impulse that inspired those institutions—it is its repudiation.
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Read the whole thing. Seriously, do. You might not be the sort of person who would go to a major art museum, but you are probably the kind of person who is glad that they exist, believing that they serve an important civilizational function. Well, wake up. They are now administered by people who hate them, who hate themselves, and who hate the civilization whose artifacts fill those museums. When Heather Mac Donald told the Hungarians yesterday that civilization is at stake in this struggle with wokeness, she was not exaggerating.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/woke-barbarians-sack-art-institute-of-chicago/
