In Defense of Philip Guston

 

Musa Mayer has been “holed up” in Woodstock, upstate New York, which she describes as “a liberal community in the midst of Trump land”, since the beginning of lockdown in March of last year. She is staying in a house she inherited from her parents and nearby is a building that was once the art studio of her father, Philip Guston. It is now the Guston Foundation, which she established in 2013 to promote his work and further his legacy. Of late, she has had her hands full.

 
Last September Mayer answered a call from Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, one of four galleries (including Tate Modern in London) that had agreed to host Philip Guston Now, a much anticipated touring retrospective of her father’s work. It had been scheduled to open in Washington DC in July, but had been pushed back to 2021 by the pandemic. Now, to Mayer’s astonishment, Teitelbaum informed her that he and the other three museum directors had decided to postpone the exhibition until 2024. (They have since announced it will go ahead from May 2022.)
 
“I was just stunned,” she says. “The show had taken over four years to put together, everything was in place, the catalogue had already been published, and suddenly they had decided it was not happening.”
 
In a subsequent phone call with Teitelbaum and Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, she discovered that the decision was prompted by their anxieties about a series of paintings of Ku Klux Klansmen that Guston had made in his Woodstock studio in the late 1960s. In a deliberately raw, cartoonish style, he had rendered them as absurdist caricatures of the real thing, their pointy-hooded heads an extension of their squat, sickly pink torsos, their eyes two rectangular brush strokes.
 
“The potent images of Ku Klux Klansmen, masked and unpunished, had lingered in Guston’s psyche since boyhood,” writes Mayer in Philip Guston, her newly published book about her father’s life and work. In 1930, just turned 20, he had first painted them in a much more straightforward figurative style for an anti-racist mural commissioned by a leftwing association in Los Angeles. It had subsequently been defaced in a raid by members of the “Red Squad”, a local police unit known to have officers sympathetic to white supremacists.
 
As Mayer is keen to point out, Guston’s later paintings of Klansmen, which the gallery directors deemed problematic, have been included in countless exhibitions over the last few decades without attracting adverse attention. Last September, though, in the heightened, fractious atmosphere of election year, and in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, their potential to offend or cause pain to black visitors became the central issue for the galleries. It later transpired that it was security staff working for Washington’s National Gallery of Art who had first expressed concern about their “painful” subject matter.
 
On 21 September, about a week after Teitelbaum and Feldman had spoken privately to Mayer, all four museum directors issued a public statement on the website of the National Galley of Art, Washington. It began: “After a great deal of reflection and extensive consultation, our four institutions have jointly made the decision to delay our successive presentations of Philip Guston Now. We are postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” The decision, they said, was rooted in “a responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment”.
 
The statement did little to placate Mayer’s concerns and she is still struggling to make sense of the their loss of nerve. “I was baffled by their reasons,” she says. “The issues they raised were all fully addressed in the catalogue, in which two black artists were among the many contributors who had written brilliantly about the work. Those same issues would have, or should have, been addressed in the contextualisation that was done for the exhibition. They certainly had the time to do that. I think they were simply afraid. I felt it was the wrong decision then. And I still do.”

 
As soon became clear in the rising clamour of protest at the decision, she was not alone. By attempting to preempt a possible controversy, the gallery directors had provoked an even bigger one that placed them in direct confrontation with most artists, curators and commentators. As Observer art critic Laura Cumming recently told me: “You would be hard pressed to find anyone in the art world who agrees with that decision.”
A headline in ARTnews – “Philip Guston Show Postponement Met With Shock and Anger” – caught the prevailing mood. Within days, the Brooklyn Rail newspaper published an open letter condemning the decision; it was signed by around 100 artists, curators, gallerists and writers. (It now has more than 1,600 signatories.)
 
On Instagram, an impassioned Mark Godfrey, Tate Modern’s curator of the exhibition, posted his thoughts on the cancellation. Among other things, he pointed out that, contrary to what was implied by the directors, he and his fellow curators had “re-addressed how we would present the work featuring the Klan imagery in a manner sensitive to these times”. He went on to describe the tone of the directors’ statement as “extremely patronising to viewers, who are assumed not to be able to appreciate the nuance and politics of Guston’s work”. Soon afterwards, news leaked out that Godfrey had been suspended by the Tate.
 
As the controversy spiralled into the mainstream, the Times published a scathing column by David Aaronovitch under the headline “The Tate is guilty of cowardly self-censorship”. This prompted a response from Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate, and Francis Morris, director of Tate Modern, in which they rebutted Aaronovitch’s accusation, but more or less admitted that the decision had been made by the American museums and they had had no real choice but to go along with it. They made clear, however, that they fully supported the decision. It had been taken, they explained, “in response to the volatile climate in the US over race equality and representation” at “a time when ‘ownership’ of representation has never been more contested”. That much, at least, is true, and they had some support from a conflicted Peter Schjeldahl, who amid a tortuous argument with himself in the New Yorker, wrote: “A time-out to recontextualize does not … constitute cowardice at a national institution.”
 
In America, though, two seemingly conflicting messages were emerging from the museum directors at the centre of the storm. On the one hand, a placatory Teitelbaum all but admitted that the problem lay with them, not Guston, and reiterated the need to “thoughtfully reconsider how the work could be presented”. On the other hand, Feldman told Hyperallergic magazine that Guston’s images were problematic because he had “appropriated images of black trauma”. It is worth pointing out here that, in his later paintings, Guston resolutely avoided depicting scenes of racial violence, instead presenting the Klansmen as bumbling, lumpen everymen, the very epitome of the banality of evil – white evil.
 
A trustee of the NGA, Darren Walker, who is also president of the Ford Foundation, a major donor to art institutions in America, went further, saying: “What those who criticise this decision do not understand, is that in the past few months the context in the US has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it.”
 

To Mayer’s dismay, her father, an antiracist and the son of immigrants who had fled antisemitic persecution, was now having his complex images misrepresented and their subject matter rendered simplistically provocative. “The history of racism in the United States,” she told me, “is one of periods when it is submerged in the popular consciousness, followed by periods of great unrest, like the present one, when it is manifest and no one can deny its existence. My father made those works at a time when the Ku Klux Klan were no longer as menacing as they had been in his youth, but racism was still, of course, a presence in the consciousness of mainstream white America. The paintings are essentially about white culpability – the culpability of all of us, including himself. That is why he referred to some of them as self-portraits. He wasn’t just pointing the finger at others, he was pointing it at himself. What hope is there if artists cannot examine theirselves?”
 
In the catalogue for Guston Now, Glenn Ligon is one of two black artists who directly engages with this prescient aspect of Guston’s work. In an essay ironically titled In the Hood, he explores the dramatic shift from figurative painting to abstraction that underpinned Guston’s later Klan images and led him, in Ligon’s words, “to explore issues of domestic terrorism, white hegemony and white complicity”. For Ligon, Guston’s Klan work challenged the unspoken idea that “living in a country built on white supremacy could leave you unmarked”. He concludes by describing Guston’s “hood” paintings as “woke”.
 
In another illuminating catalogue text, Trenton Doyle Hancock, a black artist whose style draws on graphic novel and cartoon imagery, addresses Guston’s early Klan paintings from the 1930s. “Just as Guston engaged historical sympathies, I have found my way to a new meaning by engaging Guston,” he writes, citing a series of paintings he made in 2016 that sprang from the question: “What if my character Torpedo Boy, a black superhero, met up with Guston’s Klansmen?”
 
Guston’s long journey into such complex, and resoundingly contemporary, subject matter began when he was a young man in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. Back then, membership of the Ku Klux Klan was in the millions and their hatred was not reserved for black people, but included communists, Catholics and Jews. What’s more, their threatening presence was being felt not just in the south, but in cities like Los Angeles. As the son of Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Ukraine, hewas a potential target for their hatred and, as a young leftwing artist, the defacing of his anti-Klan mural had been a formative experience.
 
Abandoning figurative painting in the late 40s, Guston built a reputation through the 50s and 60s as an abstract impressionist of the New York School, though he was not as well known as the likes of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock, all of whom were his friends. In 1968, when he turned away from abstraction, his decision was prompted by a period of acute self-questioning.

 

“When the 1960s came along,” he later said, “I was feeling split. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything … and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.”
 
Guston was particularly disturbed by television footage of the police violence against protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. For him, the Klan may have faded from view to a great degree by then, but many who sympathised with white supremacy were hiding in plain sight. “Unlike the images he made in the 30s, the new hooded figures did more than just refer to Klansmen,” says Mark Godfrey. “They needed to do more work for him as symbols of the extremism of some of the followers of Richard Nixon or Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, those who concealed their real intentions behind the mask of mainstream politics.”
 
Guston’s Klan paintings caused controversy when they were first exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan in 1970, but in a way that seems surprising now. Back then, it was their style rather than their subject matter that shocked the art world. Gone were the thoughtful abstractions that had made his name, replaced by paintings that seemed wilfully inept to many of his many fellow artists as well as the critics. The work was variously dismissed as “crude”, “simplistic”,” embarrassing” and, in a blistering New York Times review, headlined “A Mandarin Pretending To Be a Stumblebum”, Guston was even accused of being a fake indulging in radical chic.
 
His crime, as the art historian David Anfam would later point out, was to have “betrayed the ideals of the form in which he had made his name”. In the few instances in which Guston’s subject matter was addressed, it was judged to be almost embarrassingly passé. In a Time magazine review pointedly titled “Ku Klux Komix”, a bemused Robert Hughes asked: “Who now takes the Klan as a real political force?” Hughes went on to castigate the paintings for their political message, which, in his opinion, was “as simple-minded as the bigotry they denounce”. Though scathing, Hughes did recognise the metaphorical thrust of Guston’s hooded figures, pointing out that they were “not to be taken as symbols of a pervasive present threat, but as generalised symbols of inhumanity”.
 

 

Hughes’s take is interesting, not least because, like every other critic who panned the show, it never entered his mind to question Guston’s right to create such potentially provocative imagery. Nor did he question the gallery’s right to exhibit the paintings or their responsibility to visitors who might feel offended or emotionally disturbed by the subject matter. That, in itself, may be an index of the whiteness and insularity of the New York art world of the time. Fifty years later, things have changed, if way too slowly. Writing in the Atlantic, Shirley Li noted that, while conversations about inclusivity are nothing new in the art world, “the controversy surrounding the Guston show is one of the clearest indications yet that the national reckoning over race has permeated the country’s cultural institutions in a way that’s impossible to ignore”.
 
Back in 1970, Willem de Kooning was one of the few present at the Marlborough opening who grasped the full import of the work. He congratulated Guston, saying: “Do you know what the real subject is, Philip? Freedom!” When Guston recounted the story later, Musa Mayer recalls, he said: “That’s the only possession the artist has – freedom to do whatever you can imagine.”
 
That freedom, once taken for granted as one of the foundations of artistic expression, may be in the process of becoming unimaginable. It is being challenged most urgently by those who have long not been afforded the same platform to express themselves in an art world that, for all the conversations about diversity, is still defined to a great degree by the lack of it. Belatedly those issues are being addressed, but, as the controversy surrounding Guston’s work shows, it feels as if the art can too easily be made to carry the can for the failings of the institutions created to serve it, as well as their public, in a respectful way.
 
For Musa Mayer, the decision to bring forward the Guston Now exhibition, to next year instead of 2024, is heartening, but she still has concerns. “I want the show to reflect the whole span of my father’s work and to find a meaningful way to put the paintings that were deemed controversial in perspective. That needs to be done in a way that does not reduce their complexity.” She is worried, too, about the long-term effect on her father’s reputation. “Given all the publicity engendered by the controversy,” she says, “people will certainly recognise the name Philip Guston, but is that all they will know him for?”
 
Philip Guston's daughter on his Klan paintings: 'They're about white culpability – including his own'. By Sean O’Hagan.  The Guardian , February  21, 2021.

Mark Godfrey, a star curator at Tate Modern in London and a co-organizer of “Philip Guston Now,” has been suspended by his museum for speaking out against the show’s postponement.

 
The show, which was set the travel between the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Tate, was pushed back for several years by the institutions in a joint decision last month over concerns about Guston’s depictions of Ku Klux Klansmen.
 
Shortly after the announcement, Godfrey took to Instagram to blast the decision.
 
“Cancelling or delaying the exhibition is probably motivated by the wish to be sensitive to the imagined reactions of particular viewers, and the fear of protest,” Godfrey wrote. “However, it is actually extremely patronizing to viewers, who are assumed not to be able to appreciate the nuance and politics of Guston’s works.”
 
Three sources close to the Tate told the Art Newspaper, which broke the story, that the decision to discipline Godfrey was directly related to his comments.
 
“If you work at Tate, you are expected to toe the party line,” an anonymous source told the publication. “There is very little tolerance for dissent and an increasingly autocratic managerial style.”
 
The museum did not reply to Artnet News’s request for comment. An email to Godfrey returned an out-of-office message. But at least some outside commentators, including the art historian Michael Lobel, have criticized his suspension.
  
Initially delayed from June 2020, the exhibition was supposed to open in July 2021 at the National Gallery of Art.
 
In September, the museums hosting the show issued a statement announcing a postponement to 2024, citing the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police in May.
 
“As issues of race and social justice have become increasingly part of public dialogue over the last several months, it became apparent we needed to rethink our interpretation of these works,” the museums told Artnet News at the time.
 
The postponement proved immediately controversial, igniting a debate over race, censorship, and social justice. Over 2,600 art professionals signed an open letter demanding the museums open the exhibition next year as originally planned.
 
The exhibition was set to include 125 paintings and 70 drawings, including 25 works featuring KKK figures. To contextualize those works, the curators had solicited texts by African American artists Glenn Ligon and Trenton Doyle Hancock, whose recent show at James Cohan Gallery in New York featured paintings with Klan figures inspired by Guston’s work.
 
Critics say Guston’s embrace of Klan imagery was meant to remind viewers that white people are complicit in the systemic racism that permeates the US.
 
“[Guston] was appalled by the rightwing turn in America and wanted to reflect on white supremacy: how evil is concealed by hoods, how evil might succeed through its banality,” Godfrey wrote in his Instagram post. “But he also felt compelled to imagine himself behind the hood. Can one be white in America and remain untarnished by such forces, he asked.”
 
Tate Has Suspended Curator Mark Godfrey for Openly Criticizing Its Decision to Postpone the Philip Guston Show He Co-Organized. By  Sarah Cascone. ArtNet News ,  October 28, 2020

For the last weeks, the museum world has been locked in intense, multi-fronted debate over race, self-censorship, social justice, appropriation, cancel culture, and a lot more, after the National Gallery of Art and three other museums suddenly postponed a long-planned retrospective, “Philip Guston Now.” Writing about it would be easier if I had a simple, pick-a-side kind of take. Emotional and unambiguous calls to action are what carry in this news environment. Basically, either “Guston Must Go” or “‘Philip Guston Now’… Now!”

 
My impulse is more that I need to understand why the debate is taking the form that it is, then to try to work through what that means.
 
The issue at hand is whether this artist’s critically lauded paintings of goofy-sinister, Klan-hooded cartoon figures would have been insensitive to show now, despite the fact that Guston intended them to be—and they have always been read as being—about the banal evils of white racism. Speaking to my colleague Julia Halperin last week, National Gallery of Art director Kaywin Feldman related the cancellation to the current conversation museums are having about Black Lives Matter and their moves towards greater diversity, as well as the NGA’s own shoddy past treatment of its frontline workers. They can’t afford, right now, a scandal about racial insensitivity if they hope to advance on those fronts. Perhaps adding a Black curator to the Guston show, she has theorized, might open up perspectives that make it more defensible.
 
These questions about the whiteness of the museum—and art in general—are really important ones. But it seems to me that the drive to increase diversity has to be approached as a good in and of itself. Framing those efforts as being about containing controversy puts a lot of pressure on Black staff and Black artists. And increasing diversity and sensitivity alone is not likely to solve the larger problems museums are facing, since museums exist in the midst of a very unequal and increasingly enflamed world.
 
I think of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s account, in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, about how in the 1960s and ‘70s, the US elected its first wave of Black mayors on the back of the Civil Rights movement—just in time for them to have to preside over the urban crisis and impose austerity on Black communities. Something like that is in danger of happening now. Because museums are facing existential crises of all kinds.
 
The statement announcing the rescheduling of “Philip Guston Now” said that it would be returned at “a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” What, then, are the conditions for such a “clear” interpretation? When—outside of a major cooling off of social tensions that doesn’t at all look to be on the horizon—can we expect this?
 
Clearly, there are a host of factors at play here, not all of which I am qualified to talk about. I want to add two concepts to the discussion of the competing new pressures museums are under: “context collapse” and “paranoid reading.”
 
The former leads me to believe that the situation reflects more objective pressures than are conceded by those who think the NGA has simply suffered a loss of nerve and should just tough it out.
 
The latter makes me think that there are more subjective choices to think through than those who argue that today’s climate makes Guston’s art simply too incendiary to be seen.
 
Context Collapse
 
The importance of context is one of the big themes of contemporary art: context makes meaning. But the museum has lost its ability to control context. The gallery experience and professional art discourse don’t center the “cultural conversation” anymore; the trending social media conversation clearly dominates. Whatever conversation is happening online is, effectively, the overriding context and provides the “real” meaning for the largest and therefore the most decisive audience.
 
The term “context collapse” is used to refer to the situation, characteristic of social media, where you cannot control the interpretive context for an utterance or an image. Nuance does not work well here. Any free-floating meaning is bound to be filled in by whatever community it intersects with. Original intention is easily overwritten.
 
Cross-reference with the volatile online context then potentially reframes how everything is encountered offline. At its most sinister, this collapse of contextual mooring makes it possible that large numbers of Americans now believe an online theory that Marina Abramović’s art is a literal portal to hell. Some determined 4chan trolls even managed to manipulate online context to such an extent that the ordinary “OK” hand gesture has been classified as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.
 
Meanwhile, images of art are now consumed in a feed in which people are also near-constantly seeing breaking-news horrors, creating new pressures on art’s meaning. In a 2016 essay, historian and Freedom Dreams author Robin D.G. Kelley tried to look, sympathetically but critically, at the limits of the new campus activist focus on getting rid of triggering material. Describing his own generation of activist-scholars, Kelley wrote, “it never occurred to us to refuse to read a text simply because it validated the racism, sexism, free-market ideology, and bourgeois liberalism against which we railed. Nothing was off limits. On the contrary, delving into these works only sharpened our critical faculties.”
 
But Kelley also framed the new sensitivities as rooted in a historically new situation, the objectively changed infrastructure of communication:
 
“Activists framed their concerns and grievances in the language of personal trauma. We shouldn’t be surprised. While every generation of Black Americans has experienced unrelenting violence, this is the first one compelled to witness virtually all of it, to endure the snuffing out of Black lives in real time, looped over and over again, until the next murder knocks it off the news. We are also talking about a generation that has lived through two of the longest wars in US history, raised on a culture of spectacle where horrific acts of violence are readily available on their smartphones.”
 
Museums were wrestling with the implications of this volatile situation well before the current social crisis. Thus, at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (the one that followed the 2017 protests over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket), wall labels were brimming with attempts to get ahead of any news development that could transfigure the art’s meaning.
 
 
A 2018 Todd Gray photo sculpture incorporating a reference to Michael Jackson had a label that explained: “Michael Jackson was accused of child sexual abuse in 1993 and then tried and acquitted for the crime in 2005. New allegations surfaced in a documentary released on HBO earlier in 2019.” Text for a painting by Jeanette Mundt of female gymnasts was compelled to note: “Not long after Mundt began this series, which she continues to work on, news broke that the USA Gymnastics national team doctor sexually abused many young gymnasts including the women who appear here.”
 
Unfortunately, while the now paper-thin membrane between art spaces and the news renders the museums’ postponement of Guston understandable, this same situation also renders the museums’ proposed solutions long shots. All of them—including the addition of a Black curator—center on forms of contextualization.
 
Kaywin Feldman of the NGA told Artnet News, “there needs to be context around his work showing the hooded figures.” But she also said that “it’s flawed to say that museums have to make audiences understand our scholarly interpretation of the work.” That’s a deadlock.

  
Paranoid Reading
 
One of the most-cited statements in support of the postponement of “Philip Guston Now” came from NGA trustee Darren Walker, head of the Ford Foundation, an institution that has been driving the conversation about inclusion in the arts. He, again, was explicit that the changing conversation demanded new contextualization:
 
“An exhibition organized several years ago, no matter how intelligent, must be reconsidered in light of what has changed to contextualize in real time. I agree with the decision to postpone the exhibition so that the museums can ensure that we sensitively and thoughtfully present the works and accompanying public programs. By not taking a step back to address these issues, the four museums would have appeared tone deaf to what is happening in public discourse about art.”
 
The call for more context was almost immediately rendered ironic when Walker followed up on Twitter with this: “In a recent interview, I used the term ‘tone deaf’ inappropriately & out of context from its literal definition.” He continued in a series of tweets to apologize at length, concluding, “I am deeply sorry and personally pledge to do better.”
 
Language changes, and that’s a good thing. But the term “tone deaf” is not widely understood to be offensive; the most widely cited guides to sensitive language offer no specific references to it. Nevertheless, here is Darren Walker, one of the most powerful people in the arts, compelled not just to issue a note but a full-on public apology, as if he were a celebrity who had been caught on camera in a bigoted tirade.
 
The increasing spiral of scrutiny makes me think of the essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” by the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It’s a dense but important read, informed by psychoanalysis, and I’ve been struck by how much it resonates with the widely shared sense of how unwieldy social-media politics has become. Writing in the 2000s, well before the social-media age, Sedgwick was trying to show the problems with the tendency towards what she called “paranoid reading” across a variety of leftist academic discourses, from Marxist criticism to feminist studies to New Historicism to queer theory.
 
A “paranoid reading” was any style of interpretation in which, no matter the object at hand, the exposure of its secret negative side would recur as the main point of interpretation. To be clear: Sedgwick was a lefty. She was very much not making the argument that culture wasn’t full of hidden structures of oppression and power. She was saying that the impulse to point out what was “problematic” was a particular theoretical style people absorb in a variety of academic settings, that created a particular climate of reading and receiving culture, with a particular structure and set of consequences that were worth understanding.
 
Among other things, “paranoid reading” was characterized by exactly the kind of anticipatory quality we now see in the museum discussion: “The first imperative of paranoia is There must be no bad surprises.” The worst thing, within this style of reading culture, is to have been accused of having missed evidence of something bad, and failing to flag it for others; therefore, the paranoid reader shaped their own personal aesthetic reactions on behalf of an imagined third party. The style lent itself to the kind of argument based, not around the fact that an association is there, but that someone else might make an association.
 
The consequence, as Sedgwick put it in a memorable phrase, is that this kind of critical disposition “seems to grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand.” Which is exactly the case when the projected mis-construal of the Guston drawings of Klan-inspired figures completely dominates every other potential approach to the show.
 
I think that this much bigger issue is the unspoken subtext of a lot of the fierce critical pushback to the Guston postponement: a widespread but otherwise inarticulable sense among many artists and writers that art discourse has become a referendum on larger injustices in a way that has crowded out all other “ways of understanding or things to understand.”
 
 Is Now a Good Time?
 
The good that a Philip Guston show could do for the world is modest, in the big scheme of things. I doubt that his paintings and drawings, as fascinating as they are, would change many minds as anti-racist propaganda. That’s not really what they were made to do, and framing art in such directly instrumental terms does art no favors. By contrast, as a goal, avoiding potential hurt seems like a very tangible good.
 
But part of why I find Sedgwick’s framework useful is that she focuses on the ways that the “paranoid reading” style also imposes its own political costs. In being so total, she argued, it lost sense of a balance of where to direct energies, and thus ended up as a poor tool for building “effective oppositional strategy” to combat rising, openly reactionary forces.
 
“I’m a lot less worried about being pathologized by my therapist than about my vanishing mental health coverage—and that’s given the great good luck of having health insurance at all,” she wrote. (I am sure Sedgwick also cared about therapeutic bias; I think she’s saying that it’s a matter of prioritizing efforts.)
 
“It’s not a good time for rational discussion,” Feldman said of the timing for the Guston show. But it’s not a great moment to be perceived as “cancelling” a show either. “Cancel culture” is the most emotionally resonant issue that the extreme right has going for it as it fights to woo people in these turbulent times. A solid majority of the US public thinks it is a problem: 56 percent of Americans think it is a “very big” or “somewhat big” problem, including 79 percent of Republicans, 58 percent of independents, and 47 percent of Democrats. This is why Trump and his allies harp on it so much.
 
Ben Shapiro, the to-my-ears repellant and mediocre conservative commentator whose slogan is “facts don’t care about your feelings,” has grown unimaginably popular for pointing out the seeming contradictions of social-justice culture. The New York Times noted that Shapiro got more interactions on his Facebook page in August than the main pages of ABC News, NBC News, the New York Times, the Washington Post and NPR combined.
 
To be clear, I do think some of the “cancel culture” scare is just powerful people whining about being criticized online. When the National Review writes, of the Guston affair, that “today, the Cancel Culture is the Ku Klux Klan, this time with college degrees,” that’s as warped an alternate-universe view, in its way, as the idea that Marina Abramović is a high priestess of Satan—the author knows that the KKK actually murdered Black people, right?
 
But halting a show by a white artist about how the Klan is bad for being racially insensitive is custom-designed to make the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd look like the reasonable defenders of nuance. As A. Sivanandan long ago argued, redirecting so much liberal energy into the terrain of symbolism “played into the hands of the Right and provided them the modicum of truth necessary to sustain the Loony Left image in the public mind.”
 
In fact, this was the exact point of 4chan’s effort to troll people into paranoia about the “OK” symbol. “Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy,” wrote one of the original engineers of the campaign. “We must force [them] to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that shit.”
 
I don’t know the exact math by which you balance the good of avoiding genuine anguish against the bad of isolating anti-racist sentiment from wider layers of sympathetic people—but the latter is not an imaginary danger.
 

 Narrative Consequences
 
Our disintegrating world offers daily evidence of hostility to Black and other oppressed people. Again, what I like about Sedgwick’s framework is that she clearly separates her critique from one that denies these facts.
 
Her alternative to paranoid reading was what she called “reparative reading.” This was a style of reading (or looking at) the cultural object with an eye for what there was to love in it, for giving the benefit of the doubt, looking for the places where a detail might surprise you or be read against the grain. Neither way of reading was “right.” The paranoid style, she thought, was almost synonymous with social criticism; the reparative style could also be “depressive,” that is, it could involve repressing issues that needed to be dealt with.
 
But the domination of the paranoid style, Sedgwick also thought, tended to make gear-switching between critical and sympathetic postures more and more difficult: “Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’).” Sedgwick never explains why paranoid theory might have gained so much purchase in the arts and humanities, which you would think might be more invested in celebrating the “merely aesthetic.” I think that it might have to do with disciplinary insecurity—under attack and afraid of being painted as frivolous, it’s easy to reach for theories of unbending seriousness.
 
I hope that the NGA can find itself to a place where it can institutionally stand behind “Philip Guston Now.” Perhaps, once you have identified “context collapse” as an objective problem, then you can rethink the presentation of the art in the galleries. Maybe “extreme contextualization” might make a difference as a counterweight to extreme decontextualization—literal moral sign-posting to make the museum’s take on a potential controversy so crystal clear that it can’t reasonably be read out of context. I’m ambivalent about this idea: this form of display is likely to look as unnecessarily obvious and clunky, to those used to the clean white cube, as sentence-length web-media headlines seem compared to old-school poetic magazine headlines; the former are exactly designed to read in the contextless stream of digital space.
 
Alternatively, once you think about “paranoid reading” as a particular critical habit of mind, then maybe it’s possible to claim reparative alternatives without them being framed only as a conservative “return to pure art.” It is possible to think of art less as imposition of propaganda—good or bad—and more as an opportunity to build forms of dialogue about important matters that are less self-isolating. But frankly, I don’t know if professional museums (or professional art commentators) have the credibility to pull this off, given how high the stakes have become. For his part, Robin D.G. Kelley was calling for community-based study groups as the basis for “intellectual communities held together by principle and love” as the lever that might shift discourse in a productive direction.
 
These are big, difficult tasks without quick or readymade answers. Picking apart the objective and subjective factors at play is not at all easy, least of all in a situation as polarized and demanding of clear sides as the one that we are in now.
 
The Strongest Reactions to the Philip Guston Show’s Postponement Miss Two Key Points. Here’s What They Are—and Why They Matter. By Ben Davis. ArtNet News , October  15, 2020.

 

We were shocked and disappointed to read the news that the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Tate Modern, London, had postponed by four years their planned exhibition Philip Guston Now, which had already been delayed until 2021 by the COVID-19 lockdown. The reason for the postponement? The explanation given by the directors of the four institutions in their initial announcement and in a later clarification expresses anxiety about the response that might be unleashed by certain paintings in which Guston depicts Ku Klux Klansmen, and their preference to “reframe [their] programming and … step back and bring in additional perspectives and voices to shape how [they] present Guston’s work to [their] public.” These institutions thus publicly acknowledge their longstanding failure to have educated, integrated, and prepared themselves to meet the challenge of the renewed pressure for racial justice that has developed over the past five years. And they abdicate responsibility for doing so immediately—yet again. Better, they reason, to “postpon[e] the exhibition until a time” when the significance of Guston’s work will be clearer to its public.

 
The best riposte to the museum directors’ failure of nerve is conveyed by quoting Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, as reported in the New York Times: “My father dared to unveil white culpability, our shared role in allowing the racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood, when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles. As poor Jewish immigrants, his family fled extermination in the Ukraine. He understood what hatred was. It was the subject of his earliest works. […] This should be a time of reckoning, of dialogue. These paintings meet the moment we are in today. The danger is not in looking at Philip Guston’s work, but in looking away.”
 
Rarely has there been a better illustration of “white” culpability than in these powerful men and women’s apparent feeling of powerlessness to explain to their public the true power of an artist’s work—its capacity to prompt its viewers, and the artist too, to troubling reflection and self-examination. But the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience. And they realize that to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves—about their class and racial foundations. For this reason, perhaps, those who run the museums feel the ground giving way beneath their feet. If they feel that in four years, “all this will blow over,” they are mistaken. The tremors shaking us all will never end until justice and equity are installed. Hiding away images of the KKK will not serve that end. Quite the opposite. And Guston’s paintings insist that justice has never yet been achieved.
 
In the face of an action such as that taken by these four august institutions, we ask ourselves, as private individuals, what we can do. We can speak out, certainly. But we must do more. We demand that Philip Guston Now be restored to the museums’ schedules, and that their staffs prepare themselves to engage with a public that might well be curious about why a painter—ever self-critical and a standard-bearer for freedom—was compelled to use such imagery. That does not permit the museums to fall back on the old discredited stance: “We are the experts. Our job is to show you what’s of value in art and your part is to appreciate it.” It means that museums must engage in a reckoning with history, including their own histories of prejudice. Precisely in order to help take that effort of reckoning forward, the Philip Guston Now exhibition must proceed as planned, and the museums must do the necessary work to present this art in all its depth and complexity.
 
Open Letter: On Philip Guston Now
Over 2,600 artists, curators, writers, and critics have signed the open letter in response to the postponement of the Philip Guston Now retrospective.
 
The Brooklyn Rail, September 30, 2020