The National Gallery of Identity Politics

Something similar can be said of art museums. Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art. Today, many art museums serve as fronts in battles that have little or nothing to do with art: entertainment, yes; snobbery and money, of course; and politics, politics, politics.

The latest example of this trend is particularly egregious because it involves one of America’s premier institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Established and endowed by Andrew Mellon in 1937, the National Gallery quickly became one of the nation’s two or three most exquisite art museums. In terms of the breadth, depth and excellence of its collection, its only real rival is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And because of its place in the nation’s capital (and its claim on the taxpayer’s purse—about $140 million of its $190 million budget comes from the U.S. Treasury), the National Gallery occupies a singular place in the metabolism of America’s cultural life.

Obituarists looking to write the epitaph of the American art museum could do worse than ponder the elevation of Kaywin Feldman, currently director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to take the helm of the National Gallery in March when Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director since 1993, retires.

All the announcements of Ms. Feldman’s appointment have breathlessly noted that she will be “the first woman to hold the top job at the museum.” It’s meant as homage, and I hope I will be forgiven if I point out how patronizing are such declarations. In any case, the thing to appreciate about Ms. Feldman is not her sex but her slavish devotion to transforming the museum into a left-wing political redoubt.

In an article for Apollo magazine last May, she began by establishing her anti-Trump bona fides, bemoaning the “psychological toll” that his presidency is “taking on our collective psyche.” That done, she proceeded to assure us that art museums are “intensely political organisations,” adducing not only such global themes as love, death and religion but also “imperialism, colonialism, war, oppression, discrimination, slavery, misogyny, rape, and more.”

Noting the changing demography of the U.S., Ms. Feldman welcomes the insinuation of “identity politics” into the center of the museum experience. “As long as the staff and trustees at American museums remain predominantly white,” she writes, museums risk “irrelevance” by failing to attract “younger and more diverse audiences” and “address formidable and pressing societal issues.”

The list of issues she believes an art museums must tackle reads like a far-left manifesto. “Gender equality,” naturally; “diversity, inclusion, equity, and access,” but of course; “social justice,” “global understanding,” “liberal education for all,” etc., etc.

To get a sense of what this would look like in action, ponder Ms. Feldman’s response at the Minneapolis Institute of Art to President Trump’s travel ban in 2017. “The museum’s staff and I felt compromised because that message didn’t align with our belief in inclusion,” she proudly notes. “This prompted us to come up with a quick and authentic response to express our values with a billboard campaign.”

Toward the end of her essay, Ms. Feldman asks: “What more important role could a museum have today than in attempting to ease people’s pain and bring them together in a safe place for difficult conversations?” The day before yesterday, one might have answered: A more important role for the art museum is to preserve the artistic treasures of the past.

Until the late 1950s, the museum was widely regarded as a “temple of art,” a special place set apart from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The decibel level was low, decorum high and crowds generally sparse. In the culture at large, there was broad agreement that the art museum had a twofold curatorial purpose: first, to preserve and exhibit objects of historical interest and commanding aesthetic achievement; second, to nurture the public’s direct experience of those objects. “Art,” not “amenity,” not “politics” or “social justice,” came first on the museum’s menu.

The 1960s put paid to all that. As that decade’s egalitarian imperatives insinuated themselves ever more thoroughly into mainstream culture, the ideal of aesthetic excellence came under fire. Critics castigated what they called “the masterpiece mentality,” the retrograde idea that adulated “hero objects” and presumed some works exerted a greater claim on our attention than others. Entertainment and diversion, not connoisseurship, were the order of the day.

Many commentators—even many artists—rejected outright the pursuit of excellence, which they repudiated as an “elitist” holdover from the discredited hierarchies of the past. Others subordinated the aesthetic dimension of art to one or another political program or social obsession. Notoriety, not artistic accomplishment, became the chief goal of art, even as terms like “challenging” and “transgressive” took precedence over “beautiful” and other traditional epithets in the lexicon of critical commendation.

Ms. Feldman’s appointment to run the National Gallery is the latest stop on an express train whose destination is the subordination of art to politics. At the end of her essay for Apollo, she asserts that “the national and global political climates have created a situation in which our essential principles are under attack.” She is right about that. But she fails to note that it is enemies of art like Kaywin Feldman who are leading the charge.

Mr. Kimball is editor and publisher of the New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books.