The Smithsonian Under Fire

Why speak again about the Smithsonian as I did briefly before? Because it represents the issues that every other museum has, i.e., the President says to toe the line. The Smithsonian represents the American People as a country.

Why do I say that? The Smithsonian includes 21 museums and galleries plus the National Zoo and, as important, 14 education and research centers. These include The National Portrait Gallery, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Museum of the American Indian and the Archives of American Art. Two more museums are in development: the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum. From the Museum of African American History and Culture, here is an exhibit from the Slavery and Freedom Gallery. A set of wrought iron leg shackles dated before 1860.

Most of these institutions are in the Capital of our country, Washington, D.C., which attracts many tourists from this country and abroad. I would venture that at some time in their lives most Americans have visited.

In March of 2025, the President, Donald J. Trump, signed an Executive Order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. It turns out that by which he meant just the opposite. If you doubt this, read the Executive Order for yourselves: 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/

For one thing, he wanted any DEI offices shuttered. What was he scared of? Black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, Latinos, Women? He asked for a comprehensive review of eight Smithsonian museums to ensure they align with a focus on “American Exceptionalism”. Even if you believe in American Exceptionalism, that can only be ascertained by showing all our faults as well … the massacres of Native Americans, slavery, and the denial of the right to vote to women until 1920. What about the mistreatment of the African Americans after the Civil War? I remember being told by my father when I was a small boy, and we visited Florida, that I was not allowed to go into the public toilet or drink from the fountains marked “Colored” or (“For Colored Only”). I had to use the one marked "Whites" (or "Whites Only"). I can still visualize where I was standing and the confusion I felt. How can we become exceptional if we do not understand where we came from?

With approximate statistics from the web, over 40% of this country consists of non-white ethnicities, and 50% of the people in this country are women. Why should we fear the other when the other made this country the most powerful in the world, not just militarily but by innovation and creativity? Just watch a financial channel on television and listen to CEOs of the top companies in this country and note the foreign accents you hear of immigrant Americans. Even Elon Musk, possibly the richest man in the world, is an immigrant from South Africa. No matter what you think of what he has done for good and bad, he has brought about technological innovation that can be admired.

Claiming that the past decade has cast America’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” the Executive Order proclaims that museum visitors should “not be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” It promises additional actions to remove such “improper ideologies” from federal museums, parks and monuments.

Following the Administration’s misogynistic, whitewashed narrative, Pete Hegseth is “clearing out the debris” in the military. In his purge, he denies the contributions of African Americans and women by selectively removing their names from the vetted list for one-star generals, claiming they were recommended by people who were “too woke.”

Trying to rewrite history can only do harm by building a cocoon from which everyone loses except for the very few who have created it.

Laws Paved with Good Intentions

Even well-intentioned laws are open to regulation, interpretation, and execution, and there’s the rub!

The case I wish to address limits research, education, commerce, and even history. In my career as an art dealer, I have had two opportunities to testify before Congress representing an art association. The issue was the passage of a ban on the import of works of art containing ivory. The intent was to save the African Elephant from rampant poaching, obviously a noble cause. As an art dealer, I made my living through commerce, but I also care passionately about art of all kinds and art history. Why should a 13th-century ivory figure of a Madonna not be allowed into our country? It’s been a lot of years since that elephant died!

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

A similar situation now exists as far as Native American spiritual items and works of art are concerned. Recently, I came across a long article with 8 pages of footnotes by Elizabeth Weiss, Professor Emeritus at San José State University in California, titled “The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing off Native History and Archeology”. Published by the Goldwater Institute in Tucson, Arizona, it makes the argument from an archeologist’s point of view.

NAGPRA (The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), enacted in 1990, is seemingly clear. It requires museums, universities, and federal agencies to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and items of cultural patrimony to their respective lineal descendants, Native American tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations. At the time, there were many objections, but since the wording of the legislation did not hamper scientific study or collecting either by institutions or private parties, as long as they were not handling artifacts delineated in the law. However, in 2023, the Department of the Interior published new regulations elaborating that any new research could only be carried out with tribal consent. The regulations go so far as stating the opening of a box to find out its contents could be considered research.

NAGPRA, however, does not cover human remains so many thousand years old that cannot be identified with a present-day tribe. Additionally, remains have been uncovered that are so many thousands of years old that those tribes no longer exist. Since it is generally accepted that at one time there was a land bridge between Asia and Alaska, there is no way to know where these human remains might truly belong. Now even that line of study has been closed off. If a tribe does reclaim human remains for reburial, scientific tests like radiocarbon dating cannot be done, making it impossible to learn part of the history of humankind.

The Return

Museums are also hindered in their role of public education as they cannot exhibit artifacts associated with burials (not referring to remains) without prior informed consent from lineal descendants. In many cases, they cannot be found.

As far as commerce is concerned, certain types of objects that are considered by one tribe or another as religious have been subject to seizure and repatriation even though the work was made for sale. One example can be found in Hopi and Zuni katsina dolls; carvings depicting spirit beings much like Christian saints have long been, and continue to be, made for sale. This has not just affected dealers and collectors but Native American artists themselves, unsure of changing prohibitions.

The original law required substantial evidence that the items claimed for repatriation were actually from that tribe, but this consideration has fallen by the wayside before complaints that it unduly slowed the process of repatriation. Activists have pursued a requirement for consultation with the tribes about what can be exhibited, and insisted on what they deem the proper way to take care of works in institutions. I find this to be understandable and positive, but it has also been carried to an extreme. According to Dr. Weiss, in some cases, even access for study purposes has been denied to scholars and scientists because they were female.

As activist pressure has led to regulations expanding way beyond NAGPRA’s original targets of grave robbing, religious items, and theft, museum officials have removed purely secular works from view and closed galleries during the lengthy process of tribal consultation. I know of situations where tribal representatives have declared a work in a museum collection is not to be shown to the public, but won’t take it back because they too are not allowed to see the object due to its religious significance.

In her conclusion, Dr. Weiss writes, “NAGPRA began as a compromise to allow scientific research and museum exhibits to be preserved, excluded works made for sale and display, and yet also enabled federally recognized tribes to obtain their most culturally valuable materials, funerary objects along with ancestral human remains.” That this is no longer a compromise is amply demonstrated by one of the examples Weiss cites: “The Navajo tribe recently sought to halt a NASA flight on the grounds that the moon is sacred to the tribe.”

July 4th Weekend

Several people asked me last week whether I had a good Independence Day weekend. My first reaction was that we didn’t do much, and then I thought for 30 seconds and realized that was not correct. In Santa Fe, they have a tradition of pancakes on the Plaza and a vintage car show. The pancakes were not on my diet, but the old cars did not add any calories. I have written about it before, but this year there were many more cars and so many more people that it was impossible to get good photos, but here is the one I did take.

The city’s fireworks display could hardly be seen from our house, but real excitement was provided a few hours earlier with the opening of the Santa Fe Playhouse’s production of “Cabaret” in the theater of the Scottish Rite Temple. On stage through July 19, it is particularly apt for this 250th anniversary of Independence.

The concept for the play originated from Christopher Isherwood’s “Good Bye to Berlin” published in 1939 and later included in his 1945 book “Berlin Stories”. This inspired a 1951 play, “I am a Camera” by John van Druten and a 1955 film. This in turn inspired the present Musical “Cabaret” with a book by Joe Masteroff and music and lyrics by Kander &Ebb. The musical opened on Broadway in 1966 and was a great success, winning awards, with a 1998 revival also winning awards. However, it is probably best known through its 1972 movie choreographed by Bob Fosse starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York, with Joel Gray, originator of the role of the Emcee on Broadway, and here is the Emcee played by Jeffrey Barba in the Santa Fe production.

The story is the thing, all based on Isherwood’s contemporary notes during his time in Berlin from 1929, when he moved to visit his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, and stayed until 1933. During that period, Isherwood enjoyed the city’s decadent cabaret scene and homosexual opportunities. In the current version of the musical, the ambience is depicted through the Kit Kat Club and its emcee. We are shown the dark before the storm in these hedonistic times at the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic. Friendships were split as Jews were beginning to be discriminated against. In 1933, students in Munich burned books that were not approved of. That was the same year my father was thrown out of University there for being Jewish.

We all know where this ended, but it did not happen from one day to the next. Hitler did establish the first Concentration Camps as soon as he became Chancellor, but they were known as work camps in 1933. The “Final Solution” started slowly with Hitler’s 1939 "euthanasia" program. The gassing of those with disabilities progressed to the mass gassings of the Jews and others by late 1941.

The musical, however, does not go into all this horror but rather depicts what led up to it. Certain actions and phrases hit my wife and me very hard. The landlady in the show plans to marry the local fruit vendor, and she is warned that it “wouldn’t be wise”. The transition from the Weimar Republic to full throated Naziism is demonstrated when one of the characters throws off his jacket, revealing the swastika on his armband. As the play is coming to an end, the emcee pretends to have fallen for one of the girls in the Kit Kat Klub and sings a love song ending with the poignant line, “if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all”.

A personal story about people’s defense or excuses: In the late 1970’s I went with my wife, who was then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, to see a private art collection outside Berlin. The collector was old and bedridden, so her caretaker led us upstairs. When she brought us down to leave, she must have recognized me as Jewish, and to my astonishment she grabbed my arm with both her hands and said, “We didn’t know, we didn’t know”!

Leaving the theater on July 4, 2026, we were haunted by the relevance of the final line of the play:  “We were asleep”.

A Gallery Model Has Failed

Many of you know that my family gallery, known in the U.S. as Rosenberg & Stiebel, later Stiebel, Ltd., was founded around 1870 in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1939, when it became established in the U.S., it was run out of a one-bedroom apartment in New York and in 1944 moved to 32 East 57th Street. There were many galleries in the neighborhood, but in 1968 a contemporary gallery moved into “our” building.  I always teased the owner, Arne (pronounced Arnie) Glimcher, that we were there first😊. They were very nice and very generous in that when we celebrated our opening of a small contemporary section of our gallery, an artist represented by their gallery, Chuck Close, came to our opening luncheon.

Our venture (Stiebel Modern) into contemporary was brief, and as the years passed, the interest in European Old Master painting, drawings, and decorative arts also waned, and we closed our gallery in 2014. Meanwhile, the contemporary art field flourished, growing bigger and bigger all the time. Contemporary galleries added satellite galleries all over the world. Guess what? Nothing lasts forever, and that model also began to become shaky in the early 2020’s.

A few weeks ago, an article by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times announced, “A challenging art market is forcing even an established player to contract.” The focus was on Arne Glimcher’s son Marc, who has been running Pace since 2010, saying that the current model for galleries (meaning contemporary ones) was not working anymore.

Pace was therefore cutting 50 artists from their roster (30% of their representation) and 50 people from staff (representing 20%). Continued expansions with less foot traffic and fewer mega sales were not supporting the outlay. For instance, Pace moved to their new flagship location in 2019 on West 25th Street in Chelsea. They had renovated the 8-story building at a cost of $100 million, which the developer shared, but they must also pay an annual rent of $9 million on a 20-year lease. They are not giving up that space but contracting in other ways. Those are sums that I can hardly comprehend and certainly not compare with my former gallery.

We read how the art market is crashing, but that is based on the figures we get from the mega sales at a couple of auction houses and what is released by the few galleries that are asked and respond to journalists. According to an analysis by Julien Delagrange, a Belgian artist and art critic as well as Director of CAI Magazine (contemporaryartissue.com), the number of purchases of art has actually increased in the last few years but not their total dollar value. Much like a bubble, for a number of reasons including Covid, high-end sales above $10 million have diminished.

Needless to say, Pace is not alone. After 30 years, Tim Blum of the Blum gallery permanently shut down his public spaces, which included galleries in Los Angeles and Tokyo in addition to New York. Blum also pointed out that there were systemic issues such as the relentless pace of continuous exhibitions and fairs. Going with your inventory from art fair to art fair is obviously exhausting, no matter how large the staff. Note that his giving up public spaces does not mean that he is giving up on the art business, as he will continue to work privately. I know that he is not alone and have heard this from others in the world of old art as well.

I have just scratched the surface, as I always do. If it is of interest, I encourage you to read more online to properly understand what is behind all the hype about the “demise” of the art world. If you enjoy art world gossip, you can gain access by going to the online art magazine Hyperallergic, where you will find an article from June 23 by Valentina Di Liscia and Rebecca Schiffman titled “Pace Gallery’s Hall of Mirrors,” which goes into what artists and employees have to say about Pace’s downsizing.