The Sackler reputation washing experiment
It's bigger than Pablo and bigger than feminism, although feminism plays an embarrassing role here
I was going to write about Hannah Gadsby, the Brooklyn Museum’s show “It’s Pablo-matic” but I just watched Gadsby’s Netflix special, Nanette and it is based on Gadsby’s unworked through rage about being beaten up and raped in her youth. Her hatred for Picasso seems to be directly related to her traumatic experiences. She admits to being unwell and that is brave of her I guess. She agreed to curate a show about an artist she hates because the Brooklyn Museum probably offered her a nice Sackler funded paycheck.
The Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler sponsored curator Catherine Morris and Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art allow Gadsby’s pain and Feminist art history to be used as tools of reputation washing for the obscene wealth of billionaire drug dealers.
The bad reviews the show received kind of miss the point. What a world the art world is.
Was thinking about the Gurenica as well during the Gadsby/Picasso dustup. And while I feel for Gadsby's personal suffering and may be slightly repulsed by Pablo's satyrism, I don't think we have to think hard about who is the more important artist...
Whenever I read about the fight over Picasso's legacy in the media, I always think about the lead-up to the Iraq war. The US government pressured the United Nations into covering up the tapestry copy of Guernica so Colin Powell could make the case for a savage and unjustifiable war without undue embarrassment. This backfired spectacularly, of course.
Even though the tapestry itself was a reputation-washing experiment that the Rockefeller family loaned to the UN, the original painting was comissioned by the Spanish Republican government to protest the bombing of Guernica by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. The fact that Picasso's piece, long after his death, could still humiliate the most powerful people on the planet is not nothing. Obviously it wasn't his genius alone that did it, it was partially brought into being through the intervention of the Popular Front government of Spain, and the relatively new experience of civillian bombing for interwar Europe seared the piece into human consciousness forever.
I think it's a terrible judgement for the radical pretensions of today's art world that we don't see more incidents like what happened to Colin Powell at the UN. Maybe I'm being harsh and it was a lightning in a bottle moment, but I still think art can be a radical, liberatory tool if it's wielded strategically by a powerful, organized leftist movement. It's grim to think about how far away we are from that reality these days.