When Donald Trump destroyed art deco sculptures and lashed out at degenerate art

I have been following Jerry Saltz’s Facebook account for months now; I find filtering U.S. society through the eye of an art critic a decidedly interesting way to try to learn more about it. The day before yesterday, in the aftermath of Donald Trump ’s election as president of the United States of America, Saltz posted one of the most impassioned commentaries I have ever read on an event that is destined, by very high margins of probability (indeed: let’s even say with certainty), to change the fate of the planet in the coming years. Saltz’s is a commentary that lies somewhere between disillusionment and self-criticism, between discouragement and a realization of a reality concerning an intellectual class that is not only "outside the mainstream," as the American critic suggests, but is also incapable of trying to understand the mainstream: “I thought I understood the workings of the system, of the mechanisms of politics, but I was wrong.” The media, as Glenn Greewanld argues in an article published in The Intercept, have spent months painting Trump supporters (as well as Brexit supporters) as “primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational.” It is not that this lacks correspondence to reality: the problem is that we have probably forgotten, or at least underestimated, one of the fundamental principles of sociology, that ofhomophily, with the consequence that we have isolated ourselves from the rest of the world by thinking that Brexit was an impossible eventuality and that Trump was a passing phenomenon good for a laugh in company.

Donald Trump. Photo credit

The art world, of course, took the news of Trump’s victory very badly. Yet no matter how distant the art world appears to be from that of Donald Trump’s electorate (and it matters little whether it is a kid who shares racist pro-Trump memes on social media, an unsuspected professional who supports white supremacy and thinks that the real minority are heterosexual white men, or a disillusioned blue-collar worker affected by relocation), it is possible to advance an image that can provide us with some food for discussion. The average Trump voter is thus the one who, being confronted with a work of contemporary art in a more or less fortuitous way (for example, happening to be in front of a new installation in his city square, or finding a photographic reproduction of it on a social network) launches into the most classic comments of the kind “but is this art?”, “I could do it too”, “it should be set on fire”, and so on. We will return to this image before long: for now, let us continue by saying that when Edgar Wind, in his seminal Art and anarchy of 1963, wrote that it had become rare to find someone who, when confronted with a work that spoke an unfamiliar language, would simply brand it as the product of a waffler incapable of painting, he could not have foreseen thatfigurative literacy would experience severe limitations in the years to come, and that art, and with it art education, would begin to gradually disappear from the agendas of the most influential political leaders.

This disappearance affected, as indeed was largely predictable from the very beginning of the election campaign, even the programs of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. And despite the total absence of art from their election programs, The Art Newspaper tried to briefly investigate, in an article released ten days ago, the attitude of the two main candidates for the White House toward art and culture. If Hillary Clinton has settled on positions not unlike those affecting the main players in the domestic political debate around cultural heritage (art as a “flywheel of economic development” and an attractor for tourism), Trump, for his part, has not only never spoken on the subject, but seems to have never even had an interest in talking about art and culture. As a result, all analysts have expressed concern about the future of the arts under a possible Trump presidency (and the concerns, of course, became more alive than ever on victory day). Already this summer Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post, taking into account Trump’s disinterest in art, his support for Putin, and the fact that these days creativity is often connected to issues of immigration, social justice, and cultural diversity, predicted a bleak future, going so far as to imagine a “sketch of how the art world will have to adapt to a new political reality.” It followed a realistically projected narrative of a community forced to deal with censorship and systematic cuts in arts and culture subsidies, with funds rather being diverted to support heavily right-winged art.

The scenario imagined by Kennicott may be plausible. One of the pillars of the so-called alt-right, the “alternative right” backbone of Trump’s electorate (Angela Manganaro in Il Sole 24 Ore has conducted an interesting analysis of this political component for which one struggles to find an exact Italian counterpart) is represented by the website Breitbart, an information network whose CEO is that Stephen Bannon who oversaw, as the number one protagonist, Trump’s election campaign. Articles abound on Breitbart that criticize, even viciously, retrograde and ramblingly, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the U.S. state agency that subsidizes arts projects: it has repeatedly been accused of engaging in leftist propaganda, of granting support to exhibitions deemed blasphemous, and when actor Alec Baldwin, in an interview in 2012, called for increased funding for the NEA, a Breitbart columnist countered by arguing that “instead of suggesting that the money be spent on more important causes like AIDS or cancer research, Baldwin presumably would like to cut military spending so that we can throw a billion dollars into subsidies for artists who wouldn’t know how to survive on the free market [....] If it’s so important to him, why doesn’t he agree with his Hollywood friends to fund [at his own expense] art?” User comments followed, many of them filled with insults against Alec Baldwin. This is, in short, the degree to which the pro-Trump media holds art and culture in high regard. But it does not end there.

The example was given earlier of the casual observer of contemporary art who engages in simplistic trivializing comments about whether or not the work before him can be ascribed to the category of art: this image is probably as close to the relationship between Donald Trump and art as we can imagine. There are a couple of illuminating precedents that may help. The first goes back to the 1980s and is particularly well recounted by Max Rosenthal in an article published this summer in Mother Jones. It discusses the circumstances under which Trump Tower, the headquarters of the Trump Organization, the company of which the new U.S. president is CEO, was born in New York. Without going into too much detail (those who wish to delve deeper can benefit from the link to the original article, as well as from the equally detailed account to be found in Jerome Tuccille’s book Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron ), when Trump wanted to build his tower he did not care that, on the chosen site, there insisted a 1929 building, the Bonwit Teller Building, which housed on its façade some friezes and sculptures that constituted interesting vestiges of New York’s Art Nouveau. Trump arranged with the Metropolitan Museum to donate the art deco sculptures on the façade to the institution, but when he learned that the detachment would result in a two-week delay of the work, he had no patience to wait: workers were forced to remove the sculptures with jackhammers, with the result that they ended up shattered and the art and cultural world could not believe Trump’s treatment of those works. Ashton Hawkins, vice president of the Met, was asked for comment, who merely noted that “sculptures of this quality are rare and would have made a lot of sense in our collections.”

One of the sculptures in the Bonwit Teller Building

The other precedent, however, dates back to 1999, to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, as part of which a work entitled The Holy Mary Virgin, created by one of the leading Young British Artists, Chris Ofili, was on display. The “crusade” against the exhibition started from then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who first lashed out against Ofili’s work, making the same comment that any person totally lacking in art as well as common sense could have made:"if I can do it too, it’s not art." Trump, determined to support Giuliani, went even harder: “It’s not art, it’s crap, it’s degenerate stuff, and it shouldn’t be funded by the government,” adding that “if I were president, I would make sure that the National Endowment of the Arts would not grant support to operations of this kind.” Needless to mention what sad historical images the phrase “degenerate art” conjures up, needless to mention that as of the day before yesterday it is on his decisions that the future of the National Endowment of the Arts will depend, and needless also to point out that the Brooklyn Museum exhibition actually received no government funding at all-the episode is, however, further symptomatic of Donald Trump’s artistic sensibilities.

Chris Ofili, The Holy Mary Virgin (1996; paper, oil paint, glitter, resin and elephant dung on linen, 243.8 x 182.9 cm)

Of course: these are events long gone in time. But the concern of those working in the world of art and culture seems as shareable as ever. Barely two days have passed since the victory of Donald Trump, who for the next four years will be, like it or not, the president of the United States of America. Hrag Vartanian, co-founder of Hyperallergic, one of the most influential and widely read art blogs in the world, wrote, in no uncertain terms, that “the nightmare has arrived” and that the “vision of a hopeful America may be dead.” The art world could find a remedy by overcoming its divisions and offering the image of a community moving forward by forging new partnerships, challenging old outdated models, doing something new, better and different. Our field faces an entirely unprecedented challenge, and it is limiting to think that this challenge concerns only the United States: ways will have to be found to meet it.

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