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Were you delighted by the Hilma de Klint (2018) Blockbuster in Guggenheim – Visited more than 600,000 people? This exhibition would have been impossible without decades of feminist scholarships by art historians. Were you upset by the Manet / Degas (2023) or His own (2024) shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art? The two were organized by the same curator whose Harvard doctorate allowed his enviable linguistic skills and offered him time to write an essential thesis for these exhibitions.
In other words, with regard to art, there is no way to break the links between the university and the museum. This is why the war of the Trump administration against universities, and what it falsely calls “awakened ideology”, has deep consequences. Even if museums remain intact, brain flight will be paralyzing. The human sciences, which teach critical thinking and the historical context, and as such depend completely on freedom of expression, are downright attacked. Without the humanities, we cannot educate the next generations of writers, conservatives, historians and artists.
Today's museum was born during the era of the Enlightenment which gave us the American, French and Haitian revolutions. Like the library, the University and the Free Press, it is an institution of tent poles that anchors civil society in the West. This means that museums are deeply tangled in democracy. Over the past three centuries, the central mission of the museum has been to preserve, display and interpret works of art and cultural artefacts manufactured by all humanity. Some are Encyclopédic (The Louvre), others focus on nationality (Whitney Museum of American Art), some are dedicated to the most recent art (MCA Chicago). But at the sight of 30,000 feet, they share the same momentum – to provide an environment where culture can be examined, debated and saved for posterity.
It was not a benign activity. Museums have always been intimately linked to power and ideology, especially which can tell what story. They were the servants of colonialist ideas on “better” cultures than the others. They are torn apart by patriarchy. Indeed, the museum can be the original Manosphere. Then there is its global whiteness. A dealership already joked me: “Your opening of the average museum is the white walls, the whites and the white wine.” It is only a secret for anyone for three decades, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the conservatives and artists to rectify this dull and false homogeneity, and consequently, museums are now more inclusive of a wide range of stories and people than ever. They are also better frequented than ever. Whether you see it as a causal or coincident, it remains factual.
There have always been major challenges on how art has been interpreted. For example, impressionism was originally disparaged by the public who found the paintings unfinished and ugly. These photos were also collected by Americans who considered them beautiful. Some researchers think that impressionists have paved the way for abstract painting. They have become the darlings of a tourist economy of the museum. Today we use the Monet series Saint-Lazare station (1877) – Paintings of a train pulling in a station – such as an early example of air pollution caused by the industrial revolution. All these interpretations of impressionism are just as legitimate. We do not cancel another.
This is the main reason why we save from art, because of its unique ability to show us who we are and how we think we think over time. This is why art is so resonant, and what makes it so precious intellectually and emotionally. It should be remembered that right -wing authoritarian governments always take the power of culture very seriously. The Nazis demonstrated “degenerate art” by Jewish and avant-garde artists and they closed one of the most important art schools ever developed, the Bauhaus. They knew freedom when they saw it.
And freedom is surely the reason why one of the rare museums funded by the financial parts, the National Museum of Smithsonian of African-American History and Culture in Washington, DC, has been in the reticle of the current administration in recent months. An executive decree in March said that the “Smithsonian stories have argued that depict American and Western values as intrinsically harmful and oppressive”, distinguishing NMAAHC in particular. The order calls for the end of funding shows that “degrading shared American values, dividing Americans by race or promoting ideologies incompatible with federal law”.
Because museums save art, they powerfully shape the history of art and human history. The democratic story of history is a disputed affair, requiring agile expertise and multiple research and scholarships (I dare to say various). The university and the museum share this responsibility.
In addition, the threat to the exempt status of universities tax suggests another danger for museums. Federal funding was reprimanded during the cultural wars of the 1980s. But all museums, even those financed exclusively by individuals, benefit from non -profit tax status. Donations are tax deductible and museums do not pay taxes, which means that the museum is in service to the public. It is a social contract subscribed by the government which can be modified or eliminated. Since the people of the 2025 project are in a mood for destruction, I think it is unlikely not to consider the worst.
There are many red flags in the museum sector – billionaires with too much power, a philanthropy which is almost entirely transactional, a reservoir of conservatism and caution when it comes to hiring staff – but I firmly believe that museums, our main caretakers, are worth fighting. However, I do not think that museums can separate by arguing that they do not rely on federal funding. We can no longer claim that museums and universities do not depend on each other in their support and protection of democracy. The path to follow will require that we raise our voices in support of our sisters institutions in their difficulties before having to ask them for help with ours.
Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster and conservative based in Los Angeles.
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