In an art world that is besieged these days by vexing problems ranging from excessive politicization to the ongoing recession in the contemporary art market, developments that really cheer the spirit are such a rarity that news of them must be applauded when they occur. One such development came earlier this year when it was announced that Tom Armstrong, the deposed former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, had been appointed to the directorship of the new Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Talk about perfect justice! This appointment struck us as an amazingly appropriate reward for the years of service that Mr. Armstrong devoted to the task of muddling all distinctions between art and kitsch. Having succeeded so well in lowering the standards of professional judgment at the Whitney, thus preparing the museum for a successor who is proving to be even more adept at the same game, Mr. Armstrong was obviously the ideal candidate to run a new museum devoted to the figure who was the single most destructive force in American art in the last half of the twentieth century. The trustees of the Warhol Museum are to be congratulated on this appointment of the right man for the right job at the right time.
Now comes an even more thrilling and revelatory appointment of a museum professional who, only three years ago, had won his Warholian fifteen-minutes-of-fame as a hero of the contemporary art scene and was then—well, sort of allowed to settle into obscurity while the art world that had acclaimed him as a warrior and a martyr turned its collective attention to more pressing business. We refer to the appointment of Dennis Barrie, the former director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, to be the director of the new and yet to be built Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. This, too, strikes us as a rare example of perfect justice.
Mr. Barrie, it will be recalled, was the man who achieved media renown for his acquittal on charges of obscenity stemming from the famous Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition when it came to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. He was praised in the highest terms for defending the right of the museum to exhibit pictures that a great many people in Cincinnati and elsewhere regarded—and still regard—as pornographic. Yet this victory, which in the end only proved that our courts of law have now lost the power to define obscenity and pornography in the public interest, effectively destroyed Mr. Barrie’s career as an art museum director. The whole story was a wonderful example of art-world hypocrisy at work.
On the occasion of his new appointment, Mr. Barrie gave us yet another glimpse of the high ideals that had guided his decisions as an art museum director. “Not everyone,” he told The New York Times, “embraces symphonic music or paintings by Rembrandt. This is more accessible, and therefore more fundable.” Spoken like a true museum man of the 1990s! The only remaining mystery is how the Whitney Museum missed out on such an obvious candidate to direct its current course.
