Franz Kafka is a handy author to bear in mind these days. His surreal sense of the macabre is pertinent and illuminating about so many quotidian realities we face. Consider what happened last month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Perhaps you have had occasion to visit that establishment. If so, you know that it is a wide-ranging repository of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American art. Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Picasso, Braque, Beckmann, plus Winslow Homer, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, and Jackson Pollock: the collection is as various as the atmosphere is pretentious.
But what, to move on to a question that no one is asking, does the Museum of Modern Art have to do with “colonialism”? If you said “Nothing. It has nothing to do with colonialism,” go to the head of the class. But since “colonialism” is supposed to be one of the signal evils of the age (it isn’t really, you know), and since the Museum of Modern Art is, among other things, a temple to what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption, it was probably only a matter of time before a band of sweaty and hysterical “protestors” descended on moma to make a public nuisance of themselves and skirl about the evils of “colonialism” and—the meme du jour—Israeli perfidy toward the poor Palestinians.
And so it came to pass. The silly season usually doesn’t come until August, but this year February was swaddled in silliness. Hundreds of bored and underemployed Palestinian sympathizers—many wearing covid masks, we could not help noticing—installed themselves in the museum, shutting it down to the public. Why? Because “Art is but one of many weapons in the colonial arsenal.” Really? “These museums are colonial repositories.” Care to explain? “The museum is a colonial vehicle.” Gosh.
According to some reports, as many as eight hundred “activists” flooded into the museum chanting “Free Palestine” and similar ditties. We thought wistfully of the nine protestors who glued themselves to the floor of a Volkswagen facility in Germany to protest carbon-dioxide emissions. When the working day ended, VW officials locked the doors and switched off the lights and heating. The protestors spent the night glued to the floor. We admire the pluck and the initiative of the VW officials. We could do with a bit more of that candid spirit in our cultural institutions.
