Ann Arbor — UMMA: the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Mostly known to the student body for its fancy modern building and cafe with comfy chairs. Coveted study spots in the center of campus, you have to stake them out around finals week. Fond memories sitting there a decade ago, studying across from a very beautiful girl who broke my heart… wake up, Bobby, it’s time to school these wokescolds. 

Here’s the deal. UMMA hates white people, and they aren’t shy about telling you. Every single exhibition on display right now, literally every single one, is a crude attempt to lecture visitors about the evils of the white race, from one perspective or another.

Let’s start with Unsettling Histories: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism. The centerpiece is a contemporary painting, a portrait of James Madison that’s been flayed, the canvas partially cut into strips and pinned to the wall. It’s centered in the gallery and accompanied by a clumsy assortment of classical pieces from their collection—paintings of rich, old, dead white aristocrats. A few old photographs of former slaves and descendants of slaves, an old piano with ivory keys. Lots of wall text, long paragraphs explaining the work.

Regarding the wall text, UMMA specifically notes:

“As part of the Unsettling Histories reinstallation… Objects exhibited on this page, and in the physical gallery, have received label edits and updates to present their subjects, artists, and time periods in a more complex and honest light. In most cases, this is the first time UMMA has updated these labels in a decade or longer.”

This is key to understanding the curatorial activist mindset of the modern museum. Their focus is didactic; they want to lecture you, excoriate you into wokedom. The art doesn’t do this on its own, so they write long screeds and place them next to the works. They have to update these frequently, as their narratives are ever-shifting. In this case, even 10-year-old wall text proved insufficient. “Mucho texto,” as the meme goes—the Left can’t meme without over-explaining with ever-evolving therapy speak.

They need the text, because their clumsy curatorial attempts fall flat on their own. Place a new piece mocking the past, with a bunch of works from the past, and a bunch of text telling you how it’s all bad. This is supposed to enlighten you, to force an epiphany—wow, maybe slavery was bad after all! Someone call Barack Obama! 

We were just getting started. My trip upriver into UMMA’s heart of darkness continued. First, a stroll by the gift shop. Expensive merch, overpriced books and prints. The cashier wearing an N95 mask, a display of books in the window, the most prominently placed one reading, “Black Lives Matter.” Socialism ends at the gift shop, apparently—get your credit cards ready, folks. 

Two more contemporary exhibitions in the modern half of the building. The first, Future Cache, an exhibition memorializing the Ottawa Indians of Michigan, with giant wall text proclaiming, “You are on Anishinaabe land.” A 40-foot tower of wall text, a curator’s wet dream. A humongous land acknowledgement, with tons of text in English and Anishinaabe, outlining their history, perceived injustices, and claimed ownership of the land. It dwarfs the artworks themselves, ambiguous mixes of native aesthetics and modern artistic minimalism. 

Next, their central contemporary exhibition, Ouroboros by Machine Dazzle. I’ll let the photo do the talking here…

Finally, my identity is represented in a museum setting. UMMA hates white people but loves white dicks, apparently. The trope of non-white activists always having white boyfriends holds true yet again. You can even see this piece from the street, brightly lit within the facade of the glass-walled gallery. Talk about a “hard launch.”

The exhibit consists of a circular arrangement of metal wire and garbage hanging from the ceiling, with a plaster sculpture in the center of it, penetrating up from inside a circular couch into a chandelier of plastic cups. Another plaster phallus hangs from one end of the circular sculpture, circling around to penetrate a plaster vulva. This completes the “ouroboros,” an ancient circular symbol of a snake eating its own tail, symbolizing the eternal cycle of death and rebirth.

Look, I won’t lie, I kind of liked this exhibit (lmao). I’m sure the artist and I would disagree on just about everything, and you wouldn’t catch me dead at one of the drag shows scheduled to take place there, but I had to laugh. The plastic waste is the earth, the phallic white man penetrating it with his Apollonian will (shout out Camille Paglia). “We are the garbage, the garbage is us,” reads the wall text. Phallic sculptures are ancient, as far as art is concerned. Don’t mistake me for a humorless prude, this one at least made me laugh.

Of course, my humor comes from my inability to take any of this seriously. Perhaps that’s why I liked Ouroboros. Clearly that artist doesn’t take any of this seriously either. No attempt at a serious lecture (other than the painfully dry wall text, as always). That’s the difference between artists and curators. Artists execute a singular vision in their work, curators scramble to squeeze into their ideological sandbox. I take the side of the artists, obviously. Even if we disagree completely, at least they’re making something, not explaining it.

Luckily, most students don’t take any of this seriously either. They’re more interested in locking eyes with someone across the crowded cafe than with the exhibits. Curators do a piss-poor job indoctrinating the youth because the youths, as always, are more interested in themselves than anything old people (people over 22) tell them. As they should be! 

Imagine a Michigan frat bro. He just met some cute “art hoe” on campus, takes her on a museum date, trying to seem all chill and cerebral. Maybe you’d get a “hell yeah lol” for the big white dick. Bored to tears otherwise. His date sees the plaster penis and the Freudian shock is too much to bear; she ends the date early, stunned by the uncanny premonition of the impending scene in her date’s frat house bedroom. Plastic garbage and phalluses indeed, the frat bros live this art for real. 

A fitting exhibition for an institution that, like many arts institutions, has become a masturbatory enterprise, expensively gooning in its glass and marble building. We viewers are mere plebs to be chastised, to be challenged, not entertained, let alone moved.

Bobby Mars is an artist, alter ego, and former art professor. Follow him on X at @bobby_on_mars.