East Lansing — The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University is always free and open to all—or so says the slogan on their website. There’s an old saying though, and it bears remembering here: If something is free, you’re the product.
The Broad is no exception, with exhibitions promoting shallow identity politics and a basement gallery doubling as a dungeon for wokedom.
The shining, angular metal edifice of the Broad was designed by the famed Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. A relatively recent 2012 addition to MSU, it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the more traditional campus.
Like many modern museums, the building is the most impressive part. The bare metal, sharp lines, and angled glass cut an impressive figure.
The Hadid exhibit inside the museum is perhaps the only noteworthy one, arrayed with Zaha’s characteristic retro-futurist designs. Curvaceous marble, chandeliers, sunglasses, shoes and athleisure wear, even a scale model of the museum itself. Objects straight from the 1990s, but projected forward a century—maybe in 2090 things will look like this.
No attempt at ideological pandering, just an impressive showcase of a singular artist and designer’s work. Credit where credit is due. When things are kept simple, and curatorial ideology kept to a minimum, museums can be very beautiful places.
The rest of the Broad consists of wholly unoriginal attempts to lecture visitors in whatever the current cause célèbre of the Left is—usually six months or so after the fact, given the time it takes to plan exhibitions. Par for the course for contemporary campus museums.
During my visit, this included exhibits on bioethics, “black nostalgia,” and the work of a Palestinian painter and MSU alumnus. The newest slate includes exhibits on farming, as it relates to “indigenous knowledge” and the history of slavery, and paintings about war by a Lebanese painter.
The exhibitions rotate every few months, but the intention is always the same. Art cannot simply be art, it must be activism, and not just any old activism, but the sort of activism that fits whatever identitarian or ideological fixation the Left has at the moment.
You can’t blame the artists, really. This falls on the curators, the people responsible for organizing, presenting, and ideologically framing these exhibitions. Curators write the long scrolls of text next to paintings, trying to explain to viewers how, for example, a painting of colored lines is actually about the oppression of Palestinians.
Museum curators by and large form a very specific demographic—mid-30s, highly educated, bespectacled liberal women in blazers. The type who might have posted “Kamala is brat” last summer and believed it. Oat milk lattes on tap, NYT cooking subscriptions, binge watching the latest Apple TV+ slop on the couch with their “partner” and cats. You know the type.
They’re not the devil, but they’re arrogant enough to believe their own tastes are superior, that their ideologies are correct by virtue of their extensive education, that their enemies are “ontologically evil.” Redemption can only come from embracing liberal consensus, and it’s their evangelistic duty to make that apparent in every exhibition.
Yet, deep down, they’re typically self-loathing. They desperately need a perceived enemy to crusade against, and, if there isn’t one, they invent something new. When that doesn’t suffice, they turn on their own institutions, castigating themselves for the perceived sins of generations past.
This brings us to the basement of the Broad museum, a dungeon where the Broad’s curators whip themselves in a shameless display of self-flagellation.
On your way down the stairs, you pass “The Vault.” The archives, the permanent collection left undisplayed in storage. This is normal for museums, but they offer a patronizing scheme along with it. A wall text on glass explains that, every month, one student gets to select an undisplayed work from the archives and have it shown there hidden behind glass.
How generous! A museum largely funded and paid for by student tuition, and they’re allowed to select one work for display. Provided they write a blurb explaining why they chose it. Honestly, that’s more input than students get at most campus museums, but it still illustrates the ideological posturing, the arrogant hierarchy.
It’s a shallow conceit. We, the illustrious curators, deign to allow the plebeian undergraduates to display one work that they like for their shallow, pedestrian reasons.
Entering the main basement gallery, you’re greeted with a list of the museum’s sins. A wall graphic, with images of art and blurbs of text listing moments in the museum’s history, apologizing for the sins of curators past in failing to include works in the collection of sufficient racial and sexual diversity.
“Significant gaps in the collection remain,” reads the wall text. “Only recently in 2021 did the museum acquire a work by a trans artist.” Dates listed include the first acquisition of a work by an African American, first work acquired by a woman. They’re apologizing, endlessly, for the sins of previous generations buying the wrong art.
The rest of the basement gallery features large cases of African tribal art intermixed with 20th-century bronze sculptures displaying ideals of “black womanhood.” Paintings, photographs, etchings of “blackness.” One of them, in particular, features a white man hung by his ankles on a rope, with two black faces looking down on him.
A display of traditional herbs in little glass jars with squeezable rubber balls so you can waft the aroma directly into your nostrils. No need to imagine the smell, you can experience it directly.
In the center of all of this: art jail. A big glass cage with criss-cross metal wire on the inside, artworks hung salon-style off of it. A variety of ethnic art, with one painting of distinctly European origin.
“The Vision of St. Anthony of Padua,” a 1630 Spanish painting by Francisco de Zurbarán. St. Anthony, clad in a monk’s robe, looks up to the heavens in a moment of prayer and sees the infant Christ in a halo of bright light.
The deep contrast between the light of the heavens and the darkness surrounding St. Anthony, that prototypical 17th-century chiaroscuro, gives rise to a broader allegory of a man seeing beyond the shallow tempests of the world and perceiving God himself.
An artwork that looks beyond the muck and mire and gazes towards immortality. A shining light in a museum that, otherwise, takes great pains to forcefully ground every other artwork in the mud of liberal ideology. Naturally, it’s locked up in a cage.
In the contemporary museum, no mentions of transcendence are allowed. No attempts at it. In fact, the opposite—you are no more than your identity, your body, and your art is only as good as your social marginalization.
Curators can hide the good paintings away in the basement, sequester them to the archives, but they can’t stop visitors from seeking something more than their otherwise shallow offerings. They wonder why museums are closing, why attendance is down, and assume it’s because people don’t feel represented. They’re wrong.
People go to museums to see artworks that make them think beyond the circumstances of their ordinary lives. To see objects of beauty and skill that point towards something in the heavens, figuratively, if not literally.
Spare them the lectures, make the museums’ contents as striking as the buildings, and you’ll be surprised at what happens. Art is a poor vehicle for social change but an amazing means of finding higher inspiration.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
