RUTHFULLY YOURS

A couple of art-news stories are worth reporting. A few weeks ago, I wrote a pair of pieces about the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. It’s a great place and part of the Smithsonian. I love portraits, so it’s a natural draw for me.

In one piece, I suggested how the NPG, still new as museums go, could up its game. As an example, it displays many portraits whose subjects are laudable but, as quality goes, suck and shouldn’t be displayed. Since then, I learned that the museum has decided to commission a portrait of Dr. Cockroach for its collection. Fauci’s portrait will indeed premiere this fall.

You could resurrect Gainsborough and Reynolds, Rembrandt and Sargent, all laudable, even luminous, artists, but, alas, labor as they might, in Fauci’s case it’s the subject who sucks.

Fauci is the instigator and champion of the most profound case of public malfeasance in our history, more costly, more damaging, more extreme, and more futile than our failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He’s despised by half the country. No aspiring young doctor could look at him as a role model.

Fifty million children, most from poor or working-class families, tossed from school and subsequently tormented by a fear campaign, not to mention inferior online learning. Covid doesn’t affect them. Four trillion in new debt. Over 100,000 small businesses destroyed. Today’s dysfunctional economy, shocked and distorted by Fauci’s COVID regime. Soaring child abuse, drug overdose deaths, and suicides because lockdown left millions in isolation.

Every arts venue in the country shuttered for months. Fauci’s endless lies and evasions, on masks, vaccines, risk, even how many people actually died because of Covid. All to fight a highly infectious respiratory virus that can’t be stopped as long as people keep breathing and that targets the very old, very sick, and very obese. And what about the secret “royalties” to NIH brass from Big Pharma?

Dr. Geezer, so old he got his dunce cap from Hippocrates, financed a lab in Wuhan, run by the Chinese government, in a building shared with the Chinese military, to juice deadly viruses. Smart move! When the lab leaked, he mounted a smear campaign against American scientists to hide it. Fauci suppressed and defamed anti-lockdown doctors. He hasn’t treated a patient in 50 years.

He’s a publicity hog. And he’s incompetent. He has no credibility. Why in the world would the National Portrait Gallery honor him with a portrait?

I didn’t learn this during the Covid mass hysteria. I knew it already, from the AIDS crisis. In 1983, Fauci, working at NIH, caused hysteria in writing that “routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” The widely quoted statement — he was an incessant self-promoter back then, too — led to long-intractable beliefs that AIDS could come from a kiss on the cheek, breathing in the same room, a mosquito bite, or a toilet seat.

In the late ’80s, Fauci, in his current job, pushed AZT, a powerful chemotherapy drug made by Burroughs Wellcome, as the very best treatment for AIDS. AZT, designed as a cancer drug, was rarely used because of its toxicity. Fauci smothered dozens of promising, less toxic, and less expensive drugs. I learned firsthand from those with AIDS taking AZT that it was a 50/50 proposition. If AIDS didn’t kill you, AZT would. At the time, it was the most expensive drug on the market, for anything. No drug had ever been approved more quickly by the FDA.

Without adequate trials, Fauci rammed it through to make it look as if his department was doing something. He bullied doctors to prescribe it, and, as in Covid, mobilized yes-men and echo chambers. AZT was a profit gusher for Wellcome. I was in Connecticut politics at the time. Knowing a little about AZT and Fauci, but knowing a lot about crooks, I had my suspicions about this relationship. Who knows.

“He’s incompetent, he’s a publicity hog, he’s got no credibility,” odd to say, aren’t disqualifiers in Washington, and the NPG is a creature of Washington. Fauci is a master at failing upward. He has mastered, too, Washington’s culture of tenure and entitlement. He’s built a government fiefdom, a $40 billion agency, that commands the heights overlooking private-sector research and development. He’s the highest-paid employee of the U.S. government, making more than the president.

By stoking the Covid crisis, Fauci also facilitates the work-from-home culture Washington now loves. Tens of thousands of federal employees are still using Covid as an excuse not to come to the office. Fauci has kept the crisis fresh. There’s a stay-at-home constituency for making it eternal. He’s its enabler.

He’s been a government employee for more than 50 years. Like so many Washington honchos, he truly cares about only one thing: how he looks. He’s D.C.’s idea of a hero. He’s the ultimate Washington success story.

Dr. Snake Oil is getting an award at an NPG gala on November 12. His portrait goes on view on October 22. He and six others won Portrait of a Nation Awards, a prize the NPG has given since 2015 for “extraordinary individuals who have made transformative contributions to the United States.” I assume that the NPG picks these people and commissions their portraits.

This year, the other winners are tennis players Serena and Venus Williams, D.C.-based master chef and philanthropist José Andrés, music entrepreneur Clive Davis, and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who produced a love-letter documentary about Colin Kaepernick, the multi-millionaire ingrate who hates America. At least Fauci doesn’t hate the country. Why in the world is she getting this plum honor? Marian Wright Edelman, who led the Children’s Defense Fund, is on the list, too. Strange that the NPG would honor her and Dr. Destructo, whose Covid terror campaign and cruel school lockdowns imperiled so many children.

I think the Williams sisters, Edelman, and Clive Davis deserve NPG portraits, and I suppose Andrés does, too, though I’d never heard of him. Davis, after all, discovered Tony Orlando. I’d tie a hundred yellow ribbons round the old oak tree hoping that Fauci goes far, far away and never comes back.

Obviously, in honoring Fauci, the NPG has lost its way. It’s already showing dozens of crappy portraits. It needs to put the junk in storage. It should trawl museum collections throughout the country and borrow the best portraits from their storage vaults. The Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the MFA in Boston, for starters, have great portraits of dozens of famous people in storage simply because they can’t fit them in their galleries. The NPG is a national museum. Why not borrow these works? Is it too much work or too little vision?

The Gilbert Stuart portraits of the first five presidents are the NPG’s great treasures. Why isn’t it displaying them on its turf, in its own presidential portrait gallery? Its new Social Justice portrait gallery isn’t a bad idea, but it’s stocked with weird, arbitrary subjects and too much bad art. Its Outwin triennial of the best in contemporary portraiture is a good show with lots of great art but too many works that really aren’t portraits. They’re scenes of everyday life masquerading as portraits to make the curators’ favorite political points. And now it’s honoring Fauci, Dr. Wrong, with a portrait? Who’s next? Meghan Markle?

It sounds like the place needs a new director. Good judgment seems to be missing, and we can’t blame the supply-chain crisis, also caused by the Fauci lockdowns.

Fauci moved the Covid goalposts enough times to give the country a case of whiplash. “Two Weeks to Stop the Spread” became “Just Wear the Damn Thing,” referring to masks, not condoms, since, in Fauci World, sex is a super-spreader. No one has more subverted the government’s credibility about health and medicine. Now, when it comes to science, “government experts advise” is a prelude to disbelief and disdain. The public isn’t against science. It’s against fake, self-interested science.

Tell Fauci you’ve changed your mind, NPG. Give him a one-way ticket on one of Elon Musk’s spaceships. Tell him his portrait’s going on a milk carton that reads “Missing, for Good.” Expect to hear the Hallelujah Chorus throughout the land.

Get serious and announce some new portrait subjects. Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, is, in my opinion, the country’s most distinguished and accomplished cultural civil servant. His Museum of African American History and Culture, led by him from scratch to triumph, is all about positive creation and truth. Commission an elegant portrait of him. “But he runs the Smithsonian,” you say. So what. He’s a force for good. Louise Glück, the American poet, won a Nobel prize a couple of years ago, and deserved it. She’s inspirational.

I checked the NPG’s index of subjects represented in the collection. James Tour is one of the great chemists and nanotechnologists of our time. He’s a professor at Rice in Houston. Aside from Bunch, please, no Washington. The country’s not Washington. And Tour reads the Bible every morning. Margaret Geller is an extragalactic astronomer. Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel prize last year for her work on genome editing. She’s a role model. There’s Stephen Sondheim. Alice Greenwald built the September 11 Memorial & Museum and directed it until she retired last year. No cultural project was as fraught. How about Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win an Oscar as best director? There’s James Ivory, whose movies are so erudite and sumptuous.

Anyone but Fauci. Dr. Birx was habitually deceitful, but her taste for elegant Hermès scarves might have redeemed her. Now she has ditched the scarves, though, and she’s gone platinum blonde, so no one recognizes her.

Or, and here’s an idea our masters would find beyond the scope of human imagination. Why not commission a group portrait of Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, and Martin Kulldorf from Harvard? These three eminent doctors, at the very top of their game, wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which, among other things, fingered Fauci as a lame brain. Deploying brutally honest evidence, it proved the lockdowns were useless, unless we wanted to kill the economy. These are people of integrity, intellect, and courage. Fauci, channeling his inner Scarpia, did everything he could to demonize them.

*****

I’ve written several times over the past few years about the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. On the one hand, it’s a distinguished, historic museum with a superb collection. On the other, it has the worst board of trustees of any museum I know. I’ve been going to the museum since the 1960s and follow it closely since I know the collection, grew up in Connecticut, and have known all the directors over the past 40 years.

That’s enough for a baseball team as the board — dysfunctional, cheap, and smug — has a record of both tormenting directors and blaming them for failures it’s fomented through ambitions for which it wants someone else to pay. It’s a board of petit bourgeois suburbanites who believe they have the élan and arts savvy of the Upper West Side but are, in reality, hayseeds.

Two years ago, the board and its very good director, Thomas Loughman, parted ways after some trustees, big on equity, inclusion, and diversity fads, complained that the museum was “too white.” I was sad to see Loughman go. He did great exhibitions, opened the museum the minute he could after the Covid crisis, and made it free to all residents of poor, almost all black and Hispanic Hartford.

The board then did the unforgivable. With Loughman gone, and without a search, it hired a sitting trustee for the newly created position of chief executive officer, making whoever it would hire as director the subordinate of this CEO. This makes the new director, in effect, a director with no power.

The Atheneum board wants one thing: control. It can’t bear a director who’s smart, experienced, and in possession of a mind of his or her own. This is never fine, but it’s a shame it’s happened to the Atheneum, the oldest civic museum in America.

Jeffrey Brown, the new CEO, is still a trustee. He used to work for Newman’s Own, the boutique food company. I thought about the Atheneum last week. Our dog likes Newman’s Own grass-fed beef jerky. It’s been hard to find. It was plentiful when Brown kept his eye on the cow pasture. Seems like he had a calling for pet food, Fig Newmans, frozen pizza, and salad dressing. He has never worked in a museum, though. Call me a velociraptor, and say I don’t look a day over 70 million years old, but I think a major-museum CEO should have spent some time working in a museum.

That very afternoon, after the Atheneum came to mind, I read that it has finally hired a director, Matthew Hargraves, a British art specialist who has been the acting chief curator there for the past year. I heard that the board desperately wanted an African American but couldn’t find anyone, not even an affirmative-action hire.

Who’d want it? Brown, he of garlic vinaigrette and mango salsa, is in charge of “overall leadership, vision, and strategic direction.” Hargraves, who was a curator at the British Art Center in New Haven for years, won’t have much authority.

There’s apparently a faction on the board that’s furious over the money the Atheneum spent on its well-received Milton Avery retrospective this year, conceived by the previous director. “Too white.” The exhibition has now moved to the Royal Academy in London. A more prestigious partner is hard to find. I suppose the diversity faddists on the board find the RA “way too white.” What a terrible way to think. How demeaning to everyone, from every heritage. Only a bunch of dopes can make Milton Avery a racial proposition.

It’s a board that’s impossible to satisfy. Discontent and “we can do it better” are in the board’s DNA. I wish Hargraves well since I like the museum. The board, true to form, will probably blame him for everything. They won’t blame Brown, who is, after all, their crony.

Hargraves was well respected at Yale’s British Art Center. He’s a good scholar. Message to the board, aside from “please resign”: Send Brown back to his cookie sheets and coffee roaster. Give Hargraves, a good man, the authority to do the director’s job.