It might surprise you to learn that the Toledo Art Museum is outstanding. Indeed, you might be surprised that the city has an art museum. Today, Toledo is a city whose best days are behind it. Once the glass-producing capital of the world, hence its nickname “Glass City,” it is now beset by joblessness and other problems facing the Rust Belt.
I wouldn’t blame you if, after struggling with the museum’s slow-performing website, you decide to skip a visit. The website is filled with community outreach bromides. By community, the museum’s staff means the NEA, USAID, and NGO grant-chasing community, driven by government-mandated DEI and Woke policies. This community, along with a thin crust of the rich, is THE art world in the USA and has been since the ’60s–the lifetime of most of us. This is the community that supports America’s contemporary artists, such as Hunter Biden.
Wokeism’s year-zero mentality is always pernicious, but it’s disastrous when it infects museums. History for the woke is a piñata spitting out clownish straw men used to fashion the grievance narrative.
Wokism always leads to corruption. When you fashion an institute for grievance-defined groups, how do you choose among the worthy? Talent is an artifact of patriarchy or colonialism or whatever. Influence peddling and cronyism–corruption.
Worse yet is that these museums end up becoming about the exemplars of Wokeism–the staff itself. Woke institutes become bloated and top-heavy with administrators. Universities with their 2-1 ratio of administrators to professors are a good example of this phenomenon.
The end state for Woke Institute is a total abandonment of its core mission, jettisoned in favor of so-called ‘social justice’ goals. You want social justice, don’t you, bigot?
So visit the museum while it still dares to exhibit gems like this Rubens from its permanent collection. For me, this Rubens painting is worth several more trips.
