Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldWere you thrilled by the Hilma af Klint (2018) blockbuster at the Guggenheim — visited by more than 600,000 people? That exhibition would have been impossible without decades of feminist scholarship by art historians. Were you bowled over by the Manet/Degas (2023) or Siena (2024) shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Both were organised by the same curator whose Harvard PhD enabled his enviable language skills and offered him the time to write a dissertation essential to those exhibitions.Simply put, when it comes to art, there is no way to sever the ties between the university and the museum. Which is why the Trump administration’s war on universities, and what it falsely calls “woke ideology”, has far-reaching consequences. Even if museums remain untouched, the brain drain will be crippling. The humanities, which teach critical thinking and historical context, and as such are utterly dependent on freedom of expression, are squarely under attack. Without the humanities, we can’t educate the next generations of writers, curators, historians and artists.Today’s museum was born during the enlightenment era that gave us the American, French and Haitian revolutions. Like the library, the university and the free press, it is a tent-pole institution that anchors civil society in the west. This means that museums are deeply enmeshed in democracy. For the past three centuries, the core mission of the museum has been to preserve, display and interpret works of art and cultural artefacts made by all humankind. Some are encyclopedic (the Louvre), others focus on nationality (Whitney Museum of American Art), some are dedicated to the newest art (MCA Chicago). But at the 30,000ft view they share the same impetus — to provide an environment where culture can be examined, debated and saved for posterity.This has not been a benign activity. Museums have always been intimately bound up with power and ideology, specifically who gets to tell whose story. They have been the handmaids of colonialist ideas about which cultures are “better” than others. They are riven by patriarchy. Indeed, the museum may be the original manosphere. Then there is its overarching whiteness. A dealer once quipped to me: “Your average museum opening is white walls, white people and white wine.” It’s no secret that for the past three decades there has been a concerted effort on the part of curators and artists to rectify this dulling and false homogeneity, and as a result museums are now more inclusive of a broad array of stories and people than they have ever been. They are also better attended than ever. Whether you see this as causal or coincidental, it remains factual. There have always been major challenges to how art has been interpreted. For instance, impressionism was originally denigrated by audiences who found the paintings unfinished and ugly. Those pictures were also collected by Americans who considered them beautiful. Some scholars think the impressionists set the stage for abstract painting. They became the darlings of a museum tourist economy. Today we use Monet’s series Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) — paintings of a train pulling into a station — as an early example of the air pollution brought on by the industrial revolution. All these interpretations of impressionism are equally legitimate. One does not cancel another. This is the primary reason we save art, because of its unique capacity to show us who we are and how the way we think changes over time. This is why art is so resonant, and what makes it so intellectually and emotionally valuable. It is worth remembering that rightwing authoritarian governments always take culture’s power very seriously. The Nazis put on a show of “degenerate art” by Jewish and avant garde artists and they shuttered one of the most important art schools ever developed, the Bauhaus. They knew freedom when they saw it. And surely freedom is why one of the few part-federally funded museums, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, has found itself in the crosshairs of the current administration in recent months. An executive order in March claimed that the Smithsonian advanced “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”, singling out the NMAAHC in particular. The order calls for an end to funding shows that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race or promote ideologies inconsistent with federal law”. Because museums save art, they powerfully shape both art history and human history. The democratic telling of history is a contested affair, requiring nimble expertise and multi-faceted (dare I say diverse) research and scholarship. The university and the museum share this responsibility. Furthermore, the threat to the tax-exempt status of universities suggests another danger to museums. Federal funding was tamped down during the culture wars of the 1980s. But all museums, even those funded exclusively by private individuals, enjoy a not-for-profit tax status. Donations are tax-deductible and museums don’t pay taxes, meaning the museum is in service to the public. This is a social contract underwritten by the government that can be altered or eliminated. Since the folks at Project 2025 are in the mood for destruction, I think it is unwise not to consider the worst. There are many red flags in the museum sector — billionaires with too much power, philanthropy that is almost entirely transactional, a reservoir of conservatism and cautiousness when it comes to hiring staff — but I firmly believe museums, our primary custodians of art, are worth fighting for. However, I don’t think museums can hold themselves apart by arguing they don’t rely on federal funding. We can no longer pretend that museums and universities are not dependent on each other in their support and protection of democracy. The way forward will require that we raise our voices in support of our sister institutions in their struggles before we need to ask them for help with ours.Helen Molesworth is a Los Angeles-based writer, podcaster, and curator.Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
