In principle, and as often as possible in practice, it’s best to separate judgments about an artist from judgments about the art.
Roald Dahl was an unabashed Jew hater. But my childhood (and millions of others) would have been poorer without Willy Wonka and Matilda Wormwood. Pablo Picasso was monstrous in his treatment of women. He was wondrous in his depiction of them. Eldridge Cleaver was an admitted and convicted rapist. Yet “Soul on Ice” is one of the most interesting books of its time.
Then there’s the case of John Galliano, the British fashion designer, and the self-inflicted fiasco that has befallen New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Monday, Galliano withdrew under pressure from a planned nine-month retrospective of his work at the museum, to be kicked off next May with the Met’s lavish, lucrative, star-studded annual gala.
Galliano, by broad consensus, is a master of his craft whose creative gifts enshrined Givenchy, Dior and Maison Margiela as international fashion powerhouses. He is also, by many accounts, a wretch.
“From his early days as a struggling designer in London and Paris through his time at the heights of the fashion industry, Mr. Galliano was known to be verbally abusive to employees, friends and strangers alike,” wrote Dana Thomas, his biographer, in a guest essay in The Times. In 2011 a French court convicted him of a pair of hate crimes for antisemitic and anti-Asian tirades at a Paris bar. He apologized for the behavior, claiming he had been high and drunk.
But these were not isolated events. A video of a separate incident from 2010 captured him telling patrons of the same bar, “I love Hitler,” adding, “Your mothers, your forefathers would be fucking gassed.” In 2019, according to the fashion publicist Lauren London, Galliano “started screaming ‘Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas’” when he overheard a woman speaking Hebrew at an alcohol-free Italian spa. “When my friend asked him if he had a problem with Hebrew he promptly and very unapologetically responded that he did.” London’s friend and her daughter have confirmed the incident; a spokesman for Galliano says he denies it.
Galliano’s troubled history was a secret to nobody when the museum decided to honor him, thanks largely to the tireless championship of Anna Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and a longtime trustee of the Met. It was a reminder that high fashion and good judgment only rarely coincide.
For starters, the date of the gala coincided with Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Whoops. Then the museum thought it could mollify the Jewish community by arranging meetings between Galliano and prominent rabbis so they could offer their benediction. But it seems not to have reckoned with Julie Menin, the speaker of New York’s City Council, who denounced the tribute to Galliano as “wholly inappropriate” and a “serious mistake” at a time of steeply rising anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city. The city helps fund the Met to the tune of millions of dollars a year.
There was also the palaver from Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute. Bolton promised that the planned show would open with an “orientation gallery” on Galliano’s transgressions that could “provide context” for visitors. It was a touch of self-important backside covering for a show whose overriding, if unwritten, political message would have been that Jew hatred, unlike most other forms of bigotry, is a survivable mistake in elite Western culture today. As Elisha Wiesel said last week, “If someone had screamed the worst racial epithet you can imagine, said, ‘You’re a horrible Black person, and your ancestors would have been hung from a tree,’ you could not imagine them being honored by a prominent cultural institution.”
The good news is that that message will not be sent, at least not this time. The bad news is that the central lesson of this episode remains unlearned.
The error of the Galliano retrospective was not the desire to display his outstanding body of work for the public. A dress, assuming it doesn’t have a swastika stitched to it, doesn’t convey a prejudice, and curious visitors, including Jewish ones, could learn a lot from an excellent exhibition. The outrage was the highly personalized form of the honor being bestowed on Galliano himself, above all through the Met Gala, which violated the principle of separation by celebrating the execrable creator along with his extraordinary creations.
By the same token, efforts to explicate Galliano’s conduct, examine his sincerity or extract another apology from him should not be in the museum’s remit. The function of art museums is to display great art, period. It’s not to serve as moral inquisitor, contextualizer or apologist. The same attitude should apply to every other supposedly problematic artist, whether it’s Edgar Degas or Paul Gauguin or Chuck Close or Kehinde Wiley.
The smart play for the Met would have been to cancel the gala and go ahead with the retrospective — and to have used that decision as a template for every future political controversy. Instead, Wintour, in her capacity as a Met trustee, praised Galliano for being “very courageous” after he withdrew and offered him her “full support.” That she cannot seem to separate the man from his work might prompt the rest of the museum’s leadership to ask whether she hasn’t done damage enough already.
Perhaps there’s another fashionista the Met could have canceled.
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