Once upon a time, in a faraway place called Brooklyn, there lived a museum director named Anne Pasternak. Because she was a member of America’s self-appointed cultural elite, she liked to travel to trendy places like Aspen and make sweeping statements about art and society. If we don’t focus our efforts entirely on celebrating “great work by people of color,” went one of her most popular refrains, “we will create pain for others, undermine calls of equity and justice, and fail to be the cultural leaders we must become.”
To show that she wasn’t all talk, Pasternak soon raided her own museum’s collection, selling off everything that was boring and old and white. Monet’s Les Iles à Port-Villez? Miró’s Couple d’amoureux dans la nuit? Degas’s Femme nue assise, s’essuyant les cheveux? Down with these dusty emblems of the patriarchy! Instead, under her leadership, visitors to the Brooklyn Museum were treated to exhibitions such as It’s Pablo-matic, a queer feminist takedown of Picasso by cringe comedian Hannah Gadsby, or the apparently unironically named Giants, which featured art from the collection of rapper Swizz Beatz and singer Alicia Keys.
