“The Department of State is in the process of discussions with legal representatives to ascertain whether the art can be sold.” That is a senior State Department official, quoted by The Art Newspaper, on a painting the department had just taken off a wall.
Read it slowly. The painting is Kehinde Wiley’s Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, more than twelve feet wide, four Dominican art students against one of his floral grounds, installed in the US embassy in Santo Domingo in 2015 after a commission through Art in Embassies and paid for, the same report notes, with taxpayer money. In August the ambassador, Leah Campos, filmed its removal and said the embassy was “turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and instead embracing American patriotism,” Artnet reports. The same report has the head of Art in Embassies calling it “aesthetically terrifying.” Artlyst adds that staff draped it in a flag first, which is one way of answering a painting of four students.
Then the lawyers. A work that is too terrifying to hang has, on the department’s own account, a value that someone might collect. The two positions are not incompatible on paper. In practice they pull against each other: the more the object is condemned, the harder it is to explain why the Treasury should want to be paid for it, and the more it is priced, the harder it is to maintain that nobody could bear to look at it. The State Department cited allegations against Wiley, which he denies, and his earlier remarks about another work; the Art Newspaper’s account says no specific objection to this painting was articulated. I am reporting what the department has said, not adjudicating any of it. My interest is the sequence: verdict first, appraisal second.
It has a precedent, and I want to be careful with it, because I am not comparing governments. I am comparing a ledger. On 30 June 1939, in the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, the Gallery Fischer sold works that the German state had confiscated from its museums as “degenerate,” some sixty paintings in the catalogue, among them Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Chagall and Franz Marc. The purpose was to turn condemned art into foreign currency. The result was, by the accounts I can find, a disappointment, a little over 500,000 Swiss francs, and part of the reason is instructive: some expected bidders stayed away because they worried where the proceeds would go.
That was the second bill for the verdict. Calling a painting worthless is free; the trouble comes when you then need to sell it, and the buyers have opinions about whose pocket they are filling. A body that has declared an artist beyond the pale has to find a market that does not agree with it, and the market’s price is, by definition, the disagreement.
Wiley’s reply, in a 24 September letter posted to Instagram, is the tidiest move available: he offered to buy the painting himself. “The painting remains important to me, as do the people and the ideas that it represents.” His auction record, Artnet notes, is £660,400. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that any price the department accepted would become the first number attached to the phrase “aesthetically terrifying,” and the department may find that a more awkward figure to publish than it expects. If it declines to sell to the one person who has said he wants it, the object stays unsold, unhung and, on the department’s own timetable, undecided.
In Lucerne the thing that gave the sale away was not the paintings. It was the fact that it needed an auctioneer, a hotel and a date. I would watch for the same small administrative facts here: whether the legal advice ever becomes a public document, what the paperwork calls the painting when it stops being “woke” and becomes an asset, and who signs for it. A wall can be cleared in an afternoon. A disposal takes a form.