Displays of Power

Disclaimer: this book elicited a very powerful feeling in me and this essay is very personal and heated.

Steven C. Dubin’s Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (1999) details six case studies (including Sensation as a part of the afterward) of museum exhibits that have elicited excitement, protest, and outrage. Dubin’s book attempts to argue that controversial museum exhibits, like Harlem on my Mind or The Last Act (more commonly known simply as the Enola Gay Exhibit), are battles over public space, history, and culture.

His first chapter, “Crossing 125th Street: Harlem on my Mind Revisited,” explores the fiasco that was Tom Hoving’s, then curator of the Met, pet project. This is perhaps Dubin’s best work as it is the most historically contextual of the other studies. By emphasizing the political culture of race, ethnicity, and ideology of the late 1960s Dubin is able to argue how contemporary battles between African Americans and Jews of the Lower Eastside shaped the understanding of the Met’s displays. Dubin also outlines how at each opportunity for community support the curators of Harlem on my Mind made the wrong decision. From failing to include African American arts of a more traditional medium to including a racially charged essay written by a teenage girl, Hoving and his staff made every wrong choice offered to them, except perhaps to have the exhibit in the first place.

Dubin has little to say about the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s. He spends the rest of his book detailing different museum displays and tries to understand why they elicited controversy. He makes great use of various interviews with museum personel which will prove to be great resource someday. However, Dubin quotes many of these respondents at such length that most of the controversies sound like catty, juvenile battles of curatorship rather than cultural space. This does little for Dubin’s work and detracts from his writing. Aside from one chapter on The West as America exhibit which uses anonymous comments from museum guests, the audiences of these exhibits are largely ignored. Their contributions would have added more to Displays of Power than those of journalists, who Dubin accuses of being out of touch or unwilling to examine the exhibits for themselves (196-197). Dubin’s chapter on the Enola Gay adds little because so many other scholars have already written on that subject.

Perhaps the most offensive part of Dubin’s book is his afterward and its emphasis on the Sensation exhibit which featured an artist’s interpretation of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung. New Yorkers, especially Catholics, were outraged and the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, wanted the exhibit moved to a private venue. Here Dubin calls Christians and others who might be offended by such a painting homo censorious. He accuses those that believe in absolutism as opposed to moral relativism of being the real villains of America’s free speech. He argues that religion in America is antiquated and irrelevant and that these “manifold fears” are the real reasons Christians would feel compelled to picket, not the offensive nature of the exhibit. If he finds a picture of a religious figure covered in dung so understandable, what family photo of his should the public cover in excrement and argue that it is in fact a compliment to Dubin’s work. He attempts to discredit those that picketed this painting while praising those that picketed Harlem on my Mind. What Dubin fails to understand is that taxpayer dollars fund these public exhibits and as such museums, as have been discussed in other books for this class, are accountable in multiple ways to the viewing public.

Overall this book was a waste. His best chapter was his first and any book that eclipses itself in the first fifty pages should probably be left as an article. He did little to improve the public’s perception of museums and what it is that historians actually do. If anything, he probably damaged it even more. His afterword reads like the whining of an impatient toddler who blames everyone else for not getting his way. The book fails to move readers towards a deeper understanding of cultural space and power.