On Fri, 27 Jan 1995, Nmhm Afip wrote:
 
>      I am writing this without having seen the actual exhibit script, and I
>      am basing some of my comments on the "West as America" exhibit also
>      mounted the Smithsonian or the National Gallery of Art.  As you may
>      recall, that exhibit used pasinting to reinterpet the American
>      experience in the West and it ran into a firestorm of critism and was
>      rewritten.  I saw the rewritten version of the exhibtit and it seemed
>      to met that in the effort to present the "alternative view" of the
>      west, they overlooked key information and drew unwarrented conclusions
>      from the paintings.  In short, it was appallingly bad history.  I fear
>      that this is what happened to the Enola Gay Exhibit....
 
 
       If you think the revised version of "The West as America" was bad,
you should have seen the
orginal version. The curator, who is a distinguished graduate of our very
finest educational institutions, set out to show that the "winning of the
West" was a metaphorical and actual rape. If the paintings he picked to
make a particular point actually showed something else, he blithely
ignored the inconvenience and just wrote commentary that was wildly
incongruent with the artist's intention, and in some cases flatly
misstated what the picture showed. Never mind Muir, never mind the sturdy
and self-reliant pioneer women, never mind the immigrants-cum-migrants
pushing West simply in search of a place where they could raise crops and
families in peace, never mind that the noble savages who were victimized
in the process often invited white intervention in their behalf against
other Indians, commonly practiced slavery and almost universally employed
the most exquisitely obscene torture on captives, red or white alike.
       His interpretations and interpolations were so obviously and
clumsily cockamamie that it was apparent even to the congressmen who
appropiate the Smithsonian's budget, some of whom could not read the
captions without moving their lips. Hell, even journalists couldn't miss it.
       What the exhibit amounted to was the very summit of
deconstructionism employed in the service of political correctness. The
finest products of our academic system often cannot spell, or parse an
English sentence, but they go forth imbued with an unshakable conviction
that all previous history is bunk and they know what the real truth is,
let the barbarians howl and caper as we may.
       Their method is simple. If they can't find evidence to support a
theory, they just take the evidence that refutes them and turn it around,
on the ground that the author or artist who created the work in question
didn't understand its true meaning.
       I have some hope, although not a great deal of it, that the furor
over "The West as America" may eventually be recognized as the turning
point from which we'll mark the decline of anti-intellectualism in
America and Europe. And maybe even in France.
 
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