Infants, Sociopaths, and Warriors: Anonymous Art World Cancel Accounts, Texas Edition
Patience for these stunts is wearing thin.
In our liberal-progressive, circular-firing-squad culture wars, we have anonymous cancel accounts on social media—online places set up for people to air grievances—and some specifically target the art world.
This is old news to some—and by now, as many lose patience with cancel culture, it’s a pretty exhausted sphere. The first prominent art-world cancel account that got mainstream press was on Instagram; it’s called Change the Museum, and it debuted, not surprisingly, the summer of 2020. It immediately attracted tens of thousands of followers, because while it may have served as a cathartic pressure-release valve for some, it clearly fulfilled the bloodlust of the moment, and most followers—locked down at home and isolated—just tuned in to watch who was gonna get it next.
The point of the account, in the spirit of #metoo, was to provide a safe platform for outing ill-judged behavior by nasty bosses, co-workers, board members, and museum patrons. But also to police any and all slips, gaffes, misused terminologies, etc., deemed unacceptable by progressive warriors. Tales of perceived micro-aggressions abound on this account.
Of course, as with all things progressive, the goalposts constantly shift to encompass outlying gray areas and complexities of workplace dynamics that couldn’t possibly be elucidated in an Instagram post. But the prevailing mood of that summer was at full boil: people wanted heads on platters for real and imagined sins, committed across time and dimension.
I need to stress that some of the stories shared on that national account—some involved Texas collecting and non-collecting museums—read not only as believable and lamentable, but downright gross.
The mob pile-ons in the comments section could be intense, and almost none of the stories were fact-checkable. The anonymous people submitting stories about these institutions were more often than not relating “lived experience” rather than anything that an HR department (I know, yuck) could investigate.
Museums could use some continued soul searching as they’ve scrambled (and have for about 15 years now) to address blind spots, diversity and board-member issues, and historical snubs. But, given that cancel accounts rely on anonymous allegations, I struggle to understand how such an egregious lack of due process could lead to fair or healthy changes in the long term. Plus, grievance competitions are contagious, and cultivate resentments where they didn’t previously exist.
At one point in the fall of 2020, just as many U.S. museums were reopening and many of their employees were palpably relieved to still have jobs, Change the Museum demanded a full-blown boycott, by everyone, of all museums. Needless to say, it confused and pissed off a lot of its followers. Change the museum? Sure. Destroy the museum? Not if rent is due and there are mouths to feed. It was a great example of the hypocrisy of high-minded, overeducated, coastal elite activists versus actual workers and their needs. It was a real betrayal.
I was editor-in-chief of Glasstire at the time. Earlier, Glasstire had been called out by the account’s commenters who expected us to “jump” at their command, and make their cases for them; their target was the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—a behemoth—and its sin was that of being the first major U.S. museum to open to the public during the pandemic. Ahead of its reopening, MFAH stressed the extraordinary amount of precaution it would take, the protocols designed and approved by all the right kinds of experts—the whole shebang.
That the museum felt pressure to reopen ahead of the unveiling of its highly anticipated new building may or may not be beside the point by now; within weeks and months, other museums across the state and country reopened. As far as I heard, as I wrote above, many museum workers were happy to be back at work.
Some weren’t. The unhappy ones were loud about it, albeit always and only anonymously online, out of fear of losing their jobs. Glasstire dutifully covered the reopening of MFAH with as much consideration as possible, careful to mention the plight of museum front-line workers who hadn’t signed up to be on any front-line. Glasstire is a tiny non-profit lacking any legal team or resources for hardline investigation, but we got called on anyway. On more than one occasion I attempted to get or keep a dialogue going with the disgruntled, and they disappeared on me.
(By the way, chilling overreach in this atmosphere was and is common: has anyone checked on Gary Garrels lately? How is he? How about the 80 fired docents in Chicago?)
A more pathological national cancel account debuted not long after Change the Museum. Cancel the Damn Art Galleries was and is an Instagram account for going after commercial spaces. It didn’t take long for international mega-galleries to rack up mentions in the posts; I know people who have worked in these spaces, and the megalomania of some dealers and directors is legend. The abuse is real. I’ve witnessed some of it in person.
But another abuser? The account itself. The nastiness and cruelty of Cancel the Damn Galleries’ anonymous founder/moderator was really something to behold.
That account (again, in the summer of 2020) honed in on a Houston matter, an older case, and turned it into a colosseum of spectacle. I won’t name names—many readers here will know who this is about, and I won’t hand Google the name-search supply. An anonymous tip got it started—no telling how much of this stemmed from a personal grievance, possibly a smokescreen, even—and then other tips came in, too, and then it was just a shit-show of the account running unfounded posts detailing misbehavior by this person, a former institutional director in Houston with a long history in the New York art world. Many of the posts opened with the moderator’s labeling of him, IN ALL CAPS, as a pedophile. Over and over.
Was his libertine behavior “bad,” in a professional sense, by present-day standards? Absolutely! Fireable? Looks like it. He and his institution, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), parted ways in 2018. An investigation had been launched back then, and evidently due process was followed; the director did the forced-resignation thing. The scandal was public enough, and fateful: this man would likely never work at a non-profit space again.
Was his behavior criminal? Nope. Not at all. Not, at least, from all the stories and gossip I was forced to chase up when Cancel the Damn Galleries landed on this nugget of Houston-New York lore. If the man had done something truly criminal, he would have been charged in 2018.
This person in question who lost his job of ten years: we were looking at a survivor of the AIDS crisis, NYC-Edition (i.e. the epicenter) who still lives by some old codes—ongoing codes in his circle—of, ahem, living life to its fullest. You can drop your prude-o-meter now; older gay dudes fuck younger gay dudes. Younger gay dudes fuck older gay dudes. If you’re wondering if I could possibly be making this up, let me direct you to Pornhub Gay, where entire categories are dedicated to this stuff. Of course.
His lack of boundaries between the personal and professional was very old-school for 2018. Familiar-sounding tales of art-scene favoritism, nepotism—grown people attempting to maneuver and trade favors… in the art world, this stuff runs both ways.
Much of what he was accused of reads like he’d failed to recognize how retrograde this style of art-world conduct had become. Or he didn’t care. Still, not criminal—and not pedophilia, for Christ’s sake.
Gay men’s sexual culture is a nuanced and opaque topic. When all this started up again and Glasstire got hauled into the mess (for reasons I’ll explain in a minute), I spent hours on the phone, in due diligence, with young, middle-aged, and older gay men, from near and far, who knew something of the situation. They explained things to me. I believed them.
And accusing someone of being a pedophile—a gay man, no less, who would have lived through a history of right-wingers trying to force an utterly spurious link there—is the kind of thing that could get a person killed. Murdered.
This cancel account’s moderator was gleeful in their pursuit—a pitchfork-wielding, rabid executioner. How the account’s followers managed to stomach this kangaroo trial is beyond me, but then, I may lack some imagination when it comes to evil and people’s lust to participate in it.
It was the darkest week of all my years at Glasstire. I nearly quit, every day, because I was spending all of my time, hours and days, trying to do the right thing by a man who had never given me the time of day, despite our shared community and industry—a man I didn’t even particularly know. But there was no way I was going to pile on.
The CAMH’s panicked reaction to the Cancel the Damn Galleries’ madness was to send to Glasstire and some other media outlets a press statement re-defending its 2018 investigation that led to the director’s departure. CAMH’s statement implied that it was very concerned about this new blow-up on socials… and then it passed the buck.
I fought with my boss about whether to qualify CAMH’s statement with any response on our site. As goes the nightmare-circus of that summer where these kinds of things demanded as much attention as possible, of course some outlet was going to cover it. I found it incredibly irresponsible to give it more gas. It was “social justice”-as-journalism. Or covering-our-asses as journalism. Not actual journalism. My boss forced the issue. It’s news now. So we ran a news item on it.
I hated myself for it. And “force” is a loaded and subjective word here; the summer of 2020 onward is also when I felt “forced” to carry a lot of water for progressive religiosity in order to keep my job. I’ll write about my sins committed in the name of staying employed at a non-profit in an upcoming post. But this was one of them.
I never enjoyed working at Glasstire again. I didn’t believe in its integrity anymore.
Of course, the appetite for pile-ons isn’t confined to headline-grabbing national accounts. It trickles down to local copycats; there’s a lot of emotional payoff for those wanting to jump into the grievance game.
Which brings me to something even more local. Dallas Art Critic is the name of an Instagram account that started up several years ago as a benign, good-natured place where an anonymous poster (two posters, actually) ran tiny capsule reviews of local art shows.
The account, however, got testier and more carping as arty call-outs grew trendier and more common—and by 2021 it essentially started shit-stirring in the name of more localized art-world grievances. When it worked this angle into its mix, it tripled its following.
Of course I know who the people are behind it. And yet I kept quiet, and rarely checked socials. I suppose my sense is that much of the time, social justice warriors choose to believe their own stuff even when it’s unfair or misguided.
Or do they actually believe it? On December 15, 2021, Dallas Art Critic posted a long screed on how Dallas-area commercial gallerists micro-aggress them, or snub them, or whatever, when they visit their art spaces. It’s all very “lived experience”-subjective. They essentially accuse the local gallerists of being hopelessly racist. In particular, they called out the member-dealers of CADD, the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (a group my own gallery was a founding member of in 2007), and the galleries at Texas Christian University.
There’s no service-industry blueprint for commercial and private spaces. And leaving visitors alone is a legit business tactic. Most visitors, even collectors, are not there for an obsequious art lesson. They are there to look at art—art that the dealer has no obligation to make public in the first place. Their space is the welcome.
The gallerists can’t defend themselves from baseless charges; Dallas Art Critic clearly knows and enjoys this fact—this protection of anonymity.
That December post is politicized, attention-seeking crap. It’s tired, and also borderline libel. If the two behind the account want to infantilize themselves this way (“woe is me”), they might look elsewhere. They might leave these hard-working gallerists, these human beings, alone; running a gallery in Texas is a razor’s-edge existence. For some it’s hand-to-mouth. The local dealers they targeted are fair-minded, experienced, overworked, understaffed, often secretly broke, and incredibly gracious (Dallas gallerists in particular); I would say to Dallas Art Critic: Try walking into any New York or Los Angeles gallery and see if your narcissistic expectations for ass-kissing are met. In other words: Grow up.
These gallerists don’t treat visitors badly. Dallas Art Critic chooses to interpret things this way because complaining makes them more popular on social media. But: Calling people racist, in such a disingenuous way, is the shittiest thing you can do these days—every bit as base as falsely calling someone a pedophile. It can be totalizing in its effect.
These gallerists aren’t snubbing anyone, and god knows they aren’t “neglecting” anyone due to their skin color. (One of the two people behind the account is white, by the way.) What Dallas Art Critic did with that post was self-promoting, community-corroding, trust-destroying click-bait.
Patience for these stunts is wearing thin.