In late April 1965, the Fogg Museum hosted a show curated by the Harvard University junior fellow Michael Fried, who had only just turned twenty-six. According to an article published the same month in The Harvard Crimson, the show “Three American Painters,” which presented nineteen works by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella, was the campus’s “first exhibition of significant contemporary painting” of the 1960s. The accompanying catalogue essay, written by Fried, was reviewed in October’s Artforum, which described it as:

Wrongheaded, yet brilliant, positivistic, yet mystical, logical, yet unreasonable, admirable, yet infuriating . . . in confronting head-on some of the most difficult problems in contemporary art criticism [the essay] is an inspired antidote to, for example, the jaded, distasteful cynicism that laces Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object.

Fried’s formal criticism was a breath of fresh air to the reviewer Philip Leider because, as he noted, it was “devoid of the anecdotes, cryptic, mysteriously meaningless quotations from artist’s conversation, descriptions of studios, etc., which have become the standard substitute for art criticism.” Although he had already received his B.A. in English summa cum laude from Princeton University, and studied with the celebrated philosopher Richard Wollheim at Oxford, this was still an early stage in Fried’s long and illustrious career. He was yet to receive his doctorate from Harvard, where he became first an assistant professor and then an associate. It was before he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973–74, and before he eventually moved to Johns Hopkins in 1975. Two years after the Fogg show, Fried wrote “Art and Objecthood,” an anthologized essay that definitively established his art-theory credentials. In the decades that followed, he published over a dozen books with top university presses. Despite occasional warranted criticisms (including in this magazine) about Fried’s projection onto art history of his own psychosexual fascinations, his eighty-fifth year finds him comfortably seated among our most accomplished living art historians.

Fried may well be in a league of his own.

When it comes to the breadth and the depth of his writing, which ranges from abstraction through minimalism to French, German, and Italian Baroque, Fried may well be in a league of his own. It was hardly surprising when Eik Kahng, the deputy director and chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, conceived a legacy exhibition to bring Fried’s landmark 1965 Fogg exhibition into the present. With the benefit of historical perspective, Kahng planned to present a selection of work from the 1965 show through the prism of Fried’s subsequent art theory and scholarship, including “Art and Objecthood,” as well as more recent writings on photography. “Three American Painters: Then and Now” had all the hallmarks of an excellent exhibition. As it was described in a January 26 Hyperallergic article, which broke the news of the show’s eleventh-hour cancellation, the exhibition was to put the works of the three original painters (Olitski, Noland, and Stella) in context alongside work by twenty-two other artists, including Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, and the contemporary photographers Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall.

Three years in the making, the exhibition was scheduled to open in early July 2024. Kahng and her team had secured a total of sixty-two loans. A catalogue containing an introduction and four essays was about to go into print, distributed by Yale University Press. As Kahng was putting the final touches on the show, however, the sbma brought in a new director: Amada Cruz, who had previously served as the director of the Seattle Art Museum (2019–23) and the director of the Phoenix Art Museum (2015–19). Within a month of her assuming the position in Santa Barbara, Cruz instructed Kahng to halt work on the show because, according to the Hyperallergic article, “it was under consideration for its lack of diversity.”

In mid-January, Cruz fired Kahng, terminating her for “redundancy,” before promptly stepping into the role herself. While an sbma spokesman refused to comment on Kahng’s firing, citing “confidential personnel matters,” a late-January statement by the museum representative to Hyperallergic implied that the show had been at odds with “the Museum’s mission, budget, relevance, and audiences.” Additionally, several anonymous sources referenced “concerns” regarding the optics of Fried’s use of the phrase “faggot sensibility” in a private 1967 letter to the editor of Artforum. Cruz was less opaque, emailing the participants of the canceled show to let them know that it had been pulled because it was “more suited to an academic institution” than to “a broader audience at the Santa Barbara Museum.”

The dejected artists received Cruz’s message loud and clear. Eight of them, plus members of the Jules Olitski Foundation, responded with a letter to the individual sbma board members. It pointed out that Cruz had appointed herself chief curator “despite the fact that she has no training or qualification to curate while Kahng has been Chief Curator at the museum for thirteen years.” They were right, as Kahng had a solid scholarly and curatorial record. Like Fried, she holds a summa cum laude undergraduate degree from Princeton. Her doctorate is from the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Thomas Crow, Carol Armstrong, and Michael Baxandall. Kahng is a widely published art historian who has authored both scholarly articles and catalogue essays. She also has over two decades of successful curation under her belt. In an interview she gave a year before Cruz’s arrival at sbma, Kahng underscored the importance of scholarship in curatorial work:

I am . . . first and foremost, an art historian. I was trained very specifically at Berkeley to be rigorous in my scholarship . . . . [T]his long maturation process intellectually meant that I had exposure to many incredible minds at Berkeley, and benefited immensely from many hours of seminar discussion and opportunities to teach for some of the greatest art historians of our generation.

Ironically enough, this very thoroughness was her undoing. A serious art historian like Kahng inhabits a different sphere from Amada Cruz, whose highest academic achievement is an undergraduate degree from nyu, where she “studied Art History and Political Science.” As late as 2022, the sixty-one-year-old Cruz’s official bio included a stint as an intern at the Guggenheim, “where she subsequently worked as a Curatorial Assistant.” After that, she was employed by several institutions, curating and cocurating exhibitions of mostly contemporary art. Unsurprisingly, her declared forte was not in curating so much as in “grantmaking,” programming, and managing artist residencies. Given that she was at the helm of two perfectly respectable museums and is now atop a third one, her art-historical ineptitude is quite stunning. Here is a representative example of what one might call Cruz’s “art history lite” from a superlatives-filled talk she gave for Oolite Arts. This is how she presented Dürer’s 1498 engraving The Sea Monster:

And then we have a little Albrecht Dürer. Lovely little thing. Yeah, it’s also really small. And so this is in a much more traditional sense. This, you know, sort of romantic cheesy idea of the water goddess, you know, all that stuff.

She seemed relieved to leave Dürer behind and focus on the mediocre contemporary porcelains.

Cruz’s dislike (and I would suspect fear) of art history manifested itself spectacularly during her tenure as the Sybil Harrington Director & Chief Executive Officer of the Phoenix Art Museum. Her scandalous reign there resulted not only in a massive departure of staff, but also in the flight of over a hundred docents. At the time of Cruz’s arrival, the museum boasted around four hundred volunteer docents, who had to undergo a rigorous two-year training that included a crash course in art history. They were required to attend a series of talks and were then evaluated and reviewed by mentors and consultants. Docents were asked to do research. In the words of one of them, a special research committee composed “scholarly papers designed to inform volunteers about the museum’s collection.” Yet under Cruz and her newly appointed director of education Kaela Sáenz Oriti, the docent training was, according to the Phoenix New Times, “simplified and trimmed by a third in its duration” and “geared more toward engaging museum visitors and less about educating them.” As one disgruntled docent with thirty-five years of experience put it: “Kaela and Amada decided that no one cares about art history, because Kaela and Amada don’t.”

What does Cruz care about? Her interviews don’t provide a clear answer. They are full of upbeat platitudes along the lines of: “We are thinking big and destined to do big things, and the board, staff and I are extremely excited about the possibilities” (2015) and “bridging the global and the local” (2022). There are the obligatory references to making a given museum a “leader of equity”:

The work is never over. All of us just need to constantly be really mindful of it. The efforts to diversify the staff are going to be really important, diversifying the board—that’s really key. Making sure that equity work is embedded in everything that we do. We just have to constantly be committed to it. I know that it’s a journey and that it’s going to take a while, but also that we’re not going to stop doing that work.

This kind of bureaucratic word salad reveals a mindset fundamentally at odds with the intellectual rigor and complexity represented by scholars such as Michael Fried and Eik Kahng. Amada Cruz canceled what promised to be a wonderful show and canceled all the work that had gone into it. She canceled the scholar who inspired it. She would cancel art history itself given the chance. What else is to be expected in a world in which inclusion trumps scholarship?