The manufacture of scandal used to be a tabloid specialty. But
many people who pay attention to our paper of record will be
surprised to learn that imputing scandal where none exists has also become a
common feature of the way that The New York Times covers cultural
matters. A case in point was “A Fight in the Attic,” a story about
the Archives of American Art, an important repository of documents
about the history of American art that began in the 1950s as a
private enterprise but since 1970 has operated as a semi-autonomous
branch of the Smithsonian Institution. Written by Judith H.
Dobrzynski, the story appeared on the front page of the paper’s art
section on December 8. The chief point at issue
—the raison d’être
for the piece—was the recent decision to close regional offices of
the Archives in Boston and Detroit and to streamline operations at the
New York office. The decision was made partly for financial
reasons—the Archives simply cannot afford to maintain the
offices—partly for reasons of efficiency.

There was nothing complicated, mysterious, or untoward about
this decision. It was fully justified by the fiscal realities under
which the Archives operates. But Ms. Dobrzynski dressed it up as a
shocking melodrama, an “uproar,” in which Richard J. Wattenmaker,
Director of the Archives since 1990, was cast as a heartless
bureaucrat and bungling administrator. “Six employees, including two
regional directors, would lose their jobs,” Ms. Dobrzynski ominously
noted. “The news ricocheted around the American art world, and so
did the complaints. But they were not enough to stop Mr.
Wattenmaker’s plans, which went into effect on Nov. 23.”

Ms. Dobrzynski devotes the rest of her piece to painting a picture
of the Archives as a floundering institution with Mr. Wattenmaker
as its sour, clueless leader who has “lashed back” at critics “in a way
rarely heard in the art world or in the Government.” One would never
know from Ms. Dobrzynski’s report that Mr. Wattenmaker is an
internationally recognized scholar and curator, former chief curator
of the Art Gallery of Ontario, former Director of the Chrysler Museum in
Norfolk, and the author of a number of important books, including
studies of seventeenth-century Dutch art, Puvis de Chavannes, and
Maurice Prendergast. One gets no hint from Ms. Dobrzynski’s piece
that Mr. Wattenmaker has actually greatly expanded the Archives’s
collecting and publication activities. Ms. Dobrzynski does not
mention the many new projects Mr. Wattenmaker has initiated—the
recently completed Paris Survey Project, for example, which
involved tracking down and cataloguing the many organizations in
Paris containing documentary materials about American artists, an
innovation that is sure to attract greater attention to American art
among European researchers.

Ms. Dobrzynski gravely tells us that Mr. Wattenmaker “acknowledged
that only about one-third of the documents” collected by the
Archives had been microfilmed. In fact, no “acknowledgment” was
necessary. He never intended that the Archives should microfilm its
entire collection. The most significant materials are microfilmed, the
rest are computer-catalogued, cross-referenced, and available for
consultation.
The thirteen-million items under its care
include papers from artists, dealers, art magazines, art schools,
craftsmen, and galleries, all of which are available to writers and
scholars. This is a fact that gets lost in Ms. Dobrzynski’s
little drama about the “battle” that she imagines being waged
regarding the Archives’s mandate. The battle is pure fabrication. But that
hardly seems to matter these days for the Times, which in its
cultural coverage appears less and less a paper of record
and more and more a cheerleader for
pre-approved figures and causes and—as Ezra Pound said in another
context—a stirrer-up of strife for those of which it disapproves.