Guggenheim Curator Insults Trump With Offer of Golden Toilet
“Trump is synonymous with golden toilets.”
1.26.2018
9
The White House recently requested a Vincent Van Gogh painting from the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York City to display in the president's and first lady's residence. Specifically, according to Fox News, the White House hoped to receive Van Gogh’s 1888 work “Landscape With Snow”:
Instead, the museum responded with the offer of an 18-karat gold toilet satirically titled “America”:
Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, who looks exactly like what you would expect a snooty New York museum curator to look like, wrote in an email to the White House that the toilet was available “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House.”
“It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care,” Spector wrote.
Spector has been open in the past about her distaste for Trump, whom she no doubt believes lacks the virtue-signaling sophistication of the New York art circles in which Spector moves. After Trump was elected in 2016, Fox News notes, Spector wrote on Instagram: “This must be the first day of our revolution to take back our beloved country from hatred, racism, and intolerance. Don't mourn, organize.”
In a blog post on the museum’s website, for another example, she wrote, “In Trump’s America, the sustained assault on basic human and civil rights—the travel ban being only one example—calls for a decisive and unflinching response from the art community.”
Well, her toilet offer certainly gave the Trumps a decisive and unflinching response! Take THAT, President and First Lady! #Resist! What a courageous, anti-fascist gesture!
The golden toilet, created by Maurizio Cattelan, had been displayed in a public restroom at the Guggenheim for a year. In response to a query from the New York Post, Cattelan made no connection between his creation and Trump, instead explaining that it has something to do with the absurdity of life, but in a blog post last year about the exhibit, Spector herself made it clear that she viewed the piece as anti-Trump, pointing out that the President is “synonymous with golden toilets.”
“Cattelan’s anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim,” she added.
And Americans now will view the lasting imprint of Spector's tenure at the Guggenheim as symbolic of the coastal elite's contempt for the office of the President, for Americans, for America, and for art itself.
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