“I Believe Your Perspective is Very Important For Me and For Our Readers To Understand What Happened at The Guggenheim.”

It’s important to unpack these lines in Lewis’s email. Lewis is asking for my participation in an essay which she declines to tell me what it is actually about, but claims that “your perspective is very important for me and for our readers to understand what happened at the Guggenheim.”

My perspective is important because Lewis is attempting to speak for me and she made a decision to write a story centered on a subject that she has almost no access to, and she knows this. But moreover, Lewis knows that she does not have the materials needed to properly write this story, and as I’ve stated in another page, on some level, Lewis has to know that she is in trouble. There is a journalistic precedent for this — Gay Talese’s landmark essay, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” introduced this a more intimate and narrative style of journalism, which was necessary to properly excavate a reluctant and complex interiority, especially without an interview or personal experience with the subject. It also introduced the device/technique of a non-interview for a profile, offering the public two things: a supposedly more true version of a profile than had the subject and their PR team cooperated, and showcasing the skills of the journalist’s skills of not only observation, but their understanding of the human psyche. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is considered one of the most important magazine profiles ever published, made even more intriguing by the fact that Sinatra didn’t speak with Talese and did not cooperate with the profile. However, a few things to consider: Talese was by then, one of the most respected reporters working, and was working with talents so immense, he is credited as being the first to contribute to what became a new genre of both non-fiction and journalism — New Journalism. Before “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, Talese had been experimenting with the form since the beginning of the 1960s, and while the article/essay was a risk, it was a calculated one in capable hands.

Not to be overlooked is the fact that Talese is Italian, like Sinatra. Talese knew the world that Sinatra came from of tight-knit Italian communities outside of New York City, and understood the particular drive, melancholy and reflection of an Italian man, born of immigrant stock, who was both an definer of American popular culture, but perpetually outside of it, and the respect he felt due, and the means to which he took to bend the will of others to get it. Talese followed Sinatra for three months, observing and following his nearly every move, to craft an understanding of the man and human that refused to speak to him. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” breaks the rules of journalism by knowing them in the first place. Talese spoke with over 100 people who knew Sinatra; Lewis spoke to roughly four — five if we include Nancy Spector — and none of whom knew me in any great depth. (In fact, this was part of the tension in my relationship with Spector, was that I refused her access that she felt she deserved. Like Helen Lewis.) Talese decamped for Los Angeles for three months, which Esquire paid for; The Atlantic paid Lewis to report on a New York story from London and hoped Google searches would fill in the blanks. Talese understood that his subject, flawed, human, complex and underrated for his artistry was as much the subject as what the American public was misunderstanding about themselves by misunderstanding Sinatra. Lewis never rises to this occasion of being able to articulate to the American public why this story about one of their flagship museums in a sustained free-fall and the Black woman at the center of the story and the painting which backdrops it, is important. She is unable to convey who I am, how I came to be, and why Defacement is important to American political history, especially post the summer of 2020. Lewis is unable to justify, explain why the story is important, beyond the fact that The Atlantic let her write it.

It’s not enough just to point out that Lewis is not qualified. Let’s unpack this, and measure it against the context of her plea for my participation.

Lewis is not one of the best respected reporters or writers of her generation, nor has created a new style or technique of form, or discovered anything new, if we are to consider the fomenting of hate and misinformation as disqualifications. For the past decade, Lewis has been consistently rebuked for her misinformation, lack of depth and hate messaging. She was listed as one of the 100 worst people on Twitter, for aforementioned reasons. Lewis is not Black, she is not African-American, she is not from Texas, nor is she from a family older than the sovereign state from which she hails. The most traumatic thing that seems to have ever happened to her is a divorce before 30. Lewis has failed to show any mastery of the particular dysfunction of the American social fabric, and why in a country with almost non-existent state funding for the arts, a catastrophe and continued cover-up like this under the Guggenheim’s leadership, board and curatorial staff happened. To my knowledge and that of the public, Lewis has never worked in a museum, has never curated an exhibition, has never written an exhibition review, contributed art criticism or art scholarship to any publication or published a book on said subjects. Lewis has never written an interview, profile or analysis of Black women, Black public figures or Black feminist thought. Lewis has never written about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, police brutality, David Wojnarowicz, New York in the 1980s, George Condo, Abstract Expressionism, Neo Abstract Expressionism, film theory, film history in the 1970s, comic books, the semiotics of serialization, museum history, the Guggenheim, the history of the Guggenheim, representational politics, post-colonial thought and identity construction, the history of Haitian immigration and assimilation in New York City, or the history of Puerto Ricans in New York City before Operation Boot Strap. Lewis has never even written or showed tangential expertise in the areas of Spector’s expertise: Lewis has never written, published nor contributed to catalogues or scholarship on the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince or Maurizio Cattelan. Lewis has never written about the subjects of the subjects that she interviewed in support of Spector: Jenny Holzer and semiotics (back to my point about the semiotics of serialization), Doris Salcedo and the history of war and the materiality and materialization of discarded and found objects to express trauma, dissent and cultural history, Hank Willis Thomas and the issues and problems of copyright, reproduction and (toxicity) of Black manhood as mythologized, or the foundations of hip-hop, as represented by Fab 5 Freddy, aka Fred Braithwaite. Lewis has never publicly written or expressed an expertise in hip-hop misogynoir (not to be confused with hip-hop halos), which characterized and contextualized Braithwaithe’s comments, and perhaps why he agreed to speak Lewis. Helen Lewis was notably quiet most recently when Drake implied in his new album that the rapper Megan Thee Stallion was lying about being shot by Tory Lanez, a mostly unimportant rapper currently under house arrest while awaiting trial. All of these listed areas of expertise would’ve been necessary to legitimize the sort of article that she and The Atlantic thinks that she wrote. I wonder if Jeffrey Goldberg and others on the masthead thought that she was a sort of new coming of The Atlantic’s arrival of a Woman Gay Talese, rather than the British Bari Weiss that she might be more realistically compared as.

Instead Lewis wrote her blog post in London, 3,459 miles away from New York City, where the scenes of what happened took place, and and another 4,846 miles away from her main subject in Texas at the time, and light years away from any of the requisite expertise that a Black writer would’ve been forced to provide proof of to write a similiar piece about a White writer. Lewis also followed me on Twitter during a period in which I was offline and posting very little on Instagram, so she couldn’t even digitally follow or observe me, if only to mimic Talese digitally. Lewis was collectively 8,305 miles away from her story, never interviewed them on the record, didn’t have the materials to properly fact-check — and they still signed off on “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat.”

All of this should be taken into account when considering Lewis’s request and plea; with context, it is begging, which is how I read it. Contextualized with a demand for my participation — the implications of which read, or else — and then a back pedal, then followed with “I also want to be sure you know that I plan to quote parts of our correspondence so far”, it was the tell-tale sign of an inexperienced and poorly intentioned writer who did not have a grasp on her story, or the skills necessary to obtain it without risking a lawsuit and professional malpractice.

Consider the last lines of her email, in context:

This is a thinly veiled tactic of coercion and bullying — reiterating her point that she plans to use my words anyway — and if I want to be better represented, I had better play ball. This is subtly — and tacitly — reiterated with a suggestion of a day that might be best for me. It is laced with arrogance, desperation, bad faith tactics, coercion and bullying energy. The Atlantic did know that she wrote this — Adrienne LaFrance