The lack of fact-checking and vetting for “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” seems out-of-context without essential information. It was after all, Helen Lewis who once admonished her own audience to consider “context people” TK — link. But if Nancy Spector’s participation is assumed given the realities that cannot be ignored (link), Ashley James’s audio makes even more sense why The Atlantic would publish a hit piece.

The above audio is an continuation of this one, in which James claims that I cannot “continue being on the circuit saying something about the museum,” (James is referring to me being invited to a give a talk at the Armory Show in 2020, in which I was talking about my scholarship and my experience at the Guggenheim) “if the museum has moved in a progressive direction, and my hiring is a part of that, and the larger museum world sees that….”

The larger museum world sees that. What James means by this is a whole ecosystem of people and institutions that can be counted on to corroborate their lies and help them cover this up — art professionals and especially Black curators, other museums, the arts funding apparatuses like the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation (more on that later), donors, collectors and the press. All of these entities — certainly not exhaustive — make up the larger museum and art world that James is referring to. What she is saying is that the Guggenheim can depend on them to carry this narrative that they are spinning in the transcript of the secret January 27, 2020 meeting. Nancy Spector wasn’t just at this meeting; she organized it, hired James and after seven long minutes of James speaking out plans for conspiracy, sabotage and how to use the the assumed trust of the public to reverse engineer a better ending for the Guggenheim, Spector quietly says “thank you.”

Lewis’s blogpost takes on a new meaning with this context and information. Lewis’s tacit ignoring of facts that even Spector says — Lewis fails to address Spector’s self-admitted mistakes that are on public record in the transcript — or contextualize that this an audio of a woman and museum using company time — and taxpayer money — to strategize how they are going to harm the reputation and credibility of a woman whom they know is telling the truth. This is not journalism; this is propaganda, and propaganda with an intended target and masquerading as journalism is a hit piece. The Atlantic published a hit piece, in part, because they were directly and explicitly protecting the Guggenheim. It makes sense why The Atlantic deputized one of the most repugnant writers working today, to write a piece on a woman, field, artwork and cultural themes that she knew nothing about. Defamation was the point. Misinforming, misleading and lying to the public was the point.

Protecting Whiteness was the point.

You’re not mishearing this. You are hearing what you think: a curator at the Guggenheim, surrounded by her boss and colleagues, stating that they count on wider support within their world to corroborate the narrative that “the museum is moving in a progressive direction.” This sounds crazy, because it is crazy. It sounds like conspiracy because it is conspiracy. It sounds like violence because it is violence. It sounds like a lie because what they are attempting to sell to the public is a lie. This is literally an elevator pitch for a lie. The breadth, resources, institutions, names, people, money, headlines spent to discredit, silence me and strip me of my narrative, scholarship and agency is a historic level of collusion usually not publicly exposed in the art world.