Re: <nettime> Trump vs The Smithsonian Museum (& arts/culture in general). (TG)

[David Garcia via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Thank you Patrice for attempting to blow softly on the faltering embers 
of nettime. And thanks to the Guardian for rigorously detailing some of 
the latest steps of the Trump regime's relentless probing of the blurry 
threshold separating authoritarianism (control of behaviour) to 
totalitarianism (control of thought).

Trump's attack on museums such as the Smithsonian as:
-"OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country 
is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have 
been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about 
the Future.”-
Weirdly this could also be said of Trump's relationship to a core 
ideology of 'disaster nationalism' that was fully on display from the 
outset in his 2016 inaugural address  *American Carnage*.

It has been said that one of the key indicators on whether the 
totalitarian threshold has been crossed is that when you are awoken to a 
knock on your front door in the dead of night, your first thought is NOT 
that the police has not come to arrest you for something that you have 
said or written. In this regard the unaccountable actions of ICE and the 
free wheeling deployment of the National Guard suggest that this 'knock 
on the door' threshold may at the very least be under pressure.

These direct threats of violence run in parallel with, and are 
interconnected to, threats to individual jobs and livelihoods. And the 
Guardian article does a good job of showing the pressure to preemptively 
self censor on both senior individual gate keepers of museums but also 
on more vulnerable less senior staff with fewer opportunities to find 
new jobs. In short the pressure to remain silent and hope the storm will 
pass remains intense.

Trumrpianism has at least reminded us of the extreme difficulty 
accompanying claims of institutional impartiality. Anyone who has worked 
in a university knows that this is an important ideal but often a 
fiction. Trump has embraced the idea long acknowledged on the left that 
the cultural domain is not a neutral but a contested space. Anyone of us 
who witnessed the stifling of debate in the 2024 edition of 
Transmedialle knows this is not just a US issue. There is a deafening 
silence in the art world over Israel's war crimes in Gaza. The price for 
many of taking a stand against the gravity defying rise of the far right 
remains high and not just in the United States.


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