Todd Alcott posted this with the caption: “Open the palace gates, Charles.”
So far I’ve liked pretty much every meme-ish type thing involving this photo of The Former Prince Known as Andrew except for one: that stunt involving putting it in the Louvre (video here). I don’t know quite how to define or demarcate this clearly, but my gut feeling is increasingly that “interventions” in museums are a bad idea and should be discouraged, even by self-styled radicals of whatever strips. It’s not that the institutions, what they do, what they have, or what they represent is so great — they aren’t. The problem is that, in aggregate, people are worse. Yesterday (so to speak) these interventions were almost done all by tiny handful of sophisticates, today it’s a growing stream of provocateurs, and tomorrow it’ll be armies of idiot influencers. It’s OK to just say no. Am I being arbitrary? Yes. Incoherent? Yes. Inconsistent? Yes. Elitist? Yes. Sue me. At least museums still cling to some image of the best of humanity; the influencing biz is an arms race of the worst pandering to the worse.