Classicizing Philadelphia

A recently published review essay in Bryn Mawr Classical Review was fresh in my mind when I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week.  In “Artwashing the Cyclades,” David Gill highlights several problems with the ongoing exhibit called “Cycladic Art.” In brief: too many of the objects in the collection lack a secure archaeological provenance; that is, we have no idea when or where they were found in modern times. Some of them, Gill points out, may be modern fakes—there is no way to tell. And the arrangement by which a collector, Leonard Stern, acquired the objects and donated them to the Greek government, which then lent them to the Metropolitan for at least fifty years, seems a little dodgy. It skirts the now widely accepted principle that objects taken from the soil of a country after 1970 or so should be returned to that country.

With all this in mind, I stopped by Gallery 151 in the Greek and Roman wing to see what the fuss was about. The objects in the Stern Collection (161 of them, some in an upstairs gallery that I didn’t visit) stand out against a red background. Most of them are the familiar female-with-folded-arms, but there are other types as well.

As I moved along, looking and reading labels, questions emerged: What were these? Why were they made? What purpose did they originally serve? All these questions would be easier to answer, and even to ask, if we knew where the sculptures came from. Were they found in tombs? In houses? In temples or other non-domestic contexts? About this Gill is right. The lack of secure archaeological provenance deprives us of information that seems essential for interpreting any object in the collection. We don’t know, and will never know, what these objects mean to history.

For Gill, this hermeneutic obstacle is enough to make the entire collection valueless, at least to classical archaeologists and historians. But as I looked at the exhibit, I wondered whether looking at these sculptures as data points in a story about Bronze Age culture is the only way to see them. The Met’s labels certainly suggest another way. “Over thousands of years,” one declares, “sculptors in the Cyclades developed various manners of expressing the human body.” Neolithic figures appear both naturalistically and “in abstract form.” This is the language of art, not archaeology.

In the absence of archaeological context or provenance, even art history is impossible. All that remains to a visitor gazing at the enigmatic figures on their red background is an aesthetic response. In seeing the Cycladic figures in this way, as arrangements of form and volume outside of time and history, we may be coming closer to the way in which our Neoclassical prececessors looked at the Apollo Belvedere or Medici Venus; if so, then Gallery 151, at the beginning of the Met’s Greek and Roman collection, is the right place for them.

~Lee T. Pearcy

July 15, 2025

Further reading:

Marlowe E. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Provenance: A Response to Chippindale and Gill.” International Journal of Cultural Property. 2016;23(3):217-236. doi:10.1017/S0940739116000175

Chippindale, C., and Gill, D. W. J.. 2000. “Material Consequences of Contemporary Classical Collecting.” American Journal of Archaeology 104: 463–511.  Talks about San Antonio collection—should I tell UT anecdote?

On this eve of Independence Day, I take my title from an article by Paul Allen Miller.[1] Allen and I crossed paths briefly at the University of Texas more than forty years ago, and I learned that what he has to say is always worth thinking about. This article is no exception.

“Tyranny, Fear, and Parrhesia” was written when the first Trump administration was well under way, but it opens with a story from the day after the 2016 election. Miller, then a vice provost at the University of South Carolina, looked around the room at a meeting of senior administrators and said, “We are like Heidegger in 1932.”

Miller reports that his colleagues “stared at him” and said nothing. In November of 2016, comparing the election of Donald Trump to the German elections of 1932 that brought Hitler to power probably seemed a bit overwrought. And implicitly comparing the good people who administer a great American university to Martin Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University—and a philosopher who, despite that, cannot be ignored—verges on insult and perhaps accounts for the stares.

Miller was not wrong in 2016, only premature. On July 4, 2025, things are much worse, and at the same time much clearer. In recent weeks we have seen one great American university after another capitulate to pressure from the Trump administration—which is to say, agree to the demands or whims of someone who can now fairly be called an autocrat. University presidents resign under pressure from the White House. Columbia, Harvard and Penn make deals; other schools follow. Yet none of the presidents, provosts, deans, and other administrators who have signed off on these deals can be compared to Heidegger, who believed in and enthusiastically promoted the Nazi takeover of German universities. If asked, the American administrators would no doubt say something like what Acting President of Columbia Claire Shipman said in an email to alumni on June 12: It is “essential to restore our research partnership with the government, if possible,” and “following the law and attempting to resolve a complaint is not capitulation.” Miller’s staring colleagues, he reports, felt that their first obligation was “to preserve the institution.” They had to “weather the storm.” They would just “ignore these people and do the right thing.” It was important not to be “self-indulgent and irresponsible.”

As a former administrator, I sympathize with these sentiments. I suspect I would have echoed them if I had been at that meeting. The welfare and continued existence of the institution must come first. Now, however, all seems different. The changes in our Republic in just the first few months of the Trump presidency seem to me to demand a different response. Parrhesia, the third word in Miller’s title, means “frankness of speech.” It is the appropriate word for the speech of a philosopher who addresses a tyrant and takes responsibility for both the truth of his words and the consequences of saying them. It is time for those of us in academe who can to become parrhesiasts. Our institutions may may become poorer and smaller, but our souls will not, and our Republic may be saved along with them.

~Lee T. Pearcy
July 3, 2025

[1] Miller, Paul Allen. “Tyranny, Fear, and Parrhesia: Truth in the Neoliberal University, or ‘How Do I Know I’m Not Heidegger?’” Symplokē, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 2021, pp. 179–95. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48642811. Accessed 1 July 2025.

As I recall, some readers of The New Yorker felt a bit of a shock in 1998 when they read Toni Morrison’s characterization of Bill Clinton as “our first Black president.” I was only a bit less electrified when it occurred to me, shortly after noon on Martin Luther King Day, that Donald Trump may be our first post-modern president.

By “postmodernism” in this context I mean Foucault, the most influential of the post-modernists who have focused on politics and the state.  If you want the political Foucault in a nutshell, it’s this: systems of power don’t just depend on structures of discourse, they somehow are those structures. How people talk about prisons or clinics or sex in the city guides and creates those institutions, and whoever controls the discourse controls the levers of power.

Which takes us to the Gulf of America, as viewed from a long way off—say, from the peak of Mt. McKinley. Trump has always been focused on names, describing, and discourse, and he has made his fortune on turning words into money, and money into power. If he says the Trump brand is worth millions, it is. (Unless, of course, a court rules otherwise, as it did in two civil and criminal cases in New York. As my sister in Texas says, by way of capping a list of Trump’s flaws, “He may not even be rich.”) In attempting to bend reality by bending words and applying his Sharpie to the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, our 47th president aligns himself with the crowd of renamers who have changed the labels of buildings and holidays in the belief that doing so somehow made injustice go away.  It won’t. Reality—not things, as the Wittgenstein of the Tractacus said, but the alignment between things and how we describe them—has a way of refuting the postmodernist belief that discourse is all there is—that you can turn a brand into dollars, or a meme into money.  In the next few years, let’s cling tight to facts and call things what they are, as best we can tell.

~Lee T. Pearcy
January 22, 2025