Despite everything, Harvard chooses to keep the Sackler name on its museum. Why?
Back in 2022, members of the Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students, a campus group dedicated to overdose awareness, petitioned Harvard’s administration to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from campus buildings. The petition was not a haphazard one and had teeth because it followed the guidelines for such de-naming actions provided by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Process for Denaming Spaces, Programs, or other Entities.
Harvard — unlike Tufts University in Massachusetts, the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museums in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and both the Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London — just refused. In their rebuff of the request, the committee responded that it was “not persuaded by the proposal’s arguments that de-naming is appropriate because Arthur Sackler’s name is tainted by association with other members of the Sackler family, or because Arthur Sackler shares responsibility for the opioid crisis due to his having developed aggressive pharmaceutical marketing techniques that others misused after his death.”
So, I suppose, this grave insult to humanity is not Harvard’s to deal with. I mean, the company was sued and lost, but still hasn’t paid its damages and refuses to apologize for killing half a million people so far. Even though they knew the drug was addictive and dangerous. And they knew their work caused all those deaths even before they happened. Oh, right. Allegedly.
My question is this: what artist would want their work represented in a museum with Sackler’s name on it? The same who might choreograph for the Besarion Jughashvili Балет Studio at the Harvard Dance Center? Or who might do plays at the Alois Hitler Theaterzentrum under the administration of American Repertory Theatre? After all, it was not Stalin or Hitler’s fathers, respectively, who were the bad guys, right? They didn’t kill millions of people, did they? The College certainly would have no problem naming these buildings after them. Why should the artists?
Makes me wonder about the exhibition Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade that happened at the museums of Harvard early this year. Given that the money for the building was paid for by purveyors of deadly opiates, it seems a contradiction in messaging, don’t you think?
Unlike Alanis Morissette’s wobbly definition, that’s true irony. After all, it’s just a plant with seeds that you put on bagels, right? How harmful could that be?
Oh. I see. Maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, the problem is this: when nonprofit arts organizations (the Arthur M. Sackler Museum is an art museum on the campus of a nonprofit educational organization) start to waver on financial blackmail, extortion, and invite toxic donors to wash their reputations, it is not unlike deciding to use your clean, white towels to wipe the hands of someone covered in feces. Your nonprofit is the towel and the excrement-covered person is the toxic donor. The towel ultimately gets covered in unremovable feces while the person still reeks of feculence.
Sorry for the scatological analogy, but do you want your organization to be the s**t-ridden towel? Unfortunately for all of us, but it’s obvious that some would … for the right price. After all, this stuff is still happening. Which means for those who would sell their reputation for money, the old punch line is true about prostitution and social climbing: we know what you are; you’re just negotiating the price.
I know that some of you don’t really care about the rest of the arts-mosphere in which you do business, but almost all of you at least say you do. If you do, then remember this: when you decide to get dirty by engaging toxic stakeholders, it affects the entire industry. Every single nonprofit arts organization will then have to add that to their conversations with individual, corporate, and government donors. They’ll have to say out loud that they want no association with toxicity, or, conversely, that they do. Either way, it tars the whole field as corrupt, deaf to the needs of the community, and abruptly insensitive to those whose lives were destroyed by that stakeholder’s toxicity. And everyone will — appropriately — blame you.
Simply put, just like Harvard right now (and protests are happening on campus), you’ll look bad. Why would you ever want that? Do you have that little respect for the work you do for the community? Or, on second thought, does your nonprofit arts organization work for the community first or do you just produce “art for art’s sake” or some such nonsense? Maybe that’s why you’re so eager to take money from the Sacklers. You might be just as toxic. Are you?
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