ABSTRACT
“The West as America” thus attempted to in the viewer a sense of the works’ utility, the way they addressed often pressing needs. For all their hysteria over “The West as America,” the neoconservative opponents of the exhibition failed to develop a serious appreciation of its problems and shortcomings. Their myopia resulted from an inability to conceive of the exhibition as anything other than an art historical morality play, a “perverse” effort to force “works of imaginative art” into a procrustean bed of politically correct attitudes. Yet for all their dark talk about political correctness and the politicization of cultural institutions, the neoconservative pundits failed to come to grips with the difficult issues the exhibition raised. The rise of critical and revisionist art histories has resulted in withering criticism of traditional museological approaches and has thus made it more difficult for museums to ignore the nature and effects of their habitual practices.
