This essay by Salvatore Scibona, a novelist, speaks to me for its call to transcend the outrage bait, the incitements to be condemnatory, to which we are exposed in so much discourse. His reviving of a more “capacious” meaning of “witness” as an alternative to
judgment hearkens to sage advice from religious tradition that’s honored perennially in the breach. Also, it’s refreshing to encounter a witness for the benefit, besides entertainment, of reading good literature!
We could use an alternative to judgment… I think we can find one in literature. I’m talking about stories that take an ordinary person and watch her, through hours and years, inside and out, and strive, if not for objectivity, then at least for evenhandedness. George Eliot watches characters screw up and then asks the reader not to be too hard on them. Cormac McCarthy can use a language so stripped of judgment as to appear, deceptively, unconcerned with conscience. Somewhere in between, Cheever has a remarkable ability (as Joan Didion said of people with self-respect) “to love and to remain indifferent.”
All three have the skill of deep watching. When they describe in detail a conflict that cries out for us to take a side but hold back from explicitly taking a side themselves, they are not overlooking the moral stakes. They are compelling a moral response from us that’s more challenging than approval or disapproval. Under the influence of their restraint, our conscience is engaged in a new way, as a witness.
That word has a more capacious meaning than we tend to allow it. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a witness as, among other things, “one who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation.” It also lists an older meaning: “knowledge, understanding, wisdom.”
(Salvatore Scibona, “The Industrial Revolution of Shame,” NYTimes, 3-9-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
EthicalDative 
The Agony of Deaccessioning
Paintings line the basement storage space at The Indianapolis Museum of Art, which has graded its entire collection to help determine what art it may want to sell or transfer to another institution. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields; Lyndon French for The New York Times.
This article has useful and graphic information about how and why so many art museums display so little of their collections. At first blush there is ample fodder for irony for persons possessed of the notion that art’s first purpose is to be looked at. There are,
however, extenuating circumstances and complicating factors in the dilemmas that museums face.
First, the problem: “Most museums display only a fraction of the works they own… There are thousands, if not millions, of works that are languishing in storage.” Museums are confronting “a history of voracious stockpiling and the pressure to acquire still more.”
Wealthy people bestow much swag other than pictures and sculpture on museums: doilies, clothing and costumes, accessories, home furnishings, textiles, etc. All these treasures compete for scarce exhibition space as well as ballooning resource requirements for proper preservation when not on display.
In museums’ defense, however, “… many [undisplayed works] are prints and drawings that can only sparingly be shown because of light sensitivity.” There is, too, the argument that “… preserving the best of the past [even in storage] — no matter how unpopular it may temporarily become — is the purpose of museums.” Also, — surprise! — a percentage of donated works are mediocre, “not even worth showing,” according to one museum veteran.
So, while philanthropists aren’t always experts in picking masterpieces, neither are they always modest or humble people. Many donors dictate the terms of their gifts, effectively bossing from beyond the grave in many cases. Donors of art works valued at $400 million to the Art Institute stipulated that the donation has to be on display for the next fifty years. “I got the deal of a lifetime,” one of them said.
(Robin Pogrebin, “Clean House to Survive? Museums Confront Their Crowded Basements,” NY Times, 3-10-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.