Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at

Quillett. Quillett is where free thought lives. We are an independent

grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Colette.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And in this week's episode

we're going to be talking about a cancel culture story. This being Colette, it's hardly the first time we've covered the topic, but this one comes with a twist.

In a lot of stories about social justice mobs coming after someone innocent, the cry you here is that if the victim only had received

due process, they would have been vindicated. Well, in this story, the victim did get due process, and they were

indeed vindicated, but then they were cancelled anyway.

Okay so to set the scene it's the Solomon R Guggenheim Art Museum in New York and our protagonist

is Nancy Specter. The Guggenheim's former artistic director and

chief curator.

As one would expect of a high-ranking Manhattan Art World Grandee, Miss Specter is progressive in her politics, and just a few years ago became quite excited about bringing an exhibit to the

Guggenheim centered around the celebrated black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. And in particular a painting that

Baskiat did to protest the apparent police killing of a fellow black artist named Michael Stewart.

And in organizing the exhibit at the Guggenheim, Ms. Specter partnered

with a young black Baskiet scholar named Shadria Labouvier. The idea was that La Bouvier would help curate the event with the help of Miss

Specter and Miss Specter staff. Museum visitors would see an important painting, channeling

themes concerning social justice, and the Guggenheim would take a step toward diversifying its largely white culture through this collaboration with an up-and-coming young black female curator.

But things went off the rails. As my guest today, Atlantic

magazine writer Helen Lewis recently recounted in a long and definitive article in the

...