Moralizing Museum Art? Peter Plagens Responds To Holland Cotter

“There’s not a kind of art on Earth now or in the past whose societal context doesn’t include great evils. Do we need to be told in wall text or brochures–in order to look at the art–that Victorian England was a quagmire of exploitation, that Napoleonic France was nasty, that whatever dynasty in China wasn’t exactly democratic…”