Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers, Nude Art, and Texas

The conflict in Ralph Blumenthal’s article, “Museum Field Trip Deemed Too Revealing”, intensifies dramatically in the dateline – Frisco, Texas. This piece about Sydney McGee, an art teacher suspended from her job, is a story of status. Published on September 28^th, the story remained on the Times most e-mailed list for several days, and is the #10 most e-mailed article over the past week.

The photograph in the story puts the status issues out front. McGee, 51, stands in contemplation amid the white walls of the Dallas Museum of Art. Her blonde hair is beautifully coiffed and she is well-tailored. The fabric she wears is lively but not daring, her jewelry not gaudy. Framed between two Mondrians on the wall behind her, she is taste incarnate.

Not the person you expect to swagger out of Frisco. But the town itself isn’t what you expect.

In his lead, Blumenthal describes Frisco as a “moneyed boomtown that is gobbling up the farm fields north of Dallas.” “Moneyed” here means upscale exurban, a paved environmental and aesthetic disgrace. Everything is new, gleaming with prosperity. “[N]early two dozen new schools have been built in the last decade and computers outnumber students three to one.” Thus, “boomtown”.

So they don’t swagger out of Frisco after all. They glide forth in Hummers. If they tour art museums their glum teenagers are i-podded, yearning to return to Abercrombie or wherever. And no, they don’t tour art museums.

Blumenthal’s sketch of Frisco, in other words, prepares the reader to encounter the philistines who think a Mondrian is a native of Mondria. These philistines duly arrive in the form of two school administrators, a parent, and one anonymous child.

What happened was, McGee took 89 fifth-graders through the Dallas Museum of Art, where the children, everyone agrees, saw nudes here and there. The anonymous child complained to the parent, who launched a thousand lawyers. The school administrators suspended McGee with pay and then announced they would not renew her contract.

The story of status unfolds this way.

The administrators have no sense of style. Among their complaints about McGee is that she wore “flip-flops” to work, when McGee was wearing sandals by Via Spiga.

The administrators know nothing of art. The route along which the fifth-graders were herded featured “the marble torso of a Greek youth . . . circa 330 B.C.,” Auguste Rodin’s “Shade”, and Jean Arp’s “Star in a Dream”. Neither the principal nor the superintendent would say which work was offensive, referring only to “an abstract nude sculpture.”

But the parent and the administrators are convicted of low status in Blumenthal’s story by something more offensive: priggishness. McGee said she previewed the tour to ensure the children saw nothing inappropriate. The museum director, John R. Lane, said, “I think you can walk into the Dallas Museum of Art and see nothing that would cause concern.” The teachers union representative said this incident was “the first ‘nudity-in-a-museum case’ we have seen.”

Dallas-area TV stations indulged visual sarcasm by showing “images of statues from the museum with areas of the anatomy blacked out.”

Sleeping in this piece is the knowledge that Texan exurbia is an evangelical paradise. Pay dirt for Blumenthal would’ve been a pentecostal minister commanding the museum’s demons of lust to be gone.

In the eyes of a Times reader, biblical sexual morality is a sign of backwardness, insularity, and arrested development. It’s proof of low status. Prejudice against it is unquestioned.