A few days ago, Dr. Boli wrote about the plaques that usually accompany works of art in museums these days—the plaques that tell us what we ought to think of the art, as well as who the artist was and what kind of art this is. He had noticed a distinct trend in those explanations: “Art from before the Im­pres­sion­ists” (he wrote at the time) “is likely to come with an explanation of why it is morally wrong, but an artist with ‘Modernist’ credentials seems to be exempt from moral examination.”

Why is that? It does not seem immediately obvious that it should be so. It is true that the past is evil in trendy intellectual circles, but the Im­pres­sion­ists and the Fauves and the Cubists and anyone else before about 1968 lived in that era of pure evil. Why are their paintings not tainted by their era?

Dr. Boli has been thinking this problem over, and he has come up with a hypothesis. It is just like every other hypothesis you hear on the Web or in social media of various sorts, in that it comes straight from the brain to the keyboard without any intermediate fact-checking or reconsideration. Where it differs from the others is in that it comes straight from the brain of Dr. Boli, and thus earns a place in his Magazine.

It seems to Dr. Boli that the use of the term “moderns” for everyone from the Im­pres­sion­ists on accurately reflects a fundamental change that came over the art world. This change, in turn, causes museum curators and other second-rate art critics to approach the art from before and the art from after in two fundamentally different ways.

Let us take a look at this delightfully amusing painting by Jehan Georges Vibert, An Embarrassment of Riches:

This was one of the Academics who sneaked into the “French Moderns” show at the Frick in Pittsburgh. How was it painted? For most viewers, the answer will simply be “I don’t know.” The painter certainly didn’t want you to know. The object in making such a painting is that the technique should be invisible. You should not be thinking about the painter wielding a brush. You should be thinking about what the painter has depicted. If you enlarge the photograph, you will not see brush strokes at all: you will simply see the blotchy artifacts of a high-ISO picture from a cheap phone camera.

Now let us look at this Renoir, The Vineyards at Cagnes:

This was the painting used on many of the posters advertising the exhibition. You hardly even need to enlarge the picture to see the brush strokes. If you enlarge it, you will see not only brush strokes but also the texture of the canvas as it caught the brush. Every aspect of the painting reminds you of the brilliant painter standing in front of the canvas daubing it with gorgeous colors. The technique is, as the young people would say, in your face.

This is the great change that came over the art world. From the Imp­res­sion­ists on, the technique of the art was on full display, whereas the art of most eras before put all its effort into making the technique disappear in the finished product.

It is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis that the curators of today have lost the ability to parse art of the pre-modern age. They have very sensitive and well-trained eyes for technique; when the brush strokes are right there in front of them, our art experts can describe them and classify them with minute accuracy. But when the technique is made as invisible as possible, they have nothing to talk about. The thing that attracts their attention is the picture. And it is a picture of something, and therefore it is the something that they judge, and not the art.

Let us look back at the Vibert again. What do we notice if we judge it as a picture? We notice a number of extraordinarily clever things the artist has done. Note, for example, the mirror. It is a small canvas, so to make the obscenely rich cardinal the subject, the painter can afford only a small amount of background. The mirror, however, shows us the distant reflection of the opposite wall, with its rich gilt decorations. It is a way of painting a huge room without painting a huge room. Now look at the floor. Notice how the colors of the urn and the cardinal’s red cardinal suit and the details of the ornaments on the wall are subtly reflected in the expensive parquet, showing that the floor is perfectly polished and has had no more indelicate feet than the gentle pitter-pat of a cardinal’s red slippers on it since the polishing. Notice also the petals that have fallen from the bouquet, emphasizing how rich and huge it is: in spite of the obvious constant attention of the cleaning staff, it is not possible to keep up with so many petal-dropping flowers.

These are observations that might profitably be suggested on a plaque next to the painting, so that the gawking visitors might have some way of beginning to understand what the artist was up to. It is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis that they do not appear because museum curators simply do not know what the artist was up to. They have lost the ability to look at art of the pre-modern age and see it the way either the artists or the artists’ original audience would have seen it. They do not find brush strokes or garbage glued to wood or anything else that would be an obvious indication of the work the artist did, and they have largely lost the ability to judge composition and the various subtleties we just mentioned. Therefore their minds unconsciously fall back to the the subject of the picture or sculpture, and their judgments are about that subject, not about the artist’s technique. Then, of course, the dominant intellectual forces of our time assert themselves, and since the painting shows a scene from the past, our curators must make it clear that they have repudiated the wickedness of the past.

That is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis. It is probably all wrong, as most similar witterings whooshing through the tubes of the Internet are. But this is Dr. Boli’s own Magazine, and as editor he is qualified to decide which of his own witterings will be published. Today he had nothing else prepared, so you get this one.

Here is a little game for artsy types to play.

It has become the norm in museums to post explanatory plaques beside works of art, the plaques not only explaining who the artist was and where the work fits among the various artistic trends and fads, but also telling us what we are supposed to think of the art.

While wandering through the splendid “French Moderns” show at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh the other day, Dr. Boli noticed a particular tendency among the plaques for the various works. The exhibition gathered a number of the Impressionists, the “Fauves,” and a few later modernists, but it also included half a dozen Academic artists as well to show us what the modernists were rebelling against. How, after all, can you understand Renoir without knowing about Bouguereau?

What Dr. Boli noticed was that the plaques for the Academics were likely to explain why the art was evil, whereas the rest—all the works that are usually lumped as “Moderns,” from the Impressionists on—would just explain who the artist was and what the artist was trying to do. The explanations might not be very good, but they were at least about the art.

Once he noticed this tendency, Dr. Boli realized that he had seen it on every recent trip to an art museum. Art from before the Impressionists is likely to come with an explanation of why it is morally wrong, but an artist with “Modernist” credentials seems to be exempt from moral examination.

Thus we can make a trip to the museum into a sort of guessing game, or perhaps an exercise in creative imagination. For every realistic or pre-modern work of art, we try to imagine what a museum curator would think was morally unacceptable about it.

Here are a few examples to get us started.

The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, by Jean-Léon Gérôme. What’s wrong with this picture?

Lady with Servant and Dog, by Jacob Ochtervelt (c. 1671–1673). Here is a charming little domestic scene showing everyday life in a Dutch household. But we know it must have sinister implications, because it was painted before anyone had even heard of Impressionism. What’s wrong with this picture?

Here is part of the long series of murals in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Institute, showing crowds marching toward enlightenment, which they will never reach because John White Alexander, the artist, died before he could paint the symbolic figures of the Noble Quartet (Art, Science, Music, Literature). What’s wrong with this picture?

Pourquoi naître esclave ? (“Why Born a Slave?”) by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1868–1870).

Here is a bronze bust made as a deliberate rebuke of the enslavement of Africans. Surely, even in our age, when art is judged only by the quality of its political expression, this work must be above reproach. But no: it was sculpted in a pre-Impressionist style, and therefore it is morally compromised. What’s wrong with this picture?

See? You can do it.

Now it’s your turn:

Innocence, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

You can answer in the comments: What’s wrong with this picture?