Over at the storied and statusy Guggenheim Museum in New York, they've got some wokester civility culture going on in that temple of high art.

A sympathetic writer from the left-leaning Atlantic wanted to do a story about the claimed racist travails of the museum's wokester curator...and got her head bit off.

Recently, Helen Lewis from The Atlantic reached out to me for a story that she was working on, literally demanding that I speak to her. You don't have to take my word for it -- below is a screenshot of her initial DM to me. I w/o question declined this -- and here are my messages pic.twitter.com/B80VONSJ5q

— No Quarter Will Be Given (@chaedria) September 12, 2022

John Sexton at Hot Air reported on all the charm going on among these hoity-toities:

That's the most bland, polite email seeking an interview I've ever read. It's entirely professional and not the least bit upsetting in any way. And notice Lewis did not "literally demand" anything as LaBouvier claims. What Helen Lewis literally wrote was, "Might we talk?" which was a question not a demand.

And somehow we go from that polite email to this response: "So you plan to discuss my experience? F--- you. I am so tired of scavenging journalists attempting to speak for me, or depict me." She added, "As I said in my Instagram message to you, should you f--- this up — which you will — I will be on your a-- like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm at a KKK rally."

Here is my response to Helen in which I told her to go "fuck herself" and why. I cc'd @adriennelaf, the executive editor of @theatlantic. I did this b/c so often the masthead claims that they have no idea that this OOC behavior happens. Not only did they know, they co-signed it. pic.twitter.com/2sPku89MOn

— No Quarter Will Be Given (@chaedria) September 12, 2022

Helen Lewis responded with another polite but this time more pointed email. "I plan to quote parts of our correspondence so far." She noted that she had never agreed to treat any correspondence as off the record. LaBouvier doubled down: "I want to be incredibly clear again. F--- you." She added, "You also do not have the bylines that suggest you can carry this story with the reporting, truth and consideration it deserves. Your responses in no way suggest that you have the range that I am speaking of, and I absolutely will not be speaking to you. I do not defer to arrogance, Whiteness or lack of expertise."

This, in its own way, is worse than one of those fast food restaurant brawls we are always being treated to on Twitter.

The wokester curator, who was claiming that her curation of a Basquiat exhibition didn't get the press attention it deserved, sounds paranoid, if not downright possessed.  Who is Basquiat?  A mediocre artist whose work is sold on cheap t-shirts at Uniqlo as knockoffs.  Anyone with a brain would know that a curation of this guy's work wouldn't merit the time it took to write it up.

This is the most lunatic encounter from a leftist I've ever seen, clearly a sign of a rotted brain so invested in the idea of being a victim, so obsessed with being woke, that it can no longer distinguish friend from foe.  She seems to have a bad case of narcissism — even her Twitter portrait shows her in what arguably appears to be the act of taking a selfie — made worse by the attire she is wearing, which looks like medical scrubs, or the kind of clothing a patient in a mental health facility might be wearing.

The Atlantic writer clearly went into this with an eye toward writing a sympathetic account, and the enraged response was so irrational, so nutty, so accusatory, so mendacious, and so out of touch with reality that the writer now has got to change the trajectory of her storyline, which was probably about how the white art world (that bastion of Lenny Bernsteins made fun of by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic, written around 1967), is really a nest of white supremacist racists.

Not with an encounter like that.

What we are seeing now is more like the other half of Tom Wolfe's book on high society and status in the 1960s, the essay he wrote called "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," about how racial grievance-mongers have a grand old time with well-meaning white liberals who want to virtue-signal and bankroll their "oppression."  The Mau-Mauers in Tom Wolfe's book went after Hush Puppy–wearing civil servants tasked to dole out public money for "summer jobs" and the like, and the mau-mauers ran the show.  Mau-mauing described by Wolfe takes place at many levels, not the least of which is the Lenny Bernstein level, where unsmiling Black Panthers were treated to air kisses and canapés by the society jet set in Manhattan.

Well, now we have it taken to a whole new level, where a woman who's busy complaining about not getting the press she wants gets approached by an elite writer for a haughty magazine clearly intent on advancing her "racism in high places" narrative, and then eats her alive. 

One wonders who the next writer she'll attack will be in her quest for good public relations.  And whether she attacks museum donors and sponsors similarly.  Who will be the next to step up to the plate — and wait for the fork and knife to come down?

What a miserable thing wokery does for some people.  This person badly seems to need therapy, but with the therapy field just as woke as she is, she won't get any help.  She'll just go on being an advertisement for the crazed interior atmosphere of the Guggenheim these days and wondering why people want to stay away.  Somehow, I can't see the museum being happy about this, but whether they do anything about it is likely to rest on how much their donors are willing to take.

Image: Twitter screen shot.