Vandalism with a Permit

An open letter to Matthew Taylor, the artist and political strategist The New York Times says consulted on the report behind the White House order

Note: This letter represents my own personal views, shaped by more than 30 years in the arts sector. It responds to Zachary Small’s July 24, 2026 reporting in The New York Times and to the White House executive order issued that day.

Dear Mr. Taylor,

This week the President ordered signs placed on the sidewalk outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. A class on a school trip will read a government warning about the building before they walk into it. The order directs the signs to warn of “ideological capture” and point visitors toward sources the White House considers accurate. Two people familiar with your work in Washington told The Times that they heard you say you were involved. The White House denied that you wrote the report. The Times still reports that you consulted on it, and that is reason enough to write to you.

In 2018 you stood in front of a room of political consultants and explained your method. “To sell a candidate is simply to sell a concept,” you said. You compared politicians to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, manufactured objects that gained new meaning when Duchamp put them in a gallery and called them art. “We sell ideas by reassigning thoughts,” you told them. I have spent my life around art. Duchamp asked who gets to decide what counts as art. You turned that question into a method for selling a candidate. Your standing as an artist lets an administration’s opinion pass as a curator’s.

The method is now pointed at a museum. Name a museum as a political operation, and every object inside it can be read as evidence for the charge. The report says “extreme ideological activism” has taken over the National Museum of American History and calls its programming “anti-white” and “pro-abortion.” The Smithsonian replied that its work rests on scholarship and accuracy and tells the whole story of America. The order followed. The signs are vandalism with a permit. The government will stand on the sidewalk and instruct visitors to doubt a building they paid for.

The administration bears responsibility for the order. Your current roles place you inside its cultural agenda. You are a senior adviser at the National Endowment for the Humanities and a presidential appointee to the Commission of Fine Arts. The Times describes the commission as rubber-stamping the president’s building projects, among them the White House ballroom and the world’s tallest triumphal arch. According to The Times, you also oversee a planned garden of 250 statues.

Your earlier political work includes the windsurfing ad against John Kerry and Hillary: The Movie. You directed The Creepy Line, which The Verge called a “conspiratorial playbook for right-wing tech backlash.” After the administration’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, it labeled your films “Extraordinary Cinema.”

Steve Bannon has called you “an artist first and then a conservative.” You have a degree in sculpture, and your Duchamp documentary earned critical praise. Those credentials got a political strategist inside cultural institutions. You know what happens to an ordinary object when someone with standing gives it a name.

A curator answers for every word. A claim on that museum’s wall carries its source with it, and a label comes down when the evidence thins. The sign presents no evidence of its own and stands there with the government behind it. Museums across the country will understand the warning. It tells curators that this administration will override their evidence whenever the history is inconvenient. The next exhibition will be planned by people who watched this happen, and nobody will have to tell them what to leave out.

Republican members of a House subcommittee called the museum’s director to testify and questioned whether she should keep her job. Her staff’s work remains open to public and professional scrutiny. The report’s authors were not called before that subcommittee to defend their methods.

Museums outlast presidents. That is what they are for. A museum has to be independent enough to tell American history honestly, including the parts the White House dislikes. The report on which The Times says you consulted has become part of a political attack on that independence. You once called a candidate “a set of conceptual principles elevated above all to be a pure belief.” You were describing how to turn a person into an idea that can carry whatever meaning a campaign requires.

You accepted these roles after publicly explaining that method. The signs do the same work. They ask visitors to take the administration’s word over the museum’s.

A bus of eighth graders will pull up to that curb and read the government’s opinion of the building before they see one object inside it. You sit on a federal commission and advise a federal endowment. Those roles give you a room where this can be challenged. Use it. Say the signs are wrong.