As New York marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks, El Museo del Barrio issued a lengthy apology for the structural pacing and derivative visual motifs of the 9/11 truther symposium it rented space to last week. The museum assured patrons that it will no longer accept rental checks from groups incapable of mounting a cohesive narrative.
The East Harlem institution, typically a bastion of vital Latinx cultural interrogation, found itself issuing groveling retractions on Tuesday, not for the ethical void of platforming 9/11 skepticism on a day of civic mourning, but for the symposium's staggering lack of dramaturgical rigor. In a period where even the most pedestrian civic grievances are expected to arrive with the polished intentionality of a soft launch, the museum's failure to elevate the conspiracy theorists' PowerPoint presentations beyond the visual vernacular of an unmoderated internet forum felt particularly unforgivable.
One must, naturally, recall the punishing spatial endurance of Ulay and Abramovic's 1977 performance piece Relation in Movement, or perhaps the earth-shattering rhythmic subversion of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, to properly mourn the absence of aesthetic ambition here; though, frankly, even the swamp-dwelling grievance politics of the 2001 animated film Shrek offered a more sophisticated interrogation of established authority than the organizers' rambling diatribes about controlled demolitions, which largely consisted of middle-aged men pointing lazily at pixelated YouTube screengrabs.
We acknowledge that our patrons expect a certain caliber of avant-garde fabulism, and frankly, these speakers failed to romanticize the structural mechanics of the Twin Towers with any real verve.
The conspiracy group, wounded by the scathing critical consensus regarding their typographical choices, has since threatened to relocate their upcoming winter residency to a more accommodating venue in Queens. They argued, rather predictably, that the museum's suffocating demand for high-resolution graphics and cohesive narrative arcs was merely another deliberate, orchestrated cover-up by the art world's globalist elite.