A Massive Diane Arbus Exhibition Does So Little

A Massive Diane Arbus Exhibition Does So Little

The era of Diane Arbus’s cold, classist gaze is dead. It belongs to an America that no longer exists and to an artistic school of thought that has run its course. Her “freak” photographs of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people she ambushed with a camera in asylums and hospitals were morally challenged when she made them between the late 1950s and early ’70s, and have only soured over the decades. Now, with all the cruelty of the worl…