Is the art world more corrupt than ever?

by admin
Is the art world more corrupt than ever?

The cognitive dissonance of presenting political art became clear to longtime critic Rachel Spence in 2006. She was visiting the Palazzo Grassi, the Venetian outpost of the Pinault collection, when she saw, paradoxically hanging in the private museum of a French billionaire, an edition of Barbara Kruger’s 1987 artwork “I make my purchases, therefore I am”. This dark visual left her stunned by the context’s ability to undermine the work’s vital force as a political proclamation, rendering it an oxymoronic caricature of anti-capitalist critique.

This introductory anecdote sets the tone for an ambitious new publication from Spence, which argues that in the 21st century, art’s relationship with capital, climate and politics is more important and insidious than ever – and the state of culture more disastrous. . The confluence of visual art, money, and ethics is a complex subject, but Spence addresses it in more depth. Battle for the museum: cultural institutions in crisis. Its nearly 200 pages are packed with major controversies in the art world of the past decade. Providing useful insight for those joining the art world who don’t know much and want to know more, Spence succinctly explains the power struggles that have brought us to this point.

Spence begins by introducing readers to “Planet Art,” his nickname for the “temperamental and contradictory ecosystem” of the art world. It posits that the primary concern and function of contemporary art – auction houses, galleries, museums, fairs – is to make money, with its greatest profits going to very wealthy buyers at the expense of workers. In this ecosystem, she explains, wealthy bad actors patch their public reputations by investing in valuable institutions, not to mention evading taxes with their art purchases.. In a chapter titled “Decolonizing This Philanthropy” (brazenly titled in the vein of activist organizing Decolonize this placewho led protests at museums in New York), Spence begins with an account of protests that last for months in 2018 at the Whitney Museum against its former vice president and board member Warren KandersCEO of ammunition manufacturer Safariland. Hyperallergic‘s reporting is widely cited (full disclosure: including an initial report by me), paving the way for Spence to navigate the beleaguered landscape of museum funding. She condemns the dubious financing of other administrators and donors decried as Leon Black and the Sackler familyas well as the wave of European and American museums building outposts in the United Arab Emirates, lured by large sums of money while ignoring human rights violations. “There is nothing inherently unethical about selling art,” she writes. “But there is something wrong with a system in which the commerce and exhibition of art is inseparable from the exploitation of people and the natural world, because money carries more weight than morality .”

Spence is clearly exasperated by the state of art under capitalism, and this righteous indignation seeps into his prose. She finds her voice somewhere between scholar and critic. As the book continues, she acknowledges her own distancing from the term “Planet Art”, explaining that the process of writing Battle for the museum reminded him that “the sector is not an airtight bubble, isolated from its environment”. Although the book is well-researched and thorough in its overview of ethics and activism in art, it deviates from rigid, ultimately deeply opinionated and editorialized nonfiction. Throughout his journey, Spence advocates for degrowth and destruction of this capital-driven landscape in order to build a redesigned ecosystem benefiting the majority rather than an elite minority of buyers, d directors and officers. She suggests new ways forward – for example, a shift towards performance and a hyper-focus on local art scenes instead of international art fairs to reduce the impact of art on emissions. She sometimes recognizes her idealism, but remains firm in her convictions: “It is not because the abuse of power is omnipresent, simply because no system is without faults, that it is not worth the effort. ‘try to improve what we can, when and where we can.

For the sake of scope, Spence focuses his attention on a brief recent slice of art history, focusing primarily on controversies that have arisen over the past decade. Underpinning his arguments is his insistence that the art world is at an all-time low, more toxically dependent on capital than ever before. She acknowledges dissenters who might cry that it has always been this way, citing the Medici and other wealthy patrons throughout history, but asserts that our current confluence of income inequality and climate catastrophe is particularly serious; even the book’s jacket declares that “culture and power” are more intertwined “now more than ever.”

However, Battle for the museum has not convinced me that this era is significantly worse than previous years; such generalizations lack nuance and coverage of the already little-known history of popular art activism. Of course, I can agree that the last ten years of the culture industry have been historic. The exploitation of workers is disastrous, and this recent series of unionization in museums and demonstrations against unscrupulous institutional funding indicates a cultural sector in an impasse, where the values ​​of workers, artists and leaders are in contradiction. As was also the case in the 1960s and 1970s, when working-class artists who launched organizations like the Coalition of Art Workers and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition have taken museum leaders to task for their exploitation and exclusion of marginalized groups in the arts. These examples in no way call into question the considerable progress made in recent years, but rather reinforce them.

Spence wrestles with a lot of information and moves at full speed, quickly mentioning almost every controversy, large and small, addressed by contemporary artist-activists. But the writer does better when he dwells on the crucial historical moments that led the artistic ecosystem to this point of exacerbated crisis. She analyzes, for example, the trend toward “secret privatization” of British public museums (encouraged by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and solidified in the 1990s under Tony Blair). This astute section critiques the new commodification of museums into hip “destinations” that focus as much on a well-stocked gift shop as on their collections. She lucidly traces this transition to oil sponsorship, as P.A. at the British Museum and Shell at the National Gallery, leading to protests among climate activists, who have occupied their lobbies en masse in recent years.

Spence believes that art can “help save the world.” Whether you agree or not, it is essential and necessary to our lives – activists know it, politicians know it, investors know it. Its connectivity with capitalism and government is undeniable, and ignoring this fact only exacerbates the corrosion of the art world. Battle for the museum asks us to think about what we are willing to sacrifice to save it.

Battle for the museum: cultural institutions in crisis (2024) by Rachel Spence is published by Hurst Publishers and is available online and from independent booksellers.

Source Link

You may also like

Leave a Comment