Some thoughts on Occupy Museums

I was away this week and missed the occupy museums protest, but I wanted to share some thoughts.  First, I do want to affirm that it is worth challenging the increasing corporate control of museums.  Many of the people who sit on museum boards are the same people that have profited most from financial speculation.  They have driven speculation in the art market by increasing the power of auction houses.  (I recently read a quote by a Christie's executive that I can no longer locate that claimed wealthy art patrons would rather pay twice as much for a work at auction than buy directly from a gallery because paying more at auction drives up the value of the work.)   The corporate influence in art does not merely extend to boards of directors or to corporate sponsorship, but in the ways that corporate value structures, funding priorities, and administrative models have seeped their way into almost all non-profit arts organizations.  In the 60’s, artists challenged the major art institutions in New York (this movement is covered eloquently in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book Art Workers and can be referenced in the papers from the Art Workers Coalition: http://primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/art-workers-coalition/), which led to the proliferation of artist-controlled spaces and increased federal funding for living artists in the 1970’s.   Over the last 30 years, these artist-led organizations have seen their once radical mission statements watered down to neo-liberal grantspeak. 

The 99% is useful as a slogan and protesting museums makes for a good media moment, but focusing only on the most obvious manifestations of inequality we should not ignore the ways that we have all been complicit in creating the current economic situation. Beyond art institutions, Pierre Bourdieu’s laborious study of “taste” in mid-20th century France suggested that the primary activity of artists and academics was to reproduce their own privileged cultural status.  Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde also explores the category of art as a social system, distinguishing between the historical avant-garde of 19th C and early 20th C Europe--led by artists who were actively involved in reshaping social norms--and later forms of modern or contemporary art such as AbEx or Pop Art that absorbed the idea of revolution into an aesthetic framework and once-again reframed these acts as the work of heroic, individual genius.  Bourdieu’s findings continue to be my reality check, preventing me from getting terribly lofty about my own personal achievements or considering art as some kind of moral good in and of itself.  They challenge me to find ways to use whatever agency I manage to obtain in ways that empowers others.  (Bourdieu also was not fully convinced of art or academia’s futility; he used his position of prestige to champion universal access to high quality public education).

In her 1989 book Loft Living, when Sharon Zukin tried to define what she called the “artistic mode of production”, her definition was still a bit nebulous.  Now, however, we can quite clearly see the “artistic mode of production” as a form of precarious work (For the sake of brevity, I’ll just cite the wikipedia definition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarious_work) Unfortunately, the competitiveness of the contemporary art world—heightened by the individual drive for celebrity, authorship, and uniqueness—has helped drive the speculation of the art and real estate markets and increased the precarious working conditions for most art workers (the 99%).  Paradoxically, the competitive atmosphere of the contemporary art world only leads to further isolation among artists who in the effort to preserve their autonomy, make themselves ever more vulnerable to speculation and exploitation.  The speculation in the art market, which by some accounts has grown 20 times in 20 years, has also led to an expansion in the number of art degrees, which have doubled since 1990.  Art, because of its close ties to wealth and finance, has become to look like a viable career option. The appearance of so much money floating through the art world in recent decades gave students the expectation that they too could "make it," so the put their heads down and got to work, not realizing that their increased productivity, their individual quests to produce something unique, something special, was actually what made them interchangeable service providers for art institutions and the greater art economy.   In reality, money only comes to a handful of artists. And while most artists work in auxiliary jobs in art institutions or as instructors, they contribute to the legitimacy of the art market through their willingness to submit themselves to "careers" that offer little financial opportunity and by making little effort to come together and demand an alternative.  I will leave the intricate connection between class and art, financial and cultural capital, because it is far too complicated to cover here and doesn’t even begin to address all the ingrained (often colonial) hierarchies between art and culture. {Also, when I use the word "artist" in this context, I am also including a broader swath of cultural workers including curators like myself}

I just returned home from a conference in Montreal on social and solidarity economies.  There were 1500 or so participants from all over the world discussing ways to radically alter the world’s economy (and, in fact, ways that it is already being altered).  The majority of the participants were either from places completely marginal to capitalism (for instance, Ecuador’s Minister for Social and Economic Inclusion stated that 67% of Ecuadorians fall outside the capitalist economy, making things like worker cooperatives an absolute necessity) or from social democracies like Canada, France and Spain where there is a broader recognition of the importance of balancing social and capital investment.  I left excited, but also deflated, wondering how this type of thinking can ever take root here, in the very heart of capitalism.  It would require not only new legislation and a restructuring of all the institutions of civil society towards social inclusion over profit, but a total readjustment of our perspectives, priorities, and daily habits of work and life.  

Even in the meetings of the Occupy Wall Street Art and Culture working group, we see the same tendencies towards exclusion, power chasing, and greed rearing their ugly heads.  When all possibilities are open, why then do we keep returning to the same pyramidal power structures, reproducing the same conditions of hierarchy, and marginalizing the same voices, over and over again?

I often think of artists like vedic scribes or monastic orders, those who secretly maintain analog technologies, archaic forms of knowledge, and alternative ways of being in the world, in times when there is no hope, no alternative.  With OWS, we see a slight chance to bring these anarchic forms of wisdom back into the world.  But the problem is that we have forgotten how to speak one another.  We are conflicted between our own individual ambitions and our desire to contribute to the larger social good.  This is why enacting alternatives will require more than simply protesting museums, taxing financial derivatives, or re-enacting Glass Steagall, but instead require us to come together to build new economic institutions and modes of art production through which we empower ourselves and others (artists and non-artists alike), both in our local neighborhoods and through our broader international art communities.

Right now, we have an opportunity to look very clearly and with great compassion at the way we are complicit in reproducing the habitual patterns that lead to inequitable and oppressive economic relations--kind of like that moment when you realize that you keep changing partners, but ending up in the same relationship--I really hope that we don’t waste it.

-Erin Sickler

Comments

[admin]

Great post. Plenty to consider.That quote sounds like one from The $12,000,000 Shark.