The museum is the spiritual successor of the church. But if these institutions are historically entwined, so are their crises today.
Fires, floods, wars, and existential crises that have redefined what museums do and how they think of themselves and their public.
The arts must secede from the creative industries. The sooner the visual arts, dance, or music realise that they must fend against the industrial exploits of giants like gaming or streaming, the higher the chances of them finding and articulating their purpose anew.
In the 1960s, the German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke proposed that the road to the revolution would involve a ‘long march through the institutions’ first. A few decades on, Dutschke got what he wanted but the revolution isn’t coming. In its place, a reactionary backlash.
If a single NGO could take the credit for creating the cultural values of a whole region without once being called to account, what other ideologies is contemporary art producing and on whose orders?
Where one is from and who one works for has heavy consequences. The arts are expert at flat-out denying this, but isn’t it time to trial radical transparency and honesty?
Who are biennials for? Recent examples suggest that these events put the intellectual and political desires of their organisers ahead of those of their audiences or host cities.
Who really has a say in what museums do and for whom? Will museums heal the wounds inflicted on them and their audiences by the past decade’s political, social, and economic upheavals? At what cost?
Can the museum serve the public if, as we are told, it abuses its staff? Can the art institution change the world if it’s unable to put its own house in order?
There’s nothing that the art world likes more than a crisis. We had a death of painting, a crisis of art critique, and another of institutions. Now, the art school’s in crisis too – but not in the way it thinks.
Queer Britain and Queercircle mark capital’s transition from appropriation of queer culture to full-scale colonisation.
Are contemporary art museums purely public affairs? How do private collections serve the greater good? What happens when these missions become confused? How should we account for the cost (in tax revenue, no least) of the philanthropist’s gesture?
We need new institutions, not new art, writes Coco Fusco. Who, if not artists, will build them? Could wind power lend an unlikely hand?
