Barbarians at the Gates: Corporate Art Institutions Against the ‘People’

IN HER ESSAY ‘Toward a Curatorial Activism’ (1), Dr Maura Reilly made a forceful argument about the severe under-representation in contemporary art institutions, of women and artists of non-Western backgrounds. Such a scenario is shocking in our supposedly global era and moreover depressingly familiar. Clearly the terrain sketched out in Reilly’s article is appalling and embarrassing to anyone willing to think its implications further. Not denying issues of gender and race or their critical centrality to the representative functioning of contemporary cultural institutions, another trajectory can be traced from Reilly’s article. This trajectory concerns the interpolation of institutional operations, their mediated self-representations and the greater terrain of contemporary politicised economics (2). For example, if inequality is so clearly institutionalised in contemporary art and exhibition worlds, which it clearly is, surely it is because the very foundations on which such organisations are increasingly based, are likewise situated on the most onerous, divisive and essentially exploitative structures. These structures appear against the backdrop of our 'post-ideological' globalised world, a world constructed around the profoundly ideological contemporary union of representative democracy and the allegedly free market (surely one of the most blatantly ironic terms ever coined). The world of global art institutions is based, at least in theory, on the capacity to adequately represent liberal ‘free-spirited’ contemporary artists. Yet what does it mean when apparently progressive art is exhibited in the same high-profile international museums that largely relegate women and artists of non-Western heritages to silence and invisibility? What does it mean when the rhetoric of freedom of speech, which evidently forward-looking institutions deploy as part of their democratic self-imaging is not ratified by curatorial example? Surely this undeniable state of affairs indicates that the problem of the role of global museums lies not so much with questions of content, what they actually exhibit, but more broadly with their effective dissimulation of their public presuppositions. The main issue then is one of contemporary forms of institutionalisation more widely and not simply a question of adjusting the types of exhibition (3).

Given that museums and highly visible contemporary art galleries have been increasingly corporatised over the past decade at least, is it really surprising that they have begun to structurally concretise the underlying exclusionary values of the corporate world? To ensure greater representation for women and artists from non-Western backgrounds under these conditions may in fact only force practices of a certain critical agency into supplementary or tokenistic relationships to their corporatised contexts: everyone represented, but only so far as dominant corporate structures remain unaltered and business continues as usual (4). Of course, access to the career benefits granted by institutional exposure is something most contemporary artists understandably seek. To imagine that so-called ‘marginalised’ artists (5) would be happy to only exhibit elsewhere, in less visible contexts, when in fact they are given no opportunity to exhibit institutionally, is ridiculous. Alternatively, to imagine that corporate interest will solve glaring ethical problems of under-representation out of an enlightened spirit of progressivism is equally absurd. The success of corporations is obviously based on their ability to generate revenue as widely possible. As a result, numerous exhibitions are conceived today almost wholly outside the domain of curatorial decision-making (6) by marketing and promotional bodies, which see art predominantly as part of a much more generalised, and questionable, entertainment/lifestyle package. This is certainly nothing new, but its impact is felt especially acutely today under implosive economic conditions (7). How do artists believe then that under corporatised conditions they can just institutionally do or say what they want? Or that artists who may be most inclined to critique the underlying corporatisation of supposedly public institutions will be openly welcomed?  Naturally the impression that contemporary artists simply do what they want is part of what traditionally makes contemporary art so appealing: contemporary art is habitually viewed as a rare domain where artists, as hyper-individualists, are seen to be free to explore various interdisciplinary crossovers between aesthetics, politics, social theory and more commonly today, activism. Exploration and the admixing of multiple disciplinary fields has in the past, been almost entirely inadmissible in other professional areas. Today however, with the contemporary shift to post-Fordist labour (8), creative interdisciplinarity is expected within many other professional territories. The proliferation of Start-up (9) initiatives worldwide, as well as companies that trade primarily in immaterial branding and the marketing of a mind-boggling diversity of product ‘concepts’ has challenged art’s historical jurisdiction over the final frontier of its conceptually dematerialised identity. How then do contemporary artists deal with this paradox? Likewise, how do art institutions focused more than ever on marketing and profits, capitalise on a phenomenon whereby the cultural worker is theoretically supposed to always be at work? Without, that is, completely alienating their work force.

From a dystopian perspective, where large-scale art institutions are forced into situations from which they can longer realistically review their activities from a creative rather than financial perspective, it is no surprise that many alternative exhibition models have arisen. Such alternative expressions often parasitise dominant artworld models, especially the biennale. Examples are numerous and include internationally the Athens Biennale (2015-2017), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at Kerala, India (est. 2012), the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti (est. 2009), and the Jakarta Biennale (est. 2009). Local examples include the biennial Cementa in Kandos (2013-2015) rural New South Wales, the West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial, Melbourne (2009) and the UnSound festival including UnSound 2006 in Wagga Wagga, also in rural New South Wales. All of these have sought in a diversity of ways, to re-think dominant practices evident in the global artworld. They have done so by specifically addressing issues of community embedding, racial and gender exclusion and, to greater and lesser degrees, pre-established concepts of hierarchisation. In many of these instances work by internationally established artists has appeared beside that of unknown artists. In the case of the Cementa in Kandos, well-known artists have presented work in a host of locations around the small rural town alongside actions, events, presentations and art by members of the local community. In this way art and non-art was juxtaposed in ways that tended to focus attention away from art world identities and rituals (whilst nonetheless capitalising on these) and onto the abuttal of regional and global perceptions of current creative endeavour. Given these examples, generally characterised as being more ‘humane’ and open, the question remains though of the extent to which they will or can allow ‘negative’ expressions of social, cultural or artistic tension. Are expressions, by no means merely reactionary, that do not automatically defer to community goodwill in these contexts, universally unwelcome? If this were the case, then such alternatives promote as censorious a spirit, albeit from a reverse ‘positive’ angle, as that apparent in the verticalised corporatisation of contemporary art museums.

The notion of absolute inclusiveness can also come with its own restrictive and naive assumptions. On the one hand, questions of 'quality' are often specious, uneven, because frequently institutionally strategic, difficult to support theoretically and usually disguise the more covert though apparently informed, operations of institutional power. On the other hand, propositions of a universal 'everyone' or that everyone can (or should) be an artist, are equally spurious if not largely undesirable (10). Total inclusion is a myth that plays well into Western liberal democratic self-representations. In these everyone supposedly has access to avenues through which to explore their particular cultural/racial/sexual identities: fine in principle but rarely evidenced by the reality of contemporary global life where the majority increasingly lives under repressive conditions in poverty and/or as slaves to neo-liberal financial networks. At least superficially though, compartments of globalised difference are allowed to intermingle so long as the basic tenets of the Western liberal democratic capitalist ethos are upheld (11). Indeed, heavily mediatised defenses of difference and multi-culturalism frequently mask deep-rooted chauvinism towards others (12). ‘Progressive’ media representations can often simultaneously be seen to collectively allow Western powers to effectively expunge a lingering sense of guilt towards the others its economic systems brutalise and exploit. Such fallout is implicitly excused as just an unfortunate side effect of an advanced globalised system of representative democracy. Predictable recourse to humanist myths, of which art regularly partakes, may be invoked to defend the necessary evils of global post-colonialist life. Wars are waged on behalf of Western powers on the basis that they are necessary to prevent the emergence of greater evils, such as that apparently signified by the rise of radical Islam for example. Rarely is it mentioned that the conditions under which ‘aberrations’ such as Isis (13) emerged are not isolated, but provoked by globalised conditions, in which Western liberalism is viewed as the only ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of human existence (14). The appearance of such evils often promises or eventually makes way for, the creation of new possibilities primarily aimed at global profiteering. The contemporary humanisation of the market likewise enables it to appear intrinsically benign and universally useful (15). Out of this background, corporations (which they essentially are) like MoMA and the Guggenheim for instance, represent, in a globalised context, Western corporate self-interest. Western corporate imagery, logos and brands (16), and the basically ‘mysterious’ values they suggest, are traded in a supposedly entirely trans-nationalised scenario, as though they were universally valid. It is no surprise then that the art of privileged white male Western artists (17), has become so normalised globally as to suggest that it is just generally, ‘naturally’, better. Sounds outrageous and so it is. That the art of women and practitioners from non-Western backgrounds can still be relegated to specialist thematic exhibitions (18) seems appalling. It seems especially appalling in an age like our own, where such bigotry, at least in 'developed' nations and many others besides, has been addressed in the Academy and in the streets for generations. But of course the types of dissimulation employed by contemporary Western governments and corporations, is a powerful means by which basically neo-colonial actions may be made to appear contemporaneously impossible (19). Those artists, who today cling to concepts of total inclusion within systems determined by corporate interests, frequently disregard the fact that institutional inclusivity is not high on corporate agendas. Targeted audiences and tailored exhibitions are. There is no way to seriously redress issues of inclusion politically and socially without fully confronting contemporary realities of corporate interest and its control of ostensibly public institutions (20).

Ultimately, museums and contemporary art institutions remain important vehicles in principle for the presentation of advanced ideas. They are in fact, at their most thoughtfully committed, vital to the cultures in which they are embedded. Understanding the extent of their importance is to reclaim something of the enlightened spirit, the idealism, out of which museums were born. The contemporary museum still has the potential to lead by example on a range of issues and to be their champion in the public realm. This is not to argue for the museum’s primary role as simplistically educational. Nor is it to uphold an image of the function of museums and contemporary art institutions that sees them addressing social issues in ways that are necessarily palatable to an economically anticipated (or invented) public. On the contrary, the contemporary museum or public art institution partakes of enlightened discourse as far as it is willing to challenge and complexify commonly held beliefs about art and its role in contemporary society. The educational role of the museum does not automatically mean that it need be a place whose self appointed task is to illustrate specific ideals and earnestly coerce through artistic example, audiences to live their lives a particular way. Rather, the museum or art institution embraces an educational outlook as far it is willing to challenge ‘site-specifically’ the obviously paternalistic, class-based, gender and racist shortcomings of the museum as it was conceived in the past, and as it appears to have again become. The contemporary museum or art institution needs to be a place capable of tackling as part of its core operations, challenging and potentially controversial subject matter without automatically resorting to spectacle politics. Too often in a contemporary cultural climate, the notion of ‘challenging’ art is associated with predictable mechanisms of shock value. Such effects are derived in fact more from the world of popular entertainment than art. High profile art museums and other such institutions should instead be free enough to challenge audience expectations about what cultures perceive as normal, not by exaggerating the expected exceptionality of the artist, but by exposing the diversity of outlooks that comprise any genuine democracy. In its historical context democracy, despised by Plato and championed by Aristotle was the political and cultural means, by which the property-less poor could actively participate in public life. In the end it was public choice, irrespective of economic means, which nominated political leaders and the quality of cultural life. In this sense democracy, while propounded as universally ideal, at the same time took into consideration the specific social needs and demands of local populaces. Democracy was both universal and site-specific. Culture was not that produced by everyone, but that which was perceived to embody the ethos of an inclusionary ideal (21). The dominant and dominating type of Western neo-liberal democracy we know today has very little to do with the Greek origins of that term. Corporatism has taken over from public interest. Public interest does not equal populism though: populism is a knee-jerk response to a ‘democratic’ system experienced as fundamentally exclusionary, socially and economically divisive.

From a contemporary art perspective, art museums and related institutions need to wrest power from corporate interest and return it to curators, or more specifically to curatorial idealism. The conjunction of superstar career curators (and artists) is perfectly aligned with the corporate horizon. Global curators of this ilk suit corporatised structures, because both rely intrinsically on a managerial approach. The corporate executive and super-curator both administer large numbers of people and resources. They delegate responsibilities to numerous ‘underlings’ whilst claiming absolute economic and authorial control. Likewise, both depend on an exaggerated sense of self-importance and personal power that has a destructive effect on the culture of art as a multiplicity of intellectually propositional practices. Against this type of corporate image of the curator, enlightened curatorial practice should be driven by and in accordance with artists and their practices. This would mean that contemporary art institutions would not be motivated by careerist attempts to merely fulfill preemptive curatorial briefs in accordance with themes whose popularity seems assured. It would also mean that current glaring problems of under-representation could be mitigated by curatorial practice modelled as research. Instead of occasionally pre-packaging shows of ‘marginal’ art, genuine curator-artist relationships would more likely redress organically what is missing from current institutional programming. Such a shift would occur with the specific output of local artists in mind against the implicit institutional pressure to habitually source art from the centres of global political and economic power, most often North America and Europe. To defer to the economic clout of global centres, as regularly happens today regardless of certain decentralising discourses of globalisation, undermines the vitality of local cultures. As a result, artists craving maximum institutional exposure appear more and more to tailor their work explicitly, even if unconsciously, to the superficial appearance of contemporary art trending in art world epicentres (22). With generationally declining awareness of precedents, aesthetic concerns dominate conceptual and contextual ones.

The answer to this situation would obviously not entail regressively championing a narrow parochialism: contemporary art is fundamentally a global exercise, for better and worse. Alternatively, contemporary art could be an internationalist practice that was predominantly determined by the free-association of artists around the world, as the underrepresented  ‘people’ comprising the democratic majority, yet dominated by global economic expediencies. Internationally networked artists - often already highly aware of exclusionary mechanisms and equally highly sensitive to the scarcity of institutional opportunities - could exert a greater influence on institutional contexts by collectively insisting on the nature and extent of their participation. This would contribute an antidote to the willing tendency of artists to rely on pre-existing mediatised models to legitimise their work, tailoring it to what they perceive as unquestionably ‘contemporary’ elsewhere. Meanwhile, contemporary art institutions would do well to question the rise of quantative approaches to curating. Today, evidence of empty space in museums seems to be perceived by those in charge as a waste of space. The forging of contemporary curatorial styles based on the appearance of a type of crass abundance, appears to conform to a situation where presentation is everything; who cares about the social, cultural and intellectual origins of the work, so long as it all looks good together? Rather than critically informed, this endemic type of contemporary curating dilutes specificities, including those related to questions of exclusion and inequality. Hard questions are replaced by fictionalised excesses suggestive of populist types of capitalist overproduction: more art for your buck or as theorist Paul Virilio would have it, ‘art as far as the eye can see’ (23).  Such a curatorial attitude is obviously at variance with the notion of the space of the museum as contemplative. Museum space becomes instead a random field of distracted browsing, where every possible attempt is made to allay the potential boredom of visitors. Imitative of ecologies and practices of digital and online browsing, where virtual space is typically crammed with information, the reconfiguring of contemporary museums and other art institutions recasts them as ‘boredom free’ zones. Unfortunately, the spaces filled to the brim in contemporary art museums do not necessarily include the habitually excluded. In fact, they, women, artists of ‘minority’ backgrounds as well as artists working in ‘unpopular’ ways – unless they can be used to enhance an institution’s liberal self-representation – are the empty spaces covered over. This situation is unlikely to change unless those involved, directors, curators, artists are prepared to take risks, in difficult times, and embrace the possibility of futures not fundamentally beholden to the limits of the possible, the usable and economically accountable. The risks are precipitous for sure but for many already, there is no alternative and nothing to lose.

Alex Gawronski

Originally published Broadsheet vol 45 no. 1, Jan, Feb, Mar 2016. CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.

1. Dr Maura Reilly, ‘Toward a Curatorial Activism’, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), Queensland Government: Arts Queensland, 2011.  

2. Or perhaps more accurately, ‘economised politics’. Such a description would more accurately our era of what has been described as ‘financialised life’. Yanis Varoufakis, Sydney Opera House, November 29, 2015.

3. Although is obviously still a problem.

4. Represented in the art-world as ‘the current blackmail in which artists are offered all kinds of opportunities to make a difference, on the condition that they give up on their desire for radical change’. Always Choose the Worst Option: Artistic Resistance and the Strategy of Over-Identification’. BAVO in ‘Cultural Activism Today; the Art of Over-Identification’, Episode, Rotterdam, 2007, p-28.

5. That is, artists who do not self-identify as such but who are marginalised by lack of opportunity.

6. And almost entirely out of reach of the input of artists.

7. The so-called global financial crisis has caused numerous art museums around Europe to close or at least to seriously curtail their collecting and exhibition practices. See Nina Siegal, Euro Crisis Hits Museums, Art and America online; http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/euro-crisis-hits-museums/ May 03, 2013.

8. A term currently in frequent use, post-Fordism refers to labour practices fundamentally distinct from traditional productivist, factory-style Fordism (named after the US automotive Industrialist). Post-Fordism is notable for its consumptionist emphasis on ‘free creativity’ of the sort normally associated with artists and the productivist activation of ‘free’ leisure time. 

9. A new model of, generally momentary, business designed to generate maximum profit over the shortest time, usually on a ‘creative’ ‘cottage’ scale.

10. Holland, in what would appear an enlightened gesture, introduced a basic wage for resident artists who could prove through exhibition record, that they were ‘professional’. Artists were required to donate a percentage of their yearly output to the State. This resulted in a massive influx of unwanted art that went immediately into storage.

11. ‘Democracy must not be allowed to change anything’. Quote by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble as recounted by ex Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, Sydney Opera House, November 29, 2015.

12. See Slavoj Zizek, Liberal Multiculturalism Masks an Old Barbarism with a Human Face, the Guardian online; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/immigration-policy-roma-rightwing-europe, Oct 4, 2010.

13. ISIS, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, symbolically claiming religious, political and military authority over Muslims worldwide and the West’s current Public Enemy Number One.

14.  Francis Fukuyama’s proposition in his book ‘The End History and the Last Man’ (1992) that liberal democracy represents the ‘best possible solution to the problem of human existence’ unfortunately still exerts a disproportionate influence on those for whom this statement is most convenient, ie. neo-liberals. The statement is especially disturbing in the finality of its juxtaposition of the binary terms ‘problem’ and ‘solution’, as if life, as lived, ever had a ‘solution’.

15. In its most extreme neo-conservative cases, such an attitude tends to lay the blame with those unable to maximize their individual, or community, potentials. Failure to make the ‘best’ of a difficult situation is interpreted as an internal failure of individuals and particular, usually non-Western, groups.

16. This also includes the idea of art as an effective brand such as Van Gogh, Monet, Warhol, Koons ‘brands’ for example.

17. And here I am speaking as one.

18. Dr Maura Reilly, ‘Toward a Curatorial Activism’, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), Queensland Government: Arts Queensland, 2011.

19. Indeed, the very frequency of the contemporary use of the term ‘post-colonial’ effectively renders the mechanisms of colonialism absent while they most obviously still exist. This inversion is possible because current forms of colonialism more frequently assume invisible economic guises that can be made to appear benevolent: for your own good.

20. In the same way that ecologists who protest against global warming frequently do so in denial of the need for any further structural demands against the system of global capitalism. A global system fundamentally founded on the need for profit at all costs, is not going to reverse negative ecological effects, even if it can profit from the crisis.

21. Unfortunately such an ideal of inclusion did not include women at that time, a fundamental and compromising paradox.

22.  While decentralised theories of globalisation argue that the era of epicentres is over, it would be difficult to seriously argue that international economic hubs like New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and more recently, Shanghai and Beijing, do not heavily influence the rest of the contemporary art-world. The largest markets, and the highest concentration of art related press mean that these centres promote professional and aesthetic identification.

23. Paul Virilio, ‘Art as Far as the Eye Can See’, Berg, Oxford/New York, 2007.