Barbarians at the Gates: Corporate Art Institutions Against the ‘People’
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?
Art and Celebrity: the Quest for Ultravisibilty
Controversy surrounding Björk’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art raises a number of questions about the role of major art institutions in the 21st Century. These questions go far beyond fusty reactions over a pop star exhibiting in the hallowed halls of a high-end museum. Instead they indicate a broader crisis of identity for public art institutions beset by neoliberalism’s privatising demands for ever-greater profits.
Art and the Politics of Withdrawal
The controversy surrounding founding Biennale of Sydney corporate sponsor Transfield, and its simultaneous operation of refugee detention centres, raises much broader issues. At first glance, could there be anything more diametrically opposed than a multi-national corporation capitalising on human suffering and a mass cultural event implicitly believed to democratically celebrate global difference?
Sweeping Art Under the Market
Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new. In fact, since the 1980s such writing has become commonplace. A recent article by Camille Paglia extrapolating such a crisis called ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’ appeared, fittingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal. How exactly capitalism can save art however is by no means convincingly argued.
Plenty of Nothing; Art/Money/Installation
Even today, installation art, properly defined by its dependency on site and its irreducibility to isolable components, poses especial challenges. Never is this truer than when the installation art in question appears to exhibit ‘nothing’. In a global climate founded squarely on reinvigorated traditionalist principles of material accumulation, contemporary installations in which ‘nothing’ is exhibited pose important questions concerning art’s value.
Art/Social/Capital
The massive mediation of our contemporary cultural terrain obviously has a notable impact on the activities of contemporary art, particularly in a globalised context. In fact, what is especially noteworthy about much contemporary art impacted by this communication imperative, is its heightened emphasis on the value of communicability itself.
New Worlds Inc. the Global Museum Franchise
A new cultural district in Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, incorporates new lavish outposts of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. These particular ‘outposts’ will feature specially designed buildings by high-ranking glitterati of the international architecture firmament, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel. The resulting ‘utopia’ is of a kind that only the conjoined cooperation of global multinationals could conjure.
To produce value under Capital is a misfortune because it means producing value for somebody else.