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Beyond Representation: The Art World’s Guise of Progressivism WRITTEN BY ALANA FRANCIS-CROW ART BY MARGARET JACKSON
Museums, and the art world in general, have a huge representation problem. Only 3 to 5 percent of the art in major European and U.S. permanent art collections is created by women, and in New York City’s art galleries, only 12 percent of the art is created by people of color. But before we leap to the conclusion that this issue can and should be solved by simply filling museums and galleries with art by women, people of color, queer people, etc., we must think beyond demanding “diversity” and “representation” from the art world. By looking at the violent colonial history of museums, the disastrous effects elite art spaces have on their surrounding communities, and the ties that the art world has to deadly industries like oil and the military, it becomes clear that the problem with the elite art world cannot be fixed by simply “including” more marginalized artists and curators. The art world functions under the guise of cultural preservation and education, but, in reality, it functions as an appendage of the U.S. death machine that preserves and perpetuates the violence of colonialism and capitalism. By looking at the history of art institutions, it becomes clear that museums have always glorified and contributed to colonial pursuits. Museums were originally constructed for colonizers to display art and other cultural items they stole from “conquered” lands. Often, the bodies of colonized peoples themselves are put on display — Australian colonizers used museum spaces to display the severed heads of Indigenous people. Today, according to German news site Deutsche Welle, there are over 1,000 skulls of people from Rwanda and Tanzania that are currently in storage at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. These skulls were hoarded by anthropologists and collectors during Germany’s colonization of East Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Museums were spaces for “human zoos” in which living people of color were enclosed within fences and put on display alongside animals. Through the display of stolen objects, bodies, and deeply othering imagery of colonized peoples, museums play a crucial role in manufacturing the hierarchy of “savage” and “civilized.” Many of these bodies and items are still on display or archived within contemporary historical and art spaces. Museums also have deep monetary ties to toxic industries and institutions. Art Exit, a group of artists committed to exposing the art world’s insidious connections to transnational capitalist for-profit exploitation, conducts and disseminates thorough research on this subject which they often present on their popular Instagram account @art.exit. They recently published an extensive chart on their Instagram tracing the deep ties that the Whitney museum has to deadly institutions. The Whitney museum was founded by the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest people in U.S history. Three of the Whitney’s prominent trustees have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Donald Trump and the Republican National Convention. The former executive director of the museum was also the vice president of the Oracle Corporation, an information management company whose clients include the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Department of Defense (and UCLA). One of the trustees, Pamela G Devos, is related to Betsy Devos, the current U.S. Secretary of Education, who has rolled back Title IX regulations and rescinded protections for transgender students. But, ironically, the Whitney Museum exhibits art created and curated by marginalized people, with exhibits such as one entitled “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017.” But the Whitney museum is not an anomaly in the for-profit art world. Our very own UCLA Hammer Museum was founded by the ultra-wealthy Armand Hammer, the owner of the massive oil company Occidental Petroleum. According a list of donors to the George
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