Beyond Representation: The Art World's Guise of Progressivism

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 W. Bush campaign published in 2005, Occidental Petroleum contributed $250,000 to George W. Bush’s second inauguration. Occidental Petroleum actively inflicts violence on people — they attempted to drill on U’wa land in Colombia, spilled toxic chemicals in Pennsylvania leading to a 2,000 person evacuation, and sold land they used as a hazardous waste dump for a school to be built on, leading to increased rates of cancer among the children. The Hammer Museum often prides itself on being a space for progressive art, featuring exhibits like “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1950-1985.” The museum has even featured art by Andrea Bowers, whose work focuses on protest and the relationship between environmental degradation and colonialism. Her recent installation in the Hammer Museum was about the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil pipeline installed on the Standing Rock reservation by several energy transportation companies. This construction disregards the sovereignty of the Indigenous people living there by crossing their ancestral land and ignoring the extreme risk of oil contaminating the water. It seems deeply contradictory that a museum founded by the owner of an oil company would display art featuring statements like “water is life,” “no fracking way,” and “women and the earth have to tolerate a lot.”

Not only do museums and galleries still preserve and display art objects acquired through violence and profit off marginalized people’s struggles — they also perpetuate that violence in a multitude of ways. For example, the art world plays a key role in gentrification, a modern-day form of colonialism. The insertion of elite art galleries into low-income communities is a crucial preliminary step in the process of displacing long-time members of these working class communities (often communities of color) from their homes. Gentrification relies on white supremacy; the whole system rests on the idea that a community is “improved” when middle class (primarily white) people ”rebuild” a “bad” neighborhood. One of the main ways in which an area is made more appealing for middle class, white communities is through the insertion of art galleries, a process called artwashing. Once a trendy gallery pops up in one of these so-called bad neighborhoods, the hipsters start trickling in, landlords raise the rent, and people are forcibly driven out of their homes as rent rises. Artwashing also disregards the fact that these communities have their own vibrant art and culture by criminalizing or devaluing the art they create and working to replace it with museums, galleries, or murals.

Gentrification is often carried out by young people on the political left because it functions under the guise of “progress.” Many of the people who drive working class communities of color out of their homes don’t think of themselves as racist or misogynistic. Often, the art in gentrifying galleries and museums even display ostensibly anti-racist or feminist messages. Like many other industries rooted in neoliberalism, the art world makes its exploitation of colonized people’s work and bodies more palatable by displaying and marketing art that brings awareness to social justice issues. Museums and galleries are shifting their language and mission statements to focus on “diversity,” shielding the disastrous effects they still have on surrounding communities, as well as the entire world.

How do we make sense of the conflicting information the art world presents to us and the information it hides from us? It becomes more and more difficult to believe that art institutions truly have a “progressive” mission at heart, given their colonial and capitalist histories, their contribution to modern-day colonialism through gentrification and funding of the U.S. military, their links to environmental destruction, to violence against Indigenous people, to the police, to violence against women and trans people — the list goes on. In reality, museums function as spaces for wealthy people to display their personal art collections while also generating a profit. For example, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles is made up of over 2,000 works from billionaires Eli and Edye Broad’s personal art collection. Unlike storing money in a bank, the longer art is on display in these institutions, the more people see it, so the works increase and accumulate monetary value. In other words, museums function as a way for rich people to get richer. When that art is about marginalized people’s struggles, billionaires are literally making money off people’s pain.

Given this information about the ties the art world has to violent systems of exploitation, what does it mean to see art displayed that professes institutional support for social justice movements? It often means that the marginalized artist(s) and the art they create are tokenized and fetishized within the sterile space of the museum. It is enraging that these colonial, capitalist spaces profit off of art about the conditions of the oppressed, while artists from such communities are disproportionately victims of police brutality and criminalization. In a recent Instagram post regarding the famous “End White Supremacy” piece at the Hammer Museum, Art Exit points out: “When a well established white artist makes a painting that says ‘end white supremacy,’ it gets museumized, framed, protected by the police and and sold for possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, most likely to some rich white guy. When someone spray paints ‘fuck white art’ on a gallery gentrifying and displacing families in his neighborhood, the cops get called.” Museums love to present this idea that you can “curate away racism” (to borrow the language of the Instagram account @socialpracticemafia) when in reality, these institutions are profiting off of real people’s pain without doing any actual work to alleviate this pain.

Elite artists often present themselves as creators of radical work, but their actions reflect where their radical politics stop. For example, artist and UCLA faculty member Barbara Kruger, whose famous work features bold graphics and text with feminist slogans such as “Your body is a battleground” or “I shop, therefore I am,” seems to exclude working class people and people of color from her feminism. According to Defend Boyle Heights — a group that combats gentrification in the Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights — Kruger knowingly crossed the picket line at a Boyle Heights art gallery boycott against art galleries that contribute to gentrification. In other words, Kruger may produce art that seems feminist and anti-capitalist, but displays her work in elite art spaces like the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and ignores the harmful impact of these art spaces.

Groups like Defend Boyle Heights, Art Exit, and Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement are doing critical work to combat the harmful impact of the neoliberal art world. One critique these groups often face is that they are “anti-art.” But why would we ever want to accept the colonial, capitalist definition of what art can be? Why would we ever want to limit ourselves to producing and sharing art in the sterile, elitist, hierarchical space of museums? Why would we want the experiences of marginalized people to be fetishized, consumed, and sold among elites? Art is and can be illuminating, healing, community-building, inspiring, educational, and much more. There are countless artists in the world who create work that isn’t limited by the archaic, insidious art world. So who really needs museums? To be more explicit, who are museums really serving?

WRITTEN BY ALANA FRANCIS-CROW | ART BY MARGARET JACKSON