Once thought of as places of silent contemplation that are ruled by restrictions and strictly observed behavioral codes, art museums have increasingly become, over the past two decades, scenes of loud and unruly gatherings. Protests are staged, posters are posted, people are screaming, whistles are blown, and liquids of all kinds are thrown at artworks in London, New York, Paris, Mexico City and Hong Kong.
Not that any of this is new. Museums are important for many reasons, including their capacity to teach us that there is nothing new under the sun, and they themselves have long been willing participants or reluctant accessories in the history of political struggles and social movements. From the more than ten thousand concerned citizens who, in 1881, loudly demanded that the Metropolitan Museum be open on Sundays so that working class people could visit it, through Mary Richardson’s feminist protest of slashing the Rokeby Venus in 1914 in the National Gallery, to the Art Workers Coalition’s anti-Vietnam demonstration in front of Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, the pristine halls of art museums have hosted, albeit unwillingly, countless acts of disobedience throughout their history. In the 21st century, museums are more prone to becoming sites of contestation than ever. How do we account for this?
The second museum boom which began after the end of the Cold War and became a constitutive feature of the global expansion of the market of contemporary art engendered new breeds of art institutions. Private museums are on the rise in Asia and the Americas and they are often destination sites, located outside or far away from urban centers. Museum directors are no longer scholars and intellectuals; they hold titles and act as administrative and business managers. Some of the most acclaimed public collections, including the Guggenheim, the Louvre, the Tate and MoMA, are global corporations with multiple branches both in the home countries and across the globe. Art museums are no longer sites of knowledge production and participatory learning, but are turning into malls of edutainment that ruthlessly compete to raise visitor numbers and secure private funds. The transformation of the art museum is one of the consequences of the seemingly unstoppable boom of the gray market of contemporary art which both reflects and reproduces the global order of radical inequalities produced by neoliberal economics and the rise of digital feudalism. Since art museums are no longer outside of the market but part of it, they are sites where labor and civil rights, environmental policies, funding and sponsorship issues are probed and contested.
What follows is not a universal playbook, but a highly context-specific, and by no means comprehensive, survey of social protests, civil and labor rights initiatives in art museums in the United States since the early 2000s. Museums and cultural institutions from Boston to San Diego are, and have long been, in a famously absurd situation. They operate in a country with the world’s largest economy, where most of the world’s high-net-worth individuals live, buy art and are thus responsible for the US’s leading share in the global art market; and while the arts and culture sectors’ contribution to the GDP has been ranking as the third highest for years, these institutions receive very limited public funds. To make matters worse, calculating the finances of the cultural field is notoriously difficult, since there are no specific governmental agencies or secretariats to oversee the arts and culture sector, save for the National Endowment for the Arts, an organization whose powers and funds have been radically diminished in the wake of the culture wars of the early 1990s. The current administration’s 2025 budget is 210 million dollars, which is diminutive when compared to most medium-sized countries in the European Union.[1]
Due to the lack of public funds, art museums in the United States have been relying almost exclusively on the philanthropic initiatives of private and corporate donors. Since donations of all kinds, whether in the form of money, acquisitions or gifted artworks, are tax deductible, individuals and corporations have a major financial incentive to be charitable. Museums are one of the foremost domains and channels of money laundering and they are instrumental in helping the wealthy to obtain tax cuts. And since there is no such thing as a free lunch, the money, or the promised and bequeathed artworks never come without strings attached—there are always vested, and barely concealed, interests.
The lack of public funding and the overwhelming reliance on private money engendered a structure in which museums are aligned with the financial elite and perform their public functions through symbolic gestures that take the form of social media campaigns or open-access public events financed by corporations. The radical decline of education departments and docent programs in major art museums across the US, which has only been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, indicates an alarming shift in the function of these institutions. For decades, the precarious and easily corruptible situation of art museums across the United States has engendered critical and often militant attacks that advocate for better wages and agencies, and protest against discriminatory policies—it is not by chance that what used to be called institutional critique in textbooks on contemporary art had begun in the United States in the 1960s.
Since the decline of the Occupy Wall Street movement, US art museums, where staggering cultural and financial inequalities are on public display, have been battlegrounds for multiple campaigns. As Occupy Museums, the now defunct branch of the movement stated in the glorious fall of 2011, “Art is not a luxury!”[2] Anyone familiar with the workings of the global art world would beg to differ with bitterness and regret, for many people think of “art” as nothing more than an umbrella term for a transnational network of luxury goods and experiences traded as an asset class.
The revolutionary zeal of Occupy Museums, Strike Debt, or another OWS affiliate, Arts and Labor, was responsible for countless confrontations on the streets and in the museums of New York. Occupy-affiliated art workers were proposing alternative cultural economies, demanded proper wages and secured sales rights for artist, argued for the necessity to resuscitate the Roosevelt era’s Work Progress Administration and the only comprehensive federally funded arts and culture initiative in the history of the United States, supported old and newly launched art worker’s unions across town, and participated in labor campaigns. All of their demands were well-intentioned and much needed, yet also, and more often than not, oblivious to the unbreakable and centuries-long connection between art and money, or cultural organizations and capital. Not that the relationship between radical cultural practice and money would be new–we all recall Clement Greenberg’s cogent observation about the umbilical cord of gold between ruling elites and the avant-garde.
A rather quickly forgotten but important contribution to the post-Occupy shake-up of the US art world came from Andrea Fraser, the artist whose work has shaped the practice of institutional critique since the late 1980s. In her 2011 text-cum-manifesto, “Le 1% c’est moi,” Fraser examined the financing strategies of the US art world by asking, “How do the world’s leading collectors earn their money? How do their philanthropic activities relate to their economic operations? And what does collecting art mean to them and how does it affect the art world?”[3] As the title—a twist on the Occupy slogan, itself allegedly crafted by David Graeber— already indicates, Fraser argued for the complicity of US artists in maintaining a cultural economy that not only mirrors but feeds on fundamental social inequalities. As she put it, “any claim that we [artists and cultural workers] represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality—the (not so) new legitimation function of art museums.”[4]
Fraser’s somber exploration of money, art and its institutions engenders several other threads of inquiry about the role and ethics of art museums. What do public institutions owe to their visitors? How do they negotiate their allegiances to those who sponsor their activities? How to approach the unavoidable and often violent opposition between ethical duties and financial commitments? And another, rarely asked question: how do museums, especially the very generously funded ones, honor the work of the artists they show or engage in their public programming? Since Seth Siegelaub’s legendary proposition, the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of 1971, alternative economic models and regulations of the often nonexistent wages of artists and cultural workers have been of primary importance.
Since 2008, the New York-based organization, Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has been advocating on behalf of artists, art handlers and independent curators across the US. “As an unpaid labor force within a robust art market from which others profit greatly,” they declared, “W.A.G.E. recognizes an inherent exploitation and demands compensation.”[5] Over the past sixteen years, the organization has managed to convince several art spaces and institutions in the US to obtain W.A.G.E certification, a proof that they rely on ethical labor practices and abstain from non-paid or underpaid creative, administrative or physical work. After the fall of 2011, the efforts of W.A.G.E. were reinvigorated by the research activities of art workers associated with Occupy Museums, Strike Debt, and Arts and Labor, resulting in a hefty book of a compilation, The Alternative Art Economies: A Primer.[6] While Arts and Labor stopped organizing in the fall of 2015 and Occupy Museums ceased activities in early 2019, W.A.G.E. is still, almost miraculously, alive and kicking, along with other groups that emerged in the last decade.
The lack of federal arts and culture agencies is mocked by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a grass roots organization initiated in 2012 by Adam Horowitz and Arlene Goldbard. USDAC has been at the forefront of policy making and political education for art workers and community organizers across the country. They work efficiently and silently, without creating media storms. Another organization, the Gulf Labor Coalition, the now global, although semi-dormant, organization launched in 2010 by a group of New York University students and faculty members, made a lot of noise around museums, labor and human rights.
Gulf Labor grew out of a research project orchestrated by Andrew Ross at the university’s sociology department in response to several investigative reports by the Human Rights Watch. The NYU group tackled the abuse of immigrant laborers who were employed to build the university’s new campus in Abu Dhabi. After successfully securing protection and regulations, the group shifted its focus to the construction of the new Guggenheim building on Saadiyat Island. Asking “Who’s Building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?” Gulf Labor united artists, including Fraser, Walid Raad, Shirin Neshat, Jenny Holzer and hundreds of others, to protect workers whose majority came to the region from the subcontinent. By targeting the practice of kefala, the work-sponsorship agreement that mandates immigrants to pay for costly visas and work in unstable and unregulated conditions without basic rights, safety protection and health care, the organization launched an international boycott and demonstration campaign against the Guggenheim, forcing the museum to start negotiations.
Following Gulf Labor’s first protest in February 2014 in the rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York, on May 1, 2015, the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) of the organization launched another public demonstration in the museum’s Fifth Avenue building, and then, in the summer of 2015, organized a series of protests, performances and discussions at the Venice Biennale. Gulf Labor’s work secured ample media coverage across the globe, yet in the following year, promising negotiations with the Guggenheim and the Emirates to improve labor conditions for workers came to a halt. While it would be tempting to point to the Guggenheim and its then director, Richard Armstrong, the cessation of talks was not his or the museum’s sole responsibility. According to Andrew Ross, the bargaining ceased due to “government repression in the UAE,” but as Negar Azimi suggested, Gulf Labor’s unbalanced strategy of alternating between sensationalized actions and multilateral diplomatic negotiations may also have contributed to the failure of the discussions.[7]
The attention to the poorly regulated and unjust labor conditions of independent cultural workers, artists or immigrant construction workers have been at the core of institutional protests for over a decade. In the U.S., where unions were strategically compromised and dismantled through the anti-left propaganda of more than a century, through decades of Red Scare, and what historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964 labeled “the paranoid-style in American politics,” founding and organizing new unions requires careful considerations, skills, patience, time, and expertise in power play. Since the U.S. has no universal health care system, and it provides minimal social welfare for its inhabitants, whose vast majority is contracted to work at-will and can thus be easily replaced, unions are essential to protect rights and provide legal support for employees in any and all sectors.
Unions for museum workers other than those employed by the security departments have been struggling for recognition and effective bargaining agreements since the 1970s. During the last decade, employees at many major and minor art museums across the country secured organized representations. Some museums, such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hispanic Society, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Jewish Museum, chose to belong to large and long-standing unions like the UAW (United Auto Workers) that has represented the Museum of Modern Art since the mid-1990s. Others, including the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan, collaborate with Cultural Workers United, a branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The unionization of museum workers and the growing number of W.A.G.E. certified art institutions are among the most important and promising achievements in the U.S. cultural sector, but since they are often long affairs, riddled with legal discussions, they rarely captivate the attention of mass and social media. Stories about fallen heroes, rightfully prosecuted or targeted public figures, especially if they belong to the 1%, are better suited to generating commotion.
In the fall of 2016, three years after the Black Lives Matter movement was launched in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and two years after the unrest that followed the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, activists and cultural workers in New York, including Andre Ross, the founder of Gulf Labor, started a new organization. Decolonize This Place, as its name and mission statement suggest, supports indigenous insurgence, Black liberation, global workers and the Free Palestine movement, and opposes processes of urban gentrification. A broadly defined association of artists, designers and political activists, DTP was invited in the fall of 2016 by Artists Space, one of the city’s oldest not-for-profit venues, to host a three-month-long series of “public events, with collaborators from across the five boroughs anchoring assemblies, trainings, skillshares, readings, screenings, meals, and healing sessions.”[8]
DTP created and hosted many public actions across town against real-estate companies, police surveillance practices, and demanded art institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum to acknowledge the indigenous land occupied by their buildings. Their most important achievement took place in 2019, during the Whitney Biennale, when they launched their 9 Weeks of Art + Action campaign to remove Warren B. Kanders from the museum’s board.[9] Warrens is the chief executive officer of Safariland, the teargas manufacturing company whose products are deployed on the US-Mexican border, in Palestine, and on the streets of New York. Supported by several Whitney workers, including the Biennale’s curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, who commissioned the London-based Forensic Architecture to create a work based on their research of Safariland products, the campaign led to Kanders’ resignation in July 2019.[10]
Like Liberate Tate, the successful protest against British Petroleum’s corporate sponsorship of the Tate in 2016, the Kanders scandal brought into play issues of museum finances, collectors, and dirty money, as did another protest and advocacy initiative, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Founded in 2017 by the artist Nan Goldin, P.A.I.N. wanted to hold the Sackler Family accountable for the manufacturing and marketing of opioid painkillers by their corporation, Purdue Pharma. Resulting in the death of nearly half a million people and the addiction of many more, the opioid crisis was fought by lawyers, patients and doctors in class-action suits, films and on the pages of books. Between 2018 and 2021, P.A.I.N. organized multiple protests, picketing events and die-ins in the US—at the Sackler Museum in Cambridge, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan—as well as in London and Paris. By 2021, every targeted museum announced that they will, at least partially, remove the Sackler name from their galleries and buildings, and sever their financial ties with the family and its corporations. P.A.I.N. was a concentrated campaign that cleverly managed to fuse protest and performance with advocacy and legal maneuvering. When All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’ deeply moving film about the indomitable Goldin, her art and activist work appeared in cinemas in 2022, the Sacklers were busy with lawsuits and became objects of wide-ranging public condemnation.
The unionization of US museum workers, along with the activities of W.A.G.E., P.A.I.N, and Decolonize This Place, was strongly motivated by discontent with the Trump presidency, and the public health crisis of the COVID epidemic. The pandemic made the precariousness of life and the lack of social institutions in the US painfully obvious to wide swathes of the population, from essential workers who could not afford to abstain from work for financial reasons, to cultural workers whose contracts were unilaterally terminated by museums, libraries, theaters and other cultural institutions. “African Americans, Latinx and other people of color are dying disproportionately,” wrote Dr. Rishi Royal, an emergency doctor and a scholar of narrative medicine in May 2020, adding that “all of our preexisting social inequalities and vulnerabilities have been exacerbated by this crisis.”[11] The Trump-era and the pandemic made us recognize that—as Robin Kelley, David Harvey and others have argued—there is no such thing as nonracial capitalism. The murder of George Floyd and the launch of a country-wide movement against systemic racism and police violence only furthered this recognition.
In March 2021, young artists and activists in New York responded to the situation by launching a Strike MoMA campaign under the collective and rather amusing moniker, International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF). The 10-week-long drive consisted of often sparsely attended weekly events and symbolic actions in and near MoMA’s building in midtown Manhattan, asking for or imagining a “post-MoMA future.” Unfortunately, the coalition and its performative activities never truly clarified what a “post-MoMA future” might look like or indeed be, beyond asking for the resignation of several high-ranking financiers in the museum’s board, including Leon Black, the chairman, Larry Fink, and Ronald Lauder, who all own companies that are directly or indirectly maintaining, as IIAAF argued, neocolonial agendas and genocides.[12]
While IIAAF’s symbolic actions did little to present a consistent agenda, they contributed to Black’s resignation from his chairmanship, in March 2021, although not on the basis of his company’s activities, but due to his widely documented relationship with condemned sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Strike MoMA no longer exists, but Black’s surrender proved once again that in lieu of judicial procedures and accountability, sex scandals are the most efficient tools to remove dubious characters and unethical figures from public life in the US.
Over the past few years, the most clamorous museum protests have not been geared toward institutional finances, exhibition and acquisition policies, or even workers’ rights, but targeted treasured artworks. Aiming to generate the broadest possible media attention and inspired by the unprecedented success of the BP campaign in London, climate activists are showing up with tapes and food tins in hand in many European countries, but less so in the US. In a country which is the world’s second largest carbon dioxide emitter, where as of March 2024 around 15% of the population believes that climate change is nothing but media-generated hysteria or leftist humbug, this is not surprising.
While climate activism is, for the moment, a minor occurrence in US art museums, the movement to condemn Israeli aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, an ongoing concern for over a decade, has gained traction since the fall of 2023. MoMA, whose stuff released a statement of solidarity with the Palestinians “as they confront violence, colonial occupation, and apartheid,” was shut down in February by hundreds of mostly young people who demanded a ceasefire in Gaza and condemned such members of the museum’s board who have financial ties to pro-Israel businesses for financing genocide.[13] The midtown Manhattan institution is not alone: the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney and the Metropolitan were also targeted by protesters, or their workers declared their sympathy for the Palestinians.
The Hamas–Israel war, along with domestic conflicts, will create more noise and action within the white walls of museums. Meanwhile, there is another silent but indispensable activity taking place in art institutions across the country: historical narratives are revised and rethought, collections are reshuffled, and labels are amended as more diverse museum staffs are working to put the collective past under much needed scrutiny. Since “freedom is impossible in a country founded on slavery and genocide,” as Dread Scott stated in the title of his 2014 performance, there is a lot of work to be done, and we can only hope that it will be both honored and remunerated.
Bibliography
“Decolonize This Place.” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/decolonizethisplace.
DTP. “9 Weeks Of Art in Action.” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://decolonizethisplace.org/9weeksofartinaction2.
Fraser, Andrea. “Le 1% c’est Moi.” Texte Zur Kunst, no. 83 (September 2011): 114–27.
Goyal, Rishi. “A Letter from the Emergency Room.” Synapsis, no. COVID-19 Special Issue (May 15, 2020): 1–6.
National Endowment for the Arts. “Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2025, Submitted to Congress, March 11, 2024.” Accessed March 26, 2024. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-FY25-Congressional-Budget-Request.pdf.
Nayyar, Rhea. “MoMA Shutters as 500+ Protesters Infiltrate Atrium in Support of Palestine.” Hyperallergic, February 10, 2024. http://hyperallergic.com/871345/moma-shutters-as-500-protesters-infiltrate-atrium-in-support-of-palestine/.
“Occupy Museums.” Accessed March 26, 2024. https://occupymuseums.org/occupy-museums/.
Ross, Andrew. “Decolonizing the Cultural Workplace: A New Organizing Front.” New Labor Forum 31, no. 1 (January 2022): 18–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960211062141.
Sickler, Erin, and et al., eds. Alternative Art Economies: A Primer. New York, 2011. http://www.artforhumans.com/Alternative_Art_Economies_A_Primer.pdf.
“Triple-Chaser ← Forensic Architecture.” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser.
W.A.G.E. “Womanifesto (2008).” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://wageforwork.com/womanifesto#top.
[1] National Endowment for the Arts, “Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2025, Submitted to Congress, March 11, 2024,” accessed March 26, 2024, https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-FY25-Congressional-Budget-Request.pdf.
[2] Cf. “Occupy Museums,” accessed March 26, 2024, https://occupymuseums.org/occupy-museums/.
[3] Andrea Fraser, “Le 1% c’est Moi,” Texte Zur Kunst, no. 83 (September 2011): 114–27, https://img.macba.cat/public/uploads/20160504/Andrea_Fraser_1_100_eng.pdf (accessed April 3, 2024).
[4] Ibid.
[5] W.A.G.E., “Womanifesto (2008),” accessed April 3, 2024, https://wageforwork.com/womanifesto#top.
[6] Erin Sickler et al., eds., Alternative Art Economies: A Primer (New York, 2011), http://www.artforhumans.com/Alternative_Art_Economies_A_Primer.pdf.
[7] Andrew Ross, “Decolonizing the Cultural Workplace: A New Organizing Front,” New Labor Forum 31, no. 1 (January 2022): 18–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960211062141.
[8] “Decolonize This Place,” accessed April 3, 2024, https://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/decolonizethisplace. Decolonize This Place, September 17–December 17, Artists Space, New York.
[9] “9 Weeks Of Art in Action,” DTP, accessed April 3, 2024, https://decolonizethisplace.org/9weeksofartinaction2.
[10] “Triple-Chaser ← Forensic Architecture,” accessed April 3, 2024, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser.
[11] Rishi Goyal, “A Letter from the Emergency Room,” Synapsis, no. COVID-19 Special Issue (May 15, 2020): 1–6.
[12] On the Strike MoMA actions, see the hyperallergic archives: https://hyperallergic.com/tag/strike-moma/ and https://hyperallergic.com/tag/international-imagination-of-anti-national-anti-imperialist-feelings/ (accessed April 3, 2024).
[13] Rhea Nayyar, “MoMA Shutters as 500+ Protesters Infiltrate Atrium in Support of Palestine,” Hyperallergic, February 10, 2024, http://hyperallergic.com/871345/moma-shutters-as-500-protesters-infiltrate-atrium-in-support-of-palestine/.
ÁgneÁgnes Berecz is a New York-based art historian and critic. She is Associate Professor at the History of Art & Design Department of Pratt Institute.
