insurgent.muse has been thinking about the new Guerilla Girls book and wondering if they, like similar intellectuals, have been "co-opted into the system they started out fighting against". Reading the post, I was reminded that The New Republic had run a surprisingly sympathetic article on the Guerilla Girls and their criticisms of museums and the current art world. It was, in fact, this particular article that I was trying to remember when I posted about the reach of MacBain over the weekend. I'm sure there are some readers, of this site as well as The New Republic, not as enamoured of the GG or their politics as the author of the article. On the other hand, it was for a welcome respite from Jed Perl's free-floating hostility toward any art world professional aside from himself (and almost any artist who doesn't exhibit at the same gallery as his wife.) An excerpt:
However, the mechanisms by which sexism is challenged and enforced are unique in each field. As the Guerrilla Girls see it, the market-driven discrimination in the museum world is rooted in the figure of the trustee. "Art museums are in a real quandary in the U.S.," says Kollwitz. "Because there's hardly any public funding, they're totally beholden to the wealthy individuals who donate money and sit on their boards." The trustees, who are almost always art collectors themselves, buy works to donate to their museum and define the museum's collection in the process. Marla Prather, a former curator at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, recently spoke out about the 2002 donation of 87 artworks by the Whitney's board of trustees, led by chairman Leonard Lauder. Prather explained to The New York Times in early December that the works, which spanned the Pop Art and Abstract Expressionist movements, reflected a collector's tastes and agenda rather than a curator's.
"I guess the next question is what does the art market need to get caught up to the times," says Frida Kahlo. "And also, is the art marketplace the right vehicle to right our cultural history? And can someone who's involved in investing in contemporary art really sit on the board of a non-profit art museum?" The Guerrilla Girls' activity book gleefully recounts tales of dirty dealings at museums: everything from a trustee who also owned controlling stock in an auction house to a collector who apparently paid the Brooklyn Museum $160,000 for a show exhibiting works from his collection. When works from that collection were sold for high prices the following year, no one was surprised.
But the creeping tendency of museums to act like commerce-minded collectors is more insidious than these clear lapses of ethical judgment. "The system hurts everybody," says Kollwitz. "Who it really hurts is people who haven't been born yet. One hundred years from now they're going to look back and see what's in the museum, and if the museums have only collected the top ten most successful artists of each generation because that's what the collectors are buying...." Kollowitz's voice trails off wearily. "Where's our culture? Where's it represented? That's not the story of our culture today."
It would be really super if TNR would start making more of its coverage available online to nonsubscribers. And I don't mean through semi-secret backdoors, either.
Comments