No one is looking to art museums to solve problems
No one is looking to art museums to solve problems. This is something I’m constantly reminded by my peers who are more deeply involved in political life, folks who work in the housing, environmental, and labor struggles. The more radical among them even argue that thinking about museums as a site for political struggle is a waste of time, the space as a whole as been too thoroughly co-opted by capital and any gains in the museum sphere would only further sanitize and the wealth and corporate interests who’ve made managing the production of fine culture their public do-gooder hobby. Programming becomes a stand-in for work, and you don’t have to actually engage in a struggle as long as you make a show about it.
What would it take to change that? What would it take to make museums a relevant place in the major political struggles of our day? It starts with the white people, and addressing the confusion that white leaders and workers are bringing into these spaces. As bored as everyone is of identity-politics and all of the takes, white incoherence remains the key issue that prevents museum spaces from realizing what is actually a really exciting potential in becoming actual leaders in political discourse. They have all the tools, right? Massive budgets, space, media attention… and there’s all this programming about climate change, race, and so on. Yet museums are held back by a fundamental glitch in the way white people are socialized.
I don’t think of the potential for museums to be something special as that abstract. Museums could and should be the vanguard of cultural support for reparations and landback. I point to the notion of constructive reparations discussed recently by philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: reparations should not merely represent an agreement in harm repair, or a way to improve relations, but should hold our collective imagination for constructing a sustainable and just future. It’s the framework of reparations that holds within it everything else, climate justice, landback, and so on.
You can talk to a left leaning white person about reparations, and chances are you’ll hear about how it’s not practical, because ‘where do you draw the line?’ If everything in the world, essentially, is the product of colonization, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, then capitalism and globalization, then what are you gunna do, cut a check for “everything”? That’s exactly right! Except that it’s not just a check, it's a reorientation. And taken that way, it can only be the product of a similarly massive political movement to support it. Such a movement requires the transformation of white people and an undoing of whiteness.
To see where museum whites are at in their thoughts on the matter, look no further than Helen Lewis’s tragedy of a text The Guggenheims Scapegoat published October 2022 in the Atlantic. Lewis speaks mostly about the recent ousting of Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, the titular “scapegoat”. Lewis reproduces what is the general consensus opinion in the white art world: the puritanical decorum of identity politics has run amok. No one is safe to say what’s really going on, and all roads lead to some form of bureaucratic reverse racism where good people are kicked out of good jobs to save institutional face rather than risk confronting the woke scolds in an open war.
Long story short: Spector left the Guggenheim after a 30 year career, due to fallout over her and the museum's handling of a conflict with a guest curator called Chaédria LaBouvier. Lewis’s thesis is that actually LaBouvier was bad at her job and essentially played the race card to defend herself. I’m not going to re-litigate that conflict, but by interrogating Lewis’s method and opinions, we can see the effects that whiteness has on these conversations.
In the first few paragraphs of Scapegoat, Lewis quotes the artist Doris Solcedo describing what happened to Spector as “social death”. Lewis deploys this quote as a kind of upper middle class academic dog whistle, a homonym of Frank B. Wilderson III’s use of the same phrase in the popular framework of Afropessimism. The great irony here, as it appears to Lewis, is the potential for a political analysis like Wilderson’s, which ought to be against “social death”, would be doing “social death” to someone else. Ordinarily, journalists would avoid equating, even by implication, a wealthy white person leaving a super fancy job as traumatic as literal slavery and the systematic dispossession of personhood of a whole ethnic and geographic group of people, but such is the indignation of whites when the detect the slightest suggestion that their own race might be subjecting them to negative treatment.
Much of the text is devoted to bemoaning the tiptoeing that these institutions are forced to do on the issue of race. Lewis claims that institutions like the Guggenheim will go to great lengths to avoid any situation where their name even appears in the same sentence as the word “racism”. She wants a world where the museums can confront these problems directly, free of the policing of activists and their siloed academic supporters. Yet, she herself avoids meaningfully engaging directly with any of the actual positions she’s dismissing, such as, in this case, the framework of Afropessimism. Whites in the art world have been made extremely uncomfortable with Wildersons work, which entered our mainstream discourse during the protests of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmet Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, another event Lewis includes in the Scapegoat.
Recounting the events around Schutz in 2017, Lewis quotes the widely circulated letter by artist Hannah Black, which said that white artists shouldn’t profit from abstracting black death. Again, without confronting the claim head on, Lewis can’t help herself but include a parenthetical: “(Schutz had never put the painting up for sale and has since withdrawn it from circulation.)”
Lewis’s parenthetical suggests that Schutz didn’t profit from the painting, but for some reason she won’t come out and say it, instead she feels the need to condescendingly imply this in the parenthetical note, as if she had no choice but to uphold the cold standards of journalism that must report the facts. Lewis understands the best way to make a weak claim and leave it uninterrogated is to slip it in under the rug, and pass it off as factual due diligence. Any child who understands the art market will understand that exhibiting a work in the Whitney Biennial is financially beneficial for the artist's career long term, no matter if the specific work itself is for sale or not.
By the end of the Scapegoat, Lewis hangs her hat on the conclusion of the third party investigation the Guggenheim commissioned from law firm Kramer Levin, an outfit that gross’s somewhere around four-hundred million dollars annually in revenue. Of the four-hundred and thirty eight employees listed on their company’s online directory, five black people can be identified based on their profile photos.
Kramer Levin found, “no evidence that Ms. LaBouvier was subject to adverse treatment on the basis of her race.” The same day this conclusion was released by the museum's leadership, they also announced that Spector was leaving the Guggenheim. According to Lewis, this is the true injustice here, that despite the objective conclusion of impartial outside investigators, Spector still needed to go.
Lewis concludes, as if to finish the woke mob once and for all: “People are complicated, and not every workplace dispute between individuals can bear the entire weight of America’s racial history.” It’s a bit of a self report, and really showcases the disconnect. If you listen to non-white people who are experiencing workplace disputes that they describe are of a racial character, that is precisely the nature of their torment.
Using Lewis as a model, we can see how from a rhetorical and policy position, uncritically holding the white identity means fighting for whiteness at the expense of other interests one might hold. In the case of Afropessimism, whiteness cost Lewis integrity, rigor, and an opportunity to connect meaningfully with another non-white world of thought. In the case of Schutz, whiteness completely severed Lewis’s connection with the material world of business, and made her look like a bad faith bully. In the case of Kramer Levin, whiteness forced Lewis to valorize the bureaucratic machinations of the manager class, as if she watched Terry Gilliam's Brazil and went to sleep dreaming of a job at Information Retrieval. White apology makes strange bedfellows.
To get away from this kind of brain rot and its disconnections as a community, we have to abolish whiteness. Using the framework of my mentor, the late Noel Ignatiev, we can think of undoing whiteness as making white skin an unpredictable indicator of behavior. This means all you need is enough white people, not all of us, to consider that serving their whiteness is actually acting against their other interests. Those other interests could be something like: fighting against climate disaster, for tenants rights, or good journalism. It’s not even required that white people understand this in a context of justice for non-white people.
It does require an understanding that whiteness is not a “legitimate” ethnic category. It is required to understand that whiteness was contrived by colonial leaders in the seventeenth century to make slavery possible. It is required to know that whiteness as a concept in legal and social terms emerged from an eighty year period, and is in no way reflective of an immutable aspect of nature or man’s “tribal” inclinations. It’s also helpful to understand that as an unfixed, manmade construct, whiteness is subject to changing borders, and is extremely fragile to context.
It’s possible for museums to create a new context for themselves where white skin becomes an unpredictable indicator of behavior within the institutions by having museum leadership adopt and implement policy promoting constructive reparations. Some rich people should retire and give their positions to non-white people, sure, but whats more exciting is the idea that the white people left behind fundamentally change their behavior such that they are no longer holding whiteness as a meaningful part of their identity in the way that it factors into the prioritizing of their interests. To do this, they have to actually move against whiteness in policy decision making, messaging and programming, and long term engagement with all struggles where whiteness stands in the way.
