Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest

A few words from Laura: 

“I wrote and edited several chapters of the book while at Bellagio, and certainly, my conversations with colleagues influenced my thinking.” 

“My experiences as a culture worker and museum director revealed that the supposed neutrality of classical cultural spaces is not only a fiction but a profoundly harmful one at that.”

Quote from Culture Strike: 

Amid calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion in our spaces of culture, there is no way around a confrontation with neutrality as a persistent ideology within the museum. In a sense, it is the expertise of the museum that makes it trustworthy; that it selects art and makes exhibitions that are educational, that instruct its publics. However, there are many structures, from operations and governance, to curatorial choices, and the treatment of staff, that undergird these selections, and the ways in which they are presented and interpreted by the museum, that are directly oppositional to any desire for diversity and inclusion. The problem lies in the fact that these structures are unseen and unregistered, and that they undeniably privilege those of specific class, race, educational, and social backgrounds. If we truly want to undo barriers to inclusion, we must face this false neutrality and dismantle it.

Synopsis:

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm and how they can be reimagined.

In an age of protest, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests of museum funding (for example, the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (for example, the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders) — to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks — have roiled cultural institutions across the world, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. At the same time, never have there been more calls for museums to work for social change, calls for the emergence of a new role for culture.

As director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York municipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that were also political protests. Then in January, 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials became a public controversy — she had objected to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence.

In this book, Raicovich explains some of the key museum flashpoints, and she also provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.