In Culture Strike, her critique of the dominant notion that museums are “neutral” sites of art and historical memory, Laura Raicovich writes about the Warren B. Kanders scandal at the Whitney Museum. Turns out that Mr. Kanders, a billionaire philanthropist who was at the time (November 2018) the vice chairman of the Whitney’s board, also owned “Safariland,” which, contra the name, is not a theme park but a company that makes military supplies, including the tear gas used by police forces across the world, in places like Ferguson, Gaza, and US-Mexico border.
Staff at the Whitney, artists whose work the museum curated, and surrounding communities were repulsed: An institution purporting to embody the best of American culture was funded with blood money and run by scoundrels. Uproar ensued, statements were given, protests exploded, and by July Kanders had resigned while whining about mean protesters. His resignation letter called it a “toxic environment.”
As Raicovich emphasizes, most museums have this problem. They crow about ethics, values, imagination, community, social progress, and so forth, but they get their funding from some of the worst people on Earth. (Think about all that Sackler and Koch money behind all that nice art around the USA.) The Whitney, Raicovich observes, was caught between “the two types of power [a museum] needs: that of the artist, and that of the funder.”1
The funding class makes nothing. They’re parasites. Idle, extractive people. It’s bad enough that their shitty companies make the tear gas that chokes Black Lives Matter activists or the water protectors at Standing Rock; they also want to control what art we get to see.
But there’s more to it. This tension erupts as a labor problem, with workers / staff on one side and managerial boards and trustees on the other. As Whitney staff wrote in a letter to management, “This work which we are so proud of does not wash away these connections” to people like Warren Kanders.
Helen Molesworth calls it the “divergence between the values of those who give and those who work,”2 and I was struck by how similar this divergence within museums is to what has happened in higher education.
Precariously waged, care-providing workers (faculty and staff) are controlled by an administrative bureaucracy that does no teaching and conducts no research but does give itself fat salaries year after year; these administrators in turn serve boards of regents or “visitors” (the nomenclature varies). The people who actually keep the place running, thanks to their “democratic sense of shared responsibility for care,”3 have little power, while, to quote Yeats, the worst are full of passionate intensity (and hold the pursestrings).
The same thing happens in libraries. And hospitals. You have agents of capital (boards, donors, “corporate partners,” administrators) and agents of care (teachers, nurses, artists, scholars, librarians). One class is devastating the other because it has all the weapons.
This system of funding and power that dominates almost every cultural institution in the US cannot be reformed, only destroyed and replaced by democracy—by worker and community control instead of elite management. How do you do that? You could start with a new WPA for artists, writers, and other culture workers. You could fund every public college and university robustly. You could spend your money on something besides cops and wars.
Unfortunately, American elites aren’t in the business of care, unless it’s care for their stock portfolios.
Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso, 2021), 93.
“On the Reinstallation of the Permanent Collection,” Artforum, January 1, 2020.
Culture Strike, 100.
Here in Dallas, the Arboretum has come under fire recently for something that illustrates the toxic relationship between funders/trustees and workers at cultural institutions. An employee is claiming that they were fired for speaking out against discrimination by their manager for wearing pronoun pins. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2022/03/07/not-inclusive-fired-lgbtq-employee-alleges-culture-of-discrimination-at-dallas-arboretum/