Kuba Szreder has a plan for museums that would like to do the right thing
Museums and art centres have a choice: they can either reproduce extractivist institutional models based on the exploitation of artistic ecosystems, labour and commons, or engage in building more interdependent, socially inclined and equalitarian art economies. Just like individual art workers, independent artists and curators, museums can either contribute to the competitive art economy, by privatising ideas as resources to shore up their own positions, or they can create public–commons partnerships to actualise those ideas in accord with social transformation. Commons can be understood here as forms of social organisation that emerge outside of the tired division between private property and state ownership. Ranging from online repositories and art collections to buildings and parks and natural environments, commons offer ways (both old and new) of generating, sharing and taking care of resources.
Following a collective research process carried out by the Centre for Plausible Economies (which I coestablished with artist Kathrin Böhm in 2018), we might visualise these competing institutional logics as two sides of the same coin, to emphasise that the real-world institutions rarely operate as either paragons of social justice or neoliberal monstrosities. More often, museums balance between competing models: as a museum of the 1%, which operates in accordance with extractivist logics; or as museums that aspire to implement more regenerative economic models, in accordance with the commons. The latter are often discussed using names such as ‘constituent’ or ‘useful’ museums, terms popularised in the milieu of the coalition of European museums L’Internationale and referenced by curator Alistair Hudson, when he set out the vision of the institutions he directed in the UK: MIMA (2014–18) and the Whitworth (2018–22).
In the spirit of Walter Benjamin, I am not really interested in what contemporary art institutions want to tell us about the relations of production of our time, but rather in how they are situated within them. The difference between these competing institutional logics boils down to whether or not a given institution extracts or enhances artistic ecosystems. Or, to be more pragmatic – I am interested in how institutions alternate between those two states (let’s call them an underlying conservatism and a radical chic) and in which model becomes more dominant within a given timeframe or set of circumstances.
Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello emphasise that the overtly networked world operates with an organisational grammar that transcends forces hostile to capitalism: projects (exhibitions, events) can be about anything (including anticapitalism) and yet change nothing in the underlying systems of extraction and accumulation. Hence, exhibitions about climate catastrophe may be hosted by institutions sponsored by the oil industry; frontline workers of the pandemic era are lauded in exhibitions organised by the institutions that laid off their own zero-hours staff the moment the pandemic hit; decolonial struggles are waged by institutions that still benefit from the legacies of colonialism; peace and humanitarianism are promoted by institutions that do not shun funds offered by imperialistic oligarchies.
All this provokes outbursts of righteous anger and demands that institutions practise what they preach. In contrast to old-school institutional critique, this anger does not stop at producing artworks about the problems encountered. Neither does it default simply to moralising about presumed institutional hypocrisy. Instead, it embeds artistic ideas in wider struggles that operate within social movements – pickets, unionisation, industrial action, open letters, political lobbying. Art is intermingled with other forms of action, which is a fascinating development of this new wave of infrastructural critique. One of the primary sites of neoliberal extraction is labour relations – both within institutions (when institutional expansion and the privileges of institutional hierarchies are financed by the exploitation of front-desk workers, support personnel, mid-tier curatorial staff, etc), and outside of them (when leading institutions fuel their programmes by freely sourcing so-called artistic dark matter, a cosmological metaphor introduced by Gregory Sholette to denote the 95 percent of artworkers who compose the bulk of the artistic universe, and maintain it). The data is staggering. Seventy-six percent of millennial workers in art museums in the US want to quit. A Polish report titled ‘Culture Is Brimming but Accounts Depleted’ (2019) reveals that employees of artistic institutions in Warsaw earn far below median wage, and cannot even make a living wage there. Dana Kopel discusses similar problems of New York-based museum employees in her 2021 denunciation of the ‘artsploitation’ of low- and mid-tier workers at the New Museum in New York. The picture is even darker when one takes a look at artistic freelancers and artists. In Poland, most of them cannot even make minimum wage, according to research commissioned by the Polish Ministry of Culture and published in 2018. The situation in the UK is similar. The Arts Council-supported report ‘Livelihoods of Visual Artists’ (2018) indicates that only 30 percent of artists’ income comes from making art, 20 percent of them work three or more jobs, and artists earned an average £16,150 per year (in 2015, less than the national living income and far less than the average national income for that year of £27,600). According a W.A.G.E. online survey of over 50,000 respondents conducted in 2010, 58 percent of artists are not paid for participating in exhibitions, and only 42 percent of them are fully covered for installation costs. This constitutes a huge pool of labour that is being freely exploited in order to help institutions make their ends meet. This extraction unfolds not only between institutions and individuals, unevenly linking artistic dark matter to a tiny strata of star curators and artists, but also at an interinstitutional level. Larger metropolitan institutions, which are able to attract patronage, sponsorship and tourism, benefit from a system that siphons resources to the metropolis, leaving a hinterland with naught but their own unfulfilled needs. Smaller institutions are tasked with maintaining artistic ecosystems and scenes, helping new talents to emerge and solidify, while dealing with austerity, brain drain and general deficits of social welfare. They bear the costs, while the competition for prestige, audiences and visibility is won by the larger players.
This institutional sponging converges with the top tiers of private galleries. Statistics published by The Art Newspaper in 2015 indicate that almost a third of the shows in public museums in the US are organised with artists represented by only five major galleries. The US also leads the way in integration between artistic and plutocratic elites. As Andrea Fraser convincingly argued in her oft-cited text ‘L’1%, c’est moi’ (2011), the institutional boards in the US are occupied by a tiny strata of extremely wealthy patrons, whose business dealings are not necessarily as progressive as the programmes of the institutions that they hold in their grasp.
Such artistic extractivism is not only the speciality of US-centred artworlds. In countries like Poland, politicians are mostly interested in pouring concrete for new buildings for art, much less so in supporting the institutions that are getting constructed and even less in propping up wider artistic ecosystems. Such vast institutions are instead a magnet for private patrons and corporate sponsors, creating of a network of gatekeepers that can either facilitate or hamper one’s access to artistic networks on both a local and an international scale. By regulating access, they are able to extract their ‘toll’: underpaid services and provisions from the smaller players.
But this extractivist logic is not inevitable. Commons-based, constituent, equitable, sustainable and transparent museums are possible, even if they need to test their mettle in an environment engineered to enforce competition and further extraction. The alternative logic can be implemented by establishing public–commons partnerships that require a distributed social-infrastructure of checks and balances. The forms of redistribution have to involve external agents – such as unions, movements, collectives – as stakeholders rather than mere clients. Institutions are unable to transform in and by themselves; the change emerges from a coalesced movement between institutions, artistic ecosystems, publics, movements, parties, institutions of democratic state and wider apparatuses, networks and markets.
There are numerous iterations of such institutional logic-in-action. For example, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid established long-lasting partnerships with squatted art-centres, anti austerity activists, social movements and trade unions of care workers (its former director, Manuel Borja-Villel, paid the price for his commitment to cultural commons when he was barred from reapplying for his own job in early 2023). The Whitworth in Manchester employs the concept of the constituent museum in practice, making use of its collections and infrastructures by establishing, among many other initiatives, the Office for Arte Útil and the School of Creativity, commissioning and supporting projects such as the Alliance, an initiative of local activists and teenagers that builds on Suzanne Lacy’s exhibition What Kind of City? A Manual for Social Change (2021–22). From a more transversal perspective, which includes alliances established between institutions and self-organised bodies, one could mention Company Drinks, a social enterprise coestablished by Kathrin Böhm in Barking, East London. It dedicates itself to promoting and enacting community economies, both independently and in alliances with more established institutions, both public and private, such as the Showroom, in London, Frieze, Create London, and the Community Economies Research Network. The Anti-Fascist Year in Poland, a nationwide coalition of anti- fascist art collectives, artists and institutions, was supported by a couple of (anonymous) larger museums, contributing to the struggles against an authoritarian shift in Polish politics and culture. The Sunflower Solidary Community Center was hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in an act of material, and not just rhetorical, support for Ukrainians during Russia’s ongoing war of imperialistic aggression. The European museum coalition L’Internationale promotes progressive social causes by the means of art. Or even ruangrupa, who tried to revamp the economies and policies of Documenta 15 in accordance with the values of what they termed lumbung – an Indonesian word that denotes a communal rice barn, deployed here to promote the concept of communal and equalitarian economies.
All of these informed the Centre for Plausible Economies’ own series of workshops dedicated to visualising often unregistered social economies of the museum. The results were eventually presented as a participatory installation in the exhibition Economics: The Blockbuster at the Whitworth earlier this year.
Grand exhibitions, public museums, white cubes or mega-galleries are all models we currently take for granted. But they, too, emerged gradually and as exceptions to existing models, until they became dominant. While self-organised and institutional experiments are sometimes denigrated as not ideal, or unscalable, we would identify them, rather, as harbingers of change.
