Delve into the dark side of museum operations as Rachel Spence uncovers the unsettling truth behind artwashing and misdeeds
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Was there ever a halcyon period for museums, a time without controversy when they served a simple, apolitical function of public improvement? Probably not. For as long as any of us can remember, museums have been called out for cutting sponsorship deals with companies whose repute is, says author Rachel Spence, ‘often complicated, to say the least’, or for displaying objects from Classical Civilisation, Asia, Africa or South America that were purloined in grubby ways.
Egregious examples of museum misdeeds are comprehensively covered in this book, showing how galleries have functioned as useful idiots, helping China, Saudi Arabia and others, as well as weapons manufacturers, to ‘artwash’ their activities. But such Faustian pacts and theft of cultural heritage form a backdrop to a more complex picture, one that holds up an unsettling mirror to our times.
The book cover tells you exactly what to expect inside: a jacket depicting a museum engulfed in flames and a title in which a pound sign replaces the ‘l’ in ‘Battle’ and a dollar sign serves as the ‘s’ in ‘Museum’. We are, argues Spence, dealing with a capricious, contradictory ecosystem that she calls Planet Art. If you thought the art world was a gentle place for gentle people, for herbivores, not carnivores, think again.
Modern artists may not see their works arbitrarily moved overseas, but they remain vulnerable to the same principles of appropriation, of being ‘owned’, gaslighted, by those who display their work. The book gets into its stride with the example of a panel work by American artist Barbara Kruger that comprises the sentence ‘I shop therefore I am’. The work was intended to show the shallowness of material acquisitions, of believing a new handbag will make you a better person. Yet Spence finds the piece of art in a sumptuous Venetian palace, displayed by a fashion tycoon presenting himself as a philanthropist, in a manner that leaves no doubt where the power balance lies.
Manipulation by wealth and power is as alive today as it was in the Victorian heyday of archaeological pilfering; we live in a world where progressive art, progressives per se, feminists, Black Lives Matter, are sneered at. Spence argues that museums invariably know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is cynical: using radical residents ‘as a calling card for their own integrity and socially progressive attitudes’.
Reflecting wider societal trends, when museums make financial cuts it’s generally women, ethnic minorities, the cleaners, labourers who are made redundant; the tasks are outsourced. During the Covid pandemic, workers at the bottom of the museum food chain, disproportionately non-white, were the first to lose jobs and be overlooked for furlough. A generation of museum workers in big cities now can’t afford to pay rent. Colonisation, says Spence, is not a period safely sealed in the past, but an ongoing process.
Museums, it turns out, are anything but pure spaces for art to breathe. They are, like so many other institutions, places where the concepts of equity, diversity and inclusion bump up against institutional racism and box-ticking exercises. Do museums want to change, or just look like they’re making changes? Spence questions how museums can offer a better world vision when they have such huge carbon footprints.
Sometimes even the architects who design museums of unarguably jaw-dropping beauty wonder what they have themselves done. The notion that blockbuster new museums are transformational is also challenged in a chapter titled ‘Behind the Bilbao effect’. Was the city’s Guggenheim a gamechanger for the local economy or was its nickname – the McGuggenheim – indicative of a global art industry that eclipses local culture in the way the burger brand is accused of doing?
These are all themes about which it’s right to be appalled, but the book itself risks becoming too polemical. Brief, only 180 pages, and written in fluent reportage, it’s also cerebral – the author’s in-depth knowledge of art and the art world is apparent. Yet the tone never changes, nor does Spence’s writing drop to a lower, slower gear; she rarely misses an opportunity to labour a point (paragraphs open with breathless statements such as, ‘As we accelerate ourselves towards climate apocalypse…’).
There is good news among these angry pages; for example, art infused with social and political commitment has proliferated. Take Ai Weiwei’s criticism of the Chinese government or visual elegies for rural Indian communities destroyed by land grabs. But there’s a risk the reader’s eyes may have long glazed over. Reading the book is a curious experience: you may find yourself agreeing with pretty much all of its content but left dazed by the feeling that a woodpecker is drilling into your head on every page.
What’s required, Spence argues, is a complete redrawing of museum models and purpose, of societal values and economic rules – to ditch our obsession with capitalist growth. Perhaps. But what do once-hallowed museums do when companies with an image problem are the first ones to open their wallets? If museums give up everything that is rightfully someone else’s, if they turn down all but the purest philanthropical offers, how do they even begin to function in a world where state funding is for the birds? Spence herself admits the contradictions can feel intolerable, that she suffers from the claustrophobia of being squeezed between activists and love for art on one hand and the institutions that display it on the other. There’s a positive signal, she reasons: Planet Art is simply too marvellous not to clean up its act.
