GATEKEEPING THE ART WORLD
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QOUTE
Cancelling Art: From Populists to Progressives
Jela Krečič
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PODCAST
Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
EP. Tyler Mitchell and Antwaun Sargent
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ARTICLE
Primeur in het Rijksmuseum: vrouwelijke kunstenaars in de Eregalerij
Bart Dirks
TABLE OF CONTENT
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QOUTE
Cancelling Art: From Populists to Progressives
Jela Krečič
E-Flux (June, 2020)
"It has become abundantly clear how “politically correct” discourse and the sensibilities of so-called “cancel culture” have become tools of the art-system hierarchy, enhancing an image of museums’ self-doubt and self-reflection. As much writing by contemporary activists and theorists of black liberation show, this is only a cosmetic reaction. The new social climate demands that the artistic sphere recognize its blind spots and start accepting those who were systematically excluded from museum collections, exhibitions, and canons. To a certain extent, one can only commend the few art institutions that admitted that the art system was almost always a willing accomplice to dominant social power structures and their accompanying ideology. Now some have started to rethink and rebuild their collections and exhibitions more and more from the point of view of those without power, though many have opted for cosmetic rather than structural changes, as seen in the Guston fiasco.
I believe it is important for art institutions to contemplate their role in the (re)production of social antagonisms, though I don’t believe “political correctness” can contribute to any relevant systemic change. The main goal of this type of liberal, representational politics is to satisfy the prescribed demands of the enlightened liberal elite while the power structure of the museums, including the art market and capitalism, remain unscathed. One could also speculate whether and to what extent the museums’ new politics further enrichment the elite—under the umbrella of diversity."
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PODCAST
Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
EP. Tyler Mitchell and Antwaun Sargent
Season 3, Episode 4
David Zwirner (April 8, 2020)
Recently, we along with so many others have been turning to deep conversations with friends and family for comfort and stimulation, even as we remain miles apart. This week’s episode features a conversation we recorded in less distanced times with two friends of the gallery, the photographer and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell and the critic and curator Antwaun Sargent.
In their spirited dialogue, these two leading voices of their generation grapple with what success means today for young black artists and address the radical power shift from gatekeepers to artists, the breakdown of barriers between fashion and art photography, cautionary tales of social media groupthink and overexposure, and historical artists who made the new black vanguard possible.
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ARTICLE
Primeur in het Rijksmuseum: vrouwelijke kunstenaars in de Eregalerij
Bart Dirks
Volkskrant (March 8, 2021)
Het Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam heeft voor het eerst schilderijen van vrouwelijke kunstenaars een permanente plek gegeven in de Eregalerij, de zaal waar ook De Nachtwacht hangt. Het museum spreekt van een ‘inhaalslag’.
‘Vrouwen spelen een belangrijke rol in de cultuurgeschiedenis van Nederland. Zij ontbraken tot nu toe op de Eregalerij van het Rijksmuseum’, aldus hoofddirecteur Taco Dibbets. ‘Het is van belang dat we de eeuwenoude collectie van het Rijksmuseum steeds weer met een nieuwe blik bekijken en verrijken. Dat doen we door middel van onderzoek en presentatie. Het stellen van nieuwe vragen en het bestuderen van andere bronnen en objecten levert een completer verhaal van Nederland op.’
Momenteel is het museum vanwege de lockdown nog gesloten, maar de drie schilderijen zullen permanent in de Eregalerij te zien gaan zijn. Het gaat om De serenade (1629) van Judith Leyster (1609-1666), Memorieportret van Moses ter Borch (1667/1669) van Gesina ter Borch (1633-1690) samen met haar broer Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681) en Stilleven met bloemen in een glazen vaas (ca. 1690-ca. 1720) van Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750).
Cultuurgeschiedenis
Het Rijksmuseum onderzoekt sinds kort het vrouwelijke aandeel in de Nederlandse cultuurgeschiedenis en de representativiteit in de Rijksmuseumcollectie. Het museum inventariseert het aantal vrouwelijke vervaardigers en zoekt naar hun levensverhaal. Ook wordt gezocht naar de vaak ontbrekende informatie over afgebeelde vrouwen.
‘Het museum heeft op het gebied van vrouwengeschiedenis een inhaalslag te maken’, aldus Jenny Reynaerts, die het onderzoek leidt. Volgens de conservator 19de-eeuwse schilderkunst wordt het beeld van de cultuur van Nederland ‘opvallend weinig verteld vanuit een vrouwelijke perspectief’. Dat is te zien aan de samenstelling van de collectie en aan de nog onvoldoende gedocumenteerde kennis over de rol van vrouwen in de Nederlandse geschiedenis.
Stilleven met bloemen in een glazen vaas
Rachel Ruysch
(ca. 1690-ca. 1720)
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TABLE OF CONTENT
URGENT & HYBRID PUBLISHING
BOBBIE VAN LEEUWEN
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ARTICLE
Professional Ideologies and Patterns of 'Gatekeeping': Evaluation and Judgment Within Two Art Worlds.
Liah Greenfeld
Social Forces, Vol. 66, No. 4 (June 01, 1988)
Abstract
Abstract Decisions of "gatekeepers" in abstract avantgarde art are characterized by less independence than decisions made by their counterparts in different figurative styles. This difference is seen to be related to the character of professional ideologies within the framework of which the two sets of "gatekeepers" work. Specifically, the demand for the absolute freedom of artistic expression and the proscription of judgment in the philosophy of avantgarde create a situation in which decisions cannot be based on established criteria. Consequently, such decisions are sought after in the "social reality" of the inner circle of the avantgarde. None of the approaches underlying various figurative styles, in contrast, require absolute openness. The availability of specific criteria for evaluating figurative art renders a similar reliance on "social reality" unnecessary and, accordingly, individual judgment prevails in "gatekeeping" choices. In the Israeli art world, avantgarde and figurative art coexist in two exclusive subsystems and thus provide a unique opportunity to observe in high relief the patterns of judgment characteristic of each.
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Professional Ideologies and Patterns of 'Gatekeeping': Evaluation and Judgment Within Two Art Worlds.
ARTICLE
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Liah Greenfeld
Who Keeps the Gate? Digital Gatekeeping in New Media
Karolina Pałka-Suchojad
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ARTICLE
(June 21, 2021)
Abstract
This article is the result of noticing the need to transpose the gatekeeping theory. Technological progress has left its mark on the media ecosystem, generating and then strengthening the convergence processes, and has also changed the understanding of gatekeeping. The architec-ture of new media, especially social media, places gatekeeping in the context of the network. This allows one to look at the classically understood process from a new perspective, in which the key is to base the concept on network diffusion. Contemporary gatekeeping should be analyzed in the context of such mechanisms as: information bubble, echo chamber, filtering information by users and algorithms. Basic conceptual categories, the gate and the keeper, are also modified. There is a noticeable trend towards the transformation of gatekeeping towards gatewatching, in which social media users do not create their own gates, but observe and use already existing gates. Gatekeeping in the era of social media makes the audience an important element of it, moving towards secondary gatekeeping.
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ESSAY
Who Keeps the Gate? Digital Gatekeeping in New Media
Karolina
Pałka-Suchojad
My Collectible Ass
McKenzie Wark
E-Flux (October, 2017)
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ARTICLE
To think about digital objects as collectable, it may help to start by asking what it is that is actually collected. We tend to think that what is collected is a rare object. But what makes it rare? Perhaps there is more than one way to make an object rare. To make a digital object rare, it can be “locked” in various ways. Take for example The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay. It is only supposed to be seen in specially designed installations where it runs for twenty-four hours, although apparently the artist’s wishes about that did not stop the hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen from using his copy as a screen saver or his gallerist Jay Jopling from screening it for a party.
Attempting to lock the information in the digital work to some material form or situation may create more problems than it solves. As Cory Doctorow has argued, relying on digital locks does not really empower the artist or the owner. It empowers the makers of digital locks. And in any case it takes away some of the special qualities of a digital object if its form merely imitates the kind of objects that collections already collect.
What might be more interesting is to consider how the very properties of spreadability that characterize digital objects can be turned to advantage to make them collectable as well.
Paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely. This can be exploited to create value in art objects that are not in the traditional sense rare and singular. The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.
The artwork is not what it used to be. Perhaps one could think of three stages in the evolution of the artwork, each of which has its own kind of rarity and collectability. The first stage we now think of as that of the old masters. The second stage is that of modern art. The third stage begins with what we call contemporary art, but is perhaps only now starting to reveal its true form.
The first stage corresponds to the era of landed property and mercantile capitalism. This is the era in which the artwork separates itself from the crafted commodity and becomes fine art. The artwork is an even rarer instance of something already rare, the well-made thing. Artworks are collectively made, in workshops, just like handcrafted objects. The workshop has a master whose name starts to appear on the object, even if the master did not make all of it. Not every brushstroke in a Rembrandt is by Rembrandt.
The second stage corresponds to the era of industrial capitalism. Here the rare and collectible thing is no longer an exemplary instance of the crafted commodity. It is opposed to it. The commodity is no longer made by a craftsman but by a factory worker. The rare and collectible object is the product not of this alienated factory work, but of a kind of work and play outside of alienation, that of the artist. The artist is no longer the master craftsman. He (still usually “he” in this period) is a free spirit, a singular and original personage. The rarity and collectability of the artwork is not guaranteed by his being a master craftsman but by his being an original personality. The modern work of art, the artwork of this period, may have the qualities of a master craftsman, but need not.
The third stage is something else. It corresponds to the period in which information becomes the key to value in both the wider economy and also in art. The artwork is no longer a special kind of commodity as it was in the modern-art period. The artwork is now a special kind of financial instrument. The artwork is now a special kind of derivative.
The collectable artwork is now less about being an object that stores value because of its special qualities as a rare thing made by a special kind of worker, the artist. The artwork is now collectible because it is a financial instrument in a portfolio that manages and hedges risk.
The key is the role of information about the artwork. The information about the artwork is actually the most important thing about it. What establishes the value of the work is that people talk about it, write about it, circulate (unauthorized) pictures of it. The more it circulates, the more value it has. The actual work is a derivative of the value of its simulations.
Let me give an example which is a kind of limit case. Twice I appeared in artworks by Tino Seghal. I was one of the “interpreters” recruited for his work at the Marian Goodman Gallery, This Situation (2007). And I was also in his first large-scale work in New York, called This Progress (2010), at the Guggenheim. Here is what is relevant about these works for our purposes. All of Seghal’s works use actual humans to be the work. The Kiss (2007) uses dancers. This Progress used a lot of academics, as we can talk a lot. The works are always a series of protocols for how the interpreters are to interact with each other and with the public.
The artist does not want any of this documented—at all. There are no officially sanctioned photographs of any of these works. There are no written documents with the protocols the artist created. In this sense it is a step beyond work like Yoko Ono’s instructional pieces, or the notations of Lee Lozano. If you wish to buy a Seghal work, you will be instructed orally in how to perform it, and verbal contract will be conducted, in the presence of a small army of lawyers and witnesses.
When I was an interpreter for Seghal’s This Situation, I got invited to the party at Marian Goodman’s Central Park West penthouse apartment, where of course I ended up smoking cigarettes outside with Seghal’s assistants, as I really had no more business being up there among the collectors and art-world luminaries than a tube of paint from Gerhard Richter’s studio would. But I did get this good bit of rumor: a Seghal had almost gone on the secondary market. Imagine that. An artwork that has no material existence at all outside various parties’ memories, being sold again to another collector—but where what is really in the collection is not the work at all. What is collectible is not the artwork, or even the documentation. What is collectible is the simulation of the work in the artworld and beyond.
When I was interpreting this work in the Goodman Gallery, the art critic Jerry Saltz came regularly and spent a lot of time with us. He put the work on his top-ten list for 2008.
I later ran into Saltz and Roberta Smith at a showing of work by Alix Pearlstein and he remembered me from the Seghal. I tried to persuade Smith and Saltz that all of Tino’s interpreters had the Seghal signature tattooed on our asses and offered to show it to them, but they did not take me up on it. I mention this because it is not just the information about the artwork circulating in the world that makes it collectible. It is also the noise. As with any other financial instrument in a portfolio, the artwork in a collection gains and loses value at the volatile edge between information and noise.
So my attempt to make my own ass collectible by falsely claiming that it was a signed Seghal did not succeed. But maybe it raises the question of what the collector collects when she or he collects. It need not be the object, as it was in the age of the old masters. It need not even be the documentation of the provenance of the work, as it was at the end of the modern-art age. What is collected might be nothing more than the claim to ownership itself. And even a verbal contract might suffice to sustain the claim, as in the case of Seghal.
But a Seghal is not worth anything if nobody knows about it. The ownership claim is a derivative of the information circulating about the work. Some of that information may be unauthorized, like a desktop copy of Marclay’s Clock. Some of it may even be false, as I was jokingly suggesting with my attempt to spread a rumor about Seghal. What is collected is nothing more than the act of collecting itself, which is a derivative of the information circulating about the work.
As Sianne Ngai suggests, one of the main aesthetic categories of our time, in part advanced by Conceptual art, is the interesting.
Conceptual art took over from the realist novel the job of making more or less organized archives or dossiers of information interesting. Perhaps that is why art today has moved on from being orderings of interesting information, to being interesting ways of ordering information. So perhaps the avant-garde of collecting is now a question of interesting ways of collecting the act of collecting itself. Which should make digital art eminently collectible, to the extent that it is interesting. But it might in the end be uninteresting for the digital art object merely to mimic the forms of collectability of previous classes of art object.
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My Collectible Ass
McKenzie Wark
ARTICLE
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Curators Kyung An and Jessica Cerasi’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art, takes readers on an A-to-Z tour of today’s art industry, familiarizing them with the basics of how the market works, why and how one can appreciate conceptual art, and how certain art and artists gain prominence. Several of their entries detail the workings of the art world’s gatekeepers, the curators, tastemakers, and institutions that cull and present the art we see. Below is an edited excerpt from the book.
Who Decides What’s Hot?
People always say once you’re “in,” you’re “in”—but who decides who’s “in” and who’s “out”? The annual rankings of the art world’s “who’s who” don’t just exist to encourage industry gossip. They tell us who’s pulling the strings and the same names crop up time after time. It’s thanks to them that you suddenly recognize that artist’s name, when you wouldn’t have had the faintest idea who he or she was a year ago.
Let’s start with the super-curators. These are curators, independent or affiliated to an institution, whose intellectual interests and selections of artists are tremendously influential. To be included in an exhibition curated by the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist (Director of Exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London, or “HUO” to those in the business) is a nod of approval and pretty much guarantees instant global visibility.
And just why are these particular curators so super? Because they curate shows that are almost always worth looking at—shows that make us re-think the experience of an art exhibition and spotlight artists whose practices push the boundaries of what art can be. For artists, the validation and visibility that comes with inclusion in an exhibition of this kind can be career-changing. It can lead to other exhibition and press opportunities, a rise in prices, and hot pursuit from galleries and collectors.
Next up are major collectors. They make it their business to visit these super-curators’ hottest new shows, as they traverse the globe to stay up to speed with the art world’s rising stars and all the latest talking points. While some collectors choose to keep a low profile, many of them are as famous as the artists they collect and the collections they build. Sometimes they even build private museums to showcase their collections: take David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia, or Bernardo Paz’s Inhotim in Brazil, for instance.
Though they may be guided by advisors, the art in their collections is considered a manifestation of their own distinct taste. Collectors can afford to be much more playful with their spending than public museums as they are not bogged down by strict acquisitions policies. A few collectors have become almost synonymous with certain artists, propelling their prices and reputations to new heights—think Charles Saatchi and the Young British Artists—or new lows should they decide to sell! Indeed, who and what these collectors buy and sell can have a major impact on the market.
These days, an artist can become flavor of the month overnight. Sales, good reviews, and fame all happen so quickly that we often forget the role good old art criticism can play in offering more studied judgment. Drawing on art-historical and industry knowledge, critics are able to justify and contextualize their arguments. These experts range from art historians and journalists to bloggers, and although it may hold true that all publicity is good publicity, there are still a few big names whose opinions carry more weight than others.
Also in the mix are art prizes and the panels of arts professionals who judge them. A prize can do an awful lot for an artist’s prestige, generating publicity and notoriety. Equally, we cannot discount the role of galleries who are always pushing the artists on their roster.
Taste-making in the art world is a complex phenomenon and it’s near impossible to measure the role of individual movers and shakers in any particular rise or fall. But you can rest assured that the art that comes to your attention has been marked out by people of all stripes who really know their stuff.
Who Chooses What You See?
Behind every exhibition, the guiding hand of the curator is always present, setting out the rules of engagement between you and what you experience. Today we talk of curating everything, from playlists to wine collections, but the idea of a “curator” or “curatorship” originally emerged in the seventeenth century to describe someone who takes care of a museum or library collection. Over the last fifty years, curators have outgrown their traditional roles and absorbed a whole variety of new ones to fit today’s expanded art world. Nowadays, curators come in all sorts of guises. They might be independent or museum-affiliated, groundbreaking or historicizing, local or global—but they continue to be the force that connects the artist, art, and the public.
In a museum of contemporary art today, the curatorial department is typically divided into sub-departments. Although this varies from one museum to another, they are largely divided according to “medium” (painting, sculpture, drawing, video), “period’” (twentieth-century, contemporary) and “region” (Asia, Latin America). Each of these departments is made up of curatorial assistants, assistant curators, curators and, at the head of the team, a chief curator. Many museums also have one or more collection curators. Their work might involve proposing new artworks to be purchased for the museum’s permanent collection (this is called an “acquisition”), researching and writing on the works for the public (“interpretation”), as well as thinking of new ways to display the collection.
Across the board, the core process of organizing a temporary exhibition is essentially the same, whether it’s at a large museum or a small independent art space. The curator proposes an exhibition concept and begins researching relevant works or artists. It is the curator’s role to oversee everything, from selecting artworks, obtaining loan agreements and deciding on the hang, wall color and texts, to exhibition catalogues, transportation, and insurance. At a museum, it sometimes takes the curatorial team as long as three or four years to see an exhibition open. During this period, the curator is often as much a fundraiser, budget-master, interpreter, and negotiator as an exhibition manager.
Then there are those who work beyond the confines of institutions. Visionary thinkers adopting an experimental or multidisciplinary approach are invited to realize their ideas at biennials and triennials. These curators are often questioners and anarchists, who seek to challenge existing exhibition formats. There is also a posse of globetrotting independent curators, who would not hesitate to describe themselves as curator-critic-writer-artist-academic-dealer. As the art world expands its borders and takes on new interests, each curator is encouraged, even compelled, to develop the role in his or her own way.
Where Do Museums Fit in?
If one of the key goals of a museum is to collect, preserve, and exhibit the cultural achievements of our past, what does this mean for a museum of contemporary art? In practical terms, it has meant that these museums, by capturing the visual culture of the present moment, are effectively predicting what will be historically important for the future. That is to say, contemporary works that receive the museum stamp of approval are marked out as deserving of a place in our future’s past and written into that history. That’s why, for artists, gallerists, and collectors alike, it is crucial to get the artworks they create, represent, and collect exhibited in museums or, even better, into museum collections.
This confidence in the museum’s authority stems from a belief that public museums are custodians of our shared history; that the objects displayed and preserved reflect our stories, struggles, and achievements, and have the public interest at heart. They can also be a national resource and way to build a sense of local pride and shared patrimony. Since these official institutions are often in receipt of public funds, they must be able to demonstrate their fulfilment of this social responsibility and are held accountable to their board members and public authorities.
Museums must therefore be able to justify their collections in principle, and stand for ideals that go beyond the mere personal tastes of their curators or trustees. For each museum, these overarching goals are often set out in a mission statement. Think of a museum’s “mission” as its “unique selling point.” These can range from building a local arts scene and providing a platform for local artists, to something more specific, such as bringing together the disciplines of art and technology as in the case of FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, U.K.
In practice, the museum mission is carried out through its exhibitions and public programs, as well as by building collections and preserving objects. As the primary attraction for visitors and the main focal point for the press, exhibitions are the public face of a museum. They allow a glimpse into the particular artists, art forms, movements, or history that the museum deems significant. For artists, the inclusion of their works in these temporary exhibitions, especially if it’s a solo show, can be life-changing, as it is seen as validating their practice. Still, it is easy to forget that exhibitions are just one manifestation of a museum’s larger mission, with its activities stretching across a wide variety of public and research programming. For instance, SALT, a not-for-profit institution in Istanbul, was first opened in 2011 to develop a cultural community within Istanbul and foster the writing of a Turkish history of art.
While some museums are exhibition halls only (often referred to using the German term “Kunsthalle,” which loosely translates as “art gallery”) and bring together a range of temporary exhibitions, many have their own collections on permanent view. It is often only possible for a fraction of these collections to be on show at any time due to a lack of exhibition space—these works are collected to fulfil the driving goal of preserving them for future generations, not to fill floor space. Each collection will have its own “collection strategy” (a specific focus) and “acquisitions policy” (process by which new works are approved) that are aligned with the museum’s overall mission and identity. The strategy of Tate Modern in London, for example, has been to focus on the “international” to distinguish it from Tate Britain, also in London, which is dedicated to building a preeminent collection of British art.
Collecting for posterity implies that these works must be held indefinitely, i.e. forever. Naturally, the problem with collecting contemporary art is that, at best, it is an educated guess which artworks will stand the test of time. It is anticipated that works added to the collection will retain their significance and grow in value, but this may not be the case. And don’t be fooled by the phrase “permanent collection”: collections and collection-building are fine-tuned and regularly undergo a review process. As years pass, museum management changes and certain artists may fall out of vogue. Or a museum may find itself in hard times, in which case the idea of raising money through the sale of a work from the collection may gain traction.
In essence, each museum seeks to ensure that the best new work is supported and that nothing of note falls through the cracks. After all, the driving aim of a collection is to preserve a legacy. So if you are tempted to forgo the art museum on a rainy day, remember: Museums of contemporary art are more than fancy buildings with overpriced cafés; they are among the most powerful forces in the art world.
The Gatekeepers and Tastemakers Who Decide What We Call “Art”
Kyung An & Jessica Cerasi
Artsy (August 5, 2017)
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ARTICLE
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The Gatekeepers and Tastemakers Who Decide What We Call “Art”
Kyung An & Jessica Cerasi
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ARTICLE
A Reconsideration of Power Structures in the Art Community
Quote
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Matt Stromberg
Hyperallergic (November 20, 2018)
"Although the art world maintains a supposedly progressive and liberal veneer, it is rife with economic exploitation, sexual harassment, and racial- and gender-based discrimination."
The Socially Inclusive Role of Curatorial Voice: A Qualitative Comparative Study of the Use of Gatekeeping Mechanisms of Curatorial Voice and the Co-Creation of Identity in Museums
Laura-Edythe S. Coleman
Abstract
Museums, and museum professionals engage in a significant role within society. This poster visually represents new work within museum informatics: a qualitative exploratory study of the ways in which museum professionals promote or hinder the social inclusivity of a museum through curatorial voice. Through a series of exhibit evaluations and intensive interviews, I investigated the mechanisms used to craft curatorial voice within museums handling contested subject material. This research seeks to broaden the understanding of curatorial voice, as viewed through the theoretical lenses of gatekeeper theory and co-creation of identity, with the explicit purpose of aiding in the development of professional guidance to help make museums more socially inclusive. Preliminary analysis, aided by the curator participants, suggests that are multiple vantage points for viewing the socially inclusive role of curatorial voice, the co-construction of identity, and the gatekeeping mechanisms at play within museums.
ARTICLE
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A Reconsideration of Power Structures in the Art Community
The Socially Inclusive Role of Curatorial Voice: A Qualitative Comparative Study of the Use of Gatekeeping Mechanisms of Curatorial Voice and the Co-Creation of Identity in Museums
ARTICLE
QOUTE
Laura-Edythe S. Coleman
Matt Stromberg
Diversity in the Art World: Where are we at now and what's being done?
ARTICLE
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JR Atkinson
Untitled (June 26, 2020)
As long as the art world has been bastion for self-expression and radical system-challenging, the structures that make it up have often been exclusionary and narrow-minded. Part of the work of the current fight against injustice is to examine the country’s most enduring fixtures- like art museums- and force the systemic hang-ups that’s baked into them to bubble up to the surface. The question of diversity isn’t a new one in the art world, but in the current moment, these conversations have made themselves urgent, and the numbers are still disturbingly grim.
In March 2019 a group of researchers published a study at the Public Library of Science that surveyed eighteen of the most respected museums in America (like LACMA and the Met), and found that work by Black artists only made up 1.2 percent of their collections despite making up 13 percent of the population, according to the 2019 census. Works by Asian artists only totaled 9 percent of the collections, and Hispanic and Latinx artists only about 3 percent, despite comprising 18 percent of the population. It is worth noting that this study relies on public information about artists, and while the data was peer reviewed, racial and ethnic identity is often personal, thus not always accurately guessable. In any case, the numbers show marked lack of progress when it comes to representation. The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2019 study, “Artists and Other Cultural Workers: A Statistical Portrait,” also provided a comprehensive picture of what working in the art world looks like. They uncovered that from 2012 to 2016, non-white or Hispanic made up nearly 36 percent of the U.S. workforce, but only 25 percent of the artist workforce.
Another 2019 investigation by in other words and Artnet News focused on women’s representation in the art world came up with similarly stark results. They found that from 2008-2018, only 11 percent of all work acquired by the country’s top museums was by women, and that in the same period, only 14 percent of museum exhibitions represented female artists. Additionally, in this timeframe, works by women comprised only two percent of art sold at auction. A 2019 report by Art Basel and UBS underscored these findings with the troublesome fact that “2 works by women have ever broken into the top 100 auction sales for paintings, despite women being the subject matter for approximately half of the top 25.” It is worth highlighting that racially marginalized women were the least represented, with work by African-American women making up just 3 percent of the already small market for women-produced art. These numbers are made more jarring by a 2017 study which found that the Yale School of Art has enjoyed gender parity for over thirty years, indicating that the problem doesn’t lie a dearth of qualified female artists, but rather a system that makes it difficult for women to reach the upper echelons of their field. This research helps disrupt the illusion of progress that special exhibits of women’s work and positive press about acquisitions can generate.
While the case for women in the art world is bleak, it is at least well-studied. When it comes to gender minorities in the art world, like trans and nonbinary creators, much of the data simply doesn’t exist. The majority of studies about gender representation in the art world fall into a binary, focusing on those who identify as female. Large scale research projects about trans and queer representation in the art world are scarce to nonexistent. This gap in research could exist because gender and sexual identities are not easily gleaned from public information, but it also points to a larger pattern of erasure of these communities, not just in the realm of art, but in the world at large.
For Hispanic and Latinx artists, paucity of representation in museums is made possible by everything from barriers to entry for art world jobs, to largely held misconceptions about Latinx art. Artnet reported that only 1.2 percent of work in New York galleries was by Latinx artists, despite being the U.S.’s largest minority group, comprising around 18 percent of the population. In “Critics and the Slippery Terrain of Latinx Art,” scholar Arlene Dávila points to a lack of Latinx-identifying cultural critics, which leads to a system where “Latinx cultural products are often ignored, or covered in faulty and incomplete ways.” She also argues that curators of large exhibits featuring Latinx Art have historically misinterpreted the work, often generating to reductive or essentializing narratives.
However, it isn’t just the baggage of decades of historical legacy that’s holding museums back from achieving equity in their collections. A joint investigation by In Other Words and Artnet News found that from 2008 to 2018, only 2.37 percent of acquisitions and gifts from 30 prominent museums were by African American artists. These numbers suggest that curators, even today, just aren’t seeking out work by minorities. The lack of diversity in the top museums reflects the limited, often Euro-centric lens through which much of these collections are curated. Naomi Beckwith, a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, shared her insights with Artnet. “Historically,” she offered, “what curators have been asked to do is follow a particular storyline—and then when things fall outside that, they are rendered invisible.” The problem isn’t that the work doesn’t exist, but that museum and gallery culture that is still entrenched in centuries-old conceptions of what is considered high art and what isn’t- a culture that was created in service of white male European artists. Curators have, consciously or not, helped whittle art from marginalized communities into monoliths, serving the preconceptions of their predominately white audiences, thus dismissing art and artists that fall outside of those tropes.
In the aftermath of these studies, and more resoundingly in the wake of recent protests, museums and galleries have followed a trend of releasing statements denouncing institutional racism and promising a turn inward. The Whitney committed to “re-examin[ing their] exhibitions and programs to ensure they continue to address the art and experiences of people of color, especially Black communities,” and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s president and CEO Daniel H. Weiss and Director Max Hollein expressed a need “to grieve and to reflect on how we, as individuals, and as a museum, can do more to support social justice efforts in this country.”
The Guggenheim, though, is experiencing perhaps the most palpable reckoning, after a letter signed from “The Curatorial Department” was recently sent to the museum’s leadership, demanding initiatives to correct the institution’s history of maintaining white supremacy. Earlier this month, Chaédria LaBouvier, the first Black woman to ever curate an exhibit at the Guggenheim, spoke out against the museum’s working culture, claiming racist mistreatment by high-ranking staff while putting together her Basquiat exhibition. The museum quickly hired its first full-time back curator, Ashley James, after the controversy with LaBouvier came to a head during a panel in November 2019. The Untitled Magazine interviewed Ms. James in 2018 about “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” an exhibition she curated at the Brooklyn Museum. She spoke about the importance of recognizing Black artists’ contributions to the development of art, and hoped visitors to the exhibit came way “Learning that black artists were at the forefront of the avant-garde, and were experimental, and that they were creating with a sense of desire to make things new- and this exuberance, this feeling of urgency.” Bringing James’ inclusive and invigorated curatorial lens of to the Guggenheim is a step toward healing the institutional ills of the historic museum.
But even outside of the institutional magnitude of major museums, the case for racial representation does not fare much better. According to a 2017 study by CUNY Guttman’s James Case-Leal, in 45 of New York’s top tier galleries, work by white artists make up a whopping 85 percent of collections. The study has come under some scrutiny, since the artists did not personally validate their racial identities, but they rather were inferred from public information, though the results do echo that of the major museums. This racial disparity reflects on the financial side, too, with work by African American artists making up only 1.2 percent of the global auction market over the past 10 years, according to the Artnet Price Database. The same study showed that 77 percent of that already small market was works by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. A similar phenomenon holds true for women in the art world. Another study from Artnet and In Other Words found that five female artists make up 40.7 percent of the market for women-produced art (the artists in question: Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin). While these stats underscore these artists’ widespread reputations as genius creatives, they also highlight just how hard less recognized artists have to work to take up space in the market.
For queer artists, representation in the art world is marked by a similar process of tokenization. In his article “Where Is Queer,” scholar Greg Bak notes that “Many LGBTQ exhibits are ‘one-dimensional,’ in that they are either hyper-sexualized exhibits about kinky and often taboo sex or de-sexualized exhibits where the presence of HIV/AIDS makes LGBTQ people the subject of pity.” Again, any art that challenges common preconceptions of a certain group can be obscured, and innovative artists are left without avenues to success.
Considering the grim facts of diversity in the art world, it’s important to recognize the projects that take tangible and direct steps toward a more equitable industry. Art4Equality is one of the smattering of organizations that have stepped in and created opportunities for underrepresented artists. Their latest project entitled “Art4Equality, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” presented in collaboration with non-profit SaveArtSpace is commissioning emerging artists to create public art in the form of billboards, taking vital messaging outside of the white walls of large museums and making it accessible to those haven’t been historically welcomed in traditional art spaces. The Feminist Art Project is grassroots organization that uses archive projects, panels, and networking programs to fight the erasure of women’s historic and current contributions to the art world. The Professional Organization for Women in the Arts and ArtTable were both created for the benefit of working women in the art world. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is a rare example of a permanent feminist exhibition at a major institute- the Brooklyn Museum. The Black Artist Fund provides direct aid to Black artists through donations and art sales, and the Black Trans Femme Arts Collective connects some of the community’s most vulnerable artists. The Latinas Art Foundation addresses the lack of appreciation for Latinx art through their mission to educate, research, and provide scholarships for women and girls. These are just a sampling of the many organizations currently working toward a more equitable art community; but they don’t just work to aid marginalized artists, they benefit the art community at large, enriching it with opportunities for artistic diversity.
The onus of representation lies with those with power in the art world, and those who choose wield their institutions to challenge narrow-minded industry standards are more vital than ever. It’s time for gallerists, curators, and executives to not only take stock of their role in complacency, but to start vigorously re-writing that role. Only when the art world actively uplifts the artists who make America what it is, will it truly become a revolutionary space.
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Chalabi’s illustration of the representation of women in an average museum collection: of every 100 artworks at an average US museum collection, only 12 are by women. 11 of the women are white, and one is Asian.
Men constitute 88 of every 100 artists at a museums collection: 75 white men; eight Asian men; three Latinx men; one black man; and one man of another race/ethnicity.
The composition of a US museum collection, if it was to represent the entire population. 189 figures would need to be added: 79 white women; 26 Latinx women; 18 black women; seven Asian women; five women of another race/ethnicity; 22 Latinx men; 16 black men; 12 white men; and four men of another race/ethnicity.
Who Are You Here to See?
Mona Chalabi
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Diversity in the Art World: Where are we at now and what's being done?
JR Atkinson
Who Are You Here to See?
Mona Chalabi
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Artists in 18 Major US Museums Are 85% White and 87% Male, Study Says
Hakim Bishara
Hyperallergic (June 3, 2019)
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In response, artist and data journalist Mona Chalabi offered her version of what the composition of a museum collection should look like if it were to represent the entire population.
In recent years, museums in the United States have been moving toward diversifying their permanent collections to remediate the historical underrepresentation of non-male and non-white artists.
However, a recent study shows that American museums still have a long way to go in diversifying their collections, as they remain overwhelmingly white and male. The study was conducted by a group of mathematicians, statisticians, and art historians at Williams College (Chad M. Topaz, Bernhard Klingenberg, Daniel Turek, Brianna Heggeseth, Pamela E. Harris, Julie C. Blackwood, C. Ondine Chavoya), together with Kevin M. Murphy, senior curator of American and European Art at Williams College Museum of Art, and Steven Nelson, professor of African and African American Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The researchers surveyed the collections of 18 major US museums to quantify the gender, ethnic, and racial composition of the artists represented in their collections. Its findings came from a rigorous dive into the public online catalogues of these museums, deploying a sample of 10,000 artist records comprising over 9,000 unique artists to crowdsourcing, and analyzing 45,000 responses, to infer artist genders, ethnicities, geographic origins, and birth decades.
The study’s results — with all statistical caveats considered — paint a somber picture of the lack of parity in museum collections. The study found that 85.4% of the works in the collections of all major US museums belong to white artists, and 87.4% are by men. African American artists have the lowest share with just 1.2% of the works; Asian artists total at 9%; and Hispanic and Latino artists constitute only 2.8% of the artists.
This examination follows recent studies meant to encourage diversity in the cultural sector, including the Andrew W. Mellon’s landmark Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey in 2015. However, this study affirms, “While previous work has investigated the demographic diversity of museum staffs and visitors, the diversity of artists in their collections has remained unreported.”
Some museum collections are more diverse than others, the study shows. The researchers found the institutions among this grouping with the highest percentage of white artists are the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (97.4%) and Detroit Institute of Arts (94.7%). The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles had the lowest (78.2%).
Museums with the highest percentage of women artists include MOCA (24.9%), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (18.1%), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (22.1%). The lowest collections of art by women are at the Detroit Institute of Arts (7.4%), Metropolitan Museum of Art (7.3%), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (8.2%).
The High Museum of Arts in Atlanta has the highest representation of Black and African-American artists (10.6% of the artists in its collection), but all other museums had 2.7% or less. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the National Gallery of Art come close to zero (considering a margin error of up to 3.7%). Asian artists are most represented at LACMA (17.7%), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (16.1%). Hispanic and Latinx artists are best represented at MOCA (6.4%) and the Denver Art Museum (5.4%).
The four largest groups represented across all 18 museums in terms of gender and ethnicity are white men (75.7%), white women (10.8%), Asian men (7.5%), and Hispanic/Latinx men (2.6%), the study says. All other groups are represented in proportions of less than 1%. The researchers also found that 44% of artists represented in these collections are from Europe, while 44.6% are from North America.
These results expose a “very weak association between collection mission and diversity,” the study says. “We interpret gender and ethnicity as demographics reflective of artist diversity, and we interpret regional origin and birth decade as reflective of a museum’s collection mission and priorities,” the researchers write, thus concluding that a museum wishing to increase diversity in its collection should be able to do so “without changing the geographic and/or temporal emphases of its mission.”
“Our study finds museums that have roughly similar profiles in terms of the art they collect (time periods, geographic regions) and yet have quite different levels of representation of women and/or people of color,” Chad Topaz, a professor of mathematics at Williams College and the lead researcher in the study, told Hyperallergic in an email. “I can’t say what the more diverse museums are doing to achieve this, but I take our measurements as evidence that it can happen.”
Comprehensive and illuminating as it is, there are important caveats to the study that must be taken into consideration, Topaz emphasized. “All statements about artist demographics are limited to individual, identifiable artists,” said Topaz, further clarifying that race and ethnicity depend on how artists define themselves. Furthermore, some works have no identifiable artist. “MFAB boasts 85,000 works of art from Egypt, the Near East, Greece, Italy, and other areas. These generally have no identifiable artist,” Topaz added.
What Would a Truly Representative Museum Collection Look Like?
Mona Chalabi, a New York-based artist and data journalist, took notice of the study and offered her own interpretation of its results to further elucidate the lack of diversity in museum collections.
Chalabi, who also works as the data editor at large at the Guardian US, translates complex academic spreadsheets into written pieces, illustrations, audio, and film. She has earned special renown for her ability to highlight social issues through eye-catching and often humorous illustrations based on statistical data that would otherwise be impenetrable and alienating to the layperson.
Who Are You Here to See? is a series of illustrations she showed recently at Zari Gallery in London. The work draws from the study’s findings to tell us who we see when we visit museums, but it also stretches and extends the study’s results to demonstrate what the numbers should be in a more egalitarian museum sphere.
The composition of a US museum collection, if it was to represent the entire population. 189 figures would need to be added: 79 white women; 26 Latinx women; 18 black women; seven Asian women; five women of another race/ethnicity; 22 Latinx men; 16 black men; 12 white men; and four men of another race/ethnicity.
The series of illustrations begins with a vacant museum hall, which is gradually populated with human figures indexed by gender and racial background. At the foreground of the piece, Chalabi shows a cluster of 100 figures representing the current make up of artists in an average US museum collection: 75 white men; eight Asian men; three Latinx men; one black man; 11 white women; one Asian woman; and one man of another race/ethnicity (in the study, described as American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern or North African).
“The worst represented group in the US art world are women of color. We make up just 1% of all of the artists in major collections despite the fact that we account for 20% of the US population,” Chalabi told Hyperallergic in a phone interview.
Following this conclusion, Chalabi added 189 characters in the painting’s background to represent all the people missing from US museums. She arrived at this number after arduous calculations wherein she matched census data on the overall composition of the US population with the breakdown provided by Williams College’s study. The final number represents what it would take for a museum collection to be representative of the population as a whole.
A necessary focus on museum collections, Chalabi says, is what drew her to the study. In measuring representation in museums, permanent collections serve as a stronger indicator compared with exhibitions, she says.
“People keep on telling me that Black and brown artists are being so fetishized now in museum exhibitions. They are being really sought after,” Chalabi said, “But the permanent collections matter too. That’s where the artists are going to get a lot of their money from. So, if you’re not in the permanent collections, and just exhibited, it [becomes] so tokenistic — we have you up on our walls, but you’re not actually worth buying.”
Things don’t look a lot better in Chalabi’s home country, the United Kingdom. In a recent work that she presented at Tate in London, she examined the percentage of women artists at the museum’s permanent collection (using Tate’s online “collection data“) and found that it stands at just 15%. Tate has since made efforts to mend this imbalance, but it remains a fact that there are 5.5 male artists for every woman in its permanent collection. Chalabi shows a slow rise of women participation in the museum’s collection over time in a drip painting based on statistics she drew from Tate’s collection data, which was made public in 2014. The painting, symbolically proportioned 5:5:1 in size, shows that the trend has started changing only in recent years.
The rapid acceleration of efforts to represent marginalized communities in galleries and museums should be praised, said Chalabi, but they should also be put in perspective.
“I think galleries are trying really hard to fix that, but just because they had recent wins, it doesn’t mean that all of this history is suddenly erased,” she said. “It’s going to take a long long time to reach true parity, true representation, and to undo the tide.”
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Artists in 18 Major US Museums Are 85% White and 87% Male, Study Says
Hakim Bishara
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ARTICLE
As Museums Desperately Try to Diversify Their Collections, They Now Face Another Problem: How to Pay for It in a Financial Crisis
Naomi Rea & Eileen Kinsella
As Museums Desperately Try to Diversify Their Collections, They Now Face Another Problem: How to Pay for It in a Financial Crisis
Naomi Rea & Eileen Kinsella
Artnet (February 11, 2021)
Some initiatives implemented prior to the pandemic have proved surprisingly resilient, while others are under major stress.
In recent years, the public has increasingly scrutinized museum collections that disproportionately represent dead white male artists—a process that was accelerated radically in 2020 after a groundswell of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
“With the killing of George Floyd, there was a new urgency around these issues,” Sasha Suda, director of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, tells Artnet News.
While some rushed to make gestural purchases of works by Black artists, others seized the moment to look inwards at the systemic issues that resulted in imbalances in their collections.
“It really sent shockwaves through the whole sector, and certainly within Canada, it dovetailed with a lot of conversations we were having around [issues regarding] First Nations,” Suda says.
But this new energy has coincided with a massive financial crisis that has also forced many institutions to deprioritize growing their collections in the immediate term in favor of wider organizational needs. Now museums have to consider how to make their diversification commitments sustainable, and how to shelter them from future crises.
Bold Statements and Bold Actions
Some institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are making bold statements: the museum announced last year that it intended to build a $10 million acquisitions endowment for works by BIPOC artists.
But other museums are taking more radical steps to reimagine their holdings.
In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art sold off a group of works by white male artists to create a fund to acquire more examples by women and artists of color. Last year, despite successive lockdowns decimating income, it was able to use these funds to spend $2.57 million on 65 works by 49 female-identifying artists, including 40 who had not previously been represented in the museum.
The museum’s director, Christopher Bedford, says the restricted endowed for such diversity acquisitions, as well as the remaining pot from the 2018 deaccessions, will ensure a continued emphasis on collection development in 2021.
Similarly, SFMOMA, which raised $50 million to fund more diverse acquisitions by deaccessioning a Rothko in 2019, has been able to acquire 91 works by Black artists, including 55 by purchase, in the past fiscal year.
But the strategy has proven to be controversial. Selling off artworks is an unpopular move, and a subsequent effort by the Baltimore museum to deaccession tens of millions of dollars worth of artworks last fall was halted in the 11th hour after blowback from critics and a museum trade group.
The Stress of the Pandemic
Elsewhere, the pandemic has forced institutions that have acknowledged diversity gaps in their collections to scale back their ambitions.
In the UK, where endowments are a rare luxury, acquisitions capacity was already limited before the crisis. Very few museums have dedicated funds for acquisitions at all, and those that do tend to be diminutive: in 2019, more than half the museums that are supported by the Contemporary Art Society, a charity, reported acquisitions budgets of less than £5,000 ($7,000).
Additions to collections for the most part depend on a combination of donations, gifts, and bequests, over which museums have little control.
As a result, UK museums do most of their collecting passively, and have a harder time filling specific gaps. There is also a strong feeling against deaccessioning, which is widely viewed in the country as a fast track to impoverishing collections both now and in the future, as future donors could be deterred from giving art if they perceive their gifts to be tradable assets.
The pandemic has put even more pressure on already lean budgets, as resources that might have been set aside for acquisitions in another year have been co-opted into supporting organizations’ wider operations.
In its official vision statement for 2020–25, Tate listed increasing its holdings of works by women, LGBTQ+, minority, and artists of color as a priority. The institution’s two heads of the collection, Polly Staple and Gregor Muir, told Artnet News in a statement that the pandemic has “inevitably required us to recalibrate the pace and scale with which we grow the collection at present.”
Yet Caroline Douglas, the director of the Contemporary Art Society, tells Artnet News that the desire among UK museums to diversify their holdings “has absolutely accelerated this year.”
More than 68 percent of the acquisitions the charity made for museums this fiscal year, which totalled around £540,000 ($750,000), were by Black artists and artists of color, up from around 21 percent the previous year and 39 percent the year prior.
Elsewhere in Europe, institutions are trying to write their efforts into longer-term strategic goals. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, for example, committed to spending at least half of its acquisitions budget—whatever the figure—from 2021 through 2024 on works by artists of color and those from outside Western Europe and North America.
The Big Picture View
The Stedelijk’s plan suggests another, deeper question: how exactly should museums work?
“Multiple groups have been putting pressure on museums to rethink the way they do business,” says Naomi Beckwith, the soon-to-be deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim. “That really came to a head after the death of George Floyd, so now institutions that have felt they could ignore these issues realize they no longer have that luxury.”
“This can’t be the project of one curator or one director,” Beckwith adds. “This has to be an ongoing project written into the new formation of institutions. I think this is one of the primary shifts from diversity work—which is just ‘get more in’—to equity work, which is about restructuring how we think and how we function to make diversity a by-product of that.”
In other words, increased acquisitions alone will not bring about equity.
“For these kinds of changes to course through the museum system, you’re talking about years and years of painstaking work,” says Andras Szanto, and author of The Future of the Museum.
“The scholarship involved, the staffing up of expertise, the rewriting of the narrative, the re-engagement with the audience—these are things that are not happening overnight.”
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