Curating Capitalism: Centering Community Through Cultural Sovereignty in the Contemporary Art Museum

Curating Capitalism: Centering Community Through Cultural Sovereignty in the Contemporary Art Museum MA Thesis (Afstudeerscriptie) written by Jurjen Wolven (born October 18th, 1985 in Heerhugowaard, The Netherlands) under the supervision of Prof Dr Yolande Jansen, and submitted to the Board of Examiners in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MA in Philosophy at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Date of the public defense: Members of the Thesis Committee: November 28, 2018 Prof Dr Yolande Jansen Prof Dr Margriet Schavemaker Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Yolande Jansen, for seeing value in this project and taking it on on such short notice, and for her wonderful and insight- ful comments and suggestions. A big thanks to Elsbeth Brouwer as well, whose continuous support over the last few years has gotten me through, and gotten me here. It has been a fraught journey; thank you for standing by me. I owe my family a debt of gratitude for untold reasons, but most of all for always being there for me, and for enabling me to pursue my hopes and dreams. Thanks to my friends, for their advice, their kind words, pleasant chats over countless beers, and for pushing me to hone my arguments. They know who they are. This thesis is dedicated to Alison, my superlative life-partner. No other person has been as singularly important to the success of this project, and the success of my life. None of this would be without her invaluable advice, insight, support, and love. Contents 1 Introduction1 2 Art as Property4 2.1 Property, Traditionally Defined . .4 2.2 Cultural Property . .8 2.3 Owning Art . 11 3 Appropriation in the Globalized Art World 17 3.1 Cases of Cultural Appropriation in the Contemporary Art World . 17 3.2 What We Talk About When We Talk About Cultural Appropri- ation . 20 3.2.1 A Typology of Cultural Appropriation . 21 3.2.2 Transculturation and the Essentialist Threat . 30 3.3 The Logic of Capitalism as the Engine of Cultural Appropriation . 36 4 Sovereignty over Art & Culture 41 4.1 Diversity and the Institution of the Museum . 41 4.1.1 Be(com)ing Relevant: The Museum as a Political Space . 41 4.1.2 The Concept of Diversity at Stake . 47 4.2 Sovereignty over Culture . 53 5 Conclusion 61 Bibliography 64 1| Introduction One of the most prominent and critical issues facing the museum world1 today is that of diversity. Museum education departments are taking steps to make the museum more accessible to ever more people, curators are increasingly staging exhibitions around the subject and related themes (e.g. migration), and theorists are churning out publications concerning if, why, and how the museum should become more diverse and more inclusive. Yet, the concept of diversity remains relatively undertheorized within museum contexts, and one encoun- ters greatly dissimilar, often implicit, working definitions at play. One popular treatment of diversity is predicated on the idea that the concept entails a commitment to including and fostering the broadest array of voices, even going so far as to include what some characterize as “intolerant” voices, but which I think are more aptly and usefully described as harmful voices. I argue that this view constitutes a fundamental misconception of what diversity is, and actually runs counter to the work the concept of diversity is attempting to do. A commitment to social justice is, or ought to be, at the heart of diversity, and as such the notion is radically incompatible with the platforming and inclusion of harmful voices. Central to the debate around diversity in the museum world, I believe, are two strains of questions: 1. What is the museum, and what should the museum be? Who is the museum for, and who is it from? 2. Who owns art/culture, and in what way? And what does ownership mean in this context? In this thesis, I aim to shed light on these questions.2 The questions are both descriptive and normative in nature; we are interested not only in how things are, but also in how they ought to be. The first question, I think, can be distilled quite naturally from questions of diversity—what is diversity about if not the 1 A term here meant to include museums, kunsthalles, galleries, collectors, curators, art historians, and art critics, among others. 2 I shall limit myself to a consideration of the contemporary art museum; the diversity in types of museums and the different issues facing them would simply present too big of an undertaking. Henceforth, when I talk about ‘the museum,’ ‘the art world,’ and akin terms, readers can take the museum in question to be a museum of contemporary art, etcetera, unless otherwise stated. Still, I hope some of my arguments and conclusions can be profitably extrapolated to the museum world at large. 1 questions as to who is speaking, for whom they are speaking, and to whom they are speaking? The second question flows from a set of concerns closely associated with the call for diversity: that of cultural appropriation, and the role and nature of the institution of the museum as the owner or steward of cultural artefacts and expressions. Underlying both the widespread misconstruction of ‘diversity’ and issues of exploitative cultural appropriation in the museum, I argue, we find the same logic: that of late capitalism. This late capitalist logic, with the attendant preeminence of the category of private property and characterized by the process of commodification, dominates the contemporary museum world, and has lead to an operative conception of culture and its expressions (including, of course, art) as so many assets, decoupled from their cultural specificity and significance, facilitating and encouraging exploitative practices and oppression. Chapter 2 departs from an analysis of the concept of property and ownership. I examine the pedigree of Western property theory, and especially that of the concept of private property, followed by a look at how art has been and can be conceived of in terms of property. I examine an alternative category of property, namely cultural property, which seems to offer a more fruitful way of thinking about cultural expression in terms of property; though, as we shall see, it is not without its own complications. I end the chapter with an analysis of the changing operational context of museums, rooted in the writing of art theorists Rosalind Krauss and Claire Bishop: the museum is operating increasingly in accordance with a late capitalist logic, as a strictly corporate entity, with ever closer ties to corporations and private donors, resulting in a blurring of the boundary between private and public interest and a perspective on art that considers art works as assets, moving away from the perspective of art as cultural heritage and a repository of cultural knowledge. The third chapter is dedicated to an exploration of the vexed but vital concept of cultural appropriation. I examine some examples of cultural appropriation within the museum context, and their resulting controversies, followed by a conceptual analysis of the concept, departing from the work done by Richard A. Rogers, whose work is located at the intersection of communication studies and cultural studies, and Erich Hatala Matthes, a philosopher whose work interro- gates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of cultural heritage. I conclude this chapter with an analysis of the phenomena of cultural appropriation in light of the art-as-private-property paradigm we encountered in the first chapter, and the late capitalist logic I perceive to be at play in most museums today. I argue that the same capitalist logic that enables a view of works of art as assets also helps enable exploitative cultural appropriation practices, and undermines strategies of resistance by neutralizing them through cooptation, eroding the counter-hegemonic potential of the institution. The final chapter relates my findings above to the project of making the museum more inclusive and diverse. I start with considering the museum as a political space, departing from the writing of the prominent political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who has worked to explicitly connect her political theory of ‘agonism’ or ‘agonistics’ to the institution of the museum. Building on this work, I clarify the need for the project to diversify the museum by examining 2 the differing notions of diversity at play in thinking about and implementing diversity policies and engaging with the underlying theory, turning to the writing of the prolific feminist- and postcolonial theorist Sara Ahmed on the language and work of diversity, and trauma- and cultural memory scholar Stef Craps’ notion of cross-cultural witnessing, establishing the relation between practices of cultural appropriation in the museum and a lack of diversity within the institution. I address the misunderstanding of diversity as entailing the platforming of exclusionary, discriminatory, and otherwise harmful and oppressive voices, in addition to marginalized voices, and show that a commitment to diversity, per- haps prima facie paradoxically, is actually incompatible with the platforming of harmful voices. I then point to some examples of alternative pathways for the museum to take. This results in a reconsideration of the role of the museum, a call for action to diversify the museum, and some tentative guidelines on how this might be achieved in an ethical way. I hope to show that the late capitalist logic still in ascendancy in the museum world today is incompatible with a true commitment to diversity. As a tentative but promising alternative, I will develop a framework in the form of a conception of cultural property enriched by a focus on “cultural sovereignty;” a framework encapsulating the impera- tives of diversity and cross-cultural witnessing, commitments to social justice and countering the harms of cultural appropriation, and inspired by concepts of sovereignty from Indigenous studies; a framework that offers an alternative perspective on art, and centers the well-being of cultural communities.

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