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

Home , Cultural institution, Cultural property, Cultural rights

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 insightful 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 interrogates 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, perhaps 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. It is my hope that this framework can help foster healthy cross-cultural interactions, and aids in both preventing and challenging culturally exploitative practices.

3 2| Art as Property

In this chapter, we will examine the history and connotations of the concept of property, analyze a few diﬀerent permutations of the concept, and take a look at how notions of property apply to art. This task begins with an exploration of property theory and the traditional, Western notion of property it is founded on, leading to a consideration of the category of private property: the predom- inant notion of property within capitalist societies. We will then extend the exploration with a discussion of cultural property as a category and theory of property more naturally applicable to art (at least prima facie). We end this chapter with an analysis of the ways the contemporary art museum treats art in terms of property.

2.1 Property, Traditionally Deﬁned

In the 1978 book Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, a collection of important and foundational historical texts on property, its editor C.B. Macpherson, in one of two essays meant to reinvigorate the academic discourse around property and advance contemporary scholarship on the topic, provides the following ubiquitous traditional deﬁnition of property:

[T]o have a property is to have a right in the sense of an enforceable claim to some use or beneﬁt of something, whether it is a right to a share in some common resource or an individual right in some particular things. (Macpherson (1978), p.3)

A key word in this deﬁnition is ‘enforceable’: the claim to ownership needs to be backed by authority, recognized and upheld by society at large, or by the apparatus of the nation-state:

What distinguishes property from mere momentary possession is that property is a claim that will be enforced by society or the state, by custom or convention or law. (Macpherson (1978), p.3)

Property can be subdivided as crowdable or non-crowdable. Property is crowdable if the use of it by one person interferes or precludes its usage by another person. Crowdability can take diﬀerent forms: my using this laptop to type on precludes its usage by others temporarily, while my drinking the drink

4 I ordered precludes its usage by others permanently. Intellectual property,1 a category which also (partly) covers art, is typically considered to be non- crowdable, as my reading of a text, listening to a song, or looking at a painting does not preclude others from doing the same, or interfere with their enjoyment of it.2 Intellectual property covers the intangible aspects of art, but a work of art (and this is especially evident in the visual arts) also has a tangible, material dimension: the work itself, as e.g. it hangs in a gallery or museum. A work of art can thus be property, and can be owned in two distinct ways, by different owners. The artist typically remains the owner of the intellectual property, while the physical work of art itself can be owned by anyone able to pay for it. Property can be arranged in a typology in a few different ways. One common arrangement, taken from Waldon (2016), is the subdivision into common, collective, and private property. The first two are species of public property, and as such stand as alternatives to private property. Common property is governed by rules whose aim is to make the resources in question available to all the members of a community. Any restrictions placed on the usage of the resources are there to ensure that the resources will remain available to any and all. Collective property is governed by the community as a whole; collective decision-making determines the rules on use and availability of the resources in question. Collective property thus might not be accessible to all the members of a community, but the community does decide how the property is governed. Private property, in contrast, is governed by individuals or groups of individuals (treated, by law, as persons); these hold ultimate control over the property and decide who is to use it and in what way, or, perhaps more accurately, who is not to use it.3 Though the property rights lay with individuals, the system as a whole does still rest on social rules and conventions; society, or those who hold power within society (e.g. the state), has to back the system of individual rights, and has to enforce the claims of private property. John Carman, in his book on the intersection of ownership with archaeology and heritage, Against Cultural Property, distinguishes a fourth category of property: State property. He notes, however, that in practice state property does not differ much, if at all, from private property:

In general there is no fundamental distinction between state ownership and private ownership: the state as a single corporate entity has as full and complete ownership rights as any individual, with full right of exclusion of use or access; the diﬀerence lies in who makes the decisions, the corporate state or a private individual. (Carman (2005), p.29)

1 Intellectual property, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), “refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.” 2 This might surprise anyone who has ever attempted to view any iconic work of art in any major museum; the enormous crowds of people in front of the Mona Lisa or the Nachtwacht sure make these paintings seem eminently crowdable. 3 There might still be restrictions put on the individual’s control by the state or by society; think for example of zoning laws restricting what an owner of a piece of land is allowed to build on it.

5 Private property is, of course, the preeminent category of property in capitalism, with the main consequence of private ownership being “inevitably an exclusive right of access and use attached to the owner” (Carman (2005), p.119). It is important to realize that the theory of property laid out above is a specific historically and culturally situated conception; it is by no means the universal, perennial concept some might be tempted to think it is. It is but one way among many to conceive of property, and it has always been subject to change: The meaning of property is not constant. The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time. [...] The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve. (Macpherson (1978), p.1) Below I will briefly discuss the history of the institution of property, both in order to underline this point, and to unearth the problematics surrounding the particular conception of (mainly) private property it has led to. Modern property theory (in the Western tradition) is a product of the Eu- ropean Enlightenment. The most significant of the Enlightenment theorists for property theory was John Locke. Locke and others originated the idea that property was a natural right of individuals over things, pre-dating governments and thus not subject to be taken away by governments. Locke believed that nature was given to all men (a term which, to Locke, of course referred to but a very small subset of all people), and in order to solve the tension between this idea and the idea of individual property he and other Enlightenment thinkers posited the idea that property was a right gained by the mixing of one’s labour or efforts with nature, thus producing things that one then owns. Though the Earth [...] be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. (Locke (2003), II, §27, p.287-288) Locke’s theory of property influences the discourse to this day. Locke, according to Macpherson, “set out for the first time the case for an individual right of unlimited appropriation. [...] His justification was [...] in effect written into, or at least was implied in, the constitutions of the first great modern capitalist nation-states” (Macpherson (1978), p.13, my italics).4 We shall return to the link between property, capitalism, and nation-states in the next section.

4 Macpherson’s unlimited (individual) appropriation refers to an institution he identiﬁes as being central and necessary for capitalist market societies to function: What is needed, in a society that by deﬁnition cannot rely on traditional,

6 Locke’s theory of property, equitable though it may seem at first sight from a reading of the above quote, explicitly supported the expropriation of land from Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In order to defend settler-colonialists’ right to expropriate, Locke has to make some additional arguments, as he faces the obvious objection that Indigenous peoples work the land and subsist of it, and so, on Locke’s own account, ought to have title to it. Locke’s defence is two-fold. First, he claims that there is ample land for everyone, so the appropriation of land cannot hurt anyone: “Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use” (Locke (2003), II, §33, p.291). Locke’s second argument consist of the claim that land by itself, uncultivated, is essentially valueless, “waste land” in Locke’s words: it is labor that gives land all of its value.5 The labor that Locke values is explicitly labor in the mode of Western agriculture; a mode that values maximized profits: “For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yeild the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniencies of life as ten acres of equally fertile land doe in Devonshire where they are well cultivated?” (Locke (2003), II, §37, p.294). The European theory of property, so profoundly influenced by Locke’s writing, first spread to North America, was then exported throughout the world through colonial expansion, and was further enshrined in international law and policies in the twentieth century (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.3). It was fundamental to Western colonial practices and the wholesale appropriation of land and resources; native peoples were not perceived as having transformed the land sufficiently, in accordance with the Lockean idea of property, were thus not deemed to have property or rights to their land. The Enlightenment idea of property was a major engine of settler colonialism and its excesses and atroc- ities (not least among which the continuous disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples), and, in turn, I think it is fair to say, settler colonialism served as a major incentive to cling to this theory of property.6 The traditional Western theory of property thus is tightly interwoven with, perhaps one could even say tainted by, colonial practices. As we shall see, it is similarly entangled with

patriarchal, or feudal obligations to work, and whose supporters, besides, see prospects of untold wealth under the new market arrangements if only people can be induced to exert themselves, is an institutionalized incentive to continuous exertion. (Macpherson (1983), p.163-164) Intentional or not, seventeenth century thinkers provided the necessary theory and justification for this concept, by postulating that ‘man’ was in essence a creature of infinite desires, forever seeking to satisfy those desires, making man “essentially an infinite consumer” (Macpherson (1983), p.164). Combining this thesis with the additional premise that “land and capital must be privately owned to be productive (a premise which Locke, for instance, explicitly made)” (Macpherson (1983), p.165) yields the conclusion that man, to realize his essence, must be an (infinite) appropriator of land and capital. 5 See, for example, Locke (2003), II, §37-37, p.293,294. 6 See e.g. Barker (2005a), particularly p.4-17, for illuminating historical examples of how Lockean ideas of property and ownership were, quite explicitly, employed within American jurisprudence to void treaties with Indigenous peoples, and deny them any title to their land.

7 systems of capitalism and nationalism. In the next section we shall shift our attention to the idea of cultural property, a concept of property that appears, at least prima facie, more congruent to art.

2.2 Cultural Property

Cultural property is a difficult term to define in any sort of conclusive, exhaustive manner. It is a category employed across a wide variety of disciplines and practices, signifying something different in each, and evolving over time. Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar do an admirable job of delineating the concept in all its multifariousness in their introduction to the 2017 Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, and I shall liberally quote from that article below. I hope the reader will forgive me; I believe it to be very much worth their effort.

A curious hybrid of culture (the evanescent and immaterial systems and structures of knowledge that bind human beings together) and property (the ideologies, political regulations, customs and popular consensus that establish entitlement and sovereignty, and determine claims and power over a range of tangible and intangible resources), cultural property is an evolving category used to describe ways of talking about collective entitlement, shared inheritance, the material nature of identity, and in more recent years to debate the ethics of the commoditization of culture. [...] [C]ultural property is more than valuable artefacts embedded within varied forms of control and allocations of rights [...] cultural property is also popular discourse, a way of describing culture, a form of sovereignty, a unit of power, a measure of value, a political instrument, and [...] it refers to a wide range of diﬀerent things, both material and immaterial. [...] [W]e deﬁne cultural property very broadly as the recognition of collective rights in both material and intangible culture within international policy, national law, cultural institutions, local contexts, and everyday practices. (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.1)

While cultural property theory developed out of the tradition of property theory discussed in the previous section, it also departs from that tradition in important and pertinent ways. It provides an alternative to the dominant ideas about private property, and the associated ideology of what Macpherson has labelled “possessive individualism”: the idea that a person is the sole owner of their skills, and owes society nothing (Macpherson (1962)). Cultural property theory, instead, highlights the collective and the social aspects of the relations and rights to property: it marks “interests in collective identities, social relationships with tangible and intangible objects, and discourses of cultural rights” (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.3). Before we dive into how cultural property

8 bears on the ownership of art and contemporary museum practices with regards to that, it will be instructive to detail the history of the concept. The history of the concept of cultural property is inextricably tied up with the rise of European nationalism and the development of the nation-state in the long nineteenth century. The nation-state, according to the influential analysis by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities, is in essence an imagined community. Its idea is predicated on the identification of people with a community beyond the actionable reach of any one individual. Since the individual cannot have but passing familiarity with most of this collective, this community is created along necessarily mostly imagined lines (of ethnicity, of territory, of shared history and culture).7 Anderson emphasized the importance of capitalism in the formation of nation-states. What he terms ‘print-capitalism’, the dissemination of vernacular texts available to a wide audience due to vernacularization by mechanisms of capitalism (the invention of the printing press, the subsequent establishment of capitalist publishing houses, and the resulting commodification of print chief among these, with the stan- dardization of time being a second prominent mechanism), played a crucial role in the spread of nationalism and the subsequent rise of nation-states: print- capitalism cemented the vernacular languages that played such a key part in the formation of their respective nationalisms (Anderson (2006)).8

7 Anderson’s argument extends to other communities as well; it is not just nation-states that are imagined, but “in fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson (2006), p.6). A culture, or a cultural group, as we treat the concept in this thesis, also qualifies as an imagined community—though one that may imagine itself in a different style than nation-states. 8 For more detail on this process, see chapter 3 of Anderson’s book, which includes the following summary: Nothing served to ‘assemble’ related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created me- chanically reproduced print-languages capable of dissemination through the market. These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community. Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. [...] Third, print-capitalism created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain dialects inevitably were ’closer’ to each print-language and dominated their final forms. [...] High German, the King’s English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly elevated

9 The concept of cultural property emerged in the nineteenth century in response to pressures on cultural resources that the existing systems of thinking about property, centered on individual rights and pre-modern collectives, provided no way of coping with. Cultural property offered a way to conceptualize the collective entitlements of the newly imagined national communities to the products and archives of culture, such as libraries, monuments, literatures, musical traditions, and archaeological records. These communities, and their newly claimed cultural heritage, were defined in terms of territory, ethnicity, and citizenship. Cultural property constituted an important new axis of political discourse and inter-state diplomacy, and provided an essential form with which to imagine and communicate the new idea of the nation-state (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.6). As Joep Leerssen has said, nationalism starts with ‘the cultivation of culture’ (Leerssen (2006)), and cultural property constitutes an important paradigm to think about the ownership of culture, so instrumental to producing and delineating the nation-state. In this way, then, the history of the idea of cultural property is entangled with the history of nationalism, and through nationalism, with the history of capitalism. The discourse of cultural property thus came about to protect the interest of nation-states regarding specific cultural institutions and artifacts, and to establish states’ ownership of these, opening up a new category of ownership between private and public property (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.7). When, at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the concept of cultural property was codified in international policies and conventions, this centering of the rights of states over cultural property unsurprisingly carried over into the language of these conventions, and the dominant role of nation-states remains codified to this day. As an example, let us look at the first sentences of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, perhaps the single most influential codification of cultural property:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term ‘cultural property’ means property which, on religious or secular grounds, is speciﬁcally designated by each State as being of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science and which belongs to the following categories[.] (UNESCO (1970), my italics.)

The nation-state, ever since the conception of cultural property theory, has wielded disproportionate power9 over what counts as cultural property/heritage, and what is thus subject to the protection the laws and conventions offer. This is evident, for example, in UNESCO’s procedures for establishing cultural heritage, which require its member-states to file claims for recognition. The problem with the definition and designation of cultural property and heritage being the sole dominion of nation-states in international law and conventions is that nation-states are not always the best arbiter of what is and what is not cultural property (let alone of what should be protected, by whom, and for whom), as

to a new politico-cultural eminence. (Anderson, 2006, p.44-45)

9 Compared to non-state cultural groups, for example Indigenous nations.

10 they misrepresent, or do not represent at all, the interests of certain cultural communities within their borders (not to speak of the cultural communities only partly within their borders). One need only look at the past and present of various nation-states’ treatment of minority cultures within their borders to get an inkling of how and why the nation-state might not be the ideal pick as the sole institution to entrust the designation and protection of culture to (think, e.g. of the various nation-states’ relations with the Indigenous peoples within their borders in the Americas and Australia). We ought not forget, however, that this is not the only way cultural property has been construed. The Western paradigm of cultural property tends to obscure and indeed colonize other conceptions of cultural property (through e.g. its codification in international precepts), but it is increasingly being challenged since the end of the twentieth century. The meaning and significance of the category of cultural property is highly contested: [B]y the end of the twentieth century, challenges to this jurisdiction [of the nation-state over cultural property] had emerged from many directions. The language of cultural property has been adopted and adapted by collectivities that actively resist the authority of the state over diverse cultural resources. (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.2) But how effective can the concept of cultural property be as a tool to challenge the nation-states’ codified hegemony over tangible and intangible cultural heritage, entrenched as the concept is in the history of modern capitalist nation- states? We shall return to this important question and the concept of cultural property in 4.2, where we will explore and develop a notion of cultural property rooted in a notion of cultural sovereignty, which, I shall argue, can serve as an alternative, radical and counter-hegemonic way of conceiving the ownership of culture and cultural expressions, that stands in opposition to the dominant, capitalist notion of private property. For now, I want to leave the reader with the following quote, to impress on them that cultural property is much more than a mere tool in service of solidifying the borders and legitimacy of the nation-state, and safeguarding its cultural dominance: [I]t is vital to pay attention to local differences as well as global histories, to appreciate the discontent with the assumption of national sovereignty from both within and across nation-states, and to understand that the phrase ’cultural property’ does not simply reference an international category and bureaucratic order, but is itself an active site of claim making that is about political recognition, cultural memory, and identity formation. (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.2)

2.3 Owning Art

Building on the above analyses of property, I will survey and analyze the globalized contemporary art world, in order to understand how it deals with art and

11 to parse what this tells us about contemporary art in terms of property and ownership. Museums are institutions precariously situated between the public and the private. There is a definite contemporary trend towards private funding, with many publicly funded museums increasingly depending on private funding: Although the last twenty years have seen a huge diversification of museums as a category, a dominant logic of privatization unites most of their iterations worldwide. In Europe, there has been an increasing dependence on donations and corporate sponsorship as governments gradually withdraw public funding from culture in the name of ‘austerity’. In the US, the situation has always been thus, but is now accelerating without any pretense to a separation of public and private interests [...] (Bishop (2013), p.9). As a result, these museums must negotiate between serving public interest and satisfying private interests that can be at odds with one another, leading to potential conflicts of interest. Many of these resulting conflicts have been highly- publicized. The examples below serve to illustrate some of the different ways in which the public and private interest of a museum may come into conflict. The first example concerns the recent resignation of the artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Beatrix Ruf, in 2017, who was accused of not being transparent about her dealings with friendly art collectors, and of having a conflict of interest due to her working as an art-advisor on the side. At the time of writing, independent investigations into this matter are still ongoing. Another example concerns the row resulting from the Tate’s acquisition in 2005 of a work by one of the trustees of the museum, Chris Ofili. This work was acquired way below market-value, with the help of donors who, in exchange for their donation of a piece of the thirteen-part work, received other works of art from the Tate. The museum was found to have broken the law, and subse- quently rewrote its acquisition policies, promised more transparency about the costs of acquisitions, and added an independent member to its ethics committee (Higgins (2006)). One last example, this one concerning a wholly privately funded museum, concerns the exhibition the MFA in Boston put on in 2005 of a varied collection of objects of questionable aesthetic and cultural value, relevance, and curatorial cohesiveness, owned by William Koch (of Koch brothers infamy), who was an honorary member of the supervisory board of the museum (the display of two of Koch’s yachts outside the entrance of the museum was especially singled out for critique and ridicule). Koch carried most of the costs for the exhibition; a sound, if dubious, investment, because the incorporation of a work of art in a big museal exhibitions heightens its value significantly (King (2010), p.7-9). Art museums are increasingly facing market pressure, and have been for some decades now, causing them to effectively function more and more as market- driven institutions. Already in 1990, Rosalind Krauss signalled this trend in her influential essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum”.10 In it,

10 Its name a reference to the debt it owes to Fredric Jameson’s 1984 paper critiquing late capitalist culture, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”.

12 she remarks on “the massive change in attitude now in place according to which the objects in a museum’s keeping can now be coolly referred to, by its director as well as its trustees, as “assets”” (Krauss (1990), p.4). This change, she says, amounts to a shift in perspective, away from viewing art as cultural heritage and a repository of cultural knowledge, toward seeing art as “so much capital — as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only truly realized when they are put in circulation” (Ibid.); toward viewing art primarily as a commodity, if you will. Krauss sees this shift as a result of a change in the context in which the museum operates, “a context whose corporate nature is made specific not only by the major sources of funding for museum activities but also, closer to home, by the makeup of its boards of trustees” (Krauss (1990), p.5). The museum is no longer the guardian and exegete of (elite) culture, but functions instead as a corporate entity, focused on the marketability of its collection and concerned with growth and profit. This changing operational context of the museum is made manifest in the increased focus on the architecture of the building that houses the art, with museums commissioning ‘starchitects’ to design massive behemoth cathedrals of art, at the cost of a focus on the works of art themselves, Krauss finds. The public’s private engagement with the individual work of art is decentered in favour of an engagement with the space first and foremost: Krauss argued that a profound encounter with the work of art had become subordinated to a new register of experience: the unan- chored hyperreality of its architectural container, which produced effects of disembodiment that, in her view, correlated to the dema- terialized flows of global capital. Rather than a highly individualized artistic epiphany, viewers to these galleries encountered a euphoria of space first, and art second (Bishop (2013), p.5). Krauss sees a connection between the ascendancy of this new paradigm and the rise of the Minimalism art movement. Minimalism, though conceived in opposition to mass commodity culture, carried within itself the very same late capitalist logic it meant to oppose, Krauss argues. Minimalism’s attack on the idea of creative originality and the unreproducability of the aesthetic original, through its emphasis on the replication of the works (selling the plans and/or li- censes to reproduce to collectors and museums, in lieu of the work itself), echoes the technology of mass production, as does its usage of ‘simple’ industrial materials and forms. Stripping away the veneer of the unreproducible aesthetic original helped pave the way to thinking of art as a commodity. Minimalism aimed to center an immediacy of (bodily) experience to the spectator, an intensity of feeling when confronted with the artwork, rather than a narrative. The Minimalism movement thus opened the door for museums to re-conceive their main goal as providing visitors with this intensity of experience, rather than a narrative account of art history. It heralded the change of the museum from an encyclopedic, diachronic institution dedicated to showcasing the full depth and width of art history,11 to a synchronic institution committed to showing a

11 This type of museum is best known as the “universal survey museum;” see Duncan and Wallach (1980).

13 select few works, permitted the full space to affect the most intense experience: “Within this experience, it is the museum that emerges as powerful presence and yet as properly empty, the museum as a space from which the collection has withdrawn” (Krauss (1990), p.4). Krauss’ polemic against contemporary art museums has been, as stated, very influential and is still widely cited; a fact that makes it, perhaps, all the more surprising that it has not spawned that much literature dedicated to grappling with and furthering her analysis, as Claire Bishop notes in her 2013 pamphlet “Radical Museology:” Krauss’s essay was prescient in many ways: the decade to come saw an unprecedented proliferation of new museums dedicated to contemporary art, and increased scale and a proximity to big busi- ness have been two central characteristics of the move from the nineteenth-century model of the museum as a patrician institution of elite culture to its current incarnation as a populist temple of leisure and entertainment. (Bishop (2013), p.5) Bishop applies Krauss’ analysis to the present, and details how Krauss’ theses are evidenced in the contemporary state of the global museum world. She argues that a dominant logic of privatization pervades the museum world today, with most museums around the world (increasingly) dependent on private donations and corporate sponsorship, and the separation of private and public interests rapidly disappearing, leading to some particularly egregious cases of conflicts of interest:12 [A]n art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, was appointed head of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in January 2010. Two months later, the New Museum controversially installed the collection of its multimillionaire trustee Dakis Joannou and employed the artist Jeff Koons—already in Joannou’s collection—to guest curate the exhibition. Meanwhile, it is well known that the Museum of Modern Art in New York regularly rehangs its permanent collection on the basis of its trustees’ latest acquisitions. (Bishop (2013), p.9) Bishop moves beyond Krauss in mapping an alternative direction for the contemporary art museum to take. She takes three European museums as case studies: the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the MSUM in Ljubljana, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. She examines their different practises to chart an alternative trajectory for the contemporary art museum, away from the synchronous, ‘presentist’ corporate model serving the interests “of the one percent,” towards a more radical, diachronic model dedicated to “an attempt to represent the interests and histories of those constituencies that are (or have been) marginalized, sidelined and oppressed” (Bishop (2013), p.6). This different way of conceiving of the contemporary art museum, what it should be, and who it should serve, requires a rethinking of the category of ‘the contemporary,’ Bishop argues. Bishop’s project here is kindred to my own, and we shall return to her work throughout the rest of this thesis.

12 See also the examples mentioned at the start of this section.

14 As we have witnessed through the work of Krauss and Bishop, contemporary art museums are increasingly under pressure from the market, functioning more and more as corporate entities. This corporate turn in the museum world and corresponding shift in how art is viewed, is tied up with, and paralleled by a similar development in the globalized art market. The contemporary art market has seen an incredible boom in the last decades, as Georgina Adams chronicles in her two books on the subject, Big Bucks and Dark Side of the Boom. Contemporary art has come to dominate the art market, growing “by 564 per cent in value – far eclipsing the previous traditional heavyweight category of Impressionist and modern art” (Adam (2014), p.10). This boom corresponds to the rapid increase of contemporary art museums that Bishop signals, and to a similar development in academia: “In tandem with this proliferation of contemporary art museums, the study of contemporary art has become the fastest-growing subject area in the academy since the turn of the millennium” (Bishop (2013), p.16). Adams sees this extraordinary growth as a result of a combination of factors. The limited supply of works in other sectors of the art market plays a role, but the increased interest of art as an investment (mirroring the ‘art-as- asset’ paradigm we have discussed above), emerging economies that create new markets, the emergence of new or newly important players, and “an overlap between the worlds of art, fashion, luxury and celebrity” all have contributed signiﬁcantly (Adam (2014), p.10). Contemporary art, she says, is becoming more and more a commodity for the one percent, a form of luxury goods, with the artist’s name functioning as a powerful brand, mirroring a similar change that occurred in the fashion industry: a change away from “a personal, artisan- led trade in the 1970s to the corporate, branded behemoth companies we see today” (Adam (2014), p.11). The boom in the contemporary art market, and the corresponding spike in the prices of contemporary art works, “has put museums in the position of being unable to acquire works of art, in a market increasingly dominated by a tiny percentage of massively wealthy people,” Adams says. She continues, bringing to mind Krauss’ ﬁndings:

Indeed, museums, in an age when public patronage is fading and private patronage is growing, are often forced to be vendors rather than buyers to survive. The increasing focus on art as an asset and speculation by a small number of inﬂuential and wealthy players have also changed the way art is created, produced and marketed. Indeed, in many cases this has challenged the very nature of a ‘work of art’ as a unique expression of the artist, as it has become a product made to satisfy an increasingly voracious market. (Adam (2014), p.181)

We have seen that the contemporary art museum, whether private or (semi) public, has come to view the art in its collection more and more as private property, as so many commodities valuable insofar as they are seen to have monetary value in the globalized art market, liable to be deaccessioned and sold according to the corporate interests of the museum, with little regard to the interest of the public. Or, in the words of Krauss: “noninvested surplus capital

15 [...] the hallmark of late capitalism [...] is exactly one way of describing the holdings — both in land and in art — of museums. It is the way [...] that many museum figures (directors and trustees) are now, in fact, describing their collections” (Krauss (1990), p.15). Throughout this chapter I have signalled the commodification of art, without explaining what I take this to mean, exactly, or how the process of commodification works.13 I beg the reader for their indulgence a little while longer: I will return to this issue in 3.3, where I shall detail the workings of this concept. In the following chapters we shall see how these developments in the contemporary museum world and its treatment of art play out in the context of the phenomena of cultural appropriation, and in the current discourse around the diversification of the museum, respectively.

13 Anderson and Geismar instead talk in terms of the related concept of commoditization, which refers to the process where goods previously distinguishable by their attributes lose their unique attributes and become interchangeable. In the writing of Anderson and Geis- mar it is meant to emphasize, I believe, that cultural products lose their cultural specificity when they enter the capitalist exchange system and are commodified. The notion of commodification I discuss in 3.3 accounts for the related process of commoditization, so I shall employ the former concept instead.

16 3| Appropriation in the Globalized Art World

Cultural appropriation is a pressing topic within the contemporary art world. Several scandals involving appropriation have plagued the art world recently, resulting in social media outrage, boycotts and protests, an influx of (popular) literature on the subject, and serious consequences for the artists, art-works, institutions, and other parties involved. The practice and mechanisms of cultural appropriation, I shall argue, are enabled and emboldened, at least in part, by the same late capitalist logic paramount in the contemporary art world today. Furthermore, as I shall argue in the next chapter, cultural appropriation is closely connected to the issue of diversifying the museum. I begin by addressing a few different examples of cultural appropriation in the contemporary art museums in order to illustrate the urgency of the topic for the museum world, and to illuminate some of the different levels at which cultural appropriation can operate in the museum. I will then embark on a theoretical exploration of the concept itself, which will clarify both its salience for the diversity discussion preoccupying museums today, and the late capitalist logic that partially underlies its workings.

3.1 Cases of Cultural Appropriation in the Contemporary Art World

In the summer of 2015, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hosted a public program focused around Claude Monet’s 1876 painting “La Japonaise.” The work depicts Monet’s wife, Camille, wearing an uchikake (a type of formal kimono), reﬂective of “Japonism,” the French craze for all things Japanese at the end of the nineteenth century. During the weekly event, dubbed “Kimono Wednesdays,” visitors of the museum were invited to pose for pictures with the painting in reproductions of the depicted garment. The event met with controversy, with activists accusing the MFA of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, and participation in institutionalized racism, and it was widely protested and counter-protested. After an initial unsuccessful attempt to explain away the problematics of the event, the museum ﬁnally hosted a panel discussion with activists and scholars of color, inviting the public to join in a discussion address-

17 ing “issues including Orientalism, racialized iconography, institutional racism, representation of minority groups, and cultural appropriation”, and the questions of how the institution can be more accountable to its publics, and who gets to speak for whom.1 The charges of cultural appropriation against the museum in this case are, I think, twofold. Monet appropriated Japanese aesthetics and iconography in his painting, and the museum decided to display this painting (uncritically), thus becoming complicit in Monet’s initial act of appropriation. But the museum also, and separately, decided to invite its public to participate in an act of appropriation themselves by donning a traditional garment which, in the case of most visitors, stems from a culture not one’s own. The museum can thus be seen to be perpetrating two distinct acts of appropriation. The first involves the display of a work that is culturally appropriative, presented without proper contextualization and problematization of the appropriative nature of the work, thus effectively propagating and disseminating that initial act of appropriation on the part of the artist. The second involves a wholly original act of cultural appropriation compounding the first, by encouraging its public to engage in an act of appropriation themselves. The former can be said to be located on the curatorial level, involving choices on what art-works to show, and how to show them, while the latter is on the educational level, involving choices on how to reach and educate the public, separate but in addition to the curatorial choices. During the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, one of the included paintings prompted vigorous debate and controversy. The painting in question was Dana Schutz’ 2016 work “Open Casket,” which depicted Schutz’ representation of the famous photograph of the open casket of Emmett Till, the fourteen year old African American boy who was brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Activists blocked the painting from view and called for its removal, the cancellation of her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and even for the destruction of the work. Schutz, a white artist, was accused of appropriating subject matter that was not hers to speak on, of taking cultural imagery and history from a culture not hers. By displaying the work, the Whitney became complicit in this act of cultural appropriation, in a similar way as discussed in the example of the MFA: on the curatorial level. The curators of the exhibition responded to the controversy by issuing a statement saying they stood behind their decision, stating that they wanted to provide a platform for artists to explore the critical issues the painting brought up. Similar examples of cultural appropriation sparking controversy are plentiful. Sam Durrant’s 2012 sculpture “Scaffold,” incorporating the form of a scaffold on which 38 Native American men from the Dakota nation were hanged, was displayed in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center, and after the resulting controversy the curator and the artist met with Dakota elders. The rights to the work were signed over to them, after which it was buried. The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis faced calls for a boycott after staging an exhibition by artist Kelley Walker, who creates works from appropriated images of Black peo-

1 See https://www.mfa.org/programs/lecture/kimono-wednesdays-a-conversation.

18 ple that she smears with toothpaste and chocolate. The list goes on. For my last example, though, I want to point to a less visibly controversial, more widespread pattern of appropriation on display in many contemporary art museums. I will take the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s latest staging of their main collection, dubbed “Stedelijk BASE,” as my example. BASE incorporates collections of works from two Western art movements, Die Brücke and CoBrA. Artist from both movements incorporated non-Western aesthetic styles (namely, African and Paciﬁc aesthetics) into their work in reaction and opposition to what they perceived to be the stale world of Western art of their time. The wall-texts accompanying the works state as much, but do not critically examine this appropriation. Additionally, the aesthetics in question are described in terms of the ‘primitive,’ and equated to a simple, child-like aesthetic. Of course, these two movements in modern art are hardly the only ones appropriating non-Western aesthetics (think of Picasso, Fauvism, the wider movement of Primitivism, etcetera). Indeed, the history of Western modern art appears predicated on the appropriation of non-Western aesthetics. As the incomparable Eduardo Galeano wryly observes in a short story titled ‘Origin of Modern Art,’ from his wonderful collection of literary historical vignettes Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone:

Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth cele- brating. And worth stealing. It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather ab- sentminded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency. Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how re- sponsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth- century European painting and sculpture. (Galeano (2009), p.268)

The problem with displaying these works lays not just with the lack of critical framing; it is further compounded by a lack of representation of both work from artists hailing from the appropriated cultures,2 and the appropriated aesthetics in any form not mediated by Western artists. Visitors of the modern art museum are thus only exposed to these aesthetics mediated through a Western lens. While the inﬂuences are often made explicit and are explained as important to the work of Western artists and, by extension, to the history of Western art, too often no mention is made of actual work and artists within the non-Western aesthetic traditions these artists take from, nor from the relevant art history. These aesthetics are portrayed as Other, not within the purview of modern art, and as only being relevant to the contemporary art institution and its publics insofar they inﬂuenced and inspired Western art and its artists. These examples serve as a preliminary illustration of the diverse ways cultural appropriation comes into play in modern and contemporary art museums. As we shall see, the problem of cultural appropriation is rooted in capitalist and colonial mechanisms underlying the workings of the contemporary art

2 Or indeed, from anywhere other than the Global North.

19 world. These mechanisms manifest themselves in other, equally problematic ways as well. We shall return to these issues in 3.3 and4. Next, we will turn to a conceptual investigation of cultural appropriation.

3.2 What We Talk About When We Talk About Cultural Appropriation

Given the salience of the subject of cultural appropriation in our current political and cultural climate, its complexity and multifariousness, and the wealth of attention it is given in popular writing, it is perhaps surprising that academia has not accorded it a proportional amount of attention. The concept is often referred to, though seldom explained in any detail, as Richard A. Rogers attests to in his important conceptual examination of cultural appropriation:

Cultural appropriation is often mentioned in critical analyses of media representations and commodiﬁcations of marginalized and/or colonized cultures. Although such works in critical/cultural studies often use the notion of cultural appropriation, the concept is frequently used without signiﬁcant discussion or explicit theorizing (exceptions are discussed below). Therefore, although cultural appropriation is a common topic in cultural, critical rhetorical, and critical media studies, at times it is undertheorized in these literatures. (Rogers (2006), p.474-475)

The lack of conceptual clarity and precise definitions of cultural appropriation is, in part, a result of the indeterminacy of the concept at the heart of it, namely culture; a concept notoriously hard to define in any delimiting or exhaustive manner.3 Though somewhat sparse, important literature on the concept has been written within a wide variety of disciplines, including but not limited to critical- and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, legal studies, and media- and communication studies. Philosophers, however, have remained relatively silent on this issue. Importantly, the sentiments expressed in the scant philosophical writing out there strikingly differ from those expressed in most of the work done in other academic disciplines.4 The work of James O. Young, the philosopher who has written most prolifically on the topic of cultural appropriation, is an apt example of this dissimilarity.5 Though he concedes that cultural appropriation might sometimes be offensive, he is deeply skeptical of its potential harmfulness:

Artists from almost every culture are constantly borrowing styles, stories, motifs, and other content from cultures other than their own

3 ‘Culture’ is often suggested to be a Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’ concept; see e.g. Young (2010), p.15 (See Matthes (2016), p.358-359 and Killmister (2011), p.233 for a critical discussion). We will return to this issue and the diﬃculties and problems inherent in delineating ‘culture’ and cultures below. 4 But see e.g. Nicholas and Wylie (2012) and Heyd (2003) for heartening exceptions. 5 Young has co-edited one of the most visible collections of philosophical essays on the subject of cultural appropriation (Young and Brunk (2012)), as well as authoring a monologue on the subject (Young (2010)).

20 but this borrowing is only rarely wrongfully harmful. Sometimes this borrowing is oﬀensive, but even so most of the time artists do not act wrongly so long as they observe appropriate time and place restrictions (Young (2010), p.152).

Erich Hatala Matthes wrote one of the few philosophical papers synthesizing philosophical theory with the important work done on cultural appropriation in other disciplines. In it, he observes that:

[Young’s] monograph is, by design, largely a moral and aesthetic defense of cultural appropriation. In contrast, writers outside the discipline of philosophy have expressed much more concern about the harmfulness of cultural appropriation, particularly with respect to its power to oppress and silence[.] (Matthes (2016), p.344-345)

Matthes aims to stage an intervention in the philosophical literature by learning from the other academic discourse on cultural appropriation out there, and employing the “powerful conceptual resources” philosophers have developed to shed light on the harmfulness cultural appropriation can cause (Matthes (2016), p.345). In what follows, I will examine the concept of cultural appropriation in light of the analytical framework developed by Rogers and Matthes’ philosophical ruminations on the concept. The work of these authors represent some of the most thorough and insightful conceptual investigation of the concept to date. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of their work, and their commitment to take serious the real-world consequences of cultural appropriation are, I believe, indispensable methodological elements for any study of a subject of such immense import. I believe Young, and like-minded philosophers, to be on the wrong side of the divide I have sketched regarding the harmfulness (both potential and actual) of cultural appropriation. Their attempts to rationalize or explain away the harmfulness of cultural appropriation, moreover, are potentially harmful themselves, because they silence or minimize the voices of those actually experiencing the harmful consequences of the very phenomena they claim is not morally objectionable; the marginalized, the subaltern. I hope to have convinced the reader of this point by the end of this chapter.

3.2.1 A Typology of Cultural Appropriation For what follows, we shall provisionally define cultural appropriation broadly as the use, representation, and/or procurement or continued possession of a culture’s6 practices, experiences, symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by nonmembers of said culture, regardless of intent, function, ethics, or outcome.7 Note that this definition is morally neutral: cultural appropriation can be morally objectionable on this definition, but does not need to be.

6 The concept of ‘culture’ at stake here is similarly broad, and can also refer to sub- and countercultures. 7 This deﬁnition represents an expanded and amended version of Rogers’ deﬁnition; see Rogers (2006), p.476.

21 Cultural appropriation is part and parcel of contact between cultures. His- torically, the exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices between different cultures has been well-documented, and the resulting progress and benefits are readily apparent in e.g. the technologies underlying contemporary societies around the world today. Appropriation of elements of culture is often theorized by defenders of the concept as being central to what it means to be human, fundamental to human creativity, innovation, and progress. Rogers also recognizes that cultural appropriation is a fact of human interaction, saying that “Cultural appropriation [...] is inescapable when cultures come into contact, including vir- tual or representational contact” (Rogers (2006), p. 474). Though inescapable and potentially beneficial in some ways, cultural appropriation can also inflict real harm. The harm cultural appropriation can wreak takes manifold forms. Appropriation involves a taking (control) of cultural expressions. It is not merely the artefact, ritual, symbol, etcetera that is being taken here: through this taking the control of the cultural narrative and the creation of cultural meaning is also appropriated. This can result in harmful misrepresentation of a culture, potentially negatively affecting the ‘outside’ perception of said culture, and its perception of itself. A concern with this particular form of harm can be seen as informing the reaction against the MFA’s “Kimono Wednesdays.” Aside from undermining cultural identity and integrity, the appropriation of cultural narrative and meaning infringes on a culture’s ability to determine the meaning and use of its symbols, narratives, customs, and artefacts. This form of harm is the one at stake in Dana Schutz’ painting depicting Emmett Till: at the heart of the claims of cultural appropriation in this case is the idea that Schutz is appropriating a narrative, a history that is not hers to tell (and, in the telling, help shape). Additionally, the appropriation of cultural artefacts can involve physi- cally removing them from their cultural context, prohibiting further engagement with the respective artefact within its native cultural context. Furthermore, the costs and benefits of cultural appropriation are not distributed equitably:

While acknowledging the beneﬁts of cross-cultural exchange, it is important to recognize that they often come at a cost, and that this cost has largely been borne by Indigenous peoples who have had little power, historically, to determine what uses are made of their cultural and intellectual property, or to ensure that the beneﬁts of exchange are reciprocal. (Nicholas and Wylie (2012), p.196)

It is not only Indigenous people who have borne the costs of cultural appropriation disproportionately: any colonized or marginalized culture, or any culture otherwise in a position of having less power than the culture it is interacting with will be affected inordinately by the harms of cultural appropriation in that scenario. The benefit of departing from a morally neutral definition is that it will allow us to acknowledge and account for both the beneficial and harmful effects of cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is ineliminably interwoven with cultural politics: “It is involved in the assimilation and exploitation of marginalized and colonized cultures and in the survival of subordinated cultures and their resistance to dominant cultures” (Rogers (2006), Ibid.). Acts of appropriation, like all inter-

22 actions, do not occur in a vacuum, but they are socially situated, shaped by the political, social, economical, and cultural contexts the actors ﬁnd themselves in. Acts of cultural appropriation, again like all cultural interactions, “both reﬂect and constitute the identities of the individuals and groups involved as well as their sociopolitical positions” (Rogers (2006), p.476):

The active “making one’s own” of another culture’s elements occurs [...] in various ways, under a variety of conditions, and with varying functions and outcomes. The degree and scope of voluntariness (individually or culturally), the symmetry or asymmetry of power relations, the appropriation’s role in domination and/or resistance, the nature of the cultural boundaries involved, and other factors shape, and are shaped by, acts of cultural appropriation. (Rogers (2006), Ibid.)

It is thus important for any theory of cultural appropriation to center social positioning and the relevant contexts, and the cultural politics and power dynamics between cultures and between individual, diﬀerentially culturally situated actors. Before we continue this theoretical exploration of cultural appropriation, it will be instructive to say a few words about the way cultural appropriation is perceived by scholars of art, and indeed in the art world at large. The idea of (cultural) appropriation in the arts is often seen to have positive connotations. Within theory, it is a useful corrective to the myth of artistic production ex nihilo with the corresponding idea of the artist as a sui generis, wholly original genius that dominated Western art and its theory for centuries.8 In a recent compendium on Remix Studies, for example, we ﬁnd the following sentiment:

As artists, critics, and philosophers have noted for millennia, the cultural production of meaning is an inherently collective process, and creation ex nihilo is not only mythical but illogical. Nobody can create a meaningful cultural artifact or engage in meaningful cultural practice without using the codes, tools and materials established by those who came before. (Sinnreich (2017), p.20)

Within art history, (cultural) appropriation is a legitimate technique associated with a plethora of artists and movements from the twentieth century onward. From Duchamp’s ready-mades through Warhol’s appropriation of commercial images to Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of other artists’ work; from Cubism and Dadaism through Fluxus to contemporary digital art: appropriation is inseparable from the development of modern and contemporary art. Impor- tantly, appropriation has been a hallmark of radical and counter-hegemonic artistic practices (anti-capitalist, anti-heteropatriarchy, etcetera) which appropriate images and other art works from dominant cultures for radical messaging purposes.9

8 This was also one of Rosalind Krauss’ main critical projects. See e.g. the essays in Krauss (1986). 9 See Shugart (1997) for an examination of appropriation in literature as a counter- hegemonic strategy from a feminist perspective.

23 The fact that cultural appropriation can be employed in counter-hegemonic, radical ways, or that it is a corrective to erroneous myths about artistic creation is then sometimes employed to argue against harmful instances of cultural appropriation, or to justify cultural appropriation as a whole. I believe this defense of cultural appropriation stems from a failure to grasp its full, complex nature. The debate around cultural appropriation is characterized by such misconcep- tions (mostly, I believe, the result of a failure to account for the power-dynamics and social positioning that I have claimed ought to be central to any theory of appropriation), resulting in miscommunication and both sides talking past each other. The involved parties depart from radically different conceptions of what cultural appropriation is, without making those conceptions explicit. Cultural appropriation can work in both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways, depen- dant on the intricate web of power-relations and social positioning which both shapes and is shaped by acts of appropriation. Any general defense or condem- nation of cultural appropriation represents an overly simplistic view. Moreover, a general defense entails at minimum an acceptance of the harmful effects appropriation can have on marginalized peoples, or even an outright rejection and denial of those effects. This effects a further silencing and harming of marginalized cultures, and a perpetuation of hegemonic oppression. The framework developed below can, I think, shed light on how appropriation can work both in support of, and against hegemony, and will show that a blanket defense of cultural appropriation is not only harmful, but also unnecessary, contradictory and untenable.

The Framework Rogers argues that acts of cultural appropriation fall into four distinct categories, based on social positioning and the resultant power dynamics:

1. Cultural exchange: the reciprocal exchange of symbols, artifacts, rituals, genres, and/or technologies between cultures with roughly equal levels of power. 2. Cultural dominance: the use of elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture in a context in which the dominant culture has been imposed onto the subordinated culture, including appropriations that enact resistance. 3. Cultural exploitation: the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation. 4. Transculturation: cultural elements created from and/or by multiple cultures, such that identiﬁcation of a single originating culture is problematic, for example, multiple cultural appropriations structured in the dynamics of globalization and transnational capitalism creating hybrid forms. (Rogers (2006), p.477)

This framework, as it is presented by Rogers, appears to categorize cultures in terms of power diﬀerentials. Though it is deserving of commendation for adding

24 much-needed nuance and complexity to the debate, this still represents an overly simplistic and problematic hierarchy of cultures, with a tendency to essentialize power relations and the notion of culture. Cultural dominance is an inherently relative concept: it makes sense to speak of a culture x being dominant or subordinate only in relation to another culture y, and then only in relation to a specific (social, political, cultural, etcetera) dimension in which culture x is dominant/subordinate with respect to culture y. It is possible for a culture to be dominant in some respects and in some of its interactions and non-dominant in others, even in its relation to the same culture. Furthermore, individual cultural identity is intersectional: individuals may belong to more than one culture. Moreover, individuals’ social positioning within cultures operates differentially, resulting in differential interpersonal power dynamics both within and between cultures. Nevertheless, I think Rogers’ framework has merit in helping us understand the varied and nuanced mechanics of cultural appropriation, provided we make some emendations to alleviate its problems. First, we need to recognize and take care that whenever we talk about a culture as being dominant or subordinate, this label always applies only to a highly specific relation to another particular culture, in a particular domain of relations (e.g. media presence, economic power, political representation, etcetera). Second, I propose employing this framework to help evaluate individual acts of cultural appropriation, and not as a tool to categorize and evaluate cultures according to dynamics of power. Individual, concrete acts of appropriation are already specified regarding both the cultures it concerns and the relational field(s) in which they take place, and thus reinforce the first emendation. The resulting framework thus serves to categorize and understand acts of appropriation, and does not depend upon or establish a rigid cultural hierarchy in terms of power. The first category, that of cultural exchange, works as a sort of baseline in the literature on cultural appropriation, often only implicitly present, Rogers observes. It is, with some exceptions, treated as an ideal, never actualized, used to measure the inequalities that are involved in the other types of appropriation. It functions to set up the ethical standards on which acts of cultural appropriation in the other categories are to be judged: cultural exchange is voluntary, balanced, and reciprocal, and it takes place on a level playing-field, (mostly) void of power asymmetries. It does not seem to be quite as uncom- mon a position to espouse as Rogers makes it out to be, however: especially in more popular writing defending acts of cultural appropriation this model of cultural exchange is regularly invoked. As said before, acts of cultural appropriation shape and are shaped by the cultural-political contexts in which they occur. The power-dynamics active in these contexts are often much more complex than the balanced, reciprocal nature of exchange assumed by the model of cultural exchange can account for. Even in cases of two marginalized cultures appropriating from each other, for example, both the cultures as a whole and the individual actors within them are positioned differentially along the various cultural, political, social, and economic axis. This positioning might be very similar in some regards, but different in others (e.g. their respective relations and positions relative to the dominant culture). Cultural exchange does not

25 satisfactorily explain these interactions in all their complexity. The model of cultural exchange teaches us that the power dynamics in play in acts of cultural appropriation might be extremely complex (to the point of appearing “roughly equal”) and hard to parse, and while it is a convenient ideal standard against which to measure inequality in acts of appropriation, it falls short as a model of many actual acts of cultural appropriation, including the examples we opened this chapter with.10 In the case of Dana Schutz, for example, we have a white artist appropriating a part of USAmerican Black culture. Schutz herself, being white, is part of a cultural group decidedly more ‘powerful’ and dominant than the culture she is appropriating from. In the example of the MFA, the reader might balk at the idea that there is a similar asymmetry of power in place here between Japanese culture and USAmerican culture. I will leave the issue of whether such an asymmetry exists or not and what forms it might take for what it is, because the relevant context here is not the global stage, but the USA and its communities. The MFA, in terms of staff, audiences, and collection, is firmly within the dominant culture of the United States (i.e. white, Anglo), whereas Japanese-American communities, of course, are not. Hence, in this example too, the model of cultural exchange fails to apply. The second category, that of cultural dominance, accounts for acts of appropriation of elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture, often as a means of survival and/or resistance.11 It might imply a relative lack of choice on the part of the members of the subordinated culture as to whether or not to take, use, and incorporate certain elements of the dominant culture because of the radical imbalance in power, but Rogers makes clear that members of the subordinated culture nevertheless can and do negotiate the imposition of culture in a variety of ways; the imposition of culture restricts the freedom of choice in what elements to appropriate as a matter of survival, but it does not entail a complete negation of the agency of the members of the non-dominant culture. Rogers identifies five tactics which are adopted by members of a subordinated culture (either individually or collectively) to negotiate the tensions between one’s native culture and the imposed culture in a model of cultural dominance: assimilation, integration, intransigence, mimicry, and resistance. These tactics determine how the cultural appropriation of the dominant culture is navigated. Assimilation is the complete internalization and appropriation of the dominant culture, displacing one’s native culture. Integration is the partial internalization of the dominant culture. The native culture is not completely displaced, and elements of it exist either discretely side by side, or in a fusion with elements of the dominant culture. Intransigence consists of overt resistance and outright refusal to appropriate the imposed culture or other overt means of opposition to its imposition. Mimicry involves performing the dominant culture,

10 I want to leave open the possibility that there are instances of acts of appropriation the model can satisfactorily account for, though, admittedly, I find it difficult to think of examples. 11 I follow Rogers (who, in turn, follows accepted sociological usage) in his use of the term ‘subordinate’ for cultures that are disempowered, peripheral, colonized, marginalized, or otherwise affected by a power differential with regards to the dominant/hegemonic culture (i.e. ‘non-dominant’), though I have some reservations about the connotations of the term.

26 without internalizing it. Elements of the dominant culture are appropriated in order to strategically perform them to negotiate the dominant culture, while maintaining one’s own culture. Lastly, resistance also involves opposition to the imposition of the dominant culture, but in more covert ways. Certain elements of the dominant culture are adopted so as to ensure one gets to maintain one’s own culture and resist cultural domination, “often without the awareness of the colonizing culture” (Rogers (2006), p.481). The model of cultural dominance accounts for the type of counter-hegemonic appropriation we spoke briefly of before in the context of the perception of cultural appropriation in the art world. This type of appropriation is the result of the tactics of intransigence and resistance. It is the model at play in a wide variety of counter-hegemonic acts of appropriation, including such different acts of appropriation as sampling practices within HipHop; feminist artists appropriating pop-cultural images or male-authored artworks to challenge the male gaze; artists appropriating images from mass consumer culture to challenge capitalism; and texts created within the burgeoning movement of fanfic, with fans re-imagining their favorite texts to be more radical, more diverse and inclusive, and in order to better represent the actual fanbase. The type of acts of appropriation that the cultural dominance model explains do not, generally, cause much outrage and controversy; they are counter-hegemonic and as such, I contend, not harmful or morally objectionable.12 The examples of cultural appropriation discussed in 3.1, on the contrary, all appear to be acts of appropriation that reinforce and perpetuate hegemonic oppression instead of opposing it and, as such, constitute morally objectionable acts of cultural appropriation. I am interested in this type of appropriation because of the stakes and the grave risks involved in it, because of a concern with justice, and because the perpetration of this type of cultural appropriation is, I believe, something the museum is particularly prone to; I shall argue this last point in section 3.3. This kind of appropriation, which consists in the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by members of a dominant culture, is explained by the third model, that of cultural exploitation. Cultural exploitation involves the taking of elements of a colonized or otherwise marginalized culture by the dominant culture, to serve the interests of the dominant culture and/or establish and reinforce its dominance. Especially in neocolonial contexts, cultural exploitation also involves acts of appropriation that might seem to indicate a positive attitude towards the marginalized culture on the part of the dominant culture (Rogers (2006), p.486). Bruce Ziff and Pra- tima Rao, in their introduction to the anthology Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, identify four concerns with acts of appropriation that fall under this model. The first is the danger of ‘cultural degradation’:

Appropriation can have corrosive eﬀects on the integrity of an ex-

12 I reject the idea that they might be harmful to hegemony and dominant culture. The deﬁnition of harm involved in such a claim is not one I can subscribe to. They might, of course, violate intellectual property laws, and some will no doubt make the argument that these acts hurt the creators of the ‘original’ works appropriated, but for the purpose of this project I will leave these considerations aside.

27 ploited culture because the appropriative conduct can erroneously depict the heritage from which it is drawn. To the extent that the depiction is misleading, tears can appear in the fabric of a group’s cultural identity. (Ziﬀ and Rao (1997), p.9)

Dominant appropriation, through misrepresentation, influences both the conception and reception of a marginalized culture within the dominant culture itself, but also the marginalized culture’s own conception of itself and its cultural practices and expressions, potentially negatively influencing or even undermining cultural and social cohesion and identity. In this way dominant appropriation also threatens certain avenues of resistance to dominant culture for marginalized peoples. bell hooks observed that “[a] culture of domination demands of all its citizens self-negation,” making self-love “a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination” (hooks (2014), p.19-20). It is this avenue of resistance—resistance through subsistence—that is endangered by the misrepresentation resulting from dominant appropriation. The second concern involves the preservation of cultural elements. This concern is composed of two related components: the idea that cultural representations (both objects and intangibles like symbols, practices, etcetera) are best understood in their native cultural contexts, and an idea of stewardship that prioritizes the preservation and protection of marginalized cultures’ integrity. This concern relates to the physical removal of cultural artefacts from their respective cultures for display in museums, where their meaning and significance is inevitably warped and where said artefacts are effectively put out of reach of large swaths of the communities they were taken from. But it also refers to the commodification of tangibles and intangibles: think of the commodification of spiritual, ritual, and sacred objects and practices for use of members of the dominant culture in e.g. New Age appropriations (Ziff and Rao (1997), p.12-14; Rogers (2006), p.487). Cultural appropriation here thus has a doubly debilitating effect on the marginalized culture in question: the disrespectful and damaging distortion of the original cultural meaning of the object or practice, and a removal (literal in the case of objects) of culturally significant artefacts from their native context, thus denying or limiting the marginalized culture’s further engagement with the artefact in question.13

13 Wayne Modest has suggested a critical evaluation of and engagement with the dominant paradigm of preservation in museums (Modest (2018); suggestion made in his role as moderator in conversation with the audience and the speakers). The concept as it is predominantly used represents a Western-centric, patronizing view of cultural objects, that can perhaps be seen to be one of the motivating factors driving the taking of cultural artefacts from their original cultural context and putting them in the glass cages of the museum in the name of preserving them. John Carman, in his monologue on cultural property, has argued a similar point: The purpose of museums and similar organisations is the preservation of heritage material, and this is most commonly achieved by placing restrictions on access: the placing of objects in museum cases, for example, or by placing barriers around landscape features. The application of these restrictions on access are frequently justiﬁed by the need to preserve the object or place from damage, but by this means ownership of the object is at the same time removed from those people and communities who lay claim to it as their heritage. (Carman (2005), p.119)

28 The third concern identified by Ziff and Rao is the deprivation of material advantage: cultural exploitation can involve cultural products of subordinate cultures being exploited for financial gain by members of the dominant culture. This, they argue, can result in preventing the subordinated culture from (fully) profiting of their own cultural products because it suffers from undue compe- tition in the marketplace, which in turn, interferes with the culture’s ability to determine the purpose and meaning of their cultural products (a separate and distinct harm, that points to the fourth concern identified by Ziff and Rao, explained below).14 This concern brings us into the domain of intellectual property laws, which mediate competing claims of ownership in most national and international contexts (Rogers (2006), p.487). “Western legal systems and concepts of ownership,” Rogers claims, “support the widespread appropriation of elements of traditional cultures without remuneration,” while “they also often prevent traditional cultures from blocking what they perceive as inappropriate uses or adaptations” (Rogers (2006), Ibid.).15 Intellectual property is a Western concept privileging private ownership over collective rights (see 2.1 and 2.2). Ad- ditionally, marginalized cultures’ expressions are often legally placed within the public domain, and are thus deemed freely available to use by all. These factors can inhibit the viability or efficacy of legal recourse for communities affected by cultural exploitation. Of course, this does not entail that legal recourse is always unavailable for affected communities, as evidenced by a number of court cases in recent history where marginalized communities successfully defended their cultural heritage.16 I merely want to point out the simple fact that legal systems are not perfectly equitable, and can (and do) privilege certain groups or interests over others. The fourth and final concern involves the failure to recognize sovereign claims. As foreshadowed in our discussion of the third concern, cultural exploitation often violates the sovereignty of marginalized cultures: the right of a community to have say and control over their culture and the use of its expressions and objects is infringed upon in cases of unauthorized appropriation, and Western property law often offers little recourse. Cultural appropriation might be clearly wrong according to the rules and customs of a subordinated culture,

Modest points out that different conceptions of preservation are employed in different cultures, e.g. an idea of preservation that centers knowledge, practice and know-how over the objects that are the results from these. He suggests that a shift from preserving objects to caring for objects might be more beneficial. This would sometimes entails that cultural objects need to be in the communities they stem from, so they can retain their proper function, and receive the proper (ceremonial, spiritual, but also physical) care. This is a very interesting suggestion, and one that would benefit from a more sustained investigation—but such an investigation will have to be pursued in later work. 14 The third concern, perhaps ironically, is fundamentally capitalist in nature, and as such might seem disingenuous and out of place in a thesis fairly critical of the capitalist project. However, capitalism, for better or worse, remains the de facto system within which most of us are placed and have to live. Capitalism is the system within which these cases of exploitative cultural appropriation happen, and capitalism, for the time being, remains the system within which they need to be redressed. 15 On the same point, see also Anderson and Geismar (2017). 16 One can think, for example, of the legal victories surrounding the protection and recognition of Australian Aboriginal cultural expressions; see Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.10-11.

29 but not recognized as such by a conflicting system of rules, customs and laws of a dominant culture, resulting in the refusal to recognize the sovereignty of the subordinated culture (Ziff and Rao (1997), p.15-16).17 We are now in a position to recognize how the examples in 3.1 fall within the cultural exploitation model. All the examples mentioned involve institutions or individuals within the dominant culture appropriating elements from a non- dominant culture, thereby distorting the meaning and significance of the original elements to fit their own ends or to make them palatable and marketable for the dominant culture, and all involve an infringement of the human right18 of communities to be sovereign over their culture.19 It is the model of cultural exploitation that is invoked by critics of cultural appropriation, and it is acts of cultural exploitation that spark controversy and opposition. Defenders of cultural appropriation, on the other hand, usually invoke the idealized model of cultural exchange. Both do so implicitly, and both refer to their respective model as ‘cultural appropriation’ proper, resulting in a talking past one another, and contributing to the often fruitless nature of the debate.

3.2.2 Transculturation and the Essentialist Threat It may have struck the reader that the first three categories of cultural appropriation all, to varying extents, seem to depart from the assumption that a culture is something that can be delineated, that different cultures are distinct and separate entities, and that cultural membership can be ascribed unproblem- atically; in other words, that cultures have an essence that can be described, and that sets them strictly apart from other cultures with different essences. Culture is a relational phenomenon, dynamic and perpetually changing, shaped by and shaping other cultures. Cultural essentialism instead treats cultures as static, homogeneous, and monolithic; essentialist accounts “depict as homoge- nous groups of heterogeneous people whose values, interests, ways of life, and moral and political commitments are internally plural and divergent” (Narayan (1998), p.88). While the previously discussed models rely on a problematic essentialist notion of culture, they problematize this essentialism at the same time by pointing to the relational and dynamic nature of culture and by showing that cultural appropriation:

a) is an inevitable part of human culture and the creation of (cultural) meaning;

17 We shall return to the issue of sovereignty in4, where a re-conceptualization of that concept shall play a key role. 18 I use “human right” to refer to a moral principle, rather than any actual right enshrined in law. 19 Schutz, white, and to that extent, a member of the dominant culture, appropriated a culturally and historically sensitive and important image from USAmerican Black culture; the MFA appropriated the kimono, a culturally signiﬁcant symbol from Japanese (and Japanese-American) culture, displayed it without context, thus stripping the symbol of its original cultural meaning, and encouraged its visitors, overwhelmingly white (according to statistics published by the MFA, in 2015, 79 percent of its visitors self-identiﬁed as “Cau- casian”), to don the garment and so engage in some ‘playful’ Orientalism. Art museums around the world display the works of white artists appropriating aesthetic from cultures not their own as the sole representation of those aesthetics.

30 b) works in complex, multifarious, and multidirectional ways; dominant and non-dominant cultures are forever engaged in the taking of elements from each other in ways structured by the web of social, cultural, and political contexts in which appropriation (and all human interaction) takes place;

c) both constitutes and is constituted by culture.

These claims, taken together, represent a view of cultures as always already engaged in a dialogue with each other, taking from and being taken from, shaping and being shaped by each other; a view that is in tension with the cultural essentialism also evident in the models discussed. Essentialism about cultures, aside from being empirically and conceptually inaccurate, carries with it another important danger. As the philosopher Suzy Killmister argues in her work on group-membership, essentialist accounts are liable to misframe who belongs to a group and who does not, barring entry to members who self-identify as belonging but do not fit certain essentialist criteria. They are also liable to reification of the group criteria: “If a set list of characteristics is taken to define membership, and particularly if this is then used in policy, it will potentially delegitimize attempts at reconceptualizing or reinterpreting the group” (Killmister (2011), p.233). Note that the threats posed to marginalized cultures by essentialism are effectively the same as some of the threats we have witnessed in the domination and exploitation models of cultural appropriation, viz. a threat to the conception and reception of a non-dominant culture both internal and external, leading to potential harm done within the domains of identity and cohesion; a threat to the culture’s sovereignty; a threat to the culture’s capacity to be dynamic and fluent, that is: the culture’s ability to be a culture (See Clifford (1988); Matthes (2016)). The models of appropriation developed above thus, to the extent that they rely on cultural essentialism, run the risk of perpetrating the same harm that they are trying to understand and critique. Cultural essentialism poses a problem not just for cultural appropriation scholars, but for culture scholars and any theorizing about culture in general. I believe cultural essentialism is a problem we ought to take very seriously, because of the nature and gravity of the potential harms involved in essentializing. I therefore judge it prudent to examine some potential responses to the threat of cultural essentialism, before we move on to the final section of this chapter. Rogers develops his fourth model of cultural appropriation, transculturation, precisely in response to this threat of essentialism. The concept of transculturation presents a synthesis, in a way, of the domination and exploitation models, while questioning the essentialist view of culture. It sees cultures as complex blends, engaged in a continual dialogue, shaped by the conditions of globalization, neocolonialism, and transnational capitalism, and it “identifies forces of cultural homogenization and highlights the influential role of economic, political, military, and other forms of power while also recognizing how cultural appropriation can be constitutive of cultural particularity and agency” (Rogers (2006), Ibid.). Rogers uses the concept of ‘hybridity,’ as developed by postcolonial theorists, to shed light on the dynamics of cultural appropriation on the

31 transculturation model.20 While transculturation questions some of the assump- tions of the other models, “it remains oriented toward the material dimensions and implications of cultural practices and sensitive to the complex dynamics of disproportionate power,” similar to the models of cultural dominance and cultural exploitation (Rogers (2006), p.495). Rogers maintains that although transculturation is both empirically and conceptually more correct than the other models of cultural appropriation, it has one main drawback that prevents it from superseding the other models. Transculturation asks for a reconceptualization of culture, and it is as of yet unclear what the political and ethical commitments of the model are: “New conceptions of culture necessarily affect cultural politics and ethical evaluations of processes such as cultural appropriation,” and the “kind of cultural politics a transcultural model offers is unclear, including whether its analytical usefulness needs to be supplemented by external political commitments” (Rogers (2006), p.500 and p.498 respectively). In the end, Rogers argues for the retention of the other models of appropriation, because they are “still useful: analytically, heuristically, and pedagogically;” at least “until the political affiliations of transculturation are further clarified” (Rogers (2006), p.500 and p.499, respectively ). These models offer a political and ethical commitment to justice, and are therefore still instrumental in critiquing the oppression acts of appropriation can perpetrate. As understanding and critiquing the systemic oppression at the root of exploitative acts of appropriation is at the heart of my project in this thesis, I opt to retain the models of cultural domination and cultural exploitation as an explanatory framework. Matthes, in his evaluation of responses to cultural essentialism in appropriation theory, labels the strategy of retaining models of appropriation that might contain some essentialist danger for their strategic political value “strategic essentialism.” He follows Alison Stone in rejecting this strategy as suboptimal, because it produces an uncomfortable tension between rejecting cultural essentialism as a descriptive framework on the one hand, while relying on it to formulate objections to oppressive acts of oppression on the other. It depends on the demarcation of a purely politically instrumental form of essentialism from descriptive essentialism, something Stone argues has not been satisfactorily ac- complished (Stone (2004); Matthes (2016), p.361). If Matthes is correct, this leaves my project still open to charges of cultural essentialism. I believe the worst sting of cultural essentialism can be taken out of our account, however. I will discuss some promising responses to cultural essentialism below, before presenting my own defense. Another potentially promising response to cultural essentialism is employing Wittgenstein’s concept of family-resemblances to conceptualize culture; this is the response that Young, among others, opts for in his monologue on cultural appropriation. The problem with the concept of culture is that it is difficult if not impossible to define without essentializing the notion. This amounts to an epistemic problem of not knowing how to demarcate culture, and how to determine cultural membership. When we realize that culture is a family- resemblance term in the Wittgensteinian vein, Young argues, we realize that the

20 See e.g. Bhabha (2012), but also the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Stuart Hall.

32 problem with defining culture actually does not pose a real problem: though we cannot demarcate the concept clearly, and we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for cultural membership, it still makes perfect sense to us in our languages to talk about specific cultures, and about someone belonging to one or more specific cultures. “If ordinary language is in order,” Young says, taking a page from Wittgenstein, “we are making sense when we speak in this manner. It can make perfect sense to say that two people belong to different cultures and that a person has engaged in cultural appropriation by taking something produced in the context of another culture” (Young (2010), p.14). The problem we thought we faced turns out to be not a problem at all: we speak about culture in this way as a matter of course, and our speech is perfectly intelligible. Any given culture has a range of properties associated with it, none of which by themselves are necessary or sufficient to possess for one to be a member. Whether one is a member or not depends on if one possesses a sufficient number of the properties associated with the culture in question, and these properties need not be strictly defined or enumerated for it to make sense to talk about cultures or cultural membership (Young (2010), p.15). Matthes, however, argues that the family-resemblance response also does not provides solace:

[I]t is the practice of distinguishing insiders and outsiders that mo- tivates the moral concern about cultural essentialism. As Killmister notes in discussion of the family resemblance model of group membership [in Killmister (2011)], insofar as it is indeterminate, it fails to determine who the members of a group are, and insofar as it relies on a stricter interpretation of the list to avoid this issue, it falls back into the problems of essentialism. (Matthes (2016), p.359)

Matthes identifies three other responses to counter cultural essentialism in appropriation theory, all of which he judges to have important shortcomings, before developing his own response. I will go over all of these briefly, before offering my own tentative response. The first response involves centering self-identification. This response places the question of group-membership at the individual’s discretion: “the only legitimate criterion of cultural membership is self-identification” (Matthes (2016), p.359). While this does sidestep the issue of cultural essentialism altogether, Matthes argues that it does so at the cost of invalidating claims of exploitative cultural appropriation. Some acts of harmful appropriation are perpetrated by people who do self-identify as members of the cultural group they appropriate from (Matthes (2016), Ibid.). If self-identification is the sole criterion for cultural membership, we would not be able to address these cases. The second response, dubbed reframing the question, is credited to Suzy Killmister, who we have encountered above. She proposes to reject the idea that for any given group there exists a single set of individuals that constitutes said group, and that we are tasked with determining the members of this set:

Instead of looking for criteria to determine membership of a given group that will hold under all circumstances, I argue that for any

33 group right for which the question arises (and for some it may simply never arise) we must consider the kind of harms the right is protecting against. I claim that the nature of these harms will help determine to whom the particular right is to apply. At the heart of this argument is the idea that different kind of rights claims invoke different sets of group membership. (Killmister (2011), p.244) Matthes argues this response is not satisfactory either. He holds that at the heart of cases of harmful cultural appropriation (cases we have identified as falling under the cultural exploitation model) is what he calls the conceptual restriction on cultural appropriation: “if a purported case of cultural appropriation isn’t predicated on the insider/outsider distinction, then it isn’t properly speaking a case of cultural appropriation” (Matthes (2016), p.354). The problem with Killmister’s solution, then, is that we need to appeal to the insider/outsider distinction to explain what makes something a case of cultural appropriation, and we cannot distinguish insiders and outsiders in these cases based on an interest in avoiding the harm of appropriation (Matthes (2016), p.360). The final response Matthes considers is that of lineages. The most promising account of this response is due to Alan Patten. Patten develops a social lineage account of culture on which one is a member of a culture when one shares with other members a “set of formative conditions that are distinct from the formative conditions that are imposed on others” (Patten (2014), p.51). The social lineage account can explain cultural continuity while still accounting for the dynamic nature of culture, thus avoiding essentialism. Matthes, however, worries that the emphasis on formative conditions might still be too rigid, and that sharing a set of formative conditions might be sufficient but not necessary for cultural membership (Matthes (2016), p.362). Matthes presents his own alternative to these responses, which consists in linking the harms of cultural appropriation to the harms of systemic oppression in general, sidestepping the conceptual restriction on cultural appropriation, and thus escaping the essentialist trap. His account of the harms of cultural appropriation explains it in terms of the work on harmful speech and epistemic injustice done within feminist philosophy. He employs the notions of credibility deficits and -surpluses to explain the harm exploitative acts of appropriation perpetrate, and places cultural exploitation within the larger context of systemic oppression. If we understand cultural appropriation and its harms as part of systemic harm, he says, the need to identify the individual agent of oppression disappears; we clearly see both the harm inflicted, and the cause: systemic marginalization, oppression, and inequality. If this account is successful, then we can relax how we invoke the conceptual restriction on cultural appropriation: we do not need to rely on the practice of distinguishing insiders from outsiders in individual cases, and thus the essentialism that such practices are heir to, because we can instead focus our attention on fighting systematic social marginalization, which will have the downstream effect of ameliorating the harms of appropriation. (Matthes (2016), p.364)

34 This account has the additional virtue of not relying on a conception of cultural property; a controversial notion, as we have already gleamed in our discussion of the concept in 2.2.21 The main drawback of Matthes’ response to cultural essentialism is that it might not account for all cases of exploitative cultural appropriation, and that resisting systemic oppression might require calling out individual perpetrators of cultural appropriation, “in which case the harms of essentialism may be a necessary cost of seeking social justice” (Matthes (2016), p.365). While the responses to cultural essentialism that we have considered might not be satisfactory individually, I argue that they, when taken together, might offer us some relief from cultural essentialism, if not mollify the dangers completely. Recognizing that the concept of culture is a family-resemblance term and that our speech about culture is unproblematic in its intelligibility serves as the baseline for an anti-essentialist notion of culture. The notion of family- resemblance allows us to ignore the challenge to the lineage response: the fact that a set of formative conditions might be a sufficient condition for cultural membership but not a necessary one, merely places these formative conditions in the range of properties associated with a culture-as-family-resemblance, all of which are not by themselves necessary or sufficient for cultural membership. Killmister’s proposal centers the idea of looking at who has what interest in avoiding a particular harm to determine membership is nicely congruent with Matthes’ response of connecting the harms of appropriation to the harms of systemic oppression more broadly: we ought to put those actually harmed by systemic oppression and exploitative acts of appropriation front and center. This leads us to the idea of centering community: I maintain that in any account of systemic oppression and harm, the communities at risk from those harms need to be absolutely central. It is those communities that are at risk, and it is those communities who thus are in the best position to determine who is harming them, and who exactly it is that is at risk of being harmed. Scholars of culture, here (and insofar as they are not a part of the culture they are discussing), need to take a back-seat, and trust that communities are in a better (and more legitimate) position to determine cultural membership than they are. Even if this does not result in a dissolution of the problems, at least “they will become more tractable to the degree that the practical application of group rights is not undermined” (Killmister (2011), p.244). If we then take self-identification to be an important heuristic condition of cultural membership, and amend it with a form of community-recognition, i.e. the idea that for one to be a member of a culture at least some part of the community must recognize one to be a member, we end up with an account of culture and cultural membership that acknowledges and centers cultural communities’ sovereignty. This additive account, as I see it, takes the sting out of charges of cultural essentialism considerably. In any case, we would do well to heed bell hooks’ admonition to critics of cultural essentialism:

Those progressive white intellectuals who are particularly critical of “essentialist” notions of identity when writing about mass culture,

21 We will return to the problems with cultural property in 4.2.

35 race, and gender have not focused their critiques on white identity and the way essentialism informs representations of whiteness. It is always the non-white, or in some cases the non-heterosexual Other, who is guilty of essentialism. (hooks (2014), p.30)

Fully developing this aggregative strategy would take us too far afield, and is unfortunately outside the scope of this thesis, but I do not see any significant difficulty in combining the above responses into a cohesive whole. In the next chapter, my approach shall be similarly guided by the centering of community, and I shall develop a notion of cultural sovereignty that will inform a different paradigm of considering art and cultural expression as an alternative to the capitalist paradigm that currently holds a position of dominance. But first, I will conclude this chapter with an analysis of exploitative cultural appropriation in terms of the late capitalist logic I perceive to be underlying such acts of appropriation.

3.3 The Logic of Capitalism as the Engine of Cultural Appropriation

Exploitative acts of appropriation have often been analyzed through the lens of commodification, and with good reason: the concept illuminates the workings of cultural exploitation in interesting ways. We have already hinted at how commodification works in our discussion of the cultural exploitation model and the harms acts of exploitative cultural appropriation perpetrate. Below, I un- dertake a more sustained examination of the mechanics of the commodification of cultural difference that underlie exploitative appropriation. Commodification does not merely refer to the transformation of goods, ser- vices, or ideas into something that can be bought, sold, and owned, though it is often taken to refer to this transformation alone. Under the conditions of capitalism, any good or service that enters the market becomes commodified. The process of commodifications abstracts the meaning and value of an object, service, etcetera, so that it can enter the system of exchange. The specific conditions of the labor that produced the object, the use-value of the object, the social and cultural meaning invested in it; all these are lost, and the commodified object becomes equivalent to all other commodities. To then differentiate the commodified object from other commodities again, different, new meanings are attached to it; meanings unrelated to the object’s use-value, invested labor, and socio-cultural specificity. The commodity becomes a fetish:

In [the religious] world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. (Marx (1996), p.83)

36 The new artificial meanings attached to the commodity-as-fetish are collapsed into the commodified object—they are reified. Their artificiality is obscured, and they come to represent the “intrinsic” value of the commodity: the values that can be attained by acquisition of the commodity (Rogers (2006), p.488). This process serves to further obscure both the conditions of labor and the social relations invested in the production of the commodity, leading to the consumer’s detachment and ignorance of “their participation in the exploitation of others’ labor, culture, and identity” (Rogers (2006), Ibid.). Exploitative acts of appropriation function according to this process. Through commodification, the cultural values and meanings of cultural expressions are stripped away and the cultural and social contexts are obscured, resulting in a making invisible of the harms perpetrated; indeed a making invisible of the appropriated culture, in effect silencing and further marginalizing already marginalized cultures and communities, perpetrating and reinforcing (neo)- colonialist and other oppressive practices. Commodification removes the appropriated object from its native context, and changes its meaning and function to make it palatable to, and ready for consumption by, dominant culture. It transforms the cultural expressions of marginalized peoples into commodities to be privately owned by members of dominant culture. Commodification also serves to undermine strategies of resistance, which we have talked about in the context of the model of cultural dominance. By appropriating practices of resistance, dominant culture can redefine and incorporate these practices, removing or neutralizing their genuine oppositional meaning and function (Rogers (2006), Ibid.). bell hooks has written penetratingly on exploitative acts of cultural appropriation, the commodification inherent in them, and the nature of dominant (white) culture’s fascination with the Other. She observes that the commodification of cultural difference at the heart of cultural exploitation is in danger of appearing alluring to marginalized peoples and radical members of dominant culture: “marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation” (hooks (2014), p.26).22 She argues that cultural appropriation is not driven by a radical questioning of dominant representations of the Other, or even by any genuine interest in the cultures and peoples in question. Instead it represents an “eating of the Other:” the Other is made to assume recognizable forms through the process of obscuring and reassigning meaning inherent in commodification (itself inherent in exploitative acts of cultural appropriation) and is so made palatable to dominant culture, holding out the promise of further erasure rather than that of recognition:

Currently, the commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only

22 One ﬁnds a similar sentiment voiced by skeptics of harmful cultural appropriation, who argue that cultural appropriation enables cross-cultural appreciation and understanding; see Matthes (2016), p.366 for a response.

37 displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization. (hooks (2014), p.31) [...] The over-riding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate—that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten. (hooks (2014), p.39) Acts of cultural appropriation that fall under the cultural exploitation model, through the commodification of cultural difference inherent in them, thus strip the cultural meaning and significance of cultural expressions, obscuring their native cultural value and transforming them into commodities that can become private property. The transformation of culture into a category of property is emblematic of late capitalism, and reinforces and perpetuates its hegemonic status: The premise that culture is a subcategory of property [...] is not merely a consequence of the dominance of industrial capitalism in contemporary society, but an instrument of that dominance. It normalizes mercantile relations as the basis of all social relations, even as it normalizes cultural expression as a mere instrument of social organization. (Sinnreich (2017), p.20) The system of capitalism, then, is a major driving force behind cultural exploitation. We see the capitalist logic at work in the examples of cultural appropriation in the museum outlined in 3.1: all are motivated by the commodification of cultural difference, and the selling of the Other to dominant culture as so many “new dishes to enhance the white [or otherwise dominant] palate,” to echo hooks, resulting, paradoxically, in the erasure of the Other. When the MFA invites its visitors to dress up in a kimono, they are selling a commodified, ex- oticized idea of Japanese culture; an idea that has little to do with an attempt to understand or appreciate actual cultural difference, and everything to do with the repackaging of cultural difference into something recognizable and palatable so as to ‘spice up,’ to keep with hooks’ analogy, Western audiences’ aesthetic experiences. Within the MFA exhibition, the cultural symbol of the kimono, through commodification, is made to lose its cultural meaning, significance, and difference. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the dominant operational context we outlined in 2.3 and the above discussion, we witness the same process of commodification and attendant transformation of cultural expressions (viz. art) into private property at work in the contemporary art museum. Under the logic of late capitalism, art works become commodified and lose their artistic, social and cultural specificity. The corporatized museum, functioning according to the market, loses sight of the interests of its publics. Through an understanding of the mechanics of exploitative cultural appropriation, we can see how this logic functions to harm already marginalized communities disproportionately. Museums functioning according to late capitalist logic are fortified as

38 instruments of hegemony, and lose the capacity for resistance and to function counter-hegemonically. John Carman, following the writing of Lewis Hyde, outlines an interesting alternative to art-as-commodity that I think is worth discussing here, as it illuminates the issues we have discussed from a different angle, and provides a worthwhile alternative way of conceiving the flow of cultural products. Hyde analyzes artistic production as the result of a ‘gift,’ arguing that “‘the primary commerce of art is a gift exchange [and so] unless the work is the realization of the artist’s gift and unless we, as an audience, can feel the gift it carries, there is no art’. Consequently art is in danger from economics because ‘a gift can be destroyed by the marketplace”’ (Carman (2005), p.42; citation in single quotes from Hyde (1983), p.273). The gift, by virtue of its inherent properties, must always move—must always be given away—and must always be consumed. The gift is thus always used up, but only for the person giving it away; in re- giving the gift or consuming it with others the the gift itself is not really used up, but, by establishing a circle of reciprocity, the gift that is passed along to others will remain abundant; will keep on giving, as it were (Hyde (1983), p.15-16, p.21; Carman (2005), p.42-43). Gifts thus differ from commodities in this way, as commodities, when sold, are ‘used up’ in the sense that nothing in the process of the exchange ensures it will ever find its way back to the seller. Moreover, commodities have a value fixed by the market, while gifts, through circulation, may increase in value, “especially when a circulation of gifts creates a community out of individual expressions of goodwill” (Carman (2005), p.43). This brings up another feature of gifts: in contrast to commodities, gifts have a community-building aspect to them: because the giving of a gift establishes a ‘feeling-bond’ between people while commodities do not establish any connection, a “circulation of gifts can produce and maintain a coherent community, or, inversely [...] the conversion of gifts to commodities can fragment or destroy such a group” (Hyde (1983), p.80; Carman (2005), p.43). As Carman concludes:

The shift of the object from commodity to gift is a shift from a realm of use value to one of symbolic value [...] marking a change from an object embedded in systems of ownership and exchange for measured value, to the status of culture, the realm of heritage related to identity and – more importantly – the creation of community by the gift of the self. Reduction of symbolic value to use value by treating the heritage object as if it is a commodity thus represents a form of the private appropriation of the gift increase inherent in heritage, turning it into private property: it does not matter whether this is achieved by a private individual in the name of the market or by a corporate body such as a museum or an organ of the nation- state in the name of ‘the public’. It is by treating the heritage as an object of ownership that its reduction to a commodity is eﬀected and the gift increase that represents the creation and maintenance of community is thereby taken away. (Carman (2005), p.44)

As we have seen, cultural appropriation can serve to undermine the potential

39 for resistance of cultural practices. Similarly, within the realm of art, dominant appropriation works to subvert the counter-hegemonic potential for resistance of art itself. In their classic book on late capitalism The New Spirit of Capi- talism, the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello reveal how capitalism has appropriated what they call “artistic critique,” and by so incorporating the counter-hegemonic messages of artistic movements has transformed itself and found new modes of oppression: “the artistic critique opened up an opportunity for capitalism to base itself on new forms of control and commodify new, more individualized and ‘authentic’ goods” (Boltanski and Chiapello (2017), p.467). The political theorist Chantal Mouﬀe summarizes the conclusions of Boltanski and Chiapello as follows:

[T]he aesthetic strategies of the counter-culture – the search for au- thenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exi- gency, and the demands for autonomy made by the new movements of the ’60s – have been harnessed in the development of the post- fordist networked economy to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation. Through ‘neo-management’, artistic critique had become an important element of capitalist pro- ductivity. (Mouﬀe (2013), Chapter 5.)

This cooptation of artistic strategies of resistance threatens to further lessen the counter-hegemonic potential of the museum. In the next chapter, I will return to the hegemonic/counter-hegemonic potential of the institution of the museum. We will see that the above discussion has interesting bearing on the issue of diversifying the museum, and the central questions raised in chapter1: who should the museum be for, and who should it be from, and who owns art/culture, and how?

40 4| Sovereignty over Art & Culture

4.1 Diversity and the Institution of the Museum

Diversifying the museum is oft understood in terms of offering space to voices previously not heard, or not heard enough, in the museum. In some circles, this understanding of diversity leads to a concern with including exclusionary, discriminatory, and otherwise harmful voices; right-wing populist voices are often brought up, partly because of well-publicized claims of being marginalized and excluded from the museum on the part of this movement. This view represents a misconception of diversity; one that is wide-spread and harmful, and thus needs to be addressed. To do so, I will first discuss the idea of the museum as an inherently political space, and will argue that the museum needs to let go of the myth of the apolitical and embrace its political nature to be(come) relevant as an institution aspiring to an educational role. In 4.1.2 I will argue that, paradoxical though it may seem at first sight, a commitment to diversity is radically incompatible with the platforming of harmful speech. These voices, claims of marginalization aside, actually represent the hegemony, and their platforming presents a challenge to the counter-hegemonic potential of the museum. More importantly, however, I will analyze and develop theories of cross-cultural witnessing and diversity that will assist us in evaluating practices of implementing diversity in the institution.1

4.1.1 Be(com)ing Relevant: The Museum as a Political Space In the Museum Studies literature the work of Chantal Mouffe looms large. Her political theory is often invoked as a good model for the museum as a political space, either descriptively or prescriptively. I want to start this section by examining what Mouffe’s theory, variously referred to as ‘agonistics’ or ‘agonistic pluralism,’ can offer us in understanding the museum as a political space.

1 This section depends in part on the results of research I conducted during an internship at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from February through June 2018, under the supervision of Margriet Schavemaker. Part of this research was used for a talk she gave at a conference at the MMCA in Seoul, South-Korea on 07 April 2018, and elements of it may be published in her forthcoming paper in the proceedings of said conference, Schavemaker (forthcoming).

41 In her 2013 book Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, Mouﬀe ded- icates a chapter to exploring the meaning of her theory of agonistic politics to artistic practices. In it, she shows herself a believer in the power of art- institutions to be radically critical spaces, to enact change, and to “contribute to subverting the ideological framework of consumer society.” She diﬀers in this from more radical theorists, who argue that these institutions are beyond saving; they are fundamentally dedicated to maintaining and reproducing hegemony, and as such are better abandoned:2

To imagine that museums, for instance, could provide a site for critical political intervention is, according to such a view, to be blind to the manifold forces – economic and political – which make their very existence possible. [...] To believe that existing institutions cannot become the terrain of contestation is to ignore the tensions that always exist within a given conﬁguration of forces and the possibility of acting in a way that subverts their form of articulation. (Mouﬀe (2013), p.100)

Mouffe argues that the potential of the museum to transform itself has already shown itself historically in the museum’s change from a bourgeois institution dedicated to educating its audience about dominant culture, to a neo-liberal entertainment center, geared towards pulling in consumers with blockbuster exhibitions, selling them multifarious trinkets (thus contributing to “the com- mercialization and depoliticization of the cultural field”).3 She envisages another evolutionary track, one that leads in a more progressive direction (and she mentions the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona as having succeeded in creating a new model of what a museum could be). Mouffe shares the belief in museums as potentially radical institutions capable of challenging hegemony with Claire Bishop, whose case-studies of actualized alternative models of the museum leads her to the following conclusion: “Can a museum be anti- hegemonic? The three museums discussed in this book seem to answer this question in the affirmative” (Bishop (2013), p.56). Mouffe developes her theory as an alternative to what she perceives to be the two main approaches in democratic political theory, which she calls the aggregative model, and the deliberative model. The aggregative model, she says, “sees political actors as being moved by the pursuit of their interests,” whereas the deliberative model “stresses the role of reason and moral considerations” (Mouffe (2013), Chapter 1). Mouffe argues that both of these models are too individualistic and rationalistic, and that they therefore cannot account for “the centrality of collective identities and the crucial role played by affects in their constitution,” nor for the fact that passions are the driving force in the political field (Mouffe (2013), Ibid.). In putting forward her theory as a viable alternative, Mouffe additionally criticizes other theories of democracy, notably those of John

2 See e.g. the works of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (especially the trilogy consisting of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth), and the work of Paolo Virno (especially The Logic of the Multitude) within political theory. This divide between change from within and dismantling/abandoning is hotly debated within activist circles as well. 3 Cf. Krauss and Bishop in 2.3.

42 Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, as operating according to a too idealized picture of the world and as not being rooted enough in empirical reality to have real world applicability. These theories, Mouffe says, depend on participants adhering to certain idealized rules to function. Furthermore, Mouffe claims that the idea of consensus underlying these theories is naive in departing from the idea that conflict can and should be expunged in the ideal democratic society:

Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries). (Mouffe (2013), Ibid.)

However, Mouﬀe’s own theory, we should point out, can be criticized along similar lines. For the idea of agonism to work, it requires that the participants to the agonistic arena treat each other as adversaries “whose ideas might be fought, even ﬁercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned.” This account still depends on a consensus about the fundamental rules of political engagement:

Agonism [...] turns on conﬂictual consensus, where participants agree to treat each other as ‘friendly-enemies’ rather than as en- emy combatants, on the promise that the democratic struggle can be repeated, no matter which side wins or loses. Mouﬀe’s account of democratic politics thus operates on set rules no less than Rawls’ or Habermas’s does. (Hodgson (2015))

There is another important caveat I would like to add to Mouffe’s theory. It does not seem like she sees a limit on the sort of voices which can gain admit- tance to the agonistic arena. I think this presents a problem for the theory and its practical applications. As stated, Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism depends on a conflictual consensus to work: once one of the parties wins in the democratic arena but is not committed to the continual renewal of the struggle, the system is threatened with collapse. Furthermore, in order for agonistic pluralism to provide room for counter-hegemonic struggle, existing power dynamics and histories of inequity and oppression, it seems to me, would have to be accounted for in who is given time, space, a voice, a platform, lest the agonistic space becomes an amplifier of hegemonic discourse, and an arena of oppression.4 Mouffe’s writing stands a lot to gain from a direct conversation with postcolonial theory, naturally aligned as it is through its radical commitment to counter hegemony.5

4 I shall develop this idea in section 4.1.2 in more detail. 5 And vice versa, as e.g. Purakayastha (2014) argues.

43 I want to return to Mouffe’s idea of the potentiality of the museum as a counter-hegemonic institution, and explore this counter-hegemonic potential by revisiting Claire Bishop’s writing in her book Radical Museology. Bishop, like Mouffe, also looks for examples of how the contemporary museum can and should do better, and can be a more radical, counter-hegemonic institution. The model that she perceives to be at the core of these museums’ practices is something she dubs “dialectical contemporaneity,” which consists in a rethinking of the idea of the contemporary away from ‘presentism,’ “the condition of taking our current moment as the horizon and destination of our thinking.” Pre- sentism, Bishop argues, is currently the dominant mode of thinking about the contemporary in art. It is “underpinned by an inability to grasp our moment in its global entirety, and an acceptance of this incomprehension as a constitutive condition of the present historical era” (Bishop (2013), p.6). Dialectical contemporaneity instead “seeks to navigate multiple temporalities within a more political horizon.”. It abandons the presentist premise that “many or all times are present in each historical object,” and instead asks why “certain temporalities appear in particular works of art at specific historical moments” (Bishop (2013), p.23). Dialectical contemporaneity represents not only the desire to understand our present condition, but is also committed to exploring how we can change it. According to Bishop, the new approach to history that dialectical contemporaneity offers “re-imagines the museum as an active, historical agent that speaks in the name not of national pride or hegemony but of creative questioning and dissent.” (Bishop (2013), p.59) It enables museums to

not speak in the name of the one percent, but attempt to represent the interests and histories of those constituencies that are (or have been) marginalized, sidelined and oppressed. This doesn’t mean that they subordinate art to history in general, but that they mobilize the world of visual production to inspire the necessity of standing on the right side of history. (Bishop (2013), p.6)

Both Bishop and Mouﬀe agree that the best way forward for museums, the way for museums to stay (or become) relevant, is for them to be explicitly political. Museums need to let go of the myth of the apolitical and embrace their role as fundamentally political institutions. Furthermore, they need to become counter-hegemonic institutions, dedicated to promulgating narratives of dissent and marginalized histories and envisioning radical futures. The art historian and cultural critic T.J. Demos, in his book-length study of contemporary art in the global context, viewed through the lens of migration, titled The Migrant Image, echoes this call:

Such a political and aesthetic imperative invites writers, critics, and art historians to move beyond the familiar canons and genealogies of artistic formations and to confront a newly interconnected, global set of practices, discourses, and political concerns (which also means confronting the legacies of postcolonial histories and past social in- justices, as well as ﬁnding resources in the historical struggles of political and economic liberation movements). Broadly speaking,

44 a politics of migration beckons, a politics that leads to an open- ness to the unfamiliar and the untimely, to a sensitivity regarding how one’s own form of life connects inevitably to others far away and in the past, and does so in both positive and negative ways, with accompanying debts, responsibilities, and solidarities. Such an ethicopolitical commitment on behalf of cultural practitioners connects to an emerging global demand to universalize the exception in the practice of a politics of equality, and to create a “citizenship of aliens.” (Demos (2013), p.249)

A commitment to diversity on the part of the museum is, as I view it, inextricably interwoven with the aforementioned dedication to promulgate narratives of dissent and marginalized histories and voices. I agree with Bishop et al. that the way for the museum to stay relevant is by explicitly embracing its political nature.

Towards Alternative Museum Models: Cross-Cultural Witnessing & the Collaborative Museum I now want to briefly turn to the idea of cross-cultural witnessing, as developed by Stef Craps in his book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, where he applies ideas from postcolonial theory to the discipline of trauma studies, in order to hold that discipline to its promise of cross-cultural solidarity. I perceive a commitment to cross-cultural witnessing to be at the heart of the movement to diversify the museum. The concept of cross-cultural witnessing provides us with useful handles to help grasp the risks involved in representing marginalized voices and buried histories, and helps us realize what is at stake; both practically, within the museum, and theoretically, in projects such as my own. Through an extensive survey of trauma studies’ foundational texts, Craps convincingly shows how that discipline fails “to live up to this promise of cross- cultural ethical engagement” (Craps (2013), p.2). He identifies four main problems with the methodology of trauma studies as it relates to non-Western trauma, and presents some ways to ameliorate these. We shall focus on just two of these remedial suggestions; they represent the most pertinent lessons to be learned from Craps’ work for our purposes. Cross-cultural witnessing, at its root, refers to an ethical type of cross-cultural engagement, resulting in legitimate cross-cultural understanding and empathy. Craps develops the concept in the context of cultural trauma, but I believe it can be profitably adapted to apply to culture more broadly, and that is the sense in which I propose adopting it.6 Craps argues that, if cross-cultural witnessing (in its ethically normative sense) is to take place, two conditions need to hold: non-Western traumas (or cultures, in our definition) need to be acknowledged for their own sake, and they need to be acknowledged on their own terms and in their own terms.7

6 Note, however, that art comprises one very prominent way through which a culture can bear witness to, come to terms with, and process its trauma. The subject of trauma and that of culture and art intersect in deep and interesting ways. 7 See Craps (2013) Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, respectively.

45 The failure of either condition to obtain results in an exploitative type of cross- cultural engagement. If the first condition does not hold, we fall into the trap of exploitative cultural appropriation: non-dominant cultures will be engaged with only insofar as they satisfy dominant culture’s interests, as an exotic ‘snack,’ to adhere to bell hooks’ analogy of ‘eating the other.’ If the second condition fails to hold, we risk the erasure of cultural difference: non-dominant cultures will be engaged with solely on the terms and in the theoretical frameworks of dominant culture, with all the attendant risks of misrepresentation and loss of cultural meaning and specificity, leading to further marginalization and erasure. We have extensively discussed the risks and harms involved with either of the results of the failure of these conditions; I will not tire the reader by going over them again here. I propose applying the concept of cross-cultural witnessing, reworked to apply to culture, to any attempt at fostering cross-cultural understanding. I understand such an attempt to be at the heart of the movement to diversify the museum. The notion of cross-cultural witnessing will provide us with a simple evaluative framework with which to approach strategies of diversifying the museum, through asking and answering two simple questions: is the culture in question represented for its own sake, and is it represented on and in its own terms? Meeting the stipulations set out by this framework, by itself, might not be (and indeed is not, as we shall see in 4.1.2) sufficient to avoid exploitation and the perpetration of oppression, but I believe it is necessary. Ultimately, the question as to whether the museum and other art-institutions provide suitable avenues for radical critique, and are capable of transforming through internal change, might be an empirical one. It has been noted in the literature on museum practices that all the major developments of the last decade within the museum (e.g. the participatory/immersive turn which describes the growing emphasis on audience participation in and active engagement with the art work and the discursive/academic turn, which describes the increasing focus on research and education within the museum), for all their aspirations, have remained rather limited in their audiences and outreach.8 I see an argument to be made here that this is the case precisely because these practices have not been radical(ly open) enough. If the museum is willing to radically open itself up to different, critical voices, and is willing to relinquish (some of) its ownership/power, in a sense, this would show it to be an institution that can be transformed, that can be(come) an inclusive platform for critique of the hegemony, an agent of change, and thus it would prove itself to not be an im- mutable tool to maintain and reproduce hegemony. This, I posit, requires a diversification of the collection, staff, and audience simultaneously. Wayne Modest and Viv Golding, in their introduction to the collection Muse- ums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration, address similar concerns, but framed in terms of contemporary developments within museums that move toward new collaborative paradigms, beyond the curatorial practice— communities dichotomy. “[R]eflecting on what a museum is (and may do) in the twenty-first century,” as Museums and Communities does, and as we have done

8 See e.g. Schavemaker (forthcoming).

46 throughout this thesis, “opens questions of the potential role for museums in developing social cohesion within today’s rapidly changing world, working with similarities while acknowledging and respecting differences” (Golding and Mod- est (2013), p.3). Golding and Modest point to the idea—reminiscent of Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism on the one hand and Bishop’s dedication to platforming narratives of dissent on the other—that: contestation and controversy—if imaginatively, respectfully, and sen- sitively addressed in the museum with reference to wider concerns of equality, human rights, and social justice—may offer a potent means of building bridges and even overcoming divisions among disparate groups. (Golding and Modest (2013), p.1)9 Golding and Modest signal that more collaborative and polyvocal practices are increasingly being demanded of the museum, and that such practices involve a more radical change than a mere turn towards consulting and including diverse perspectives: they require “a concerted movement to locate diverse audiences at the heart of the museum” (Golding and Modest (2013), Ibid.). A commitment to diversity in the museum thus requires the museum to radically rethink its curatorial structure; to make it less stratified, and more collaborative. Such close collaboration with diverse communities, “in non-tokenistic ways that be- stow equal respect—on a platform to safeguard the fundamental ethical values surrounding international human rights,” requires risk and creativity, Golding and Modest argue (Golding and Modest (2013), p.3). We shall encounter examples of contemporary museums taking steps towards alternative models of the museum in section 4.1.2, in line with the commitments outlined in this section, and we will see such risks being taken, and such creativity on display. The writ- ings of Golding and Modest are a prime example of what Anderson and Geismar identify as the “extensive critical writing about museums and communities and the various re-assemblage of collections viz community rights and expectations of inclusion, participation, and co-management;” writing which marks “a new and distinct turn in questions about exhibiting and display, and who gets to speak and has the right to do so. It has also opened up extensive dialogue about collaboration and who the ‘publics’ of museums are and have been pre- sumed to be” (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.19-20), a turn to which my own project humbly hopes to contribute.

4.1.2 The Concept of Diversity at Stake We will now ﬁnally move to examine the notion of diversity in question: what does this diversity look like, and what does it entail? Sara Ahmed brilliantly examines and questions the language of diversity in her article under that title, ‘The Language of Diversity,’ and in her book-length study On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. She cites a wide variety of postcolonial and feminist thinkers that have been critical of the language of ‘cultural diversity’ on diﬀerent, but related grounds. Underlying many of these critiques is a concern that the institutional adoption of the language of diversity displaces

9 Cf. the above section on cross-cultural witnessing.

47 more critical language: that of social justice and equality. Ahmed focuses her critique on institutions of higher education, but her theory applies to museums as well:10 Some critics suggest that ‘diversity’ enters higher education through marketization: the term is seen as coming from management, and from the imperative to ‘manage diversity’, or to value diversity ‘as if’ it was a human resource. Such a managerial focus on diversity works to individuate difference and to conceal the continuation of systematic inequalities within universities. (Ahmed (2007), p.236) Considering the museum’s increasing corporatization, and the current preeminence of the movement to diversify the museum, it should come as no surprise that the museum is especially at risk of adopting the language of diversity mediated through managerial concerns with marketing and PR. The institutional adoption of diversity because of market-pressures alone risks hollowing out the full meaning and import of the concept; a decimation of meaning and conse- quent repackaging, in fact, that looks a lot like what happens in the process of commodification. Ahmed, in her paper, discusses one other possible problem with the language of diversity that is illuminating in this context. That problem occurs with how the term ‘diversity’ operates on the level of the nation-state: [M]ulticulturalism posits difference as something ‘others’ bring to the nation, and as something the nation can have through how it accepts, welcomes or integrates such others. This model of cultural diversity reifies difference as something that exists ‘in’ the bodies or culture of others, such that difference becomes a national property: if difference is something ‘they are’, then it is something we ‘can have’. (Ahmed (2007), p.235) Diversity, or cultural difference, as (cultural) property, something we can own, mirrors the problems with commodification and cultural appropriation we discussed in 3.3. The problem with diversity, then, is that it can be commodified and co-opted; “that it can be ‘cut off’ from the programmes that seek to challenge inequalities within organizations, and might even take the place of such programmes in defining the social mission of universities” (Ahmed (2007), p.236).11 The revolutionary icon Angela Davis made a similar point about diversity functioning as a board-room buzzword in a 2015 lecture at the University of South Carolina: I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a strategy designed to ensure

10 Following the discursive/academic turn, museums increasingly have adopted some of the educational aspirations of the institution of higher education, and some museums additionally have become more concerned with producing original research, thus now functioning, at least in part, quite similar to an institution of higher education. 11 One could argue that this is not a shortcoming of the concept of diversity itself, because the conditions of late capitalism make it so that any- and everything can be thus commodiﬁed and co-opted. Nevertheless, diversity is the concept that has de facto fallen prey to such cooptation and commodiﬁcation; hence Ahmed’s concern with the concept is at least empirically valid.

48 that the institution functions in the same way that it functioned before, except now that you now have some black faces and brown faces. It’s a diﬀerence that doesn’t make a diﬀerence. (Davis (2015))

Diversity as merely a corporate strategy, divested from its connections to struggles for social justice, can then act to obscure inequality, and to obstruct the push to ameliorate inequality:

[T]he institutional preference for the term ‘diversity’ is a sign of the lack of commitment to change, and might even allow organizations such as universities to conceal the operation of systematic inequalities under the banner of diﬀerence. (Ahmed (2007), p.236)

Ahmed suggests that the way to challenge this appropriation of the term ‘diversity’ is to reconnect it with the histories of struggle for equality and justice, which are in danger of getting obscured in the institutional adoption of the language of diversity. That entails connecting the language of diversity with that of decolonizing, of anti-racism, of anti-sexism, and with the language of other movements for social justice, if diversity is to hold out any promise for cross-cultural witnessing. A similar argument was oﬀered by bell hooks, who, speaking in the context of cultural appropriation and cross-cultural contact, contended that:

Mutual recognition of racism, its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate, is the only standpoint that makes possible an encounter between races that is not based on denial and fantasy. For it is the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other. Often it is this reality that is most masked when representations of contact between white and non-white, white and black, appear in mass culture. (hooks (2014), p.28)

Applying this to the language and practices of diversity, I would argue for extending this line of reasoning to the mutual recognition of sexism and other systemically oppressive -isms, as well. Sara Ahmed is emphatically not, it should be noted, against the circulation of the language of diversity within institutions; if meaningful progress is to be made it is important that this language is used and disseminated throughout the institution from the top all the way down, but:

[I]t needs to circulate in such a way that the term does not get cut oﬀ from histories of struggle which expose inequalities. For diversity practitioners, this means repeating the word ‘diversity’ in ways that allow others to hear the (often) concealed associations between the word ‘diversity’ and other words that are marked through the struggle against the reproduction of social and material inequalities, such as ‘equality’ and ‘justice’. In other words, diversity work is not only about accumulating the value of diversity, as a form of social

49 currency, but also re-attaching the word to the other words that embody the histories of struggle against social inequalities. (Ahmed (2007), p.254)

Ahmed’s examination of the language of diversity also illuminates concerns about tokenism that are prevalent within the museum world. Tokenism, one could argue, is the result of the institutional appropriation of diversity, meant to accrue social capital and safeguard the institution against charges of racism, sexism, and other -isms. The vacuous notion of diversity this leads to, is the result of diversity without a commitment to inclusion and equality. The difference between tokenism and (actual, demonstrated/performed) inclusive diversity is thus significantly also a question of intention. Tokenism is what happens, for example, when the museum hires diverse staff but does not actually hire them into positions of real power, or when it exhibits diverse artists only to play up their Otherness, allowing them to speak only to their experiences as ‘Other’. As the outward, surface-level result of an institution committed to diversity replete with its full social justice connotations, and connected to histories of inequality and oppression, and one employing diversity as a marketing strategy and a shield can appear the same on a cursory look,12 it is important for any institution committed to a strategy of diversity to constantly be reflecting on its motives and actions, to critically engage with their diversity practices and the theory driving it. It is similarly important to listen and be open to outside criticism from those systemically affected by these practices, and those that have experience with them professionally or personally. It is only then that diversity practices “can be offered as a narrative of repair, as what allows us to “recover” from racism by recovering the very signs of injury,” by bumping into the ‘brick wall’ through doing the work of diversity (Ahmed (2012), p.17). “[W]e need to keep asking what we are doing with diversity. If diversity is to remain a question, it is not one that can be solved” (Ahmed (2012), Ibid.). Ahmed’s analysis of diversity has interesting bearings on the misconception of diversity we highlighted in chapter1 and 4.1: the idea that striving for diversity pledges one to include harmful and oppressive voices as well. This misunderstanding—which represents a perversion and cooptation of the very spirit and intent of the concept—underlines the risks of a hollowed-out, commodified notion of diversity, of diversity as a mere boardroom buzzword. It is only when diversity is divorced from its social justice core, when it is disconnected from histories of oppression and inequity, as Sara Ahmed has it, that a conception of diversity as committed to (also) platforming harmful, hegemonic, oppressive voices can take root. The concept of diversity, based on the work of Sara Ahmed, that we outlined in the preceding paragraphs, as I see it, entails that a commitment to diversity does not commit one to offering a platform to harmful voices—in fact, these commitments are shown to be incompatible.

12 To those, at least, not themselves threatened by the eﬀects of marginalization. Sara Ahmed talks about “the brick wall” in this context, “as that which keeps its place even when an oﬃcial commitment to diversity has been given. Only the practical labor of “coming up against” the institution allows this wall to become apparent. To those who do not come up against it, the wall does not appear—the institution is lived and experienced as being open, committed, and diverse” (Ahmed (2012), p.174).

50 First off, platforming these voices means legitimizing and amplifying their discourse, with all of its oppressive trappings. Regardless of one’s stance on ‘tolerating’ oppressive and hateful speech and ideas, we ought to be careful not to conflate the toleration of such speech with amplifying and normalizing it.13 Giving harmful speech a platform falls firmly into the latter category. Provid- ing a platform to someone is always a political act. It does not entail that one supports the views that person or group espouses, of course, but it does signal that one accepts these views as being within the purview of reasonable discourse; that they deserve to be listened to and taken seriously, however much one might disagree with them. Platforming harmful speech thus contributes to the normalizing and mainstreaming of it—sending a message that “we believe these to be acceptable ideas worth engaging with”—while simultaneously amplifying it by providing yet another platform and audience to disseminate its toxic and damaging ideas.14 Secondly (and relatedly), these voices perpetuate and reproduce hegemonic oppression: they represent the perpetration of the histories of oppression and inequality the institution should be committed to challenging instead. Though extremist voices (often successfully) perpetuate the idea that they are not represented, and contra public opinion, white supremacist, racist, misogynist, het- eropatriarchal, fatphobic, classist, and ableist (a.o.) voices and ideas are baked into the very foundation of our societies and their institutions, 15 (White) Dutch society, for example, has long cultivated an image of itself as an exemplary model of ‘tolerance,’ despite evidence to the contrary being omnipresent, as Gloria Wekker beautifully addresses in her book White Innocence. She dedi- cates her book to an exploration of this specific paradox she perceives as being at the heart of Dutch society:

[T]he passion, forcefulness, and even aggression that race, in its intersections with gender, sexuality, and class, elicits among the white population, while at the same time the reactions of denial, disavowal, and elusiveness reign supreme. I am intrigued by the way that race pops up in unexpected places and moments, literally as the return of the repressed, while a dominant discourse stubbornly maintains that the Netherlands is and has always been color-blind and antiracist, a place of extraordinary hospitality and tolerance toward the racialized/ethicized other, whether this quintessential other is perceived as black in some eras or Muslim in others. One of the key sites where

13 Whatever one’s view on tolerance within democratic society may be, it does not necessarily translate one-to-one into the same view on tolerance within the institution. One might, for example, think that harmful speech should be tolerated within society at large, while still adopting the perspective that one’s institution should not provide a platform to such voices. 14 Interestingly, Matthes employs feminist philosophers’ work on epistemic injustice and harmful/dominant speech to explain the harmful consequences of cultural appropriation. He argues that those harms can be entirely accounted for within the framework these philosophers develop, in terms of credibility excesses and deﬁcits (Matthes (2016), p.346- 354). This is a tantalizing connection between cultural appropriation and harmful speech, but one we sadly do not have the space to explore here. 15 See the popular right-wing discourse about the marginalization of white men, for example.

51 this paradox is operative, I submit, is the white Dutch sense of self [...]. (Wekker (2016), p.1)

Systemic oppression and harmful speech, then, will not be checked by public opinion or rational argument (pace rationalist liberal theorists): public opinion is what props it up and perpetuates it. Any rational argument challenging it is suppressed, ridiculed, or simply ignored. The dominant groups do not see themselves as dominant or oppressive, and as such do not perceive there to be a problem concerning oppression, diversity, and related issues, because they are dominant and thus not subject to that oppression: they themselves constitute the hegemony, they themselves are threatening the security of marginalized groups, perpetrating oppression that is invisible to them, wilfully or not. Lastly, the type of harmful voices we are addressing here are predicated upon the silencing and erasure of exactly those marginalized voices diversity is meant to empower. Platforming them thus runs directly counter to the aims of diversity, understood in its full meaning, as dedicated to equity and social justice. One cannot, in this sense, have one’s cake and eat it too: one cannot hope to foster an environment safe for, and committed to the inclusion and promul- gation of systemically marginalized narratives and voices, while simultaneously opening that same environment to precisely those who seek to perpetuate this marginalization. This argument bears a similarity to one that we encountered in section 4.1.1, in response to Mouffe’s agonistics: a system based on the assumption of conflictual consensus can only work as long as all participating parties are committed to upholding the system itself and each other’s participation in it. A party whose views and beliefs are predicated upon the silencing and erasure of the Other will cause such a system to disintegrate. To conclude, opening the museum up to harmful voices, paradoxical though it may seem, precludes it from a commitment to diversity, from performing any sort of counter-hegemonic function, and from being an agent of social change. The language of diversity, as Ahmed has shown, cannot be divested from histories of oppression and inequity if it is to effect real change. I propose combining and applying the theories on diversity and cross-cultural witnessing discussed above to examine what shape museum practices surrounding diversity should take. Though the framework of cross-cultural witnessing provides us with some tools to evaluate the institution’s commitment to diversity, we see now how it, by itself, might not be sufficient: through the cooptation and commodification of the language of diversity, institutions, to the casual observer, can seem open, diverse, and inclusive spaces, because the systemic inequality still present gets obscured in the process of commodification. This represents a practical problem with the application of cross-cultural witnessing as an evaluative framework, and not, I believe, with the theoretical framework. The cultural representation resulting from a public-relations driven commitment to diversity fails to meet the stipulations of cross-cultural witnessing quite decidedly: the problem here is that, to some, it might be hard to pierce the facade and perceive what sort of commitment is actually being offered. Addi- tional evaluative criteria seem to be required (or, in any case, beneficial). In the next section I aim to unite the theory on diversity (as indivisibly connected

52 with histories of inequality and oppression, and struggles for social justice) and cross-cultural witnessing, and place them under the umbrella of a concept of cultural sovereignty. It is my hope that the resulting theory can serve as a more accurate, more helpful evaluative framework, and as a practical guideline for the museum to implement strategies of diversity. Moreover, it will point to an alternative way for the museum to consider art and other cultural expressions. Such an alternative is sorely needed, as the current dominant logic of late capitalism and its concomitant view of art as private property, I shall argue, is incompatible with diversifying the museum.16

4.2 Sovereignty over Culture

Working in a contemporary art museum in a late-capitalist society poses quite some significant challenges, if one aims to work towards diversifying and decolonizing the institution, or transforming it into a more radical, counter-hegemonic space. The late capitalist logic driving the categorization of works of art as private property and the concomitant commodification of art, cultural exploitation, and the appropriation of the diversity discourse seriously complicates such work, compounding the usual institutional barriers that are in place. I want to examine some examples of good practices in the contemporary art museum that challenge this logic, and this system, in order to see what is done right, what is reproducible in them, and what we can learn from these practices in the context of our framework. The first example concerns collection practices. The famous Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid recently envisioned a different way of collecting art from differing regions or cultures: when they were offered the archive of the Chilean activist artist group Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA)—the group was not confident that a Chilean institution could preserve it—the museum “paid two researchers to catalog the archive and worked to ensure that an institution in Chile would house it; in return, the museum received an exhibition copy of this archive” (Bishop (2013), p.44). This policy represents one promising alternative way of conceiving collection practices and the ownership of cultural artefacts; one that is cognizant of cultural exploitation, and attempts to avoid it. The original collection stays embedded in its local political and cultural context, thus respecting the cultural significance of the artworks and the interests of the Chilean people both, while still allowing the Reina Sofía to educate its audiences on the art, culture, and politics of a region and culture different from their own, displaying a commitment to ethical cross-cultural witnessing. While the work is still privately owned by a European museum, it is also still culturally ‘owned’ (in the sense of cultural property) by the originating culture. The new collection policy is part of a movement to reconceive the museum as an ‘archive of the commons,’ with a collection that should be available to everyone because “culture is not a question of national property, but a universal resource” (Bishop (2013), p.43), and based on an assumption of (intellectual) equality between the institution and its audiences. It is buttressed by an educational policy

16 In the full radical sense of ‘diversifying’, as we have come to understand that term above.

53 grounded in the belief that “representation of the other is not enough,” and that “new forms of mediation and solidarity between the intellectual culture of the Reina Sofía and social movements” must be developed (Bishop (2013), p.44). The work of CADA lends itself to the practice of obtaining and displaying a copy of an artwork particularly well, because it was mostly performance- based, rooted in political actions and interventions, and blurs the line between documentation and the work of art.17 Different collection practices will have to be conceived for other types of art; one could think, for example, of the sharing of collections between museums, replacing the accumulation of works of art by a single museum, and moving away from art as something to be privately owned and hoarded. The museum confederation L’Internationale, to which not a few of the museums we (will) discuss in this thesis belong, and which aims to “build a sustainable constellation of European museums,” focused on fostering “new forms of transnational access – both physical and digital – as well as intercultural dialogue on society and visual art,” presents an instructive example of how museums can profitably collaborate more closely on the level of the organization “of exhibitions, symposia, publications, education programmes and staff exchanges,” and of what an alternative approach to the museal ownership of art might look like.18 The second example is that of the Newark Museum, and concerns both exhibition and hiring practices. The Newark museum has been at the forefront of progressive exhibition policies. For example, it recently was one of the first museums to rehang their collection of Indigenous American art, placing the works at the front of the American art wing, putting contemporary and historical works in dialogue with one another, and with non-Indigenous artworks. Yet its work force, at the mid- and high level positions, remains predominately white, and as such does not reflect the cultural or ethnic make-up of its potential audiences, the city of Newark, or its collection. However, the museum recently received a grant from the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative (DAMLI). DAMLI funds sustainable programs aimed towards diversifying management and curatorial positions, so that the institutional make-up of museums might better reflect the demographics of the communities they serve. The Newark Museum’s DAMLI project encompasses a long-term mentorship program for six sophomore students in the art field, consisting of a fully paid internship. I recently had the opportunity to interview Natasha Baruah, the manager of the Newark Museum’s DAMLI project, about her experiences implementing this program and doing diversity work. She con- firmed that diversity discourse is gathering momentum in the museum world, and has witnessed more and more institutions and their staff recognizing that the homogeneity of museum staff represents a problem. Nevertheless, she simultaneously perceives that there are still real barriers in place complicating

17 In keeping with its vision of itself as an archive of the commons, the Reina Sofía is now “attempting to legally recategorize works of art as ‘documentation’. This recategorization increases accessibility to works of art—for example, the public can go to the library and handle them, alongside publications, ephemera, photographs of works of art, correspon- dence, prints, and other textual materials” (Bishop (2013), p.44). 18 Citations are taken from the “About” section of the website of L’Internationale: http: //www.internationaleonline.org/about (accessed on 21-08-2018).

54 diversity work. For one, the institution of the museum is fundamentally an instrument of dominant culture, rooted in a principle of exclusion and functioning according to dominant culture parameters; there is thus an inherent resistance to the work of diversity baked into the institution. Second, the implementation of certain diversity programs paradoxically causes some people to think there is no problem (or no longer a problem) concerning diversity in the museum. As an example, the Newark Museum is one of the many institutions to recently implement a diversity committee, tasked with researching and implementing diversity policies.19 Irrespective of the efficacy of this committee, its mere existence caused some people to become more resistant to the idea that a lot more work has to be done: there is a committee in place, so surely the problem is being addressed already! Baruah also noted encountering other ancient objections to diversity work: the assumption that diversity leads to a broadening or loosening of the parameters of excellence, for one, based on the premise that a more diverse staff or collection somehow constitutes hiring less than excellent candidates, or acquiring less than excellent work. Baruah identified one of the goals and promises of diversity work to be the changing of the parameters of the institution, and emphasized the importance of connecting the diversification of staff with the diversification of audiences, exhibitions, and collections, and of connecting the language of diversity with the language of equity—diversity disconnected from equity, or in the words of Sara Ahmed, disconnected from histories of oppression and struggles for justice, is meaningless (Baruah (2 August, 2018)). The final case I want to bring up is that of the Van Abbemuseum in Eind- hoven, and mainly concerns curatorial practices. The Van Abbemuseum represents a good example of a museum that has come to terms with its fundamental political nature, to such an extent that it consciously positions itself as “a par- tisan historical narrator” (Bishop (2013), p.35). Indeed, its director, Charles Esche, argues that taking a position is a core task of the contemporary art museum, in order to counter relativism, which “is the dominant narrative of the market, where everything is equalized by exchange value” (Bishop (2013), p.33). The museum, in other words, aims to resist late capitalist logic in its curatorial practices, and explicitly positions itself in opposition to this logic, searching for alternative ways of operating. The Van Abbemuseum’s curatorial practices are structured around this idea, as well as ideas and concerns around the emancipatory drive of modern- and some strands of contemporary art, “cultural internationalism and the need for planetary thinking” (entailing cross-cultural understanding and solidarity), and the social value of the telling of marginalized and suppressed histories in order to imagine other possible futures (Bishop (2013), p.33-35). The Van Abbe’s set of curatorial practices thus position the museum as a political institution with counter-hegemonic aspirations, determined to center marginalized voices—not so that dominant culture can gawk at the Other, but from a position motivated by social justice and the value of cross-cultural witnessing and planetary solidarity. Each of these examples highlight different salient features of practices that

19 A diversity committee that is itself, unfortunately and ironically, not very diverse.

55 offer an alternative to the dominant late capitalist logic and its concomitant culturally exploitative tendencies. Perhaps most importantly, they illustrate that such alternative practices are not only possible but can be highly successful, and that they can be conceived and implemented in contemporary art museums with widely dissimilar budgets, audience sizes, and missions. Further, these examples have illustrated how the museum is one of the principle sites where cultural property is created and given meaning. Indeed, museums and their collections “have been a primary reference point for the establishment of international definitions of cultural property” (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.19). The idea that museums are the natural stewards and owners of cultural property is being increasingly challenged in the literature, however. Inherent to the notion of cultural property, and the related notion of (intangible) cultural heritage—and counter to the way cultural property is enshrined in law, as we have seen—is the idea that cultures and their members ‘own’ their cultural expressions in some way, however hard to define that definition of ownership might be—one might call it ‘cognitive ownership,’ a term that has some currency in archaeology and heritage studies. It is precisely this aspect of cultural property that gives the concept its value in the context of our project, and it is this aspect also, I maintain, that is at the center, explicitly or not, of many of the alternative museum practices and museum theory that we have encountered. Cultural property, as it stands, is not sufficient as an alternative to private property, that dominant capitalist mode of conceiving property and ownership. In 2.2, we discussed how the concept is still rooted in Western-centric thought on property and what it means to own something, and how the authority on cultural property within international law has come to lie with nation-states, and we have hinted at the difficulties for marginalized groups within and outside of the nation-state in seeking justice regarding their cultural property. Yet, as I hope to have motivated throughout this thesis, we stand in need of such an alternative, if we are to resist cultural exploitative practices, make good on the museum’s promise of cross-cultural witnessing, and strive for equity and justice in the museum world. We need to call for a notion of cultural property that is inextricably linked to social justice, that provides a way of thinking about cultural expressions that acknowledges and respects cultures’ rights and authority over their own cultural expressions, yet accounts for the necessity of cross-cultural witnessing and diversity, and decenters preservation as the main mode of managing cultural artefacts in favor of a mode of ‘care’. In short, we need to call for a notion of cultural property that revolves around a notion of cultural sovereignty. Sovereignty is a concept prevalent throughout the literature of political theory and philosophy, legal theory, and Indigenous studies, often carrying (subtly) different meanings from subject to subject (or even from paper to paper), oft left implicit. The particular notion of cultural sovereignty I intend to out- line is inspired by concepts of sovereignty developed within Indigenous studies. In the period following the second World War (but especially since the late nineties), the concept of sovereignty has become increasingly popular among Indigenous scholars in North America, as “a specific discursive response to liv- ing under conditions of settler colonialism” (Sturm (2017), p.340). Indigenous

56 scholars have changed and added to the concept in interesting and important ways, transforming the (rather antiquated and stale) Western concept dealing with the rights and obligations of nation-states vis-à-vis their citizens (and vice versa). Joanne Barker, a scholar of Indigenous studies, has edited an excellent collection of essays on Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty, titled Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination.20 Her own opening essay chronicles the history and evolu- tion of the concept from its early European roots in Christian theology to its contemporary Indigenous formulations:

[S]overeignty emerged not as a new but as a particularly valued term within indigenous discourses to signify a multiplicity of legal and social rights to political, economic, and cultural self-determination. It was a term around which social movements formed and political agendas for decolonization and social justice were articulated. It has come to mark the complexities of global indigenous efforts to reverse ongoing experiences of colonialism as well as to signify local efforts at the reclamation of specific territories, resources, governments, and cultural knowledge and practices. (Barker (2005a), p.1)

These efforts ‘to reverse ongoing experiences of colonialism’ and ‘reclaim specific cultural knowledge and practices’ resonate with the ongoing experiences of marginalization and oppression and the issue of reclaiming cultural knowledge and practices that we have identified in this thesis. Hence, sovereignty, being central to decolonial and counterhegemonic efforts and strategies, suggests itself quite naturally as a promising candidate to serve as the foundation of the framework we have been calling for. Barker shows that the concept is by no means unambiguous: the meanings of sovereignty are highly localized and context-specific:

Sovereignty is historically contingent. What it has meant and what it currently means belong to the political subjects who have deployed and are deploying it to do the work of deﬁning their relationships with one another, their political agendas, and their strategies for decolonization and social justice. Therefore to understand how it matters and for whom, sovereignty must be situated within the historical and cultural relationships in which it is articulated. (Barker (2005a), p.26)

20 Barker (2005b). For an informative overview of work done on the concept of sovereignty within Indigenous studies, see also Sturm (2017). Sturm additionally, and convincingly, argues that this work on sovereignty is often neglected within other academic disciplines (Sturm singles out anthropology, but I believe this holds for other disciplines as well), much to their own detriment. A lot of interesting work being done on sovereignty within Indigenous studies takes the approach of bringing Indigenous scholarship to bear on Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics (e.g. Foucault (1990) and Foucault (2004)) and Giorgo Agamben’s work on state sovereignty (e.g. Agamben (1998) and Agamben (2005)): worthwile examples include Rifkin (2009), Morgensen (2011), Ziarek (2008), and Simpson (2014). Regretfully I cannot pursue these connections here, but I believe they are very much worth investigating.

57 The context-specificity and somewhat protean nature of sovereignty suits our project quite well: we actually desire a concept that gets a precise interpretation according to the social, cultural and historical specificity of the relationships and interactions it is brought to bear on. Barker also notes the resistance to the concept among Indigenous scholars, due to its problematic origin in colonial culture,21 and its perceived incom- patibility with and displacement of Indigenous concepts and epistemologies. “Sovereignty carries the horrible stench of colonialism. It is incomplete, inaccurate, and troubled” (Barker (2005a), p.26). But, she concludes, “it has also been rearticulated to mean altogether different things by indigenous peoples. In its link to concepts of self-determination and self-government, it insists on the recognition of inherent rights to the respect for political affiliations that are historical and located and for the unique cultural identities that continue to find meaning in those histories and relations” (Idem.). Indigenous notions of sovereignty are congruent to the concepts of diversity and cross-cultural witnessing developed above. With their roots in strategies for decolonization and social justice, insisting on self-determination and autonomy (inflecting those concepts, contaminated as they are by their particular histories, with a fresh radical, counterhegemonic spirit, and linking them with cultural identity) they are, I believe, particularly well-suited to serve as the inspiration for a concept that aims to unite a conception of cultural expressions that acknowledges and respects cultures’ rights and authority over their own cultural expressions, accounts for the necessity of cross-cultural witnessing and diversity, and is motivated by a striving for social justice. Having laid out the significance and relevance of sovereignty for our project, it is time to move on to the formulation of our own concept, that of ‘cultural sovereignty.’ Sovereignty, at its core, concerns the (human) right to self-determination. It centers the well-being of communities, premised as it is on the idea that a community itself will best be able to manage its resources, make those decisions that affect the community, and look out for its own and its members’ best interests. Cultural sovereignty, then, concerns the cultural well-being of a community. It departs from the idea that cultural communities ‘own’ their culture and its expressions—they might not own it in any way recognized by law or property theory, but they own it nevertheless, in the sense that they are inherently and inextricably connected to their culture, and that they are the main creators of it, shaping it and being shaped by it.22 It arrives at the idea that this ownership ought to be stable and safe. This sense of owning one’s culture might be characterized as similar to intellectual or cognitive ownership; I propose calling that sense ‘cultural ownership’ here. The idea of cultural ownership and the centering of community well-being lead to the idea that communities should have say about their culture and about what happens to its cultural expressions. Communities ought to have a

21 Barker details exactly how, for example, the concept was employed by colonial adminis- trations the world over to deny rights to Indigenous nations (see Barker (2005a), p.4-17). 22 Though a cultural community is, of course, not the sole influence on their culture, as we have established in our discussion of cultural appropriation, as cultures constantly influence and are influenced by other cultures in complex webs of interaction.

58 degree of self-determination and authority over their cultures, and these ought not be under threat. We shall deem an act of cultural interaction between a dominant and a non-dominant culture to be honoring cultural sovereignty (of the non-dominant cultural community in the interaction) if both these conditions are met—if the right to self-determination and authority of the cultural community is upheld, entailing that the well-being and the interests as defined by the community itself are honored, and are not threatened by the nature, particulars, and effects of the interaction. Put another way: a cross-cultural exchange honors cultural sovereignty if it does not exploit and does not risk exploiting the culture in question, so that their well-being remains intact—or is improved. In this way, cultural sovereignty meets the stipulations set out by cross-cultural witnessing: by placing the well-being of the cultural community one is interacting with front and center in the manner described above, one ensures an engagement with the culture for its own sake, and on and in its own terms. A commitment to honor cultural sovereignty in cross-cultural exchange is predicated upon a dedication to social justice, and the mutual recognition of, and reckoning with, systemic inequity and histories of oppression. As I see it, cultural sovereignty primarily serves as a guiding principle and evaluative criterion for cultural interactions and practices, and as useful language to discuss and evaluate these interactions. A practice or interaction, then, can maintain, break, contribute to, or put at risk cultural sovereignty for any culture. Diversifying the museum, on the level of the staff, the publics, and the collection all, fundamentally is concerned with cultural interactions across (sub)cultures; with building bridges, and fostering solidarity with and understanding of non-dominant cultures—with challenging the hegemony of dominant culture, in a phrase. This is where the idea of cultural sovereignty intersects with the movement to diversify the museum: it can serve as a tool and guiding principle in engaging in the sort of cross-cultural interactions necessary in order to diversify the museum. The concept of cultural sovereignty interrogates the museum’s motives for wanting to diversify, ensuring that these are in good faith. It questions the make-up of the collection and exhibitions in relation to the museum’s potential audiences. It probes the diversity of the work-force in context of the exhibitions proposed and the potential publics the museum could and should reach. It inquires after who is speaking, for whom, to whom, and how these interactions could be improved upon from a cross-cultural perspective. I propose amending the language of cultural property with the framework of cultural sovereignty. Cultural property has the potential to foreground the cultural significance of cultural expressions; that prime dimension of art and other cultural expressions that has been eroded in the current late capitalist system. By centering the framework of cultural sovereignty in the language of cultural property, that language can then be more profitably employed to resist the authority of the nation-state over cultural resources, and to counter the privileging of Western perspectives on property at the expense of all others. Since museums are chief creators of the meaning and significance of cultural property, they, by focusing on cultural sovereignty themselves, can help bring a notion of cultural property enriched with cultural sovereignty to the fore. The resultant change of perspective in how the cultural institution views and

59 manages art and other cultural expressions would constitute a healthier, more equitable and less exploitative way of engaging with culture, more true to the signiﬁcance and meaning of culture in and for our lives.

60 5| Conclusion

The system of late capitalism, which myself and, I presume, most if not all of my readers are involved and to some degree complicit in, makes it very easy to slip into (culturally) exploitative practices. It does so by endeavoring to make invisible the cultural and social significance of the cultural expressions we consume, through the process of commodification, so obscuring the harmful effects this consumption might have. The exploitative harms of the system make it important to strive for a deeper understanding of it, of both harmful and helpful practices within it, and to explore alternatives—not only charting alternative practices, but alternative concepts, frameworks, and rubrics to offer to the museum world in order to curate a more just world to live in. Diversifying our cultural institutions along the three axes I identified— publics, collection, and staff—is one such practice that is, I firmly believe, absolutely essential; not only for the sake of justice and equity, but also for the institution to stay relevant: to live up to its promise of having something of value to teach us, about ourselves, our world, and each other, and to not devolve into an organ regurgitating, reproducing, and reinforcing dominant culture. For the project of diversification to succeed, however, the museum needs to disen- tangle itself from late capitalism and the logic of increasing corporatization with its associated distorted perspective on art and culture. To avoid the pitfalls of cultural exploitation (market-driven ‘diversity’ being but one instance of that), the cultural significance of art needs to be foregrounded, and the well-being of cultural communities needs to be centered. Cultural expressions need to be seen again as exactly that: as being cultural, first and foremost. In light of this, I articulated a conception of cultural property revolving around cultural sovereignty, cognizant of the need for cross-cultural witnessing and solidarity, and of the absolute necessity for our cultural institutions to represent and reflect us all. It is my hope that this framework has something practical to offer the museum world: as a (relatively) simple and easy to grasp guiding principle and evaluative criterion in conducting (cross-)cultural interactions, assisting in making these less focused on and in service of the dominant perspective, and more equitable—more, in a word, just. In this way, the framework can also assist diversity work, which by its very nature revolves around cross-cultural interactions. Of course, cultural sovereignty is no panacea, and it is not offered here as such. It will have to stand together with the plethora of other concepts, frameworks, rubrics, practices, and efforts aimed towards decolonizing, diversifying, and radicalizing our world, generally, and the museum,

61 specifically, by exposing, resisting, and offering alternatives to the systemic inequity within our institutions. More work developing this area of research is called for, as the concept of cultural sovereignty and its intersections and interactions with other concepts (e.g. cultural property, cultural appropriation, etcetera), and its implications for the treatment of cultural expressions in- and outside of the cultural institution, needs to be further theorized and fleshed out. I hope to pursue this direction in later research. Another interesting avenue for future research would be to try and develop a variant of cultural sovereignty that covers cultural artefacts. This avenue would build upon Wayne Modest’s mode of ‘care’ for objects as an alternative to the dominant mode of preservation. One could perhaps see ‘care for objects’ as functioning relevantly analogous to ‘well-being for communities,’ with a notion of a ‘culturally sovereign’ artefact, as it were, centering the importance of culturally relevant care for that object (which then connects it, again, with the cultural communities the object holds cultural significance for). This conception of cultural sovereignty could potentially help safeguard cultural artefacts from being used and managed in a culturally exploitative manner— resulting, indirectly, in preserving the cultural sovereignty of the source communities of the objects. As an additional outcome of this thesis, I hope to have made clear the need for a nuanced theoretical framework of cultural appropriation. The discourse around this concept, both popular and academic, is hindered by a lack of clarity about the multifarious forms cultural appropriation can take and the complex ways in which it operates, resulting in debates characterized by the parties talking past each other. The vagueness of the concept is perhaps partly due to widespread essentialist notions of culture, misrepresenting cultural dynamics and the fundamental interconnectedness of cultures. I have tried to address the spectre of cultural essentialism, and have offered a tentative solution in the form of an aggregate approach, combining and uniting different responses to the problem. Whether or not the reader will judge this solution to be adequate, I believe that addressing the issue of cultural exploitation is too important to let fall by the wayside. Scholars of culture ought to be attentive to cultural essentialist tendencies, and strive to eliminate them from their theorizing, but, in line with strategic essentialism, this cannot stand in the way of challenging culturally exploitative systems and practices. Cultures, by their nature, are always already in constant contact with each other, forever affecting and being affected by one another, perennially dynamic and in flux. No culture is a monolith. Cultural membership and identity are complex concepts, not always able to be precisely pinned down for any particular person. However, and importantly, none of this implies that we, as cultural agents, can take from one another carelessly, indiscriminately, callously. Differ- ential power dynamics and histories of oppression shape our cultural dynamics, and ought to be at the forefront both of our attempts at understanding cultural interactions, and of conducting said interactions. The absolute necessity of cross-cultural witnessing and solidarity is as clear as it has ever been in our increasingly globalized world. Museums and other cultural institutions have the potential to play a key part in fostering this, but they still have a long way to

62 go in order to live up to their potential. Much of the future of the museum as a counter-hegemonic instrument depends on the mutual recognition of the different systems of oppression at work in our cultures and societies. The potential benefits are substantial. Museums can have the power to be a source of community organizing, when they open their large glass revolving doors to diverse audiences whose experiences are reflected in the work of that institution. As an institution dedicated to the project of education that has fulfilled varies hegemonic roles throughout its history—from its start as a bourgeois instrument reproducing dominant culture to the populist temple of leisure Bishop and Krauss describe—the museum has displayed the capacity to transform and the ability to question itself. Through embracing this perspective of critical self-reflection, it can challenge its own hegemonic tendencies, and, in that way, by example, it can transform into a space dedicated to interrogating hegemony in its multifarious forms, committed to contributing to cross-cultural understanding and solidarity, and devoted to disseminating the virtues of cultural sovereignty. This potential, this promise of the museum, however, is contingent on it transcending the dominant logic of late capitalism; a formidable challenge, as my readers will realize. I can provide no sure or easy pathways to triumph here, but we might take some small comfort in the examples of museum practices discussed in 4.2, which show that, however laborious, slow, and incremental it might be, progress can still be made, and alternative models can be found.

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