As a Professor at UCLA, looking at a hundred applications to my area of the graduate program every year, I’ve been shocked that even with the rise of Trump and the election, and before that with the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the middle class and Occupy Wall Street, there has been very, very little work that engages with class or electoral politics in a direct or even an indirect way. If there are young artists out there doing this work, I imagine some of them would apply to my program [laughs]. I have come to understand institutional critique and a lot of other forms of cultural critique and even politics as an enactment of an ambivalent relationship to authority and institutions: we may attack institutions and those who take up authority in institutions, but usually without really stepping up ourselves. We attack the economic power held by the donor class, without really taking on that power as it finances our own field, much less the class power at work in the institution of artistic practice itself, where class diversity has been lacking in ways not unlike some museum boards.

I know very few artists with working-class backgrounds.

The book has its origins in an effort to get Steven Mnuchin off the board of MoCA in Los Angeles. It was motivated by my horror in finding Trump supporters on the boards of art institutions. These people have a fiduciary responsibility to defend the missions of their organizations and are supporting politicians who were very directly undermining those missions. But as the project developed, my focus shifted from Trump supporters to the broader systemic issues of plutocracy. I think that calling out Republicans is a lot easier for people in the art world, and for progressives on these boards and in these institutions, than looking at the systemic issues of plutocracy and philanthropy.

We started thinking specifically about districts in California with Republicans in Congress that had art schools or art communities. And in the run-up to the midterm elections, that energy was refocused on getting artists out to canvass for Democratic candidates in a couple of neighbouring districts.

In the context of art, matters are worse precisely because art is understood as creation, not work

Artistic labour became the laboratory for the neoliberal rationality that instrumentalises aesthetic ideas of creative genius and autonomy to promote self-sufficient, self-relying subjects. Under neoliberalism we don’t work to earn a living, rather we do what we love and love what we do. Work is no longer seen as a process through which we also secure our livelihood but as a psychological category of self-expression. Sergio Bologna calls this process a dissolving of the notion of labour (Bologna 2014). And this dissolution is importantly vested precisely in the founding pillars of Western art, where work is by definition invisible and beyond matters related to subsistence and supported by ideals of autonomy of art that define the art practice as something unrelated to economic processes.

I term this condition the paradox of art. Its central feature is the idea that art is not labour but an essentialised expression of individual creativity or an individual need for self-expression, which is why art and its results appear as something that is independent, or autonomous from the economy. Then what artists do is not work but creation, a capacity ascribed to deities (see, for example, Beech 2016). In other words, persistent cultural (mis)representations of artistic labour in the West are founded on a mystification of the artist’s labour and render it invisible

Perhaps, however, they could do so, if we leave the abstract world shaped by privileged Western philosophy, and begin to understand artists’ creative powers as labour that can and should be remunerated.

within marginalized communities this notion of urgency can be particularly challenging, as the time of the beacons of our communities is in constant demand.

But numerous articles recently have high-lighted this strain on marginalized professionals that become sole beacons of support to countless marginalized students or mentees

Yes, there’s a current moment of proliferation of Black art all over the place—at the Royal Ontario Museum, the AGO— but it doesn’t seem to me that institutions are also making sure that when this work is done that there is actually structural change and policy change within those institutions, to allow for our work to actually have longevity and to reside in some critical context. If there’s no writing as there would be for other kinds of exhibitions, and if there’s no conversation from folks in the field who come from these communities, I think we’re always going to end up with a void in the historical record of what happened, and the impact of what happened then gets lost

For her, her role as an art critic is to care for the work, while identifying ways that the work can be supported by true critique.AF: Exactly. It is about caring about the work, caring about interpreting it and its context, as a way to allow people to see the work’s possibilities, but also to allow people to understand the limitations of the work in the context of its presentation. What’s important for me is also making sure that as we write our opinions, we are really aware of the genealogies that have come before—the histories of the kinds of discussion about particular works and their [historical] contexts—so that we ourselves can push the conversations further. I feel that’s what’s missing sometimes: a deep care for the histories of the discourses that have brought the work to where it is now. LI: So, we’re not reinventing the wheel every generation—which is so painful. That’s something that has come up a lot lately… It feels right now like things are changing, but that there’s this disconnect between generations before, which [indicates] that there are ways that writing and art are produced in what is considered a void, without references to what’s come before.

However, we have not been able to sustain our own spaces; institutions and the stewards of contemporary art in this country continue to construct the spaces that then we have to contort ourselves to fit into. By creating our own spaces, we can address the diversity in our Blackness, to open up the possibilities to be seen and appreciated, but also to challenge one another. Conflict is okay—I believe we can find something new through the quarrels that we have with each other. I’m not sure new things can emerge without that friction, and it feels like we’ve been sidestepping that friction for years.

That’s part of our work as folks trying to find other ways to speak ourselves into being, to make ourselves not just visible. Visibility comes with its own challenges. So how do we actually write ourselves, act ourselves, create ourselves into being?

Without the critical engagement with the work, when the work doesn’t quite find its place in the archives, it seems to come and go. The rest of the art world doesn’t seem to understand that there’s a range of Black art production and curation in Canada, and tends to default [to] the one internationally known name. But it hit me as well that, in Canada, we don’t even know, as Black artists and cultural producers, who we all are. And so, there’s an erasure in this space called Canada that just continues to reproduce itself elsewhere, and this notion of producing a singularity around Blackness and who produces [it] continues to persist. Usually one person rises to the top and that person becomes the representative of who’s here.

Which is the more public event—the throng of people gathering at 42nd Street to watch a lighted apple drop, or the millions of people at home, each watching this congregation on TV? In other words, more and more, the home has become the site for the complex play of social meanings.

In short, the making of public art has become a profession, whose practitioners are in the business of beautifying, or enlivening, or entertaining the citizens of, modern American and European cities. In effect, public art’s mission has been reduced to making people feel good—about themselves and where they live.

And given the very real need for relief from, or challenge to, the loud monotony of the urban landscape, state and federal guidelines for “percent for art” programs were initiated; standards and criteria for selection and review drafted; and bureaucratic procedures codified. But this clarification of operations has ultimately led to a “minimum basic standard” mentality. Not unlike American housing reform in the late 19th century—which was not based on constructive legislation for a sound life, but on the absolute lowest standards of acceptability—the public art “machine” now often encourages mediocrity. To weave one’s way through its labyrinthine network of proposal submissions to appropriate agencies, filings and refilings of budget estimates, presentations to juries, and negotiations with government or corporate sponsors, requires a variety of skills that are frequently antithetical to the production of a potent work of art. If the “machine” itself can be put to use as a conduit, rather than as a molder of the art that emerges, then there is still the potential for transforming methodology and materials into positive energy. But more often the result of this process has been what Gordon Matta-Clark, James Wines, and others have referred to as “the turd in the plaza.”

Saboungi’s portrait is exemplary of ideological codes and indexes of the nahdah portrait

In one article, Saboungi elaborates on a previously published article about glossing photographs, offering instructions on a better process that he claims to have discovered. At the end of the article, the editor interjects: “We laud the attention of the expert photographer Mr. Jurji Effendi Saboungi for this generous advice. Following the procedure that he discovered made the photographs gleam. The glossing was completed in less than a half hour and its process was considerably simpler for a student to learn with less practice.”17Ibid., 685. The dialogue demonstrates that indigenous photography practitioners were not merely replicating Western photographic practices but innovating photographic technology and procedure. Saboungi’s contribution to the formation of a discourse on photography in the pages of the Arab world’s most popular journal, al-Muqtataf, highlights that, as was the case in India, native photographers were producers of technological knowledge, innovation, and practice essential to the craft, not just passive consumers of it.18

Once again, the press has dismissed a popular movement as carnival—this time not Occupy Wall Street, but the anti-Putin protests. On March 1, 2012, in a Financial Times article titled “Carnival spirit is not enough to change Russia,” Konstantin von Eggert wrote, “One cannot sustain [the movement] on carnival spirit alone.”1 A little over a week later, Reuters sought to close the debate with an article by Alissa de Carbonnel, in which she announced, “The carnival is over for Russia’s three-month-old protest movement against Vladimir Putin.”2 On the contrary, it was just the beginning of Russia’s carnival. Around the same time, Irina Sandomirskaja, professor of cultural studies at the Center for Baltic and East European Studies at Stockholm’s Södertörn University, wrote in an online article: “The world will be saved by the balagan (street theater playing farce).” In this carnivalesque paraphrase of the famous dictum by Dostoevsky, Lev Rubinstein, truly the brain and the tongue of Moscow’s recent political protests, and the one who currently occupies the position of “the Sun of Russian Poetry,” sums up the results of the political season that is swiftly moving to its end in the presidential election on March 4th.3

While it is not possible for me to suggest that carnivalesque laughter could be at play in Egypt

“Even though we wear dresses, we make ‘unfeminine’ movements. It’s a multilevel way of breaking with traditional feminine behavior,”

Curators, who have become central figures in cultural production within the art canon, have the power to decide which (and how) histories are told.

In order to imagine a decolonial curatorial practice, it is important to define the context and parameters from which decoloniality emerges. While decolonisation refers to the completed socio-historical process of independence from colonial powers, decoloniality is an ongoing ethico-political and epistemic project, which seeks to de-link from colonial structures that have persisted throughout modernity and which underpin Eurocentrism and systems of discrimination.

Viewed under this logic, the day the Art Gallery of New South Wales reaches an even gender representation in a collection hang will arguably mark a significant decolonial triumph – a step forward for the institution, its curators, artists and audiences.

focuses almost exclusively on work produced by women, artists of color, non-Euro-Americans, and/or queer artists

Why are mainstream curators perpetuating such bigotry? Have curators today become so arrogant that asking them to include more non-white and/or women artists is an affront to their egos? Do they view their curatorial thematic as so Biblical / air-tight / brilliant that it can’t allow for Other artists? Has the curator’s voice today become too god-like?

Blockbuster exhibitions are also subject to appalling levels of discrimination. The gender and race breakdowns of the Venice Biennale are a case in point. In the 2017 edition, entitled “Viva Arte Viva,” curated by Christine Macel, women artists comprised only 35% of the participants. European and North American artists dominated the 2017 edition, with 61% of participants coming from the two continents. The racial demographics of the show were particularly disheartening, especially given the widespread vocal activism of groups such as Black Lives Matter: a mere 5 of the 120 artists were African American—just one of whom (Senga Nengudi) was a woman. To my knowledge, not one critic has yet noted these gross disparities. In 2014, however, critics slammed the Whitney Biennial for its blatant racism and sexism, with protests in the galleries—by a group of artists calling themselves the “cliterati”—about the lack of women artists on display: of the 103 artists, just 37 were women. The Yams art collective withdrew their work from the Biennial in disgust at the show’s lack of black and female artists and its inclusion of the fictional African American artist Donelle Woolford. Despite this very public criticism of their 2014 Biennial, when the Whitney Museum of American Art opened its new location in New York in 2015 with an inaugural exhibition entitled America Is Hard to See, showcasing works in its permanent collection and spanning a period from the 20th century to the present, it was an astonishing 69% male and 77% white—which, in my opinion, amounts to serious curatorial malpractice.

auction-price differentials

If you don’t believe that the art world is sexist and racist, it’s time for you to come out from under your rock. Current statistics demonstrate that the fight for equality in the art world is far from over. Despite decades of postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and queer activism and theorizing, the art world continues to exclude Other artists—women, non-white and LGBTQ artists. This discrimination invades every aspect of the art world, from gallery representation, auction-price differentials, and press coverage to inclusion in permanent collections and solo exhibition programs.

How do we fight against such cognitive dissonance—or, dare I say, ignorance?

“Curatorial Activism” is a term I use to designate the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principle aim of ensuring that certain constituencies of artists are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art. It is a practice that commits itself to counter-hegemonic initiatives that give voice to those who have been historically silenced or omitted altogether—and, as such, focuses almost exclusively on work produced by women, artists of color, non-Euro-Americans, and/or queer artists. The thesis of my forthcoming book, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, takes as its operative assumption that the art system—its history, institutions, market, press, and so forth—is an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists.

What we need is more transparency, and more education: If we cannot help others to see the structural/systemic problems, then we can’t even begin to fix them. We need to make statistics more readily available, so that the empirical data cannot be dismissed or denied. In other words, how can we get mainstream (non-activist) curators to think about gender, race, and sexuality, to understand that these are persistent concerns that require action? How can we get them to recognize, accept and acknowledge that there is indeed a deep-seeded inequality that needs addressing? How can we elicit sympathy to the point of action?

In an art world that remains what Judith Wilson has called “one of the last bastions of white supremacy-by-exclusion,” most mainstream curators tend to reproduce a whitewashed art world, offering little more than lip service to the concept of racial inclusion.

It also insists that this white Western male viewpoint, which has been unconsciously accepted as the prevailing viewpoint, “may––and does––prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones.”

avoid this North/South separation of the African continent

Interestingly, Tate Modern’s former director Chris Dercon legitimized the fact by having started to buy art in geographic areas where the Western art market hadn’t arrived yet (such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia), as a consequence of the disproportion between the museum budget and the increase of market prices.[xxviii] Dercon was not dishonest with this statement, but he missed addressing the issue of Tate’s position. For a European museum, collecting art from almost all over the world could be interpreted as the maintenance of a colonialist attitude of plundering other cultures to enrich its own.

André Breton tells a story about a French poet who, when he went to sleep, put on his door a sign that read: “Please, be quiet—the poet is working.” This anecdote summarizes the traditional understanding of creative work: creative work is creative because it takes place beyond public control—and even beyond the conscious control of the author. This time of absence could last days, months, years—even a whole lifetime. Only at the end of this period of absence was the author expected to present a work (maybe found in his papers posthumously) that would then be accepted as creative precisely because it seemed to emerge out of nothingness.

artworks as specific material objects—as art bodies, so to speak—are perishable. But this cannot be said about them as publicly accessible, visible forms. If its material support decays and dissolves, the form of a particular artwork can be restored or copied and placed on a different material base.