I’d like you to join me in an exercise. Let’s sit in a circle. Close your eyes. Think of your roots: your grandparents, maybe your peers. Breathe. Breeeeathe. Now think of your roots again. Do they need pulling out?
Perhaps such decentring exercises are not quite your thing. Here’s an alternative one, then. Imagine a room full of contemporary art curators joining in that breathing and root-pulling exercise as part of what museum HR departments call “continuing professional development”. Now imagine that these curators believe such exercises, if not all of their work, are “radical”.
If you can imagine this, dear reader, you should next picture me in fits of despair at Contemporary Art Society’s conference “On Radicalism” as I witnessed the shameful degradation of all that was once valuable in contemporary art, museums, and curating. This latest exercise in indoctrination was held on International Workers’ Day and aimed to coordinate the institutional art cadres’ response to society’s most pressing political problems. Sadly, it more resembled a kindergarten than a socialist rally, let alone a meeting of the nation’s intellectual leaders.
That paradox that contemporary art institutions, many of which receive state funding, nonetheless pose as radical, disruptive agents is not new. It is shocking, however, how ingrained the notion of radicalism has become in the administration of cultural institutions and how deformed, if not deranged, it has become. Even more shameful is how little today’s cultural activism has to do with art.
Speaking about the priorities of her member institutions, the head of the Museums Association Sharon Heal enumerated evergreen concerns like food poverty, populism, and Net Zero. These issues are already at the forefront of public institutional programmes. But between the lines, Haeal revealed an inward turn in museum practice. She boasted, for example, that her organisation provides resources for museum professionals struggling with climate anxiety. She undertook to support colleagues in accommodating audiences who may, gasp, have voted incorrectly in last week’s local elections. This received nods of appreciation in the room where everyone had nothing but contempt for the Reform voter.
Such is a radicalism of toolkits and frameworks in which the concerns of art and artists are set by HR protocols. This turn is not unexpected given the demographics of the conference attendees and, indeed, the sector. While male artists are more likely to find success than their female counterparts, women dominate the institutional sector. One could uncharitably suggest that the art museum is the contemporary manifestation of the longhouse where matriarchs set the rules. These principles? “Safe space”, “No Tories”, and #bekind.
Listening to the Tate Liverpool director Helen Legg describing her institution’s acquisition of the Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel’s installation The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge conjured an image of a seance. Calal is a member of the Maya-Kaqchikel ethnic group and, therefore, an exotic delicacy to a Western art curator interested in “decolonising” her museum collection. His work consists of “sacred” stones on which the artists’ community supposedly made offerings of fruit, a beguiling tradition which it is now the responsibility of Britain’s premier contemporary art museum to continue. Legg spoke exaltedly about the quasi-religious ceremony performed by the artist on the stones in which she had the honour of participating. She was overjoyed to have thus personally partaken in arcane Kaqchikel knowledge, despite not understanding a word or the language. She was proud that Tate radically altered its purchase protocols and directed special conservation resources to Calel’s rocks.
The atmosphere in the conference room was electric. I wondered if things got quite as exciting in 19th-century English village halls as they hosted the touring lectures of retired officers sharing their bewildering tales of the British Empire. I doubt that many attendees of “On Radicalism” could pronounce “Kaqchikel” after Legg’s presentation, let alone point to the people’s domicile on a map. But this is beside the point. Today’s brand of decolonisation, far removed from the radical idea that gave rise to it, is a self-deluding continuation of an imperialist tradition on which many museums were founded.
Whoever museum “radicals” once were, they have now submitted to an order that treats them as if they were children. It is staggering that this baby radicalism has convinced educated museum professionals that they hold the key to secret knowledge. That performing Kaqchikel rites for the populace is tantamount to revolution is a fantasy they produced themselves.
It may be unfair that I singled out this radicalising event. Indeed, I could have looked to many other corners of the art world for signs of regression. Since the Supreme Court ruled on the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act, for example, the UK’s arts institutions have thrown themselves into a frenzy familiar to any primary school teacher. One after another, cultural venues have declared their support for trans people, and many have suggested that they will break the law. The Thackray Museum in Leeds declared that their trans staff and visitors are “family”. An open letter which decried that cultural venues, who are “often based in listed buildings”, cannot comply has gathered over 1600 signatures from museum administrators, artists, and even the odd critic.
UK’s cultural institutions are in shameful denial that the social contract under which they operated in the past decades is now irreparably broken
The radical crown, however, goes to Margate’s Crab Museum whose viral social media post analogised the intricacies of human sexual dimorphism with the finesse previously only known from Jordan Peterson’s notorious explanation of dominance in lobsters. If Tate can learn from rotting fruit, we can all learn from crustaceans. Never mind that, as the journalist Helen Lewis pointed out, these creatures urinate out of their faces.
Urination has been a key concern for art since Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain and I, for one, look forward to a new form of fetishist piss art making its way into the galleries. It is not clear, however, how this art activist cause du jour will entice disaffected audiences back into the museums, let alone spur them into radical action.
The serious point is that the UK’s cultural institutions are in shameful denial that the social contract under which they operated in the past decades is now irreparably broken. That contract had elite liberal cadres begrudgingly telling the populace how to think. Today, the hoi polloi have no problem asserting their views with their feet, or indeed, at the ballot box. The institutions don’t like it. Yet, as if it were 2016 (the year of the Brexit vote and Trump’s first election), museum staffers still insist that it’s the people who have erred. Not once in the past ten years did they consider that it is them who turned the institutions into a childish farce.
The UK museum is now a cross between a tantrum-prone toddler protesting bedtime and a culture war soldier in denial that his side has been defeated. Bathrooms are only one of the many issues which these institutions believed they could hold under their control. Contemporary art was going to stop Brexit. Museums must avert the climate disaster. Artists will save Gaza. Without taking sides, a layman would easily understand that these issues are the subject of politics. Cultural institutions believed that they were the subject, if not the substance, of art.
Having interfered in politics for so long, British museums are now terrified of political interference from outside. The experiences of their US colleagues whose liberal initiatives are being decimated by Trump’s administration, indeed, should be a warning. The UK institutional art world’s retreat into infantile denial is, therefore, nothing short of bewildering. Have Britain’s radical museum thinkers not developed a diagnosis of the world changing around them? Where are the radical “Marxists” who conservative commentators such as the American activist Christopher Rufo believe run these institutions?
That today’s radicalism is such childish babble is even more bizarre because some of the most potent critiques of the institutional cadres have emerged in the past decade from this very faction’s dissidents. Perhaps radicals don’t know their own history and are thus doomed to their conformism and perverse conservatism. The conference’s convenor found inspiration in the oxymoronic proposal that early 20th-century artistic avant-gardes “collaborated with the state” to bring about change. Back in the 21st century, a report recently released by the cross-party think tank Demos and endorsed by parliamentarians alarmingly suggested that the “museum’s long-term purpose has become confused” and that “investment in curatorial expertise and foundational knowledge” has declined. Despite, if not because of the preponderance of PhDs among the conference’s attendees, this observation is hard to refute.
The Demos report went on to bemoan that museums have become “instruments for other policy goals”. Will the state now step in to rescue them? That seems unlikely. But it is even less likely that the current breed of radicals will because they would rather uproot the museum than tend to the art inside it. If “On Radicalism” held even a grain of radical hope, I missed it because I stormed out of the room before the breathing exercise’s end.
