Is the Art World More Corrupt Than Ever?

The cognitive dissonance of displaying political art became clear to longtime critic Rachel Spence in 2006. She was visiting Palazzo Grassi, the Venice outpost of the Pinault Collection, when she saw, hanging paradoxically in the private museum of a French billionaire, an edition of Barbara Kruger’s 1987 “I shop therefore I am” artwork. The bleak visual left her stunned by the capability that context has to sap the work’s life force as a political proclamation, rendering it an oxymoronic caricature of anticapitalist critique.

This introductory anecdote lays the groundwork for the tone of an ambitious new publication by Spence, who argues that in the 21st century, art’s relationship to capital, climate, and politics is more important and insidious than ever before — and the state of culture more dire. The confluence of visual art, money, and ethics is an unwieldy topic, but Spence takes it on in Battle for the Museum: Cultural Institutions in Crisis. Its nearly 200 pages are tightly packed with the major art-world controversies from the last decade or so. Offering a useful overview for those joining the art world who don’t know a lot and want to know more, Spence succinctly explicates the power struggles that brought us to this point.

Spence begins by introducing readers to “Planet Art,” her moniker for the “capricious, contradictory ecosystem” of the art world. She posits that the primary concern and function of contemporary art — auction houses, galleries, museums, fairs — is money-making, with its greatest benefits yielded for mega-wealthy buyers at the expense of workers. In this ecosystem, she explains, affluent bad actors remedy their public reputations by investing in treasured institutions, not to mention evading taxes with their art purchases. In a chapter titled “Decolonise This Philanthropy” (cheekily titled in the vein of activist organization Decolonize This Place, which has led demonstrations at museums across New York), Spence leads with an account of monthslong protests in 2018 at the Whitney Museum against its former Vice Chairman and board member Warren Kanders, CEO of munitions manufacturer Safariland. Hyperallergic‘s reporting is heavily cited (full disclosure: including an initial report by me), setting the stage for Spence to navigate the embattled landscape of museum funding. She condemns dubious financing from other maligned trustees and donors like Leon Black and the Sackler family, as well as the spate of European and American museums building outposts in the United Arab Emirates, enticed by big payouts while ignoring human rights abuses. “There’s nothing intrinsically unethical about selling art,” she writes. “But there is something wrong with a system in which the trade and display of art are inextricable from the exploitation of people and the natural world because money has more clout than morals.”

Spence is patently incensed by the state of art under capitalism, and this righteous indignation seeps into her prose. She finds her voice somewhere between scholar and critic. As the book continues, she acknowledges her own shift away from the “Planet Art” term, explaining that the process of writing Battle for the Museum reminded her that “the sector is not a hermetic bubble sealed off from its environment.” Though the book is well-researched and thorough in its overview of ethics and activism in art, it veers from rigid nonfiction, ultimately deeply opinionated and editorialized. Over its course, Spence argues for degrowth and a razing of this capital-forward landscape to build a re-envisioned ecosystem benefitting the majority rather than an elite minority of buyers, trustees, and executives. She proposes new paths forward — for example, a shift toward performance and hyperfocus on local art scenes in lieu of international art fairs to lessen art’s impact on emissions. She recognizes her idealism at times but stands firm in her beliefs: “Just because abuse of power is ubiquitous, just because no system is without flaws, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth trying to improve what we can, when and where we can.” 

For the sake of scope, Spence narrows her attention to a brief, recent slice of art history, mostly focusing on controversies that have occurred within the last decade. Undergirding her arguments is her insistence that the art world is at an all-time low, more toxically reliant on capital than ever before. She acknowledges dissenters who might cry out that it has always been this way, citing the Medicis and other wealthy patrons across history, but says our current confluence of income inequality and climate catastrophe are particularly grievous; even the book jacket declares that “culture and power” are more related “now more than ever.”

However, Battle for the Museum left me unconvinced that this era is quantifiably worse than previous years; such generalizations lack nuance and blanket over the already-underknown history of grassroots art activism. I can, of course, agree that the past 10 years in the culture industry have been historic. The exploitation of workers is dire, and this recent spate of unionization at museums and protests against unscrupulous institutional funding points to a culture sector at an impasse, where the values of workers, artists, and leadership are at odds. As was the case in the 1960s and ’70s, too, when the working-class artists who launched organizations like the Art Workers’ Coalition and Black Emergency Cultural Coalition took museum leadership to task for their exploitation and exclusion of marginalized groups in the arts. These examples by no means undermine the tremendous leaps made in recent years, but buttress them. 

Spence is wrangling a lot of information and bounds full-speed ahead, rapidly mentioning almost every controversy, small and large, addressed by contemporary artist-activists. But the writer fares best when elaborating on crucial historical moments that led the arts ecosystem to this exacerbated crisis point. She breaks down, for instance, the shift of UK public museums being “covertly privatized” (encouraged by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and solidified by the ’90s under Tony Blair). This astute section critiques the newfound commodification of museums as trendy “destinations” that focus as much on a well-stocked gift shop as their collections. She lucidly traces this shift to oil sponsorship, like BP at the British Museum and Shell at the National Gallery, and resulting in protests among the sector’s climate activists, who have taken to massive occupations of their lobbies in recent years.  

Spence believes that art can “help save the world.” Whether or not you agree, it is critical and necessary to our lives — activists know it, politicians know it, investors know it. Its connectivity to capitalism and government is unquestionable, and ignoring this fact only exacerbates the art world’s corrosion. Battle for the Museum asks us to consider what we’re willing to sacrifice to save it.

Battle for the Museum: Cultural Institutions in Crisis (2024) by Rachel Spence is published by Hurst Publishers and is available online and through independent booksellers.