Museums today are at the frontlines of a generational battle for accountability. In the wake of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, a wave of protests has swept through the art world in recent years, calling into question every aspect of institutions’ operations—from the work they buy, hold, and show to their lack of diversity and representation, their funding, governance, treatment of employees, and more.
This current maelstrom of issues is tackled in varying degrees by three new books published since April: Financial Times art writer Rachel Spence’s Battle for the Museum: Cultural Institutions in Crisis (Hurst & Co.); Tate director Maria Balshaw’s Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter (Tate publishing); and The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model (Lund Humphries), by the Turkish-born, London-based curator Fatoş Üstek. Each title offers a different perspective on how institutions can respond to some of the existential questions facing museums today.
Do Museums Have Ethical Values?
These three books make clear that, for the moment at least, the overriding answer to this question is no. Museums rarely lead in questions of ethics, succumbing instead to public pressure, usually after lengthy activist campaigns.
What currently prevails in many of our large institutions is “cognitive dissonance between the stated goals of the museum, the views and ideas of those artists it shows, an interested public keen to see positive social change and the means by which the museum is funded,” writes Balshaw, whose Gathering of Strangers, initially delivered as a series of lectures in Cambridge, provides an insight into the thinking at the top of one of the world’s most influential modern and contemporary art museums.
Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of the Tate.
She is disappointingly silent on some pressing ethical issues, most notably questions related to internal labor disputes, museum governance, and funding from problematic donors, focusing instead on how museums can widen the demographics of their visitors through targeted programming and how Tate can tell stories springing from its collection from multiple, “polyphonic” perspectives.
Spence pays closer attention to matters of ethical leadership, recounting the ousting of the Whitney Museum’s vice chair Warren Kanders in 2019 following a sustained campaign spearheaded by the activist group Decolonize This Place, which began after the online journal Hyperallergic revealed that gas canisters made by one of his companies had been used on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Initially, the museum resisted protestors’ calls for Kanders to go, but after an open letter to museum leadership signed by over 100 of the Whitney’s own employees was published, and artists began to withdraw their work from the Whitney Biennial, Kanders resigned.
“David won. Goliath crumpled,” says Spence in Battle for the Museum, a self-described cri de coeur and call for a more equal, less exploitative art world. Throughout the book, she advocates for collective organizing as a tool of “radical transformation.”
“In the story of [Kanders’s] demise, we see how museum workers, if they unite, are a significant catalyst for change,” she adds.
While Balshaw is aware of the disconnect between the values museums publicly espouse and their actions, the “cognitive dissonance” she describes persists in the pages of her book. She writes that Tate needs to create “a space premised on an ethics of care,” yet she fails to mention the dismissal, during the pandemic lockdowns, of hundreds of workers employed by Tate Enterprises, the museum’s commercial arm which runs its retail, events, catering and consultancy services and is a wholly owned subsidiary of the gallery.
Activists took over the lobby at the Whitney Museum of American Art to protest and demand the removal of the museums board of directors Vice Chairman Warren B. Kanders. Kanders is the CEO of Safariland, a corporation that manufactures the tear gas used against migrant families presently at the U.S.-Mexico border. Photo: Erik McGregor/ LightRocket via Getty Images.
“It’s not set up to be loss making,” she said in 2020 as those at risk of losing their jobs protested outside Tate Modern. It is, of course, entirely within Tate’s power to rethink how its commercial arm operates. Though this may not be financially astute for an institution which needs to self-generate significant funding to stay afloat, Balshaw’s platitudes about embracing a “culture of care at all levels” seem particularly disingenuous in this context, not least because Tate only improved its offer to the hundreds of employees it was firing following protracted negotiations with the PCS union, which represented many of the workers.
Üstek believes museums need to move away from their historic, hierarchical structures and focus on decentralizing power and delegating decision-making throughout their organizations, supporting their staff throughout the process with appropriate training. Only then will institutions begin to see effective change, she argues in The Art Institution of Tomorrow, the most radical of the three books.
“The institution requires clarity about its values, their specific meaning and function, so that the organization can deeply understand and accomplish its mission. Values are the scaffolding of the organization, protecting it from external pressure and internal turmoil,” she argues, adding that the museum’s “core purpose” should always be “to center art and artists.”
Who Is Going to Pay for Museums?
“The pressure to raise money has probably never been greater,” says Balshaw. Despite this, she declines to explore the ethical issues involved here, writing, for instance, that “most international exhibition tours, consultancy, and advice bring a vital financial return for [institutions]” and that “this is an important growing part of the business of many museums including Tate.” But she fails to examine the potential minefield of collaborating with State-owned partners in countries like China or, perhaps one day, Saudi Arabia.
If museums are to decline funding from donors such as Kanders and the Sacklers, from oil and gas companies, and from others whose businesses or conduct are not in alignment with institutions’ stated values, where will the money come from?
Activists from the group BP or Not BP protest the oil company’s sponsorship of the British Museum in 2019. Photo: Ron Fassbender.
It is Üstek, again, who provides the most original thinking here. Money needs to be sought from a global network of interested parties and not just a handful of privileged individuals or governments so that museums are no longer beholden to the demands of a small number of rich patrons or subject to the vagaries of politics. Instead, they should build global networks of “individuals, groups, and communities whose interests align with their institutional programming.”
This can be achieved by leveraging the interests, talents, and individual connections of museums’ entire workforce and embracing digital fundraising platforms like Patreon where supporters pay a monthly subscription fee and, in return, are offered exclusive content. Sponsorship needs to be “reimagined in a non-hierarchical manner” where every supporter, no matter the size of their contribution, is treated the same. In other words, no more perks for the biggest funders. “An entire culture of institutions that positions funders in forms of governance has to change,” Üstek writes.
How Should Museums Respond to the Climate Crisis?
All three authors are in agreement when it comes to climate change. “Ultimately the message we are still sending is that the conservation of our objects is more important than the conservation of the planet,” writes Balshaw.
“Right now, the conservation of our forests matters more than the conservation of our museums,” argues Spence. “We may be moving into a world so urgently in need of carbon reduction that even the greenest and most ethical new projects are of questionable benefit.”
Climate protesters hold a demonstration as they throw cans of tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, 2022. Photo: Just Stop Oil / Handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
Both she and Balshaw argue that the way forward for museums is to abandon the expansionist drive to build infrastructure and new buildings which has been an enduring, embedded feature of institutional thinking from the 1990s onwards. Instead, they should embrace “degrowth,” a concept borrowed from economic theory which describes a “less intensive and less exploitative mode of economic activity,” Balshaw writes. Put simply, museums need to do less, stage fewer exhibitions and abandon the idea that bigger is always better, focusing instead on the quality of the visitor experience and not just the quantity of people who come through the door.
Balshaw, in particular, is progressive in her thinking here, proposing that museums need to reconsider the way they care for their works. “Our objects are gradually decaying, whatever we do with them,” she argues.
“Where appropriate, care of collections should be achieved in a way that does not assume air conditioning or other high energy cost solutions.” Museums need to devise new best practice standards for low-energy storage, display and travel, research that is already being undertaken by conservators working across the Bizot Group, which comprises some of the world’s largest institutions. The greatest risk to artworks in storage is not the lack of air conditioning but the abrupt failure of their conditioned environments, Balshaw notes, adding that during the Second World War, works in Britain were moved for safety to non-air conditioned environments like salt mines which were “extremely stable.”
When travel was restricted during pandemic lockdowns, Tate and other museums introduced courier-free travel for the works they were sending out on loan. These were monitored “solely using digital communication and trackers attached to object crates,” a successful experiment which is likely to become standard practice for the institution, Balshaw says. Given her innovative thinking here, one longs for the book Balshaw might write once she’s retired from Tate and is, perhaps, freer to confront the other existential challenges museums are facing with equally innovative solutions.