#museum protest

The notion of museums as popular spaces open to all has contributed to their identification as sites for political struggle. Yet it is perhaps an unsurprising irony that as arts institutions increasingly represented themselves as democratic, political, and civic spaces, they came to rely more and more upon funding from the private sector. Faced with proving their value as they competed for scraps of government money and for private donors looking to maximize their philanthropic impact, museums justified their existence by affirming their public mandate and social utility, advancing the narrative that art institutions are privileged spaces for political discourse. Individual grants, gifts, and bequests fund the diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion initiatives that open the museum to broader publics, and fuel the exhibitions, acquisitions, and rehangs that foreground artists and traditions beyond the Western canon.  But despite the tantalizing whiff of democracy they seem to exude, museums are not democratic institutions, and never have been. That today’s protesters see the museum as a suitable point of access through which our ruling class may be addressed speaks to the almost complete depletion of real recourse elsewhere; the almost total lack of strategic pressure points from which to attack an ironclad and unimpeachable oligarchy. In particular, the global scope of the demands associated with museum protest reflects the difficulty of meaningful engagement in international politics from the metropole. Because the points of contact between the layperson and the multinational corporation are so limited, museum donors and board members — and the museum itself by extension — have been framed as targets in the fight against imperialism.

Sich morgens aus Protest gegen Lebensmittelverschwendung auf die Straße kleben und nachmittags dann mit Lebensmitteln auf Gemälde werfen – das ist verrückt.

These stunts had started two years before, in October 2022, in London’s National Gallery when two young British women threw cream-of-tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. They then knelt below the painting and glued their hands to the wall. “What’s worth more, art or life?” 21-year-old Phoebe Plummer yelled. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” Video of the incident ricocheted all over the world — 1.7 million viewers on TikTok and 7.1 million on Twitter within a few days. In terms of cultural traction per protester minute, this was perhaps the greatest protest in climate history.