PhD Thesis proposal
For the Love of Art? Contemporary European Museums Facing their Contradictions
Supervisor/s: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marcus Verhagen
Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies
Funding: FCT
Project's overview
This thesis attempts to situate the complex relationship between Western European museums of modern and contemporary art and the "public", focusing on the strategies of three institutions. Faced with the urgent need to renegotiate the social contract of culture, these museums participated in the Creative Europe-funded project "The Uses of Art - the legacy of 1848 and 1989" (2013-2017) with the aim of reimagining a role for art museums and their educational model in the production of new forms of citizenship in the 21st century. One of the central intentions of "The Uses of Art" was to reconsider museums' relationship with visitors, seen as political subjects.
"The Uses of Art's" approach, which places social relations inspired by human rights principles at the heart of museums' operations, calls for a recalibration of their internal division of labor, which reflects the structural inequalities that exist and persist within art institutions. This thesis is therefore a critical analysis of the frictions between the theoretical efforts of these museums and the reality of those who perform work in relation to museums' visitors. It thus pays particular attention to the place these people occupy in the museums' broader division of labor, and to the implications of this situation in the process of building renewed relationships with the "public".
Research objectives
This study places important questions to the expanding critique of museums as politically neutral spaces and the urgent need for instituting otherwise. Hence, the project pursues the following objectives:
- Through the analytical concept of "primitive accumulation" as an axis of continuity in modernity through the violent separation of producers and means of production, draw a picture of Western modern and contemporary art museums' place in the world-system's political economy and their role in sustaining inequality locally and globally.
- To investigate the exclusionary constitution of Western citizenship that the art museum contributed to shape through the critical examination of the "love of art" as the matrix for the relationship between art museums and their public. Propose an alternative genealogy of art and its public, and the place that working with visitors occupies in the museums' institutional hierarchy.
- Since this professional field has been historically "feminized", theorize reproductive labor in the museum and the complex intricacies of class, gender and race in contemporary museums' outsourcing policies. To raise the question of the separation between the conditions of art's reproduction and the criticality of art institutions.
- To engage in a debate about institutional proposals that perform radicalism at a representational level, without addressing the economic conditions under which they operate. To seriously analyze alternative initiatives that take as their starting point what is possible in compromised environments such as art museums.
Methodology
Scholars of critical cultural labor studies (CCLS) have identified that art museums are rarely considered as proper workplaces. For that reason, this study applies a methodology partly drawn from CCLS, feminist and anti-racist theories of social reproduction that allows to consider the organization of labor in the museum and the (dis)articulation between frontstage and backstage work.
From this perspective, institutional ethnography is applied as a method of inquiry focused on the social organization of knowledge. Through in-depth interviews and participant observations, institutional ethnography is a critical qualitative theory/methodology, with a particular focus on people's everyday lives in relation to institutional forces.