interviews
Observations on Media Activism
by Dr. Clark-Parsons
October 16, 2019
Dr. Clark-Parsons is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Activism, Communication, and Social Justice at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research revolve around feminist social movements in the United States and their media practices, drawing on her own participation in and observations of contemporary feminist media campaigns. She can be reached via email at rosemary.clark@asc.upenn.edu
This interview with Dr. Rosemary Clark-Parsons was conducted and condensed by frank news and originally published on September 13, 2018.
frank: I would love to talk to you about your focus on feminist social movements and media practices. But particularly, digital media and social media, in both positive and negative ways.
Rosemary: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. Always.
Right now I am post-doctoral fellow in activism, communication, and social justice at the Annenberg School for Communication which is at University of Pennsylvania. I just wrapped up my PHD there over summer, and I sort of came to this research interest through a long-standing interest going back to college in gender in media. I was really interested at first in focusing my research on media representations of women, girls, and other gendered bodies.
But I found that that research area was so depressing and kind of stagnant. We know that the state of affairs when it comes to media representations of gender is pretty bad and has been pretty bad for a long time. That's where the story ends on the research side of things.
I was interested in turning toward the activists who are trying to do something with media to change the state of affairs when it comes to gender and power and representation. So, that's essentially how I got into my interest in studying activism.
frank: How did you end up combining them?
Rosemary: For me the answer came through a research method that we call ethnography which essentially involves participant observation. The data collection method comes from actually being involved in and participating in the thing that you're studying.
That meant getting involved with grassroots activist groups in the city of Philadelphia.
frank: What have you found effective in both your research and your activism?
Rosemary: A lot of my research has been focused on the fact that there are both strengths and weaknesses to using any sort of communication tools, whether we're talking about digital, or analog, or non-digital tools, for activist purposes. All of these tools have a fair amount of limitations, but a lot of the discourse in the early days of the internet was this is how the revolution is going to happen.
Twitter and Facebook, these were how we were going to change the world. But now we're seeing a shift toward identifying the fact that while there are many affordances to using these tools and we've seen some really powerful campaigns, there are also some serious limitations. I'm interested in how feminist activists are figuring out how to negotiate between those or take advantage of the good while also dealing with the downside of using some of these tools.
frank: What are those limitations?
Rosemary: One of the biggest limitations actually comes from one of the biggest strengths. Now we no longer need to have access to a big name organization, with lots of money, lots of people power, resources, and experience to launch a movement. And on the one hand, that's great. We can launch a big protest without requiring the same degree of physical organization. We don't have to be meeting for months at a time in person to organize some kind of political action whether that's a street protest or a boycott or what have you.
So, while we can launch an action really quickly, sometimes we have issues in these movements with long term struggles for social justice, with responding to new challenges as they emerge.
frank: One thing that keeps coming up in terms of effective activism is having very clearly outlined goals. With the ease of social media we can quickly gain a lot of attention but just as quickly forget the true desired outcome. How do you think people avoid that? What sort of leadership or communication does that take?
Rosemary: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's another issue that comes from this sort of double-edged sword of doing digitally networked activism. On the one hand, if you look at hashtag campaigns, anyone can chime in and sort of bring their own personal reasons for participating to the table. I can share my story under the #MeToo hashtag, for example. But then when it comes to articulating a very clear set of, for example, policy goals, or just concrete steps toward social change, whether at the policy level or more at the cultural level, we're not seeing these movements come together to put out a mission statement. Does that make sense?
frank: Yes.
Rosemary: I think the more successful movements that we're seeing are combining the more old fashion elements of movement organizing, like meeting somehow in person together with a dedicated group of activists, organizing locally, and then also doing these sort of huge network campaigns at the same time. #MeToo is a great example of that, having both the long term struggle component led by Tarana Burke, and sort of branching off into the Time's Up movement. The Never Again movement that came out of the shootings in Florida is another great example of this as well. They're taking advantage of the participatory globally networked nature of social media platforms while also doing the difficult work on the ground to organize long term.
frank: Right. There seems to be a need for a more intense focus on the communities you're actually trying to help.
Rosemary: Yeah, I think that we especially saw this with the very impressive young activists who came out of the Stoneman Douglas shootings. You could see it play out in terms of the news coverage, the need for them to gain trust, not just within their local communities but to gain the trust of their audience. To gain respect of authorities on the issue of control despite the fact that they're these teenagers. Which was working against them.
I think trust, in terms of how you're received by the public, whether that's your immediate neighborhood, organizing for an issue on your block, or whether that's your national audience, as in the case of the Never Again movement, it's essential for social movements, and again requires some of that more old fashioned form of organizing. There were a couple of pieces written about how the teen activists in Stoneman Douglas came together and organized in the aftermath of the shooting. There's a story about them getting together at a slumber party at one of the activists houses and deciding “This is our strategy. This is how we handle the media. We cannot make mistakes, actually, because that will immediately be a reason to put us down. You know we already have our age working against us. We need to gain the trust of our audience."
Trust has always been a key component for a successful movement and continues to be. And it's become even trickier in our world of fake news and conspiracy theories circulating online. You really need to have some authority and gain the trust of your audience.
frank: What do you think about the commodification of cause? About activism as trend? I have a strong gut reaction when I see this stuff online, and think, I don't need to hear about x from you, but perhaps that doesn't matter and all voices added to the mix are important.
Rosemary: Yes, that's a great question. There are two big related changes I've seen with activism over the past five years. One is that it's becoming more mediated and the second is that it's becoming more personalized, like hashtag activism. All the people posting under the hashtag are united by the hashtag itself but they're sharing these very individualized, personalized stories or reasons for participating. That makes it really easy to coopt and commodify. When it's just this personal individual act, it's very easy to take that up and turn it into something that you can sell.
When activism becomes individualized, and personalized, it's not that difficult to make the leap between that and the acts of individualistic consumption and buying something.
We saw this unfortunately, and unbelievably to me, with the #MeToo movement. There were makeup lines branding their products with the #MeToo hashtag. We saw jewelry and clothing lines popping up around the campaign, even a whole bunch of different mobile apps. And they certainly have somewhat of a positive valance. We want to see these issues represented within popular culture, within consumer culture. But there's the danger there of suggesting that what's needed to solve a problem as big as sexual violence and sexual harassment is just this individual act of buying something rather than collectively organizing for structural change.
frank: If you have a large social presence or voice, and you want to be involved, how do you avoid personalizing everything, or avoid taking away from the movement's goals?
Rosemary: I don't think that there's necessarily anything inherently wrong in personalizing your involvement. Feminists in the U.S. have been saying the personal is political since the 1960s. The issue is keeping that connection between the personal and the political, reminding the people who are following you that your personal story is connected back to this structural issue, not just you. It's part of this, in the case of #MeToo, global issue of sexual violence.
frank: Do you feel like people, especially women who have a large voice or public presence, should feel a responsibility to contribute to the conversation, or do you think that we put too much pressure on people to fall into the categories and narratives that we would like to see them in?
Rosemary: One of the very valid concerns about the #MeToo movement, for example, is that we're putting a lot of pressure on not just women but anyone who has experienced sexual violence and harassment to come forward and tell their story. And one concern there is all of the focus is on the survivors and the victims rather than on actually holding accountable the people who are responsible for this behavior and for these assaults in some cases.
I think it can be an issue in terms of our focus on where the change and action needs to happen. We don't necessarily want to add to the weight that survivors are carrying, and we also want to be careful not to turn what is again this structural problem into some sort of media circus around individual people.
We see a lot of hype in the media, a lot of excitement, however misguided, when someone comes forward and says yet another big name renowned celebrity has committed some act of sexual misconduct, and then it becomes about the interpersonal drama.
Rather than the fact that this is huge problem that exists way beyond the scope or the story of two people. I think that there's a danger there in encouraging high profile people to continue to come forward, but at the same time, it's yet another one of these double-edged sword situations. When they come forward, they also encourage other people to feel less shame about their own experiences.
So, it's one of those sort of gray zone situations, to me.
frank: What do you think is next in terms of feminism and feminist movements? What do you think is the next big push and focus?
Rosemary: I think what seems to be on the horizon for feminism in the U.S. right now is figuring out how to take what has been for several years now a very visible surge of feminist activism that has been very much focused on the personal, on everyday fight the power and oppression, everyday encounters with sexual violence, and channeling that into more sustainable, long-lasting, efforts for social change, at the policy level, at the level of more formal institutions of power.
Because on the one hand, we're living in a moment where feminism is everywhere. We can, as we've talked about, buy feminist branded products in the store.
We live in this moment, where it's everywhere, but we also live in a moment where the reality is that Donald Trump is president and we're seeing a systematic roll back of women's rights, of civil rights, the rights in marginalized communities, on a near daily basis. So, there's a disconnect there.
Somehow, we have risen to this high level of visibility within popular culture, but we're not at the same time able to create these longer lasting institutional changes. I'm hopeful that that's going to shift, that the disconnect is going to come together a little bit more. We're seeing a lot of headlines heralding what they're calling the Year of Women. A lot of feminist candidates have been running for different levels of political office. The next big issue for these movements is figuring out how to turn that energy, turn that focus, on everyday sorts of injustice, everyday sites of power, and channel that into more institutional long lasting forms of change.
frank: What new policy for women's equality are you looking for? Or, is the change you're more interested in cultural?
Rosemary: I think we need to not lose sight of either one. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far into the direction of institutional policy and let go of some of the great work feminist activists have been doing around these more every day social forms of change. We're now more aware than ever, I think of sexual harassment as a social issue, but I think they need to be paired together. I would love to see the same amount of energy and the same amount of success in the area of shoring up our policies around sexual harassment, shoring up the resources we have for survivors who are seeking legal recourse or who are seeking some kind of transformative justice within their particular cases. We know that this is an issue that is everywhere and that's undeniable, but the question becomes now what?
We need to make sure that we're creating resources for survivors who want to hold their perpetrators accountable at whatever level, to be able to pursue that. I think that's a major issue right now.
frank: What do you feel is being overlooked right now? In terms of what your research is focused on.
Rosemary: This has been the common thread, I think, in what we've talked about already, but one point that I feel I try to make in my research is that we need to be paying close attention to this shift away from a time when big name formal organizations structured with movements which came with its own set of pros and cons. There are organizational resources on the one hand, and dedicated leaders, but then there are also all sorts of exclusion and gatekeepers filtering out who gets to participate and whose voices are heard.
We're seeing a shift away from that and towards these media platforms, actually becoming the way that movements are structured. So, whereas you might have had in the past, organizations controlling a movement's communication, today, the actual message itself, whether it's a hashtag, or whether it's a platform - these forms of media are at the center of a lot of social movements today and that comes with a whole range of affordances and limitations. I think that's a major shift that's being overlooked in conversations about the future of social organizing in the U.S. and one that I try to highlight a lot in my own work.
interviews
Andrea Fraser on Art, Money, Politics, and Power.
by Andrea Fraser
October 24, 2018
This interview with Andrea Fraser, a performance artist and professor at UCLA, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Andrea: 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics started as a publication component of a year-long program of events about my work organized by the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco. But it was originally supposed to be a completely different book. It was originally supposed to be a book about something else that I've been engaged in for the last 10 years, which is called Group Relations or the Tavistock Method, a method of experiential learning about groups and leadership and authority, which developed out of psychoanalysis and systems theory.
But then the election happened, and that didn't make any sense to me suddenly. Then I became involved in an action here in LA, about the presence of Steven Mnuchin on the Board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, a museum that has my work in its collection. I had been aware that Steven Mnuchin was on the Board and around the time he became Trump's Campaign Finance Chair. There had been some protests about his presence on the board, both inside and outside of the museum, but these had no effect.
Shortly after the election, I collaborated with a curator named Eric Golo Stone on writing an open letter to MOCA, which we circulated and got a few dozen prominent artists and historians to sign.
frank: You didn't release it anyways?
We didn't release it. The museum knew that we planned to release the letter to the press on a certain day. We got the call the first thing that morning. Part of the discussion was: He's off the board. His name is off the website. Please do not circulate the letter.
Right.
In a sense, I feel like we missed an opportunity with our success.
So that was part of the context for the book. When I became involved in that letter, I thought, "Well, I should find out who the other board members are supporting. What's the context here?" I started looking up the other board members of MOCA and was appalled to find quite a number of contributors to the Trump campaign on the board. Then I started looking up other museums, and that's when the idea for the book developed.
CCA Wattis had approached Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner about co-publishing a book project with me, and we had discsued the idea for a book about group relations. It was a little odd because they're better known for publishing artists books and that would have been more like an academic book. Thea Westreich was one of the first and perhaps, I would say for a period, most influential art consultants when that line of work developed in the '80s. But they also publish artists books, often very limited edition artists books that are focused on visuals.
I was already wondering whether it made sense to do a more academic book with them. Then, when I had the idea for 2016, I thought, "Oh, my God, are they gonna go along with this?"
The peole on these boards are like their former clients. They just recently retired. I sent them an email about the idea with an exit hatch: I know this isn't what you signed up for. I would totally understand if it wasn't something that you were interested in. The response was, "This is great. We got to do it." They were totally enthusiastic, and from the very beginning I thought, "Wow!"
What I didn't realize is that not only are they politically progressive, but actually Ethan Wagner, before he joined Thea Westreich's art consulting business, was a political consultant.
Interesting.
Then I realized, "Oh, this is perfect. They're the most perfect people to do this book," because they have this expertise in both of these fields. They know that world of collectors and patrons and museum boards. They also know the world of campaign finance. Then I talked about it at an event in New York. Someone from Art Newspaper wrote up the project. Roger Conover at MIT Press saw the write up and emailed me. That's how MIT Press came on as the third publisher.
I took that question as an opportunity to give you the whole background.
[Laughter] No, that's perfect. Is the information you were seeking all public?
Yeah.
Was it easy to find?
There were stages. The first stage was putting together the list of museums, and I needed criteria for that. One of the criterion was that they had to meet a certain budget threshold. For that, I went to Guidestar.org, which is a nonprofit organization that maintains a website with the 990 tax forms of almost every nonprofit organization in the United States. They have other information that they distill from that. That was my first source when I was putting together the list of museums and identifying their total operating budgets, indicating the financial scale of the organizations, which is an important reference for me in the book and for any further analysis of the data in the book.
Then the next step was putting together the list of board members. Now, there might be different sources for that. I could have found that in the 990s as well, but I just basically went to the museums' websites, which I also assumed would be the most up-to-date. There were a couple of cases where the boards were not listed on the museum websites, when we went to 990s, or annual reports, or contacted the institutions directly.
The instances when we had to contact the institutions directly, were mostly instances where the institutions were public, rather than private-nonprofit, or university museums, where the boards have a different status. Some of these organizations are also supported by foundations or private-nonprofits that exist independently of their governing entities or boards but were created to support the museum. In some cases we include board members of those kinds of organizations as well.
The third and biggest chunk of research in the book was in the political contributions themselves. There are a number of organizations with websites that track and publish political contribution data, including the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which maintains a website called OpenSecrets.org, as well as a few forprofits that serve an industry of political operatives.
In the end we just used the FEC website. Although then I went back to OpenSecrets.com to determine the partisan affiliation of many of the recipients and the Political Action Committees, which is much harder to get out of the FEC website. OpenSecrets.org collects data on almost all of the registered political action committees and super-PACS, including information about where their money goes and where it comes from. We were able to use that to identify the partisan lean of various PACs, which then influence how we identify the partisan lean of the board members who are giving to those PACs.
I'm surprised this doesn't exist as its own dataset already. It's a massive amount of work though.
Yeah, it is. I had a team. The designer that I worked with, Geoff Kaplan, who is amazing, put together a team that included a programmer who got the data from the FEC website and put it into spreadsheets and another designer-programmer who developed a program to export the spreadsheets directly to the design software.
Most of the book was never a manuscript. It went directly from spreadsheets to design. The fact-checking and copy-editing happened in the spreadsheet stage.
Was the goal to collect all of this so that it existed publicly, for transparency sake? Or was it action-oriented?
It was. Early on I envisioned an appendix for the book with template letters to board members, saying, "Dear so-and-so, as an artist in the collection," or, "As a member of the community," or something like that. And in these letters develop an argument, tailored to the nature of the contributions being made by the board member, about the conflict of interest between their political support and the missions of the organizations they serve.
Did you get pushback on that?
No, I didn't. I didn't do it because in the process of developing the book, the emphasis shifted away from the partisan inspiration for the book in finding people like Steven Mnuchin and other supporters of Trump and white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist, politicians on the board of cultural institutions that they're responsible to support and protect.
My research for the introduction, more than my research of the political contributions themselves, brought into focus the pay-to-play culture of governance in for-profit institutions, which, I argue, serves to legitimize a pay-to-play culture in public governance.
As it became more about plutocracy, the strategy of influencing the influencers started to feel cynical to me. Artists might have a certain amount of access to the donor class and might be able to use that access to influence the influencers. But if that's where we invest our political energy, aren't we buying into the whole plutocratic system? Aren't we buying into the political influencing machine, to the political inequality that results from economic inequality?
That's why I decided not to do it.
Right.
I didn't want the book to become about that.
What surprised you about the research?
I assumed that there would be more of a correspondence between the political leanings of the board and the political leanings of the state and the district in which the museum was located.
Each museum is listed with its district and with the congressional delegation representing that district. There's a table at the back of the book that lists each museum with the partisan index of the state and district where the museum is located. Each museum is listed with its district and with its congressional delegation representing that district. Then I made a partisan index for the board members of each museum and a partisan index representing the money that we found associated with each board.
I did expect to see more of a correspondence between the boards and the districts, if not the states—most of these museums are in urban centers, which, even in the reddest states, are usually represented by Democrats in congress.
In a way it's not surprising. This is true in New York City, and it's true in LA, and it's true in San Francisco, and it's true in some of the bluest cities and states in the country. And it’s more true of the money than the board members.
Sometimes that has to do with one or two major Republican donors that just swing things way to the right with regard to the money. At the end of the book there are two big pie graphs. One shows the partisan breakdown of all 5,460 board members research, and the breakdown of the partisan breakdown of the money we found, and you see a significant rightward shift.
It shows that right-leaning politics have a close correspondence in many cases to wealth and to financial scale in these institutions.
Do you feel strongly about that money disappearing from the institution? Immediately when I hear this I think of Lincoln Center and the Koch Brothers.
Yeah, there are also Koch spaces at the Metropolitan Museum.
Exactly. You think of the big ones, and what happens in them. I've been to New York City Ballet shows, for example, and it's an incredible experience, made possible by financial contributions like those from the Koch Brothers. Do you think those institutions have a responsibility to reject that money?
I do think so. There's been reporting in The New York Times and a few other outlets recently identifying particular trustees with glaringly obvious conflicts of interests between their political patronage and the mission of the museum they serve.
The most obvious is Rebekah Mercer who is on the board of the Museum of Natural History in New York, which is just obscene. The Mercers are among the biggest funders of science denying, climate-change denying organizations that directly threaten the very mission of the Museum of Natural History, which includes promoting science and conservation. How is that possible? There's also been press about the Sacklers...
Who are the Sacklers?
The Sacklers are major philanthropists of cultural and educational institutions. The Metropolitan has a Sackler Wing and the Brooklyn Museum has a Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Sacklers' money comes from pharmaceuticals and particularly from Oxycontin.
Do you have a proposed solution? Ways in which you think that these institutions should be financed? Is the answer to collect small donations?
That’s one solution. I have done quite a bit of research on the history, not only of arts organizations in the U.S., but also of philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and trusteeship. When you take in the whole picture, it gets harder, unfortunately, to envision change. But when you extend that picture beyond cultural organizations and the nonprofit sector to include civic, professional, and other kinds of community organizations, one does find other models. In the visual arts and in the big cultural and educational institutions, the model is self-selecting and self-perpetuating boards who are usually required to make personal financial contributions, which collapse patronage and governance.
I know of almost no cultural institutions in America that have that structure. I do know of cultural institutions in Europe that have that structure, such as Kunstvereins, or art associations, in Germany, which have histories that go back to the early part of the 19th century. They are supported by their members, who also elect the board and participate in governance.
There are a lot of organizations that have that structure. Museums have not, for the most part, had that structure, although there are museums in the book that started out as art associations.
When I finishied writing the introduction, I just didn't have it in me to write up recommendations. I needed a bit of distance. I do need to get that out somewhere. One, to diversify museum boards, not only racially and ethnically, but also so they represent the full range of stake holders and community members, and not just patrons. Another is to develop more rigorous guidelines to ensure that patrons and board members are not subveriting or threatening the organization’s mission in their other professional and political activities. Another is to organize to advocate for public funding.
More and more museums and more and more cultural nonprofit organizations, generally, nationally, have developed a policy of requiring personal financial contributions from board members.
That's something that a few observers of the nonprofit world have noted and tracked. I've found some data suggesting that it went from less than 50% in the '80s to over 75% today.
That's a big jump.
Yes, it’s a significant jump, and the incidence of board members making contributions is even higher than organizations requiring it, which may indicate that this has become an implicit norm.
Again, this isn't just in museums, but I think museums have among the highest requirements with regard to personal financial contributions. This is largely anecdotal, because most board members have to sign nondisclosure agreements. There's very, very little transparency about this, which is another big issue. In the nonprofit sector we don't have the disclosure laws that are like the last vestiges of campaign financial regulation, the disclosure laws, which is what allowed me to do this book.
Reportedly, it costs $5 million to get on the board of MoMA, and then it's a quarter of a million dollars a year to stay on the board. $10 million for the Met. I'm not sure what it costs to get on some of the other boards that I've looked into, but I have been told that a lot of mid-sized institutions cost about $150,000 a year.
When you go back to the '70s or the '80s, particularly in smaller institutions, one would find a much broader range of people. You'd find more artists. You'd find more professionals, more academics, more people who are coming out of families with long traditions of collecting, who are knowledgable about culture. At a certain point, the financial structure of museums and the ways they started to fundraise became more and more focused just on wealth, with waves of new board members who reflect the boom industries of the day. First it was the leverage buyout guys. Then it was the hedge fund guys, then the private equity guys. Or in some cities, it's all real estate. It's whoever has that kind of money.
How influential is a board on the space itself?
You mean on the programs?
Yes.
That's a big question that comes up. I did a conversation that just came out in the magazine BOMB with Helen Molesworth, who was the Chief Curator at MOCA and was fired very abruptly by the director. I asked her about this, because I've never heard a museum professional admit publicly that the board has any influence on programs. Everybody pretends, and I would say pretends, that there's a firewall there, because the legitimacy of that world depends on it in some sense.
Right.
But what I say is, if museums have to raise money for everything they do, if they can't do a show or buy an artwork unless they can find someone who's willing to give them the money to do it, that's a tremendous amount of influence. It's veto power, essentially. There are very, very few other sources of funding for programs.
Then there are instances that have gotten a little bit more discussion, such as restricted gifts, like the Fisher Collection which is on long-term loan to SFMOMA with the requirement that the museum show a large percentage of it in a large percentage of their space continuously.
They wield a tremendous amount of power then.
A tremendous amount of power. In that case, the collection consists almost entirely of white men who are either German or American and work in painting or sculpture. It represents a very, very narrow slice of art, even in the period that they're focused on, and excludes most of what has been important in art in the last 50 years. And it’s already very dated. It's basically like going to a very high end art gallery at this point.
What about The Broad?
LACMA thought they were going to get Broad’s collection and built a whole building for it. But then he decided to open his own museum. In some ways I would say that LACMA is probably better off without it. We should note that we are sitting in the Broad Art Center at UCLA, which is my place of employment.
Right. I saw the sign.
The Broad is part of a trend of collectors creating their own museums for their own collections. These are sometimes called private museums. But the history of museums in the United States is that a lot of them started like The Board. There is the Whitney, the Guggenheim the Walker. We have lots of museums that were started by individuals focused on a very specific collection and were originally governed by those individuals and their family members, along with their lawyer and accountant, basically. But they evolved into institutions that we think of as serving a broader public and a broader set of cultural agendas. The Broad may develop in that way.
You've riled me.
Yeah. I know. I've spent my life riled. I'm an artist, and I do a lot of work on museums, but I don't really like them that much. There are a few museums I like.
Which are?
Well, I was just at the Berkeley Art Museum recently. That's a good one.
Do you think if one BIG museum were to take your advice, draw this line, change the way they approached funding, others would follow suit?
No, probably not. We could talk about W.A.G.E., which I think has succeeded in those terms. It started something that had a ripple affect and is now being adopted more widely.
I just joined a board of the ICALA, which is not in the book because it didn't meet the financial threshold when I was doing the research. I know they ask other board members for personal financial contributions. They have a couple of spots for community members who are not asked for that contribution and I have one of those spots. A few other museums have those spots: MOCA does, the Hammer, MoMA has a couple. Often they are used to add racial diversity to the board.
Joining that board, I've taken on fiduciary responsibility along with the other board members, and I don't have an alternative to that fundraising model. I can try to start that conversation, but going in and saying, "You should eliminate this financial contribution requirement," when it's a significant percentage of the museum's budget, is not something that feels doable.
Moving toward greater diversity on boards is something that I can be very vocal about. I think that's a start. I’m also on the board of W.A.G.E., which stands for Working Artists in the Great Economy, which was founded by a group of artists about 10 years ago and became a 501(c)(3) about five years ago. I've served on the board since then.
They've created a voluntary certification program for museums and arts organizations that commit to equitable compensation of artists and others who contribute to their programs, including artists' fees and honoraria as well as support for exhibitions. It was something that there was a lot resistance to initially and a lot of arguments about. But we just had our 10th year anniversary and have been very successful. W.A.G.E. has certified, I think, over 50 organizations, although mostly smaller organizations. We're still working on certifying larger organizations, but we know that many larger museums, even though they're not lining up to get certified, are looking at our fee schedule and are starting to compensate artists for the work that they do in those institutions. They are starting to talk about equity in a way that they haven't before.
On a smaller scale, we did succeed in shifting the terms with the institutions we certified. But even with the larger institutions, I think, we've changed the conversation about equity in relations with artists and beyond that, I think we've also created a space for curatorial assistants and interns and even curators in some of these institutions talk about whether they're being supported equitably.
You think about these structures from the top down, and they influence everything that people entering their institutions see and ingest. What we're allowed to look at, in terms of history and culture, what the narrative is, what we're exposed to.
Yeah. What gets legitimized, presented to us and legitimized as, well, as legitimate culture, as public culture. By virtue of their nonprofit status and often also of land grants for sites in parks and other public support, museum represent public culture.
Certainly.
I was just in New York and I went to the Whitney to see the David Wojnarowicz Show. He was an artist that died of AIDS in the early '90s. His work is encreadibly visceral in its politics and in its rage at the genocide that was being tacitly if not explicitly condoned by the politicians of that time. It was a very powerful show. But it was also shockingly cutoff from the broader context of AIDS activism.
Nevertheless, I have been impressed by what the Whitney is representing from the collection since they moved. They are presetning a narrative of American art that I’ve never seen on view anywhere, that includes outsider art and artists who are Communists and labor organizers and involved in the Civil Rights Movement. By the time you get to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, which was always the pinnacle of the classic narrative, you can see it’s politically conservative as well as it's formally “progressive” aspects. Or at least that’s how I saw it.
One of the other important conclusions I reached by doing the book is that we can’t just complain about the donor class, whether we’re talking about political donors or nonprofit donors more broadly.
Absolutely.
Whether we’re politicians or other political professionals, curators or other nonprofit professionals, artists, educators, or scientists, we give the donor class its power. We can argue that we have no other sources of funding, but very few of us are fighting for public funding. It can't just be about criticizing the donor class.
We so readily accept these systems as they are, because they feel historic...
They're institutionalized.
We've been working on a new project that's an update of something "old". Everyone keeps telling us we're insane. And the thing we keep hearing is, "Yeah, but it's been this way forever." And I'm like, "No, it's been this way since 1986."
People have short memories.
If I didn't update my computer since 1986 it wouldn't work. We'd all be using...
Floppy disks.
Rotary phones. What are you talking about, since 1986?! Everything in the world has updated since then.
Yeah. Right.
Well, this is great. Thank you again.