Our idea for the manifestation of the public art collection was highly informed by our experience of the pandemic and the fundamental questions it posed for the future prospects of our field. Throughout this period, many of our peers experienced some sort of financial instability or uncertainty about their (professional) future. While some were made redundant, others had to close programs and venues that ran for years, or found that their previously confirmed institutional commissions have been now canceled or pushed back to unknown dates. As we were both curating projects for established institutions at that time under the illusive neoliberal condition of not being directly employed by them, we found ourselves in the latter position, which was in turn projected onto all the artists we were working with on these projects.[1]
In the United Kingdom, where Or lives and works since 2019, the conservative government initially avoided lockdowns and supported the “herd immunity” approach to prevent economic setbacks. But even after lockdowns were finally announced, the fate of cultural institutions and art workers remained “in the air” for many months. In October 2020, a notorious governmental campaign effectively advised cultural practitioners to change profession to a more desirable and income-generating career in cyber (fig. 1). Causing an unforeseen backlash for its patronizing and diminishing tone, this campaign was soon scrapped. However, its short-lived circulation reflected an approach which was shared to large extent by many governments—failing to see the arts as a valid occupational sector, not to mention offering suitable support to its workers.
Figure 1. A governmental advert encouraging cultural practitioners to change profession to cyber, released in the UK in October 2020. This campaign was soon scrapped after being heavily criticized.
As the long closures began taking their toll, museums across the world have started facing some fundamental issues of their own. Attempting to cover for the inability to physically open their gates to the public, many fell with an overnight “Digitization Panic” demonstrated by countless attempts to create content out of and for isolation and to adapt their locked-up exhibitions for virtual consumption. A small minority of institutions have reutilized their spaces for other forms of public benefit, like Castelo di Rivoli near Turin restaging as a vaccination center and the Queens Museum in New York facilitating a food pantry and artist studios.[2] But overall, despite some occasional community outreach gestures, most institutions offered vulnerable members of the arts community very little, if any, sort of financial safety net.
In places like the United States, where museums are less reliant on public funds, the impact of the pandemic was even more severe. The loss of income from both donations and ticket revenue resulted in major workforce cuts, especially of those in lower-paid positions like educators, admission, and support workers.[3] This financial distress, topped by sociopolitical campaigns like the Black Lives Matter protests, increasing calls to decolonize museums, and their workers’ unionizing efforts with the aim of fighting institutional “artsploitation,” started biting into their existential core.[4]
These factors have also accelerated processes of deaccessioning museum collections as means to diversify and raise additional funds to secure the overall continuity of these institutions and their employees.[5] But as more problematic aspects of museum operation and the acquisition of museum collections were unearthed, one could not help but wonder whether this precarious condition might signify the forthcoming end of museums as we knew them.
Theoretically, this time of institutional crises could have been ideal for the thriving of platforms like that of the art weekend. A festival of public art installations is an effective platform for public engagement that would be hardly affected by pandemic restrictions, should these be reinforced. However, as permanent outdoor commissions are extremely costly to produce and take years to finalize against planning and safety procedures, the works commissioned for this event tend to have the lifespan of a single weekend.
This pop-up-like nature makes them cheaper to fabricate (no need to factor in costs of enduring materials or maintenance works) and may even add to the overall appeal of the event. But soaring rent prices in today’s space-deficient cities often mean that these works find their way into garbage sites shortly after, as most artists cannot afford the storage cost of such large-scale projects at the end of the festival. This operational nature had turned periodic art festivals such as this into one of the largest waste-generating cultural formats, perhaps only second to that of temporary mega-exhibitions and international biennials.
This situation embodies a disturbing contradiction: while most art institutions recognize the urgency of the climate crisis and gladly incorporate environmentally related content into their exhibition and educational programs, implementing its lessons in their operational frameworks often remains more in the realm of potential than that of practice. This understanding, unfortunately, rarely stretches far enough to undo the environmental damage caused by international art shipments, for example, or to reduce the amount of building waste generated by frequent modifications of spaces for changing exhibitions (fig. 2).
Figure 2. Installation parts from the acclaimed Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, turned into building waste on the day after its closing. Photo credit: Oded Bajayo.
Sustainability is broadly understood as the ability of a certain system or condition to last over time, without diminishing or harming its ability to do so in the future.[6] It is discussed mostly in relation to ecological and environmental activity, but it involves interlinked ecological, economic, and social dimensions, or “pillars,” as they are often described in research.[7] Other diagrams, like that of the expanding self-contained circles (fig. 3), demonstrate this dependency by stressing that every economic activity happens within a society, and every social structure operates within an environment. Essentially, for economic systems to last over time, they need to ensure the survivability of the subjects involved and of the environment in which they operate, or, for something to ensure environmental sustainability, it needs to be financially achievable and vice versa.
Figure 3. Diagrams depicting the three pillars of sustainability. Originally in Purvis, Mao, and Robinson, “Three Pillars of Sustainability,” 681–695.
In her sincere account of the efforts to form a workers’ union in New York’s New Museum, former museum editor Dana Kopel described an exploitative organizational culture in which senior management earns as much as twenty times the salary of their lowest-paid workers, and where “Salaries were so low that full-time employees worked extra jobs.”[8] The case of the New Museum is not a singular instance (we both had to previously take on extra teaching or curatorial projects while holding curatorial positions in Israeli institutions), and similar conditions have recently brought an unprecedent number of museum workers in the US and the UK to join/establish new workers’ unions.[9] In Israel, where a national artists’ union had existed for several decades, 2021 was the year when a national curators’ union was established.[10]
In the UK, where alongside underpaid workers, interns are still a major workforce in arts institutions, almost 90% of internships are still unpaid.[11] Compared to art workers, the condition of UK-based artists is not much better, either, as artist fees are still very far from reflecting the amount of work put into producing exhibitions and commissioned projects.[12] These, in turn, add more fuel to the sector’s pre-existing lack of diversity, as only those of the wealthiest backgrounds can afford working under such conditions, especially with today’s soaring living costs.
When examining the current modus operandi of museal “ecosystems” in relation to this, it does not only prove to be unsustainable in terms of its carbon footprint and waste production but it also fails to ensure the socioeconomic sustainability of its own institutions, artists, and workers. If museums are struggling to maintain their large collections and buildings in the face of global changes while museum employees are taking additional jobs just to make ends meet, then the future undoubtedly calls for a change. This means embracing different priorities and investment strategies to the ones implemented so far.
Referring back to the pillars of sustainability (economic, social, environmental) is an important exercise for those attempting to pick up the pieces of a post-pandemic world. While scholars are still debating whether the pandemic did or did not bring the neoliberal economy to its end, it surely demonstrated why a global, market-driven economy cannot last uninterruptedly without factoring in environmental safekeeping or basic social and human rights such as health care. It is enough to dig under one of these foundations, whether it is the protection of animal habitats or the provision of basic social services, and—before we know it—all economic and governmental systems are subsequently paralyzed by a zoonotic spillover that could not be contained nor treated for months.[13]
On a much smaller, art-world scale, the sustainability factor remains crucial as we reconsider what future alternative models of owning, displaying, and commissioning art may be financially sustainable without overlooking environmental impact, social rights, or unethical conduct. While relying more heavily on what is already in the museum and prioritizing collection-based exhibitions may be a good economic and environmental strategy, the hidden politics, power structures, and dubious ethical foundations of such collections have been at the center of many public debates, which may imply this is not the ideal way forward, either.
In her essay dedicated to museums and climate change, museum director Julie Decker points out that “what once were considered museum assets are now, at times, museum burdens: temple architecture, extensive collections, influential donors, real estate.”[14] The burden she refers to is not only financial or environmental but also a moral and political one. Whereas it may be clear why museums should not take part in any direct form of exploitation or oppression, it is also important to assure they are not benefiting from such social injustices, even as a third party or from the distance of time.
Museums like the Louvre, for example, which is considered a symbol of the French Revolution allowing public access to art that was previously only owned and seen by nobles and rulers, owes its grand Egyptological treasures to the Napoleonic conquests in the Middle East. Another popular example is that of Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection of over 70,000 objects and artifacts formed the base for the British Museum. Sloane funded his collecting hobby with earnings from his wife’s sugar plantations in the Caribbean, made on the back of enslaved people from West Africa. Both these collections were further expanded during the European colonization of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with objects looted and illegally trafficked from their places of origin.[15]
Other, more contemporary examples that have been heavily criticized include sponsorships by global corporations whose profits are made on the account of vulnerable groups in other realms, whether through deepening environmental injustice in the Global South (see the case of BP sponsorship of the Tate) or by fueling patient addiction to opioids (see the case of the Sackler family).
This recent, growing awareness of embedded violence, exploitation, exclusion, and trampling of Indigenous cultures within museum practice initiated multiple discussions about the repatriation of artifacts and human remains, and revealed both historic and contemporary institutional dependence of unethical and colonially rooted funds. In response, it also brought some museums to initiate their own steps toward “self-decolonization,” including publishing research into the dark histories of their collections and inviting additional perspectives through newly created positions and commissions from artists of underrepresented backgrounds.[16]
Following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2019, for example, the UK’s Tate museums released a statement titled “Tate Galleries and Slavery,” relating to the historic connections of Henry Tate, a nineteenth-century sugar merchant and an art philanthropist, to slavery. Conveniently, Tate was trading after slavery had been already abolished in the UK (although not in North America, where the sugar he was trading came from), hence no direct connection could be traced. Nevertheless, a series of new “decolonial” curatorial hirings and commissioned collection writings have taken place in the years following, in the hope of reflecting a wind of change. The British Museum, an institution standing at the center of many decolonization protests, released a series of online statements regarding its most contested objects and their current status. In 2020 the museum went even further in its alleged self-critical approach and launched a new display following the colonial origins of its collection.
The confusion one might feel toward this wide array of accusations and institutional responses is, to some extent, part of the problem. “Decolonization” and “decolonizing museums” have different manifestations across the wide spectrum of reclaiming assets and undoing the harm caused by centuries of colonial rule, which is highly intertwined with racism and injustice. But the danger in being so broadly interpreted, as rightfully articulated by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their renowned essay “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” is that decolonization had now become an overused umbrella term advocating for a whole range of goals such as social justice, anti-racism, diversity, and more. Needed and justified as they are, this process transforms decolonization into a metaphor that has been emptied from its original meaning of “repatriation of Indigenous land and life.” This then allows settler powers to claim it for their own use while effectively maintaining an oppressive status quo.[17]
In Israeli museums, where we both work or worked in the past, the situation is slightly different, although not without its faults. Unlike their centuries-old Western counterparts, most museums in Israel were only founded several decades ago, following the withdrawal of British colonial rule from Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.[18] Whereas European and North American museums have accumulated their collections over centuries under various legitimate and illegitimate circumstances, newly established museum collections in former colonies often had (or were left with) very little material assets to begin with.
The development of such museums and their exhibits were commonly harnessed to publicly reinforce new national identities and to build a notion of a deep-rooted national history.[19] Very often, the establishment of such narratives also meant omitting, eradicating, and taking over the traces of other people and cultures. In Israel, the history and cultural heritage of non-Western Jews from Arab-speaking countries and Asian and African diasporas were often excluded and overlooked, but more institutionally systemic erasure has to do with the Palestinians.
This form of ongoing colonization may be less traceable in the provenance of collection items, such as those brought to Western museums from overseas colonies, while there is effectively no “museum-decolonization” discourse as we know it from such museums happening in the local context of Israel. However, an inquisitive look into museum architecture and infrastructures can often unearth evidence of an institutionally concealed former Palestinian presence. Although not officially acknowledged, a walk around Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum courtyard, for example, would reveal architectural remains from the former Palestinian village Sheikh Munis, and the Negev Museum in Beersheba, to name another, is situated in a repurposed Ottoman building complex which formerly included the local governor’s house and a mosque built for local Muslim communities in pre-1948 Palestine.
In any case, even when not explicitly taking a stand, museums are far from being neutral. Their buildings, boards, collections, and infrastructures are all deeply infused with external interests and power relations. Some of them may be more willing to publicly admit it than others, but the fact remains that self-initiated criticism would very rarely pull the rug from under one’s own feet. To paraphrase Andrea Fraser’s analysis of institutional critique, when decolonizing practices are so enthusiastically embraced by the very institutions they are meant to be inflicted upon, it is safe to assume that decolonization has been, well, colonized.[20]
This state, in turn, makes it almost impossible to create new, equitable structures without dismantling the old ones, thus leaving the old ones very much undisturbed. We would therefore suggest that, instead of investing countless efforts and resources into re-legitimizing inherently problematic structures, it might be time to reimagine new, more ethical and sustainable future ones.
Taking these conditions into account and considering more sustainable and ethical future forms of exhibiting and commissioning art in the years to come, we sent the arts department a fairly improbable outline. Instead of a traditional exhibition concept and a list of potential participants, we suggested utilizing the allocated festival funds to set up a new type of a public art collection—a collection that would buy artworks from local artists in order to lend them to everyday members of the public.
In contrast to previous art weekend events, which only lasted for several days before turning into an environmental burden, we wanted to create a more sustainable infrastructure with a longer-lasting community impact. Operating similarly to a library, this continuous project would invite members of the public to take an actual work of art back home by periodically borrowing original, framed artwork for a small or subsidized fee. After being publicly exhibited for the occasion of the festival, these works would then go “into storage” in their new host homes, where they would be appreciated in the intimate setting of the borrower’s residence until the next exchange event.
With this purpose in mind, the collection would turn away from wasteful large-scale perishable works in favor of moderately priced, small/medium-scale artworks that would suit smaller domestic environments. Purchased directly from local artists through an open call, these works’ value would be capped around the €1000 mark per entry. Following a review of submissions by a nominated committee, we were aiming to purchase fifty to seventy works in the first round of the project.
Although between fifty and seventy is a fairly insignificant number for an established art collection, even these cautious assessments would mean supporting three to four times the number of artists participating in an average art weekend edition. And despite the limited €1000 cap, these purchases could still leave artists with a larger take-home sum, as these works could be pre-existing ones and do not require ambitious large-scale production.
This proposed art collecting strategy also challenges some of the problems in common museum collecting approaches. Whereas the maintenance of many museum collections relies heavily on public funds, the majority of these collections remains publicly inaccessible. Information about their contents, provenance, and the breakdown of funds spent are still far from being fully transparent or comprehensive. While museums may display as little as 1% of their collection or even less at any given moment, thousands of stored items may not get “used” or see the light of day for generations.
Although most public museums are effectively in charge of “public art collections,” they often perform more as gatekeepers concerned with the safety of objects and cultural canons than as public facilitators working toward the well-being of the subjects and communities they are meant to serve. This project, fondly named “a (truly) public art collection” or more simply a “co-llection,” aims to demonstrate a more user-oriented approach by encouraging community/public ownership of cultural institutions and resources in more direct ways. In other words, we hope to create a public art collection that would treat the “public” part of its title with the same level of commitment it would treat that of “art” and “collection”—one that will not hesitate to put subjects before objects, even at the occasional cost of breaching professional museum conduct.
In the proposition we sent the municipal arts department, we suggested the new collection initiative as a reflective future response to the needs and challenges of commissioning and exhibiting art in the public realm in the next twenty years. Its necessity was underpinned by three prominent tendencies: domestic changes as remote work from home retains its growing popularity and encourages home improvements; resource sharing as a recession-related means of generating profit or saving costs through communal ownership and peer-to-peer exchange; and growing sustainability and environmental awareness, where the deepening of the climate crisis and its consequences would force more private and public corporations to demonstrate environmental responsibility and reduce their carbon footprint. In this socio-environmental atmosphere, we stressed, wasteful traditions like the current art weekend could no longer continue uninterrupted.
Our sent pitch was received with a long silence. After several weeks, the commissioners notified us that, although appreciated, our idea may not be applicable due to a number of technical complexities. With only nine months left to the opening date, the arts department was not keen to delve into a project requiring the development of new institutional infrastructures. In reassurance of the models they already knew, we were soon informed that another curatorial duo was chosen to curate a series of temporary outdoor works in one of the city’s rapidly redeveloping areas.
Sustainability, as we learned in this context, was both a blessing and a curse. In fact, one-off cultural events like the art weekend have long been favored by councils due to the high traffic they generate without requiring long-term investment in maintenance or permanent workforce. Our proposal, on the other hand, required a continuous allocation of space, funds, and human resources, while each art weekend edition is budgeted as a stand-alone event with its own contributors and temporary contract hires.
Whereas the Tel Aviv council had previously invested the equivalent of €24 million to create its municipal car-sharing service (Auto-Tel), and although it runs municipal tools and book libraries, we were told by the commissioners that the council is legally incapable of buying artworks, not to mention insuring and overseeing their loan to the public.[21] Although not unimpressed with our idea, it seemed that forming this potential relationship would require jumping over multiple bureaucratic hurdles and commitment issues. Having already set a healthy budget for the arts and the willingness to establish new platforms for resource sharing, we could not help but feel frustrated by the fact that the country’s wealthiest municipality, which already spends a whopping 10% of its annual budget on culture and found ways to lend cars and Dyson vacuum cleaners to the public, cannot fund artworks without having them end up as garbage.
Convinced that the legal and operational resources for this project can be found within the council’s own walls if we could only get the right people on board, we requested an in-person meeting. In this meeting, we suggested addressing the collection’s potential storage, management, and maintenance issues by teaming up with other municipal institutions, like a municipal museum or a library, which already have the capacity of managing collections and public loans.
The representative from the arts department was somewhat convinced, and over the next following months we negotiated potential partnerships with multiple municipal institutions. Ideas included Tel Aviv’s central library, the new under-development city museum, and the Old Jaffa authority, which is responsible for several municipally owned buildings and their allocation for cultural activities, to name a few. Some were interested in the project but lacked collection storage and registration facilities, others had the space and funds but were less keen to spend it on artworks that would not stay in-house for long-term exhibitions and could “only” benefit fifty to seventy households.
Soon after, we were asked by one of the key potential partners to pursue further research into similar case studies, in order to draw a solid list of recommendations and operational plans for the implementation of the project. Interestingly, throughout this process we came to learn that, although our plan to establish a new art collection that would lend works to the general public was a timely result of global, sectorial, and personal circumstances, public art lending was not an unprecedented idea.
Initiatives we came across included the Israeli Graphoteque, a local print loaning initiative founded as an independent, artist-led charity in 1986. Similar to “artotheks,” which are more commonly found in Germany (with fewer examples in Austria, Sweden, and Czechia), this public loaning collection operated alongside a library and was based in Tel Aviv’s central public library until its official dissolvement in 2015 due to administrative and financial difficulties. Another type of nonprofit art loan scheme we examined was that of university art collections, where university-based museums and galleries (mostly in the US) owning their own art collections allow students and faculty to borrow artworks for a small or no fee. We also learned that some currently operating public art lending schemes, like the D. Walker Art Rental Program at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, for example, existed from as early as 1934.[22]
After dedicating a considerable amount of time to conducting interviews, meetings, and online research, we formed a second detailed version of our proposal. This version comprised a comparison of the different lending models we reviewed, followed by a full project plan spanning strategies, timescales, budgets, and risk assessments based on the guidelines provided by our potential partner.
A couple of months later, we found out through social media that the arts department officer we were originally in touch with had resigned. Not long after, the institutions we were in touch with gradually stopped responding to our emails. We were told that this could be due to changes in management, but none of these organizational changes were ever formally communicated to us. Although being heavily invested in this project for over a year by then, at no point were we offered any payment or compensation for all the work we had done so far.
As it stands, it is still unclear when, where, or whether our plan for the “co-llection” will be materialized. Although we were originally aiming to develop this essay as a theoretic companion to the implementation of the project, the result is unfortunately not the reflective analysis of a successful case study we were hoping for it to be. Instead, it serves as a creative chronicle following the sequence of events and circumstances that led to its development and the barriers we met along the way.
This journey began in early 2022, out of our personal experience as curators and cultural organizers, but also as freelance practitioners, who, like so many of our fellow creatives, tried making ends meet in the precarious condition of a post-pandemic art world. Our acquaintance with the afterlives of exhibitions and commissioned artworks that later turn into an environmental burden was a driving force in the manifestation of this project. It requires moving away from preaching about the consequences of climate crisis under the convenience of familiar exhibition-making practices and moving toward a more comprehensive, environmentally and ethically responsible conduct that encompasses all aspects of our work—from travel and shipment to modification of spaces, from collection management, through energy use, to the cafeteria’s chains of supply.
It also acknowledges that sustainability within museum practice does not and cannot exist only with regards to a physical or natural environment, but requires the care for a broader ecosystem, which includes the well-being of artists, workers, and surrounding communities.
When the idea of setting up a municipal art collection that would buy works from local artists for the sole purpose of lending them back to the public came about, we believed it to be a first of its kind. In reality we learned that, although taking art out of sheltered storage and putting it in the hands of “untrained” individuals is fundamentally opposed to professional museum conduct, it is already being carried out to some extent by institutions that can see the greater value of putting the well-being of subjects over that of objects.
As we learned from our research, public art lending can operate under multiple structures and take various forms. It can work with existing art collections or establish new ones; it can be displayed continuously, like in a shop or a library, or rely on one-off swapping and borrowing events; it can share resources with other institutions like museums and libraries or be a stand-alone initiative. Interestingly, in an interview conducted in September 2022 with Heather Scanlan, Assistant Registrar at the Weisman Art Museum, who also manages its art rental program, we came to learn that the damage caused to artworks by public lending is extremely rare. In fact, she could not recall a single case where a work has been destroyed or an insurance claim filed.
While arguing that museums require change in order to become more equitable and survive what is yet to come is not unprecedented, reality teaches us that creating new operational infrastructures can be far more challenging than acknowledging their necessity. Although all potential partners we encountered along the way have agreed the “co-llection” was a well-articulated and much-needed project, almost none of the directors, managers, and officials we communicated with were confident in their ability to pursue it.
The “creative sector” can be an elusive title, because over the years we were repeatedly accustomed to producing content into predetermined frameworks: exhibitions, performances, public programs, publications, and pedagogies. Even when occasionally transgressed, we tend to run back to these familiar outputs in order to manifest our thoughts and actions, very rarely, if ever, creating something to replace them with. Attempting to establish alternative mechanisms, as we came to learn, often comes upon resistance in the form of endless bureaucracies, impossible legalities, lack of resources, and self-contradicting policies (to name a few).
These hurdles could have been easily cleared if solid actions (or sanctions) were made by funders and policymakers in order to encourage a more sustainable administration. But in the present condition, altering familiar models in favor of new, long-term and sustainable cultural strategies often relies on the good will of overworked and underpaid professional individuals. Introducing such infrastructural changes within institutions does not become easier when eligibility for public funding is measured through the narrow perspective of sum lines and head counting, while factors like accountability, continuity, and depth are being overlooked. This approach effectively imposes short-sighted prioritization of highly trafficked spectacles, even if only to allow institutions to keep their heads above water.
While, over the past few years, climate crisis, Covid-19, and anti-racist/decolonial protests have all (jointly and separately) catalyzed many writings and calls toward more ethical and sustainable forms of practice, it is often more difficult to take discussions from the realm of What (needs to change) to that of How (we can change it). Although far from being an ultimate or a final solution to all the ethical questions and organizational problems reviewed throughout this essay, the “co-llection” offers one possible structure of conduct driven by sustainability and solidarity. With creativity being such a crucial virtue to one’s ability to survive, we are now required more than ever to utilize the critical and creative qualities of our sector in order to tackle the very conditions in which we operate, and reimagine the ones we would like to see in their place.
Or Tshuva is a curator, writer, and educator currently leading 422 Arts, a community arts organization based in Manchester, United Kingdom. Her curatorial projects were exhibited at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, Jerusalem Design Week, Artport Tel Aviv, Beit Hagefen: Arab-Jewish Cultural Centre, and more. She was involved in curatorial and research residencies at the MuCEM (Marseille, FR), Liverpool Biennial (UK), and Residency Unlimited (Brooklyn, NY). She was a lecturer in curatorial studies at Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology, and the Arts in Tel Aviv, a visiting lecturer in Museology and Curatorial Studies at Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University, and a guest speaker at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, HaMidrasha School of Art, King’s College London, and Residency Unlimited. She is also a co-founder of RedLine Beer Sheva, an artist residency and nonprofit gallery for socially engaged art, where she served as a curator and artistic director between 2013 and 2016. Or gained her master’s degree in Global Arts with distinction from the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a co-author of the book Altering Narratives: Essential Political Practices in Visual Culture (2017, Hebrew). Her writings and curatorial projects gained support from Arts Council England, Artis, the Lottery Fund, and more.
Karni Barzilay is a curator working at the intersection of contemporary art, community, and educational practices. She is head of public program at the Ruth Youth Wing at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and for the past six years she has been curator and head of Kav 16 – Community Gallery for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. She was a PhD candidate in the department of Learning, Instruction and Teaching at Haifa University and holds a master’s degree from the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at Tel Aviv University, as well as a diploma from the Curatorial and Museum Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. She has curated solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums in Israel, such as Haifa Museum of Art, Indie gallery for photography (Tel Aviv), Hansan House (Jerusalem), and Art Cube Artists’ Studios (Jerusalem). Between 2013 and 2016 she was a part of “Metropolis” curatorial and production team. The Metropolis project was a social experiment toward the foundation of a new “multidisciplinary art school,” one in which the urban domain constitutes a place for learning and sharing knowledge. In 2019 the project was presented at the annual CAA conference in NYC.
[1] In the recent English translation of his book The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World (Manchester, 2021), Kuba Szreder refers to this unique sector of zero-hours art contractors as the “projectariat”—a neoliberal creative proletariat relying mainly on its own ability to globally move between precarious project-based employment opportunities.
[2] See https://www.artforum.com/, accessed May 2023;
and https://news.artnet.com/, accessed May 2023.
[3] Nancy Kenney, “‘From bad to worse’: over half of US museums have laid off furloughed staff, survey shows,” The Art Newspaper (November 2020), accessed February 2023.
[4] Dana Kopel, “Against Artsploitation,” last modified February 2023.
[5] Andrew Russeth, “As Museums Push to Sell Art, Competing Ideas About Deaccessioning Art Playing Out in Public,” Artnews (February 2021), last modified February 2023; Stefanie S. Jandl and Mark S. Gold, eds., Collections and Deaccessioning a Post-Pandemic World: Towards a New Reality (Cambridge, MA: MuseumsEtc, 2021); Tom Seymour, “State of the Union: why US museum workers are mobilising against their employers,” The Art Newspaper (February 2022), accessed February 2023.
[6] Official definitions of “sustainable development” often refer to the 1987 definition introduced by the UN Brundtland Commission: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” accessed February 2023.
[7] B. Purvis, Y. Mao, and D. Robinson, “Three pillars of sustainability: in search of conceptual origins,” Sustain Sci 14 (2019): 681–695, retrieved March 2023; Katriina Soini, Inger Birkeland, “Exploring the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability,”Geoforum 51 (2014): 213–223.
[8] Dana Kopel, “Against Artsploitation: Unionizing the New Museum,” The Baffler 59 (September 2021).
[9] See https://www.nytimes.com/; and https://www.theartnewspaper.com/.
[10] See https://www.curators-union.org/english.
[11] See https://www.theartnewspaper.com/.
[12] See https://hyperallergic.com/, accessed May 2023.
[13] Sociologist Eva Illouz brings similar claims in “Coronavirus Reveals What Really Makes the World Go Round , and It’s Not Money: The Bluff of Neo-Liberalism Must Be Called Out,” accessed May 2023; and https://www.theguardian.com/, accessed May 2023; see also Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (New York: Penguin, 2021).
[14] Julie Decker, “Climate of Change,” Museum Management and Curatorship 35, no. 6 (2020): 636–652.
[15] Shimrit Lee, Decolonize Museums (New York: OR Books, 2022).
[16] In 2019, the UK’s Tate museums released a statement titled “Tate Galleries and Slavery,” relating to the historic connections of Henry Tate to slavery; The British Museum, an institution standing at the center of many decolonization protests, released a series of statements regarding its most contested objects; see https://www.britishmuseum.org/. In 2020, the museum launched a new display acknowledging the colonial origin of its collection; see https://www.britishmuseum.org/visit/.
[17] Eve Tuck and K. Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1‐40.
[18] Two exceptions include Tel Aviv Museum of Art (est. 1932) and Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod (est. 1938).
[19] This is described in depth in Ariella Azoulay, “With Open Doors: Museums and Historical Narratives in Israel’s Public Space,” in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, eds. I. Rogoff and D. Sherman (New York: Routledge, 1994).
[20] We are referring to Andrea Fraser’s essay where she claims that institutional critique was swallowed up by the institutions it stood against, and effectively, institutionalized. See Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005).
[21] See https://www.haaretz.com/
[22] Other university collection lending schemes studied included those of the MIT List Center and Kettle’s Yard at Cambridge University, UK. See more in Jessica Diedalis, “Guide to Art Lending Programs for Students in Institutions of Higher Learning: A Capstone in the Field of Museum Studies for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2017).
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