____Comes as No Surprise
There are many artworks that comment on what I would term the Ozymandias art complex – the tendency by powerful people to create monuments of themselves with the delusional aim of gaining permanent fame and recognition. One of the most memorable is by Barbara Bloom, The Reign of Narcissism- a Neoclassic museum-style period room populated by Greco-Roman-like reproductions of her own effigy.
In a more explicit comment about the link with authoritarianism and museum propaganda, Spanish artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo came into the art world’s map when rescuing monuments from the Franco era (which are still plentiful) and recontextualizing them to comment on Franco’s dictatorial regime.
Recently I have been thinking about that dictatorial mindset, mainly as the result of a relatively recent experience. A few years ago I was contacted by a curator who followed my work as both an artist and educator. She told me that she had recently landed a directorship at a small university art museum in the US (the curator and museum shall remain unnamed for reasons that will become clear later) and wanted to involve me in some consultant capacity to help them figure out their educational mission. However, as we initiated conversations it became clear that the challenges she was facing clearly went way beyond education.
This university museum, located in a traditionally conservative state, was founded by a wealthy donor with the intention to house and preserve the oeuvre of his late wife who was a local figurative sculptor. The museum itself had a complicated recent history: the preceding museum director had committed suicide and the new director (the person who contacted me) had been hired to replace him.
After starting her tenure, what she encountered was a deeply dysfunctional institution where she had little to no say in the actual exhibition program or the management of the museums’ collections or policies. Her direct supervisor was the chair of the art department of the university, a mediocre printmaker with no museum work experience who used the institution for his own professional gain— often forcing the museum to schedule exhibitions where he himself was featured. The museum had also made an agreement with a regional printmaking association (of which this professor was part) where every member would contribute a print every year and the museum would be required to bring every single submission into its collection— not only bringing in hundreds of substandard works every year without any curatorial selection criteria but also generating a huge amount of work for its sole registrar and overwhelming the limited storage facilities of the museum. Because of the conservative leaning of the university and the local politics of the city where it was located, a show about AIDS that the new director organized was frowned upon by the administration (even while receiving positive press), and after the death of George Floyd, when practically all art museums in the US published a statement on their websites in support of Black Lives Matter, she was not allowed to do so.
I wanted to get a better understanding of the organization’s situation from the staff directly, so I arranged one-on-one meetings with each of them (it was a small staff of about 7). Each one told me a story that was more harrowing than the other. They all felt powerless and demoralized; all of them were concerned about speaking out, fearing retribution and concerned about the security of their jobs amid the budget cuts that the university was currently making. Some of them had worked for the museum for more than a decade while others were young professionals. The museum had no acquisitions committee, no exhibitions committee, no executive or advisory board that the director could answer to or rely for fundraising support. I also learned that because of the power vacuum created by the university’s leadership, credible claims of harassment and inappropriate behavior of some donors with museum staff were unaddressed. The museum was mainly an institutional shell, routinely violated. At some point of my research the director shared with me that she had resigned and was on her way out.
I told the outgoing director that I felt it was incumbent upon me, aside from the small project I was invited to do, to also produce a small evaluative study that I could share with her supervisors to share the problems I had observed. When I completed the project I was hired to do, I submitted my report directly to the corresponding senior higher up in the university who oversaw the art department ( and yet who had no visual arts or museum knowledge or experience whatsoever), explaining that I felt important to share these observations and making a few suggestions for best practices that any non-profit art museum should follow (acquisitions, governance and curatorial policy, etc.). Most importantly, I suggested that the museum should have a strict conflict of interest policy where the curatorial, acquisition or program decisions could not be influenced by those who would personally stand to benefit from them.
This was the senior administrator’s response:
We are in receipt of the Museum Report you drafted. […] the draft report you submitted was outside the agreed upon scope of work, and therefore cannot be accepted. In the future, we expect that you will strictly adhere to the terms of the agreements you signed.
And then we parted ways.
Ever since that time I have thought about this experience. In spite of the cynical self-serving intent of those who ran this university museum, and in spite also of their incredible ineptitude and my outrage and sympathy for the departing director and her staff, I was nothing more than a mere passerby who witnessed an unfair act, an outside party with no direct relationship with that community, no connections to anyone who I could ask for help to start a battle on ethical practices there. So I let it go.
Still, the experience has kept me thinking of how museums are attractive to those people in power who want to prove something about themselves. One might think that it might be evident for anyone that using their political influence to enhance their artistic status is not only unethical but also naïve and ridiculous. Did this not occur to this artist/department chair when forcing his work into the museum he controlled? The answer might not be as easy as it appears.
When artists are individuals of means or have political connections, power, and/or influence, they can use their own distorted sense of self (and benefit from the protective bubble around them within which people in their proximity will not tell them the truth about their work) to build self-monuments. As artistic amateurs, these individuals usually also are professional amateurs who don’t understand the basic norms around conflicts of interest.
As many know, the museum I dealt with is not an isolated incident: there are many cases of museums where donors use their influence to feature their own art, most notably the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum. I also have written in the past about wealthy people who decide to become artists, so I will not go into detail on that topic here.
The use of political power to gain artistic credibility is one of the oldest strategies. A case that comes to mind is one involving the late Mexican figurative painter Arturo Rivera, a virulent critic of contemporary art, who in 2001 maneuvered with the culture ministry of Mexico to order the hosting of a book launch of his at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City (of which he was an outspoken critic). The director at the time of the Tamayo, Osvaldo Sánchez, objected to the top-down insertion of that program without consultation with him or the staff, the potential public humiliation of being forced to host someone who had publicly declared himself as his enemy, and the unjustified imprimatur of credibility that doing the event in that museum would give to the artist. When told by the culture minister that he had to host the event in spite of those objections, Sánchez resigned. In his resignation letter, he wrote: “the decision of imposing an agenda with improvised priorities and decisions made from higher ups without consideration of the museum’s curatorial criteria nor the specificity of the proposal, makes my job as director become superfluous and trivializes the intellectual project that a professional team needs to undertake in order to consolidate a museum’s prestige.”
What is most significant to me is not so much the absolute lack of introspection or awareness of the museum abusers I have described above, but what their abusive behavior reveals of their psychology. Museums bestow credibility through their authoritative structures; and for those who feel insecure about their worth and/or have the need for a public form of validation, having oneself featured within the platform of such institution often feels like the solution.
The creation of museum-shrines is the strategy of autocrats and dictators who love to use grandiose museum buildings as propaganda theaters. A good surviving example of Stalin’s rule is his birthplace museum in Gori, Georgia, mostly a time-capsule of Stalinist propaganda (with the exception of a tiny side gallery that quickly and superficially glosses over his many atrocities, as a journalist recently described, “a literal footnote: a couple of meaningless exhibits, a paragraph about Stalin’s crimes, and another telling you that the repressions had already begun before Lenin’s death.”
Most fascinating are the examples offered by North Korea: not just its museums, of course, such as the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, and the Jonsung Revolutionary Museum, both elaborate propaganda pieces by the Kim dynasty. The entire city of Pyongyang is mainly a propaganda ad for the dictatorship, including the surreal Department Store No. 1 ( fittingly titled as if it were an artwork) which truly is a performance art piece: a largely staged department store, often populated with actors as salespersons and even fake shoppers with the intention to prove the vibrancy of the North Korean economy to outside visitors from the West and elsewhere.
While it may be unfair to compare a dictatorship’s propaganda museum with the ego trip of a failed academic in a tiny university museum, my point is that the mindset that prompts such manipulation is of one piece: an altogether human delusion of grandeur or desperate attempt to bend reality to one’s own desires and narcissism. Furthermore, it is important to recognize those impulses because they all, to an extent, live within each one of us.
The majority of us do not have the wealth or political power to enhance our reputations. At the same time, on a daily basis and in very small ways we curate largely positive narratives about ourselves, usually in social media. I am reminded of the masterpiece science-fiction novella La invención de Morel (Morel’s invention) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, one of my all-time favorite books. The story is about how the title character creates, in an abandoned island, a museum structure with a mechanism that forever projects three-dimensional images of him and a group of his friends, permanently memorializing their lives.
All these examples might be useful case studies for each one of us, whether artists, curators, collectors or other related art profession, as we consider how to critically assess our contributions to our field and try to reach an honest assessment of ourselves and be crystal clear that forcing our way into forms of public validation is nothing but a pathetic act that will only diminish our stature in the long run. The good news is that in the long arch of history, when everyone reading these lines today is gone and the art of this period is studied a century from now, those petty mediocre artists who tried to force their way into prominence will all be forgotten, while those who truly contributed something of worth (i.e. not self-promotional memorials) will be remembered.
This is a super important piece. I am going to share it on social media. Thank you so much Pablo.
Each time I read your pieces I am amazed at how you think. I would like to send you a copy of my recently published book, not as self promotion, but as a sense of "like minds." You confirm for me much of what I have experienced in my 80 years on the planet, 50 as an artist. Please contact me directly via email to let me know where to send it. Thank you - Judith Ren-Lay
ren-lay@mindspring.com