Occupying the museum is not enough, rethink completely the situation!

Interviewee: Gregory Sholette

Gregory Sholette: I think that we are talking about what is going on right now, the present moment. And like your project Occupy Museums is a good example of artist who are trying to attempt to rethink the public sphere by focusing on what they know best: the art museum: basically an ideological institution that has been preserved beyond its original historical use or logic as a nation-building repository of accumulated material culture. I think that probably the thing Occupy did best was to generate an exciting and wonderful moment where a lot of people asked ‘how do WE organize?’. In other words, “we” creatives who the system promised so much to and who now are being shut out of the economy. And Occupy was still doing that for quite a long time after Zuccotti Park closed down, although it is pretty much disappeared now except for some still functional smaller groups including Art and Labor and Occupy Museums. My big issue with Occupy Museums was more about their objectives once they did “occupy” the museum. For them it was a little bit like: hey let’s go in, let’s make a fuss and let’s talk about this thing called art and art and labor. But hey didn’t have a strong sense of the history of these kind of actions by artists including the work of Art Workers’ Coalition in the late 1960s and early 1970s whom I discuss in my book Dark Matter . What is it you want to occupy the Museum for I would ask them? Why occupy the museum because if you want to change the way that we think about culture and the political economy of art then why go to the museum at all? You are just risking using the same validation system all over again. So the question really is a more fundamental one: how do you begin to rethink completely the cultural labor situation without reproducing it all over again, not even unknowingly, by accident so to speak?