1 00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:07,170 OK, so I'd like to start by thanking Geraldine for the very generous introduction. 2 00:00:07,170 --> 00:00:18,620 And I also want to thank and acknowledge the Terra Foundation for American Art for supporting this lecture series. 3 00:00:18,620 --> 00:00:25,100 November twenty eighteen. An image ricochets across the Internet. 4 00:00:25,100 --> 00:00:33,080 The photograph depicts a migrant from Honduras named Maria Lila Masr Castro and her two young children. 5 00:00:33,080 --> 00:00:42,890 She flees the tear gas canister at left. Fired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the US Mexico border near Tijuana. 6 00:00:42,890 --> 00:00:47,870 The woman's face is contorted in confusion and her children both in diapers. 7 00:00:47,870 --> 00:00:53,060 One in bare feet scramble in fear over a barren terrain. 8 00:00:53,060 --> 00:01:02,390 The fence behind is laced with barbed wire. An American flag is visible between the steel slats of a barrier wall. 9 00:01:02,390 --> 00:01:09,230 The photograph is compelling, in part because of the visual contrast at its centre visa, 10 00:01:09,230 --> 00:01:18,610 Castro's candy coloured T-shirt depicts Princess Elsa and Princess Anna from the Disney animated blockbuster Frozen. 11 00:01:18,610 --> 00:01:26,360 The characters wide eyed grins contrast violently against Masr Castro's tense face and against the bodies of her daughters, 12 00:01:26,360 --> 00:01:35,910 who's bent limbs, convey panic and whose faces were hardly even visible, obscured as their mother pulls them. 13 00:01:35,910 --> 00:01:40,760 Masr Castro's t shirt alludes to the migrant experience. 14 00:01:40,760 --> 00:01:51,240 The fairy tale film tells the story of on his journey to find her sister Elsa and restore peace in a faraway land. 15 00:01:51,240 --> 00:01:58,290 She also hoped Masr Castro to reunite with the father of her children, who is already in the United. 16 00:01:58,290 --> 00:02:08,780 Oh, excuse me. I've jumped at this. Castro. Also fled violence in Honduras, seeking peace, seeking asylum in a faraway land. 17 00:02:08,780 --> 00:02:15,110 She also hoped to reunite with a child with the father of her children who was already in the United States. 18 00:02:15,110 --> 00:02:24,740 Her T-shirt reads Family Forever. The image captured by Reuters photojournalist Kim Kyung Hoon went viral, 19 00:02:24,740 --> 00:02:32,750 instantly becoming an emblem of the clash over immigration that has convulsed American society over the past three 20 00:02:32,750 --> 00:02:40,340 years since President Trump first called for a multi billion dollar a border wall during his presidential campaign. 21 00:02:40,340 --> 00:02:45,320 The image contrasts violently against Trump's inflammatory rhetoric, 22 00:02:45,320 --> 00:02:51,770 which uses xenophobia as a political weapon by vilifying migrants as a threat to the U.S. 23 00:02:51,770 --> 00:03:00,320 The image makes visible how unthreatening, how desperate these migrants are. 24 00:03:00,320 --> 00:03:04,370 The image also incited protest in an unlikely location. 25 00:03:04,370 --> 00:03:10,760 The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City recalled a tear gas canister at left. 26 00:03:10,760 --> 00:03:16,520 The New York Times counted some two dozen such canisters on the Mexican side of the border. 27 00:03:16,520 --> 00:03:20,540 Journalists posted photographs of them online. 28 00:03:20,540 --> 00:03:29,780 All were branded with the logo of Defence Technology, a manufacturer of crowd control weapons for military and police use, 29 00:03:29,780 --> 00:03:41,000 or what the company calls, quote, less lethal solutions, including riot gear, body armour and chemical munitions like tear gas. 30 00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:51,020 A warning. Excuse me, on the defence technology Web site describes the effects of the gas irritation, burning sensation, 31 00:03:51,020 --> 00:03:58,880 coughing, the sensation of shortness of breath, tightness in chest, often accompanied by a feeling of panic. 32 00:03:58,880 --> 00:04:08,460 End quote. The parent company of defence technology is the Safari Land Group, a global defence manufacturer spanning some 19 brands. 33 00:04:08,460 --> 00:04:19,380 The CEO and majority stakeholder of safari land, Warren B Canters, is also vice chairman on the board of trustees at the Whitney. 34 00:04:19,380 --> 00:04:24,600 This surprising link from Trump administration to the administration of the Whitney, 35 00:04:24,600 --> 00:04:32,730 from world events to the art world, shocked many news articles posted on the arts blog. 36 00:04:32,730 --> 00:04:36,750 Hyper allergic triggered a series of dramatic events. 37 00:04:36,750 --> 00:04:41,190 More than 100 museum staffers, including senior curator Christie Illes, 38 00:04:41,190 --> 00:04:46,470 signed an open letter to Adam Weinberg, the winner's director, voicing concerns. 39 00:04:46,470 --> 00:04:53,760 The artist activist group Decolonised This Place then stormed the museum in a series of animated protests. 40 00:04:53,760 --> 00:05:07,860 Images from their demonstration, in turn ricocheted at high velocity across the Internet, triggering still more outrage. 41 00:05:07,860 --> 00:05:15,090 Recently, some two hundred and twenty artists and academics signed an open letter demanding the removal of Canters from the board. 42 00:05:15,090 --> 00:05:20,880 The statement includes the names of nearly 50 artists participating the Whitney's upcoming biennial, 43 00:05:20,880 --> 00:05:25,290 the most significant exhibition of contemporary art in the United States. 44 00:05:25,290 --> 00:05:33,510 The statement also includes the names of important art historians Claire Bishop Howe, Foster Lucila Part and Douglas Crimp. 45 00:05:33,510 --> 00:05:46,710 Amongst them decolonise. This place also unleashed an ongoing nine week series of actions at the museum that continue there on week eight right now. 46 00:05:46,710 --> 00:05:54,880 I first became interested in this controversy back in January when I presented a talk about the emerging debate at Modern Art Oxford. 47 00:05:54,880 --> 00:05:59,910 And I want to acknowledge moderate Oxford for that initial invitation to lecture. 48 00:05:59,910 --> 00:06:06,480 At the time, it was not clear what would happen, but the controversy now appears to be enduring. 49 00:06:06,480 --> 00:06:14,970 It is representative of the many related controversies over money that have exploded across the art world. 50 00:06:14,970 --> 00:06:28,280 My talk today examines these events. It is the first in a series of four talks through which I explore excuse me, through which I explore. 51 00:06:28,280 --> 00:06:36,360 The complex moral, ethical and political questions raised by recent arts controversies in the United States and the way that money, 52 00:06:36,360 --> 00:06:43,110 power, history and a shifting definition of truth are intertwined and unravelling. 53 00:06:43,110 --> 00:06:47,430 Protests of the sort now taking place at the Whitney are not new. 54 00:06:47,430 --> 00:06:51,080 There have been many similar conflicts in American art. 55 00:06:51,080 --> 00:06:56,280 And I will mention a few of these historical examples throughout this lecture series. 56 00:06:56,280 --> 00:07:07,500 However, the events of 2016, the Year of Trump and Make America Great Again have also functioned to accelerate the urgency of protest in American art. 57 00:07:07,500 --> 00:07:12,500 And it is my claim that American art, the actual art, the art itself, 58 00:07:12,500 --> 00:07:20,610 and not just the museum or gallery that houses it has become a battlefield for new forms of aesthetic activism and symbolic struggle. 59 00:07:20,610 --> 00:07:29,330 A new culture war. The culture war is a quintessentially American phenomenon. 60 00:07:29,330 --> 00:07:38,000 The term was first applied to conflicts between urban and rural Americans and their contrasting values in the early 20th century. 61 00:07:38,000 --> 00:07:46,040 But it gained notoriety in the 1990s after the publication of sociologist James Davis and Hunter Hunter's book, 62 00:07:46,040 --> 00:07:56,510 Culture Wars The Struggle to Define America. The Culture War is defined by its polarity between two ideological worldviews that 63 00:07:56,510 --> 00:08:02,030 are completely irreconcilable and align in opposition across a range of social, 64 00:08:02,030 --> 00:08:13,880 cultural and political issues. As Hunter puts it, quote, Our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans are now at odds and quote. 65 00:08:13,880 --> 00:08:23,330 Indeed, the phrase culture war is especially appropriate for the dispute over safari land and the Whitney culture war is in this case, 66 00:08:23,330 --> 00:08:31,040 not just metaphor or not just analogy, but a literal contraction of the two forces that are shaping these protests. 67 00:08:31,040 --> 00:08:37,310 We are talking about actual warfare in the form of real weapons made by Warren Kandos company Safari Land, 68 00:08:37,310 --> 00:08:43,650 and the way that weapons relate to the culture of contemporary art. 69 00:08:43,650 --> 00:08:50,370 These recent events are also more complex than the infamous culture wars of the 1990s. 70 00:08:50,370 --> 00:08:56,370 Those debates revolved around right wing opposition to government sponsorship of the arts, 71 00:08:56,370 --> 00:09:01,050 specifically sponsorship of art that some perceived as morally offensive. 72 00:09:01,050 --> 00:09:11,310 Like Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit photographs were Andre Serranos image of a crucifix submerged, supposedly in a vat of urine. 73 00:09:11,310 --> 00:09:20,370 The controversy is defining our present moment. Instead, reflect left wing opposition to a wide range of disparate issues intersecting with the arts, 74 00:09:20,370 --> 00:09:26,190 the legacies of colonialism and debates over the repatriation of art objects, 75 00:09:26,190 --> 00:09:33,660 climate change and fossil fuels, and the links between the energy industry and the money that fuels the arts. 76 00:09:33,660 --> 00:09:38,790 The opioid epidemic and the pharmaceutical industry, particularly Purdue Pharma, 77 00:09:38,790 --> 00:09:45,930 makers of OxyContin and the philanthropic philanthropic activities of the Sackler family. 78 00:09:45,930 --> 00:09:53,340 The crisis over public monuments like Confederate statues and their role in perpetuating racism. 79 00:09:53,340 --> 00:09:58,740 All of these topics have become the focus of new culture wars. 80 00:09:58,740 --> 00:10:10,320 The forces that have created constant political crisis worldwide, a new age of anxiety, an age of outrage, are also now transforming the arts. 81 00:10:10,320 --> 00:10:16,140 Forces like global neo liberal capitalism and the spread of communications networks, 82 00:10:16,140 --> 00:10:21,990 digital culture and new media that create dangerously fast image circulation, 83 00:10:21,990 --> 00:10:29,840 unstable conceptions of truth, fake news and new forms of digital propaganda. 84 00:10:29,840 --> 00:10:35,420 This lecture series considers these controversies as a contest of images. 85 00:10:35,420 --> 00:10:43,760 In examining these controversies, these new culture wars. I have five broad hypotheses that I want to test first. 86 00:10:43,760 --> 00:10:49,430 Number one, these controversies are analogue, but also digital. 87 00:10:49,430 --> 00:10:57,470 Physical things. Sites like museums or objects like works of art, painting, statues, monuments are at the centre of these debates. 88 00:10:57,470 --> 00:11:02,780 But the digital network fuels the conflict, digital culture and new media. 89 00:11:02,780 --> 00:11:13,290 The Internet intensified cultural turmoil. To these controversies are more polarised and polarising than ever before. 90 00:11:13,290 --> 00:11:16,980 This is really, by definition, the meaning of a culture war. 91 00:11:16,980 --> 00:11:28,230 But it is important to emphasise that these debates are framed by a set of diametrically opposed dialectically, dialectically inverted positions. 92 00:11:28,230 --> 00:11:34,110 Three. These controversies are political, but also aesthetic. 93 00:11:34,110 --> 00:11:36,960 They involve political positions on cultural questions. 94 00:11:36,960 --> 00:11:43,590 But I want to make the case that artists and activists are responding with uniquely aesthetic strategies. 95 00:11:43,590 --> 00:11:55,280 In a sense, the culture war is an artistic medium. For these controversies are about the present, but also the past. 96 00:11:55,280 --> 00:12:05,390 The debates may seem numbingly a historical, but in fact, they are actually and they actually engage longstanding debates in the arts. 97 00:12:05,390 --> 00:12:10,610 And finally, relatedly, number five, these controversies seem new, 98 00:12:10,610 --> 00:12:19,460 but our old if we trace the debates and their visual culture, we are led back into the history of art. 99 00:12:19,460 --> 00:12:23,870 Mark Colvin to to begin today's particular case study. 100 00:12:23,870 --> 00:12:27,710 Let's return to the Whitney Museum and the open letter that was first addressed 101 00:12:27,710 --> 00:12:32,570 to the director of the Whitney and signed by more than 100 museum staffers. 102 00:12:32,570 --> 00:12:38,210 They write, quote, to the leadership of the Whitney Museum. 103 00:12:38,210 --> 00:12:43,430 We are writing to convey our outrage upon learning that Whitney vice chairman Warren Canters company, 104 00:12:43,430 --> 00:12:51,500 Safari Land, is the supplier of the teargassed recently used to attack asylum seekers at the U.S. border. 105 00:12:51,500 --> 00:13:02,340 And our frustration and confusion at the Whitney's decision to remain silent on this matter, to remain silent is to be complicit. 106 00:13:02,340 --> 00:13:03,960 First and foremost, 107 00:13:03,960 --> 00:13:11,820 some of us are deeply connected to the communities that are being directly impacted and targeted by the tear gassing at the border. 108 00:13:11,820 --> 00:13:18,780 For the Widney not to acknowledge that this news may impact its staff is to assume we are separate from the issue, 109 00:13:18,780 --> 00:13:22,560 that it is happening somewhere else to some other people. 110 00:13:22,560 --> 00:13:29,670 Many of us feel the violence inflected, inflicted upon refugees and against mostly PEOC people of colour. 111 00:13:29,670 --> 00:13:35,280 Protesters in Ferguson and mostly indigenous protesters of the Dakota access pipeline. 112 00:13:35,280 --> 00:13:46,360 Just two of the many other instances of militarised tear gassing of unarmed citizens, much more personally that it seems to affect leadership. 113 00:13:46,360 --> 00:13:54,520 So many of us are working towards a more equitable and inclusive institution upon learning of Canada's business dealings. 114 00:13:54,520 --> 00:13:58,900 Many of us working on these initiatives feel uncomfortable in our positions. 115 00:13:58,900 --> 00:14:06,640 We cannot claim to serve these communities while accepting funding from individuals whose actions are at odds with that mission. 116 00:14:06,640 --> 00:14:13,540 The work, which we are so proud of, does not wash away these connexions and quote. 117 00:14:13,540 --> 00:14:19,810 The letter introduces the core concept that is a central tenant of many recent culture war debates, 118 00:14:19,810 --> 00:14:26,140 art washing alluded to in the explanation that the staff work with those affected by 119 00:14:26,140 --> 00:14:32,660 immigration policy does not wash away the links between border politics and the museum board. 120 00:14:32,660 --> 00:14:36,870 And I will return to this concept momentarily. 121 00:14:36,870 --> 00:14:46,020 The letter also established concrete demands, including a request that the Muzammil leadership develop a clear policy around Trustees', 122 00:14:46,020 --> 00:14:52,230 quote, What qualifies or disqualifies a wealthy philanthropic individual for the board? 123 00:14:52,230 --> 00:14:56,250 Is there a moral line? If so, what is that line? 124 00:14:56,250 --> 00:15:07,380 We believe the line should be that we not be afflicted with any board member whose work or actions are at odds with the museum's mission and quote. 125 00:15:07,380 --> 00:15:14,820 The staff statement concluded with a quotation from Martin Luther King Junior's letter from the Birmingham Jail, 126 00:15:14,820 --> 00:15:23,910 one of the most famous documents from the civil rights movement. King explains that the barrier to progressive change is not the Ku Klux Klan are, 127 00:15:23,910 --> 00:15:28,830 but quote, the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, 128 00:15:28,830 --> 00:15:36,250 who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice. 129 00:15:36,250 --> 00:15:43,050 And quote, the staff statement relates King's remarks to the present, quote, 130 00:15:43,050 --> 00:15:47,280 continuing to accept funding from individuals who are knowingly complicit in the 131 00:15:47,280 --> 00:15:52,470 injustices committed on our own land and across our borders is negative peace. 132 00:15:52,470 --> 00:16:02,350 We demand positive peace and quote. Some might say that the art and the politics should be separate. 133 00:16:02,350 --> 00:16:09,370 That what a museum board does after hours does not concern the operation of the museum. 134 00:16:09,370 --> 00:16:13,570 But such an argument makes little sense. At an institution like the Whitney, 135 00:16:13,570 --> 00:16:23,810 which explicitly showcases political art and activism in which art and politics are always already present in the museum's cultural offerings. 136 00:16:23,810 --> 00:16:32,740 And I'm going to return to this point momentarily as well. The activist group decolonise this place later released their own open letter condemning 137 00:16:32,740 --> 00:16:38,650 what they saw as the ambiguous reception of the staff statement amongst art world elites. 138 00:16:38,650 --> 00:16:48,000 Amongst critics, curators and art historians, all of whom perhaps recognise truth in the criticism, but also simultaneously, 139 00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:57,550 maybe hypocritically resist the insinuation that they might also be in some way complicit to use the term invoked by the Whitney staff. 140 00:16:57,550 --> 00:17:04,000 That did decolonise this place letter reads, quote. 141 00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:09,430 There has been a conspicuous silence from many artists, curators, historians and critics, 142 00:17:09,430 --> 00:17:18,940 including those whose work is celebrated for its engagement with themes of politics, social practise, racial justice and even institutional critique. 143 00:17:18,940 --> 00:17:22,900 We feel this silence is not a matter of Callison difference. 144 00:17:22,900 --> 00:17:29,980 Instead, it is a sign that powerful people are shaken by the profound contradiction that is finally coming to 145 00:17:29,980 --> 00:17:36,730 a head between the purported values of contemporary art and the violent profiteering that sub tens. 146 00:17:36,730 --> 00:17:47,380 Most of the major institutions of the art system. The statement points to the crucial tension in this controversy. 147 00:17:47,380 --> 00:17:54,640 The profound contradiction in the arts between a performed politics and intellectual politics, 148 00:17:54,640 --> 00:17:59,760 a politics that is theorised, rationalise, historic sized and explained, 149 00:17:59,760 --> 00:18:14,570 and that is easily assimilated by culture, industry and the politics of aesthetics that might instead actually destabilise the status quo. 150 00:18:14,570 --> 00:18:21,530 These protests are interesting to me, not only because of their confrontational politics, 151 00:18:21,530 --> 00:18:29,460 but also because of their confrontational aesthetics, the way that the image itself becomes contested. 152 00:18:29,460 --> 00:18:38,790 Decolonised this place infiltrated the witness visual culture using the museum's own exhibition, a blockbuster show on Andy Warhol, 153 00:18:38,790 --> 00:18:47,320 a show substantially financed by Warren Canters against the museum itself through a series of graphic interventions. 154 00:18:47,320 --> 00:19:01,140 Many of these were simple and straightforward graffiti, vandalism, well-placed decolonise this place, stickers on subway billboards and so on. 155 00:19:01,140 --> 00:19:08,130 But other interventions were more elaborate, specifically seeking to repeat and invert warhorse work, 156 00:19:08,130 --> 00:19:13,710 thereby forcing it into dialogue with the debate over safari land. 157 00:19:13,710 --> 00:19:24,870 One poster, for example, repeats and inverts Warhols 1962, painting green Coca-Cola bottles instead of the silkscreened soda bottle, 158 00:19:24,870 --> 00:19:31,020 that gin generic image of post-war American affluence, mass production and consumer power. 159 00:19:31,020 --> 00:19:34,380 The poster shows a repeated grid of safari land. 160 00:19:34,380 --> 00:19:42,810 Tear gas canisters of contemporary American violence, mass produced weaponry and state power. 161 00:19:42,810 --> 00:19:56,190 The Whitney name replaces the Coca-Cola brand. This repetition and inversion recurs in numerous designs for posters and pamphlets or famous painting 162 00:19:56,190 --> 00:20:03,000 of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis shows the first lady before and after the assassination of JFK. 163 00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:06,970 The same grid is used to instead repeat safari lands. 164 00:20:06,970 --> 00:20:10,740 Tear gas canisters. Or another. 165 00:20:10,740 --> 00:20:16,280 A celebrity portrait that shows not the glitz and the glamour of art collector Ethel Scull. 166 00:20:16,280 --> 00:20:24,720 Thirty six times. One of Warhols first and most famous portraits, one intended to sell the sizzle of the socialite. 167 00:20:24,720 --> 00:20:29,910 But instead, Warren and Allison, Canada's Widney director Adam Weinberg. 168 00:20:29,910 --> 00:20:45,000 And yet Mortier Gas. Another mimics an early Warhol painting of Superman in the original canvas, which is on the right copy from a comic strip. 169 00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:50,370 Superman offers a declaration of super human strength. 170 00:20:50,370 --> 00:20:56,310 Good. A mighty puff of my super breath extinguished the forest fire. 171 00:20:56,310 --> 00:21:06,690 Now, decolonised this place is Superman offering words of advice from a tweet posted in solidarity with activists in Ferguson, Missouri, 172 00:21:06,690 --> 00:21:12,480 where the death of Michael Brown, an 18 year old black man who was shot by a white police officers, 173 00:21:12,480 --> 00:21:17,730 triggered violent demonstrations in 2014 over weeks of protests. 174 00:21:17,730 --> 00:21:23,430 Police fired tear gas into civilian crowds on numerous occasions. 175 00:21:23,430 --> 00:21:26,630 Quote, Always make sure to run against the win win. 176 00:21:26,630 --> 00:21:32,340 Teargassed. Keep calm. The pain will pass. Don't touch your face or put water on it. 177 00:21:32,340 --> 00:21:43,290 Instead, use milk or coke and quote. Other interventions manipulate the design of the witness Web site. 178 00:21:43,290 --> 00:21:53,190 And also here you can see I'm comparing Deklin ISIS plays posters with the Whitney Web site advertising the Warhol exhibition. 179 00:21:53,190 --> 00:22:01,250 And then also the Whitney subway advertisements as reimagined by decolonise this place. 180 00:22:01,250 --> 00:22:05,660 One overlays Whitney's Warhol design with Ferguson. 181 00:22:05,660 --> 00:22:12,380 It includes four photographs of tear gas attacks from the Ferguson protest reproduced at Centre. 182 00:22:12,380 --> 00:22:23,540 So in this particular poster, images are taken that these activists found online of tear gassing that happened at Ferguson. 183 00:22:23,540 --> 00:22:30,590 And you can see these are the photographs that they have appropriate. 184 00:22:30,590 --> 00:22:37,380 And they've repeated this in the full range of promotional materials that the Whitney produced. 185 00:22:37,380 --> 00:22:46,310 So, for example, Warhol Soup can becomes the tear gas canister. 186 00:22:46,310 --> 00:22:52,130 All of these techniques descend directly from media tactics used in the 1990s and early 2000s, 187 00:22:52,130 --> 00:22:56,120 like culture jamming or the approaches of the Leatrice International, 188 00:22:56,120 --> 00:23:06,830 and the situation is in the 1950s and 1960s, like de Tormé or turning routeing hijacking techniques in which brands and logos 189 00:23:06,830 --> 00:23:14,030 are reformulated and remixed in order to reveal truth behind the spectacle. 190 00:23:14,030 --> 00:23:22,700 The Whitney W, a flexible logo, one that expands and contracts to fill available space from the blank frames of Web browsers 191 00:23:22,700 --> 00:23:29,090 to the empty ground of a poster is now bent into the spray from a can of tear gas. 192 00:23:29,090 --> 00:23:36,710 You uphold white supremacy. Or simply safari land. 193 00:23:36,710 --> 00:23:44,120 These strategies are actually more interesting than simple brand hacks or culture jams. 194 00:23:44,120 --> 00:23:52,160 The safari land hashtag appended to the Instagram post causes it to appear in an Instagram feed of safari land products, 195 00:23:52,160 --> 00:23:59,420 grenade launchers, gun holsters and ammunition, all promotional images of the company's products and their owners. 196 00:23:59,420 --> 00:24:09,110 You uphold white supremacy. This highjacked logo is still flexible, able to fill any available space. 197 00:24:09,110 --> 00:24:18,340 All through the logic of tagging. The hashtag Whitney Museum makes it appear alongside examples of the museum selfie. 198 00:24:18,340 --> 00:24:26,730 That ubiquitous form of contemporary art spectatorship now undermined through a violent juxtaposition. 199 00:24:26,730 --> 00:24:31,700 The new logo condemns viewers as mindless, consumers as complicit. 200 00:24:31,700 --> 00:24:47,380 You uphold white supremacy. And this effect recurs throughout the images that these activists have posted on Instagram and on Twitter as well. 201 00:24:47,380 --> 00:24:56,560 This approach using the networked effects of digital platforms as collage plays off conventional appropriation strategies like photo montage. 202 00:24:56,560 --> 00:25:05,990 But it does so in ways that take advantage of new medias, media specific trait, its digital format. 203 00:25:05,990 --> 00:25:14,070 One of the more more effective examples shows activists standing in front of a painting from the Whitney exhibition, 204 00:25:14,070 --> 00:25:21,280 their t shirts bear the tagline from Defence Technology, Less Lethal Solutions. 205 00:25:21,280 --> 00:25:28,540 More safari land products. Guns, holsters, ammunition. 206 00:25:28,540 --> 00:25:37,490 One hundred and twenty nine die. Warhol, the original painting, referenced a plane crash from the 1960s here. 207 00:25:37,490 --> 00:25:42,190 Reproducers, a newspaper's shocking front page here. 208 00:25:42,190 --> 00:25:48,250 However, a digital collage uses new media to relate the painting to current events. 209 00:25:48,250 --> 00:25:52,420 Two guns to ammunition. 210 00:25:52,420 --> 00:26:01,660 This method, standing in front of paintings with protest statements, is also borrowed from canonical protests of the 1960s and 70s. 211 00:26:01,660 --> 00:26:12,420 Specifically, the actions of the Art Workers Coalition, a group who in 1970 famously stood in front of Picasso's iconic 1937 painting, 212 00:26:12,420 --> 00:26:16,810 where Anicka then hanging in the New York's Museum of Modern Art, 213 00:26:16,810 --> 00:26:23,170 where annica depicts the bombing of a Spanish town by the loofa during the Spanish Civil War. 214 00:26:23,170 --> 00:26:32,590 The art workers attempt to move this image from the past and make it present by inserting contemporaneous images of violence from Vietnam, 215 00:26:32,590 --> 00:26:42,490 specifically images of the My Lai massacre in which American soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians, including women and children and babies. 216 00:26:42,490 --> 00:26:52,730 And the signs that they are holding repeats that line. For the art workers, percussive where any car was muli. 217 00:26:52,730 --> 00:26:55,990 For decolonised, this place, the goal is the same, 218 00:26:55,990 --> 00:27:04,820 a chronological shift that moves us from the one hundred and twenty nine dead in the 1960s to the less lethal solutions of defence, 219 00:27:04,820 --> 00:27:08,780 technology and safari land. 220 00:27:08,780 --> 00:27:24,440 This goal was also mimicked by others who sat in gas masks in front of Warhols famous soup cans, transforming cans of soup into canisters of tear gas. 221 00:27:24,440 --> 00:27:29,060 I want to emphasise the aesthetic significance of this intervention. 222 00:27:29,060 --> 00:27:37,820 Part of what makes the repetition and inversion strategy used by decolonised this place so interesting is that it actually 223 00:27:37,820 --> 00:27:47,390 is the very same strategy that Warhol himself used in some of his best paintings or host Canonical Death in America series. 224 00:27:47,390 --> 00:27:53,180 The chilling name he gave for his paintings of disasters, suicides, car wrecks, 225 00:27:53,180 --> 00:28:03,620 electric chairs and graphic depictions of police brutality often involve the repetition of mass media imagery, but also its violent inversion. 226 00:28:03,620 --> 00:28:12,800 He turned and de taunt advertisements from Life magazine ads for Sheedy's and Volvo's into death in America. 227 00:28:12,800 --> 00:28:16,880 So we have a car crash. And here's an advertisement from Life magazine. 228 00:28:16,880 --> 00:28:26,360 He turned and day torn photographs from a picture essay about life in small town America on Main Street, USA, 229 00:28:26,360 --> 00:28:33,740 an image of the joy of childbirth into death in America, into a hospital disaster, 230 00:28:33,740 --> 00:28:38,870 which is the name of this particular Warhol painting in these paintings. 231 00:28:38,870 --> 00:28:47,510 Warhol transforms, meaning not only by repeating images, but also by inverting them through unique formal qualities. 232 00:28:47,510 --> 00:28:53,690 The silkscreened images are often ripped and torn, pulled and punctured. 233 00:28:53,690 --> 00:29:03,180 They break down over successive iterations. Each image distorted by blips of dried pigment on the screen surface. 234 00:29:03,180 --> 00:29:08,430 Art historian Howe Foster suggests that viewing this visual effect is akin to the punk dumb, 235 00:29:08,430 --> 00:29:19,230 that sensation of being picked that suddenly exposes the real the perceptual effect for us is one of visceral sensation to the bodily traumas. 236 00:29:19,230 --> 00:29:27,490 The images depict and through their punctured surfaces, actually contain on the surface of the picture plane. 237 00:29:27,490 --> 00:29:33,010 Mark Colvin decolonised this place explicitly repeats Warhawks Death in America 238 00:29:33,010 --> 00:29:39,250 paintings one protest poster mimics Warhols Little Race Riot in which Warhol 239 00:29:39,250 --> 00:29:44,350 appropriated an image by civil rights photojournalist Charles Moore from Life 240 00:29:44,350 --> 00:29:50,260 magazine that depicts attack dogs released on peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, 241 00:29:50,260 --> 00:29:56,290 Alabama. And the name it's worth mentioning, little race riot is a misnomer. 242 00:29:56,290 --> 00:30:05,200 The paintings do not Tippex race riots. They actually depict police brutality against peaceful citizens. 243 00:30:05,200 --> 00:30:13,500 The array of four panels is coded as an American flag with an extra red panel denoting blood. 244 00:30:13,500 --> 00:30:27,490 The pumped home might appear in the man's ripped trousers, but also in the way the legible image breaks down through a mesh of black and white. 245 00:30:27,490 --> 00:30:37,270 Decolonised, this place creates their pumped them by disrupting the functionally inert quality that now clouds much of Warhols work for, 246 00:30:37,270 --> 00:30:43,030 despite whatever Power Warhols Death in America paintings once held in the early 1960s. 247 00:30:43,030 --> 00:30:52,360 It is hard to view them today as chilling statements. They are clouded by celebrity money, the ego of Warhol decolonised. 248 00:30:52,360 --> 00:31:04,210 This place punctures the experience of viewing familiar, canonical, iconic, reified works by suggesting that their images of police brutality persist. 249 00:31:04,210 --> 00:31:13,400 These paintings are historical, of course, but also contemporary past, but also present. 250 00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:18,560 Perhaps the best example of this effect is when the group reproduces war horse race, 251 00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:24,440 riot paintings with photographs of their very own protest on the steps of the Whitney, 252 00:31:24,440 --> 00:31:30,590 their very own protest against less lethal solutions and police brutality. 253 00:31:30,590 --> 00:31:36,500 Birmingham is now the so-called race riot is now. 254 00:31:36,500 --> 00:31:41,600 This idea was reiterated at the actual protest in the witness lobby, 255 00:31:41,600 --> 00:31:48,410 during which activists burned sage, the cloud of smoke were intended to evoke tear gas. 256 00:31:48,410 --> 00:31:54,530 The smoke set off alarms. The New York Fire Department was called to the scene. 257 00:31:54,530 --> 00:32:02,240 The result was the spectacle of firefighters and demonstrators captured in photographs, photographs. 258 00:32:02,240 --> 00:32:08,170 And I believe this was exactly the intention that evoke the images from Birmingham. 259 00:32:08,170 --> 00:32:13,930 This effect, again, creates for me a sensation of the pumped on the sudden awareness, 260 00:32:13,930 --> 00:32:19,720 the sensation of the real that ruptures the inert quality of Warhols original paintings. 261 00:32:19,720 --> 00:32:32,300 That makes the past present. Of course, this type of chronological compression is one many feel as if we are living through the turmoil of the 1960s, 262 00:32:32,300 --> 00:32:40,060 a new age of the silent majority now embodied by Make America Great Again. 263 00:32:40,060 --> 00:32:47,360 On Twitter, someone made this argument by posting images comparing the tear gas used against Maria Layla 264 00:32:47,360 --> 00:32:54,640 as a Castro and her children to the fire hoses used against the citizens of Birmingham. 265 00:32:54,640 --> 00:33:01,510 Although this Twitter user has the wrong date for the Birmingham events. 266 00:33:01,510 --> 00:33:06,910 The point is that these interventions are not aesthetic in a simple sense. 267 00:33:06,910 --> 00:33:15,340 They are not merely stickers and graffiti merely means, but instead demonstrate how to bend the arc of history. 268 00:33:15,340 --> 00:33:26,490 The arc of art history. The activists bring death in America back to life. 269 00:33:26,490 --> 00:33:33,340 Mark Colvin, the fact that this controversy takes place online as much as on the ground means it is easy to 270 00:33:33,340 --> 00:33:40,720 rapidly trace lines of argument in all directions and to become lost in the digital profusion. 271 00:33:40,720 --> 00:33:46,090 One commentator on Twitter linked the debate to a famous anti-war song by Bob Dylan, 272 00:33:46,090 --> 00:33:52,330 written in response to Vietnam and clicking through finally brought me to Dylan's lyrics. 273 00:33:52,330 --> 00:34:01,610 Now relevant again, Dylan writes. Come your masters of war, you that build the big guns, you that build the death planes, 274 00:34:01,610 --> 00:34:07,660 you that built all the bombs that hide behind walls, that hide behind desks. 275 00:34:07,660 --> 00:34:19,000 I just want you to know I can see through your masks. The lyrics are actually describing that core concept behind the Whitney protest, 276 00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:25,330 art washing uses a philanthropic activity as cover for less savoury business practises. 277 00:34:25,330 --> 00:34:34,100 Or, as Dylan puts it, as a mask. Dylan Song explains that the issue is not just about tainted money. 278 00:34:34,100 --> 00:34:40,880 It's about the art and about what an artistic investment does about the aesthetic transformation. 279 00:34:40,880 --> 00:34:54,160 It creates the process that turns capital into cultural capital and the way cultural capital disguises masks its origins in actual money. 280 00:34:54,160 --> 00:34:58,330 Activists have critiqued Canter's for these reasons before, 281 00:34:58,330 --> 00:35:04,450 Kandos also sits on the advisory council of the Institute for Environment and Society at Brown University, 282 00:35:04,450 --> 00:35:10,120 which some Brown alumni found contradictory to the ambitions of the institute. 283 00:35:10,120 --> 00:35:21,620 Especially because of the use of Safari Lantier gas at standing rock against those protesting the construction of the Dakota access pipeline. 284 00:35:21,620 --> 00:35:27,710 The Institute for Environment and Society is guided by a progressive environmental agenda. 285 00:35:27,710 --> 00:35:38,940 One significantly at odds with the Dakota access pipeline and the way facilitates the extraction of fossil fuels. 286 00:35:38,940 --> 00:35:46,620 In an editorial in the Brown Daily Herald, the alumni write, quote, By aligning himself with the institute, 287 00:35:46,620 --> 00:35:51,060 Kandos can greenwash his career in the crowd control weapons industry, 288 00:35:51,060 --> 00:36:00,780 covering up his culpability in human rights violations by appearing to support environmentally progressive causes and quote. 289 00:36:00,780 --> 00:36:09,570 This episode mirrors the one that plays out at the Whitney in response to the Whitney staff letter that initiated this controversy. 290 00:36:09,570 --> 00:36:12,930 Candidates claimed that, quote, I am not the problem. 291 00:36:12,930 --> 00:36:21,870 The authors of the letter seek to solve and quote, since he does not determine when or why safari land products are used. 292 00:36:21,870 --> 00:36:28,110 But Kanter's misunderstands the critique, which is not about the morality of manufacturing, 293 00:36:28,110 --> 00:36:33,660 teargassed or deciding to use it, or even really about the money earned from the sale of that teargassed. 294 00:36:33,660 --> 00:36:37,530 But the fact that giving money to the museum transforms it. 295 00:36:37,530 --> 00:36:45,270 That capital becomes cultural capital. One passage in Canberra's response to staff is especially relevant. 296 00:36:45,270 --> 00:36:53,950 So this is a letter he writes in response to the staff letter that Whinney employees write. 297 00:36:53,950 --> 00:36:59,710 More than 10 years ago, I became involved with the Whitney because I believe its mission is bigger than any 298 00:36:59,710 --> 00:37:05,890 one person and that creating a safe space for artists and expression is critical. 299 00:37:05,890 --> 00:37:14,230 My involvement with the Whitney also reflects my personal values around diversity, inclusion, access and equality. 300 00:37:14,230 --> 00:37:18,700 In fact, just last month I co organised a series of exhibitions, 301 00:37:18,700 --> 00:37:27,060 installations and public programmes at Brown University entitled On Protest, Art and Activism and quote. 302 00:37:27,060 --> 00:37:35,970 The irony is considerable, Kanter's cites the Brown University panel he Coorg Ani's, which means funded on protest, 303 00:37:35,970 --> 00:37:44,370 art and activism as evidence that he should not be the target of protests, art and activism. 304 00:37:44,370 --> 00:37:49,530 But by making such a statement, Canters demonstrates the critique being made against him, 305 00:37:49,530 --> 00:37:54,930 namely that philanthropic activities in the arts serve as a form of art washing as 306 00:37:54,930 --> 00:38:03,630 evidence of positive values that can be leveraged to disguise negative values as a mask. 307 00:38:03,630 --> 00:38:12,120 This paradox also suggests how arts institutions inadvertently become entangled in these contradictions. 308 00:38:12,120 --> 00:38:18,240 The protest art and activism panel that Kanter's Coorg ionised accompany to an exhibition that included 309 00:38:18,240 --> 00:38:26,820 political art such as the flag by the artist Dred Scott that reads A man was lynched by police yesterday. 310 00:38:26,820 --> 00:38:35,040 The flag mimics one used at the end double ACP as New York City headquarters in the 1920s and 1930s, 311 00:38:35,040 --> 00:38:39,840 where it was flown whenever a lynching was reported in the news media. 312 00:38:39,840 --> 00:38:48,960 The work like that of decolonise this place attempts to make the historical contemporary again to make the past present the flag, 313 00:38:48,960 --> 00:38:57,210 as we presented in reference to recent instances of police brutality against African-Americans as occurred in Ferguson. 314 00:38:57,210 --> 00:39:07,320 That is a location where tear gas and other products made by safari land or subsidiary defence technology were used against civilians. 315 00:39:07,320 --> 00:39:11,520 The logic is illogically circuitous as legitimation. 316 00:39:11,520 --> 00:39:17,400 Candar cites his financial support of a panel related to an exhibition which included works of 317 00:39:17,400 --> 00:39:26,740 political art protesting the brutality of police using his products products his company manufactured. 318 00:39:26,740 --> 00:39:34,570 Indeed, the Whitney stage, its very own exhibition of protest art less than a year ago, it closed last August. 319 00:39:34,570 --> 00:39:41,740 The show, titled An Incomplete History of Protest, sought to display the work of artists challenging, establishing thought. 320 00:39:41,740 --> 00:39:47,760 These are the museum's words and creating a more equitable culture. 321 00:39:47,760 --> 00:39:55,860 The very first work on a show was Dred Scott's flag. It seems then that the Winnie wants it both ways. 322 00:39:55,860 --> 00:40:07,890 They want politics and protest, but only contained inside frames, within the trees, behind plexiglass in the controlled space of the white cube. 323 00:40:07,890 --> 00:40:14,850 The artist Andrea Frazier summarised this dynamic in a now canonical statement about how institutional critique, 324 00:40:14,850 --> 00:40:18,960 a genre of art aimed at revealing Art's ideological context, 325 00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:21,960 has become, well, institutionalised, 326 00:40:21,960 --> 00:40:34,690 embraced by the museums that the art was intended to critique politics and protest are assimilated, reduced to theme. 327 00:40:34,690 --> 00:40:40,780 I can't help being somewhat uncomfortable about aspects of this activism. 328 00:40:40,780 --> 00:40:47,470 I'm not sure what I think about the way Declan's decolonise this place targets individuals. 329 00:40:47,470 --> 00:40:57,710 I'm not sure what I think about claims of complicity, which seem to avoid the ways in which we are all, to some extent, complicit. 330 00:40:57,710 --> 00:41:05,480 Decolonised, this place addressed at least some of these concerns in their open letter in a section labelled Concerns and Truisms. 331 00:41:05,480 --> 00:41:11,900 They write in private. We hear questions, concerns and truisms. 332 00:41:11,900 --> 00:41:18,130 Why the Widney, the most progressive of all museums? Why not focus on Kansas himself rather than the museum? 333 00:41:18,130 --> 00:41:22,880 Isn't all money in the art world tainted at some level? Are you naive? 334 00:41:22,880 --> 00:41:29,750 Don't you realise that this is how the world works? Would you have us bite the hand that feeds us? 335 00:41:29,750 --> 00:41:39,880 Where do you draw the line? And quote. These questions all point to a structural and systemic problem in the art world. 336 00:41:39,880 --> 00:41:49,690 The issue really is larger than Canter's. According to an internal email circulated between board members and obtained by Forbes magazine, 337 00:41:49,690 --> 00:41:55,960 the board resented this focus on an individual, quote, We feel it is unfortunate. 338 00:41:55,960 --> 00:41:59,890 This is the board's email that Forbes obtained. 339 00:41:59,890 --> 00:42:04,180 We feel it is unfortunate that Warren Kanter's was singled out. 340 00:42:04,180 --> 00:42:08,590 We have an extraordinarily committed, thoughtful, active and generous board. 341 00:42:08,590 --> 00:42:13,690 Together, we shall get past this challenging moment and quote, 342 00:42:13,690 --> 00:42:20,020 The comment is revealing in emphasising that Canters should not have been singled out their words. 343 00:42:20,020 --> 00:42:27,670 The email actually points to the presence of many others who could have been targeted as well. 344 00:42:27,670 --> 00:42:32,170 Consider Nancy Carrington Crown, another vice chair of the Whitney Board, 345 00:42:32,170 --> 00:42:37,090 whose husband, a Stephen Crown, is general partner of Henry Crown and Company. 346 00:42:37,090 --> 00:42:41,020 That company's investment branch, Long View Asset Management, 347 00:42:41,020 --> 00:42:46,870 owns the majority stake in General Dynamics, one of the largest U.S. defence contractors. 348 00:42:46,870 --> 00:42:54,580 General Dynamics produces advanced surveillance systems used to track migrants at the US Mexico border. 349 00:42:54,580 --> 00:43:00,730 They also provide data processing services for facilities where migrant children are detained. 350 00:43:00,730 --> 00:43:10,960 You might remember the news stories last fall about Trump's child separation policy and the caged like enclosures where refugees have been held. 351 00:43:10,960 --> 00:43:21,670 News reports have linked as many as eight members of the Whitney board to the defence industry and another 10 to fossil fuels. 352 00:43:21,670 --> 00:43:26,680 In this way, the campaign is an exercise in radical thinking. 353 00:43:26,680 --> 00:43:33,730 The gesture is radical because it requires rethinking cultural institutions in their entirety. 354 00:43:33,730 --> 00:43:39,520 decolonise this place forces us to imagine alternatives to negative peace. 355 00:43:39,520 --> 00:43:43,840 To imagine what positive peace in the art world actually looks like. 356 00:43:43,840 --> 00:43:49,930 What a museum. Liberated from compromising influence could be. 357 00:43:49,930 --> 00:44:01,060 All of this reminds me again of some famous lines written by Merthyr excuse me, Martin Luther King Junior in the 1960s. 358 00:44:01,060 --> 00:44:10,630 King was arrested weeks before the events in Birmingham. The events captured on camera by Charles Moore, silkscreened by Andy Warhol, 359 00:44:10,630 --> 00:44:18,430 mimicked by Decolonised this place at the Whitney and reference by a quotation in the Whitney staff letter. 360 00:44:18,430 --> 00:44:26,860 The most famous and often repeated line in King's Birmingham letter is a core call excuse me to moral action. 361 00:44:26,860 --> 00:44:32,290 Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. 362 00:44:32,290 --> 00:44:43,760 But I am struck by the sentence that follows. Quote, We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. 363 00:44:43,760 --> 00:44:49,450 Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. And quote. 364 00:44:49,450 --> 00:45:00,190 This inescapable network of mutuality is today experienced as the financial networks, we cannot escape the digital networks that we cannot escape. 365 00:45:00,190 --> 00:45:07,960 These networks are not new, but they are perhaps more convoluted, more inescapable than ever before. 366 00:45:07,960 --> 00:45:15,160 It is for this reason that all of us in the art world and in the academy must confront these issues. 367 00:45:15,160 --> 00:45:24,280 Our artistic, academic, intellectual and creative work requires money and that money must come from somewhere. 368 00:45:24,280 --> 00:45:31,840 The result is that we all have become implicated in complex and sometimes contradictory systems. 369 00:45:31,840 --> 00:45:34,660 We are all members of entangled institutions. 370 00:45:34,660 --> 00:45:42,800 This is precisely why the issues raised by decolonised this place are compelling, but also uncomfortable. 371 00:45:42,800 --> 00:45:51,470 For me, the significance of their critique is in the questions it prompts for all of us. 372 00:45:51,470 --> 00:46:03,890 I want to end by bringing the many intertwined and unravelling threads together with a few final remarks about the larger causes of this controversy. 373 00:46:03,890 --> 00:46:11,840 The first cause is obviously money, this protest and many other recent culture wars are the result of funding policies 374 00:46:11,840 --> 00:46:17,750 that have made art institutions completely reliant on private financing, 375 00:46:17,750 --> 00:46:23,570 at least in the U.S., in part because of the impact of an earlier generation of culture wars. 376 00:46:23,570 --> 00:46:29,720 The canonical culture wars that caused Congress to slash funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. 377 00:46:29,720 --> 00:46:35,020 So for when there's no public financing, you need to turn to private sources. 378 00:46:35,020 --> 00:46:39,280 As cultural institutions secure more financing from the ultra wealthy, 379 00:46:39,280 --> 00:46:45,490 these entanglements, these networked connexions inevitably lead in all directions. 380 00:46:45,490 --> 00:46:51,190 These protests work to reveal the complex relationships all institutions take on. 381 00:46:51,190 --> 00:46:56,860 Once they accept private moneys, the situation is bound to get. 382 00:46:56,860 --> 00:47:04,360 Excuse me is bound to become more complicated. Take this specific case study I had discussed today, 383 00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:13,900 market forecasters predict that less lethal weapons market dominated by safari land will grow to eight point three seven billion U.S. dollars by 2020, 384 00:47:13,900 --> 00:47:20,030 with a compound annual growth rate of eight point two percent from 2015 to twenty twenty. 385 00:47:20,030 --> 00:47:24,070 Kandos puts it succinctly in an interview with Forbes magazine. 386 00:47:24,070 --> 00:47:34,900 I'm very comfortable with our business practises as global capitalism creates more intense crises, perpetual crises, an age of anxiety. 387 00:47:34,900 --> 00:47:43,540 It is companies like Safari Land that will benefit their best business model is predicated on disaster, on death in America. 388 00:47:43,540 --> 00:47:53,110 More riots, more migrants, more tear gas. The second cause for this controversy is the power of the network. 389 00:47:53,110 --> 00:48:00,130 I refer here not only to the financial networks, the umbilical cord of gold, as Clement Greenberg called it, 390 00:48:00,130 --> 00:48:10,890 the military industrial aesthetic complex, but also to the digital networks that pervade everyday life in profound and profoundly disturbing ways. 391 00:48:10,890 --> 00:48:17,360 The networks of the Internet, of social media, of Twitter and Instagram. 392 00:48:17,360 --> 00:48:20,870 It is worth returning to the image with which I started my talk. 393 00:48:20,870 --> 00:48:24,320 The photograph of me as a Castro fleeing tear gas. 394 00:48:24,320 --> 00:48:31,610 That image not only incited a reaction from the left, which I have presented, but also from the right. 395 00:48:31,610 --> 00:48:44,730 The alt right. In the dark web of the Internet, the image was marked as liberal propaganda, with some claiming falsely that it must have been staged, 396 00:48:44,730 --> 00:48:54,800 an attempt to generate sympathy for asylum seekers and thus promote an anti American pro Migrante agenda. 397 00:48:54,800 --> 00:49:00,260 One Twitter user performed a formal analysis of sorts, 398 00:49:00,260 --> 00:49:09,560 decoding what she saw as figures posing in front of cameras as if the scene was actually a photo shoot with pay models on a stage set, 399 00:49:09,560 --> 00:49:18,830 as if it was all fake news. This reading took hold online despite the fact that it is completely false. 400 00:49:18,830 --> 00:49:25,760 But such paranoid interpretations are of a piece with the image strategies used on the left. 401 00:49:25,760 --> 00:49:30,140 The images made by decolonised this place are also fake news. 402 00:49:30,140 --> 00:49:34,400 Notice how they are manipulated. Subway signs are all the same. 403 00:49:34,400 --> 00:49:40,570 Not real at all. So, for example, you can tell. 404 00:49:40,570 --> 00:49:49,330 They are photo shopped. Despite the ease with which activists presented them as actual interventions as real. 405 00:49:49,330 --> 00:49:56,830 I don't want to make false equivalence, but to suggest that the aggressive manipulation of visual culture is ubiquitous. 406 00:49:56,830 --> 00:50:01,900 It is digital networks that have enabled this paranoid approach to the image. 407 00:50:01,900 --> 00:50:05,770 These networks create instantaneous image circulation, 408 00:50:05,770 --> 00:50:14,740 but also erode epistemological truth in the images that circulate at high velocity that ricochet across the Internet. 409 00:50:14,740 --> 00:50:16,660 Given the state of current events, 410 00:50:16,660 --> 00:50:24,910 the power of financial networks and the pervasiveness of digital networks and the destabilisation that both have created, 411 00:50:24,910 --> 00:50:32,619 it is certain that there will be many more culture wars to come.