OK, so I'd like to start by thanking Geraldine for the very generous introduction.
And I also want to thank and acknowledge the Terra Foundation for American Art for supporting this lecture series.
November twenty eighteen. An image ricochets across the Internet.
The photograph depicts a migrant from Honduras named Maria Lila Masr Castro and her two young children.
She flees the tear gas canister at left. Fired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the US Mexico border near Tijuana.
The woman's face is contorted in confusion and her children both in diapers.
One in bare feet scramble in fear over a barren terrain.
The fence behind is laced with barbed wire. An American flag is visible between the steel slats of a barrier wall.
The photograph is compelling, in part because of the visual contrast at its centre visa,
Castro's candy coloured T-shirt depicts Princess Elsa and Princess Anna from the Disney animated blockbuster Frozen.
The characters wide eyed grins contrast violently against Masr Castro's tense face and against the bodies of her daughters,
who's bent limbs, convey panic and whose faces were hardly even visible, obscured as their mother pulls them.
Masr Castro's t shirt alludes to the migrant experience.
The fairy tale film tells the story of on his journey to find her sister Elsa and restore peace in a faraway land.
She also hoped Masr Castro to reunite with the father of her children, who is already in the United.
Oh, excuse me. I've jumped at this. Castro. Also fled violence in Honduras, seeking peace, seeking asylum in a faraway land.
She also hoped to reunite with a child with the father of her children who was already in the United States.
Her T-shirt reads Family Forever. The image captured by Reuters photojournalist Kim Kyung Hoon went viral,
instantly becoming an emblem of the clash over immigration that has convulsed American society over the past three
years since President Trump first called for a multi billion dollar a border wall during his presidential campaign.
The image contrasts violently against Trump's inflammatory rhetoric,
which uses xenophobia as a political weapon by vilifying migrants as a threat to the U.S.
The image makes visible how unthreatening, how desperate these migrants are.
The image also incited protest in an unlikely location.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City recalled a tear gas canister at left.
The New York Times counted some two dozen such canisters on the Mexican side of the border.
Journalists posted photographs of them online.
All were branded with the logo of Defence Technology, a manufacturer of crowd control weapons for military and police use,
or what the company calls, quote, less lethal solutions, including riot gear, body armour and chemical munitions like tear gas.
A warning. Excuse me, on the defence technology Web site describes the effects of the gas irritation, burning sensation,
coughing, the sensation of shortness of breath, tightness in chest, often accompanied by a feeling of panic.
End quote. The parent company of defence technology is the Safari Land Group, a global defence manufacturer spanning some 19 brands.
The CEO and majority stakeholder of safari land, Warren B Canters, is also vice chairman on the board of trustees at the Whitney.
This surprising link from Trump administration to the administration of the Whitney,
from world events to the art world, shocked many news articles posted on the arts blog.
Hyper allergic triggered a series of dramatic events.
More than 100 museum staffers, including senior curator Christie Illes,
signed an open letter to Adam Weinberg, the winner's director, voicing concerns.
The artist activist group Decolonised This Place then stormed the museum in a series of animated protests.
Images from their demonstration, in turn ricocheted at high velocity across the Internet, triggering still more outrage.
Recently, some two hundred and twenty artists and academics signed an open letter demanding the removal of Canters from the board.
The statement includes the names of nearly 50 artists participating the Whitney's upcoming biennial,
the most significant exhibition of contemporary art in the United States.
The statement also includes the names of important art historians Claire Bishop Howe, Foster Lucila Part and Douglas Crimp.
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.
I first became interested in this controversy back in January when I presented a talk about the emerging debate at Modern Art Oxford.
And I want to acknowledge moderate Oxford for that initial invitation to lecture.
At the time, it was not clear what would happen, but the controversy now appears to be enduring.
It is representative of the many related controversies over money that have exploded across the art world.
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.
The complex moral, ethical and political questions raised by recent arts controversies in the United States and the way that money,
power, history and a shifting definition of truth are intertwined and unravelling.
Protests of the sort now taking place at the Whitney are not new.
There have been many similar conflicts in American art.
And I will mention a few of these historical examples throughout this lecture series.
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.
And it is my claim that American art, the actual art, the art itself,
and not just the museum or gallery that houses it has become a battlefield for new forms of aesthetic activism and symbolic struggle.
A new culture war. The culture war is a quintessentially American phenomenon.
The term was first applied to conflicts between urban and rural Americans and their contrasting values in the early 20th century.
But it gained notoriety in the 1990s after the publication of sociologist James Davis and Hunter Hunter's book,
Culture Wars The Struggle to Define America. The Culture War is defined by its polarity between two ideological worldviews that
are completely irreconcilable and align in opposition across a range of social,
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.
Indeed, the phrase culture war is especially appropriate for the dispute over safari land and the Whitney culture war is in this case,
not just metaphor or not just analogy, but a literal contraction of the two forces that are shaping these protests.
We are talking about actual warfare in the form of real weapons made by Warren Kandos company Safari Land,
and the way that weapons relate to the culture of contemporary art.
These recent events are also more complex than the infamous culture wars of the 1990s.
Those debates revolved around right wing opposition to government sponsorship of the arts,
specifically sponsorship of art that some perceived as morally offensive.
Like Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit photographs were Andre Serranos image of a crucifix submerged, supposedly in a vat of urine.
The controversy is defining our present moment. Instead, reflect left wing opposition to a wide range of disparate issues intersecting with the arts,
the legacies of colonialism and debates over the repatriation of art objects,
climate change and fossil fuels, and the links between the energy industry and the money that fuels the arts.
The opioid epidemic and the pharmaceutical industry, particularly Purdue Pharma,
makers of OxyContin and the philanthropic philanthropic activities of the Sackler family.
The crisis over public monuments like Confederate statues and their role in perpetuating racism.
All of these topics have become the focus of new culture wars.
The forces that have created constant political crisis worldwide, a new age of anxiety, an age of outrage, are also now transforming the arts.
Forces like global neo liberal capitalism and the spread of communications networks,
digital culture and new media that create dangerously fast image circulation,
unstable conceptions of truth, fake news and new forms of digital propaganda.
This lecture series considers these controversies as a contest of images.
In examining these controversies, these new culture wars. I have five broad hypotheses that I want to test first.
Number one, these controversies are analogue, but also digital.
Physical things. Sites like museums or objects like works of art, painting, statues, monuments are at the centre of these debates.
But the digital network fuels the conflict, digital culture and new media.
The Internet intensified cultural turmoil. To these controversies are more polarised and polarising than ever before.
This is really, by definition, the meaning of a culture war.
But it is important to emphasise that these debates are framed by a set of diametrically opposed dialectically, dialectically inverted positions.
Three. These controversies are political, but also aesthetic.
They involve political positions on cultural questions.
But I want to make the case that artists and activists are responding with uniquely aesthetic strategies.
In a sense, the culture war is an artistic medium. For these controversies are about the present, but also the past.
The debates may seem numbingly a historical, but in fact, they are actually and they actually engage longstanding debates in the arts.
And finally, relatedly, number five, these controversies seem new,
but our old if we trace the debates and their visual culture, we are led back into the history of art.
Mark Colvin to to begin today's particular case study.
Let's return to the Whitney Museum and the open letter that was first addressed
to the director of the Whitney and signed by more than 100 museum staffers.
They write, quote, to the leadership of the Whitney Museum.
We are writing to convey our outrage upon learning that Whitney vice chairman Warren Canters company,
Safari Land, is the supplier of the teargassed recently used to attack asylum seekers at the U.S. border.
And our frustration and confusion at the Whitney's decision to remain silent on this matter, to remain silent is to be complicit.
First and foremost,
some of us are deeply connected to the communities that are being directly impacted and targeted by the tear gassing at the border.
For the Widney not to acknowledge that this news may impact its staff is to assume we are separate from the issue,
that it is happening somewhere else to some other people.
Many of us feel the violence inflected, inflicted upon refugees and against mostly PEOC people of colour.
Protesters in Ferguson and mostly indigenous protesters of the Dakota access pipeline.
Just two of the many other instances of militarised tear gassing of unarmed citizens, much more personally that it seems to affect leadership.
So many of us are working towards a more equitable and inclusive institution upon learning of Canada's business dealings.
Many of us working on these initiatives feel uncomfortable in our positions.
We cannot claim to serve these communities while accepting funding from individuals whose actions are at odds with that mission.
The work, which we are so proud of, does not wash away these connexions and quote.
The letter introduces the core concept that is a central tenant of many recent culture war debates,
art washing alluded to in the explanation that the staff work with those affected by
immigration policy does not wash away the links between border politics and the museum board.
And I will return to this concept momentarily.
The letter also established concrete demands, including a request that the Muzammil leadership develop a clear policy around Trustees',
quote, What qualifies or disqualifies a wealthy philanthropic individual for the board?
Is there a moral line? If so, what is that line?
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.
The staff statement concluded with a quotation from Martin Luther King Junior's letter from the Birmingham Jail,
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,
but quote, the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice,
who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice.
And quote, the staff statement relates King's remarks to the present, quote,
continuing to accept funding from individuals who are knowingly complicit in the
injustices committed on our own land and across our borders is negative peace.
We demand positive peace and quote. Some might say that the art and the politics should be separate.
That what a museum board does after hours does not concern the operation of the museum.
But such an argument makes little sense. At an institution like the Whitney,
which explicitly showcases political art and activism in which art and politics are always already present in the museum's cultural offerings.
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
what they saw as the ambiguous reception of the staff statement amongst art world elites.
Amongst critics, curators and art historians, all of whom perhaps recognise truth in the criticism, but also simultaneously,
maybe hypocritically resist the insinuation that they might also be in some way complicit to use the term invoked by the Whitney staff.
That did decolonise this place letter reads, quote.
There has been a conspicuous silence from many artists, curators, historians and critics,
including those whose work is celebrated for its engagement with themes of politics, social practise, racial justice and even institutional critique.
We feel this silence is not a matter of Callison difference.
Instead, it is a sign that powerful people are shaken by the profound contradiction that is finally coming to
a head between the purported values of contemporary art and the violent profiteering that sub tens.
Most of the major institutions of the art system. The statement points to the crucial tension in this controversy.
The profound contradiction in the arts between a performed politics and intellectual politics,
a politics that is theorised, rationalise, historic sized and explained,
and that is easily assimilated by culture, industry and the politics of aesthetics that might instead actually destabilise the status quo.
These protests are interesting to me, not only because of their confrontational politics,
but also because of their confrontational aesthetics, the way that the image itself becomes contested.
Decolonised this place infiltrated the witness visual culture using the museum's own exhibition, a blockbuster show on Andy Warhol,
a show substantially financed by Warren Canters against the museum itself through a series of graphic interventions.
Many of these were simple and straightforward graffiti, vandalism, well-placed decolonise this place, stickers on subway billboards and so on.
But other interventions were more elaborate, specifically seeking to repeat and invert warhorse work,
thereby forcing it into dialogue with the debate over safari land.
One poster, for example, repeats and inverts Warhols 1962, painting green Coca-Cola bottles instead of the silkscreened soda bottle,
that gin generic image of post-war American affluence, mass production and consumer power.
The poster shows a repeated grid of safari land.
Tear gas canisters of contemporary American violence, mass produced weaponry and state power.
The Whitney name replaces the Coca-Cola brand. This repetition and inversion recurs in numerous designs for posters and pamphlets or famous painting
of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis shows the first lady before and after the assassination of JFK.
The same grid is used to instead repeat safari lands.
Tear gas canisters. Or another.
A celebrity portrait that shows not the glitz and the glamour of art collector Ethel Scull.
Thirty six times. One of Warhols first and most famous portraits, one intended to sell the sizzle of the socialite.
But instead, Warren and Allison, Canada's Widney director Adam Weinberg.
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.
Superman offers a declaration of super human strength.
Good. A mighty puff of my super breath extinguished the forest fire.
Now, decolonised this place is Superman offering words of advice from a tweet posted in solidarity with activists in Ferguson, Missouri,
where the death of Michael Brown, an 18 year old black man who was shot by a white police officers,
triggered violent demonstrations in 2014 over weeks of protests.
Police fired tear gas into civilian crowds on numerous occasions.
Quote, Always make sure to run against the win win.
Teargassed. Keep calm. The pain will pass. Don't touch your face or put water on it.
Instead, use milk or coke and quote. Other interventions manipulate the design of the witness Web site.
And also here you can see I'm comparing Deklin ISIS plays posters with the Whitney Web site advertising the Warhol exhibition.
And then also the Whitney subway advertisements as reimagined by decolonise this place.
One overlays Whitney's Warhol design with Ferguson.
It includes four photographs of tear gas attacks from the Ferguson protest reproduced at Centre.
So in this particular poster, images are taken that these activists found online of tear gassing that happened at Ferguson.
And you can see these are the photographs that they have appropriate.
And they've repeated this in the full range of promotional materials that the Whitney produced.
So, for example, Warhol Soup can becomes the tear gas canister.
All of these techniques descend directly from media tactics used in the 1990s and early 2000s,
like culture jamming or the approaches of the Leatrice International,
and the situation is in the 1950s and 1960s, like de Tormé or turning routeing hijacking techniques in which brands and logos
are reformulated and remixed in order to reveal truth behind the spectacle.
The Whitney W, a flexible logo, one that expands and contracts to fill available space from the blank frames of Web browsers
to the empty ground of a poster is now bent into the spray from a can of tear gas.
You uphold white supremacy. Or simply safari land.
These strategies are actually more interesting than simple brand hacks or culture jams.
The safari land hashtag appended to the Instagram post causes it to appear in an Instagram feed of safari land products,
grenade launchers, gun holsters and ammunition, all promotional images of the company's products and their owners.
You uphold white supremacy. This highjacked logo is still flexible, able to fill any available space.
All through the logic of tagging. The hashtag Whitney Museum makes it appear alongside examples of the museum selfie.
That ubiquitous form of contemporary art spectatorship now undermined through a violent juxtaposition.
The new logo condemns viewers as mindless, consumers as complicit.
You uphold white supremacy. And this effect recurs throughout the images that these activists have posted on Instagram and on Twitter as well.
This approach using the networked effects of digital platforms as collage plays off conventional appropriation strategies like photo montage.
But it does so in ways that take advantage of new medias, media specific trait, its digital format.
One of the more more effective examples shows activists standing in front of a painting from the Whitney exhibition,
their t shirts bear the tagline from Defence Technology, Less Lethal Solutions.
More safari land products. Guns, holsters, ammunition.
One hundred and twenty nine die. Warhol, the original painting, referenced a plane crash from the 1960s here.
Reproducers, a newspaper's shocking front page here.
However, a digital collage uses new media to relate the painting to current events.
Two guns to ammunition.
This method, standing in front of paintings with protest statements, is also borrowed from canonical protests of the 1960s and 70s.
Specifically, the actions of the Art Workers Coalition, a group who in 1970 famously stood in front of Picasso's iconic 1937 painting,
where Anicka then hanging in the New York's Museum of Modern Art,
where annica depicts the bombing of a Spanish town by the loofa during the Spanish Civil War.
The art workers attempt to move this image from the past and make it present by inserting contemporaneous images of violence from Vietnam,
specifically images of the My Lai massacre in which American soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians, including women and children and babies.
And the signs that they are holding repeats that line. For the art workers, percussive where any car was muli.
For decolonised, this place, the goal is the same,
a chronological shift that moves us from the one hundred and twenty nine dead in the 1960s to the less lethal solutions of defence,
technology and safari land.
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.
I want to emphasise the aesthetic significance of this intervention.
Part of what makes the repetition and inversion strategy used by decolonised this place so interesting is that it actually
is the very same strategy that Warhol himself used in some of his best paintings or host Canonical Death in America series.
The chilling name he gave for his paintings of disasters, suicides, car wrecks,
electric chairs and graphic depictions of police brutality often involve the repetition of mass media imagery, but also its violent inversion.
He turned and de taunt advertisements from Life magazine ads for Sheedy's and Volvo's into death in America.
So we have a car crash. And here's an advertisement from Life magazine.
He turned and day torn photographs from a picture essay about life in small town America on Main Street, USA,
an image of the joy of childbirth into death in America, into a hospital disaster,
which is the name of this particular Warhol painting in these paintings.
Warhol transforms, meaning not only by repeating images, but also by inverting them through unique formal qualities.
The silkscreened images are often ripped and torn, pulled and punctured.
They break down over successive iterations. Each image distorted by blips of dried pigment on the screen surface.
Art historian Howe Foster suggests that viewing this visual effect is akin to the punk dumb,
that sensation of being picked that suddenly exposes the real the perceptual effect for us is one of visceral sensation to the bodily traumas.
The images depict and through their punctured surfaces, actually contain on the surface of the picture plane.
Mark Colvin decolonised this place explicitly repeats Warhawks Death in America
paintings one protest poster mimics Warhols Little Race Riot in which Warhol
appropriated an image by civil rights photojournalist Charles Moore from Life
magazine that depicts attack dogs released on peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham,
Alabama. And the name it's worth mentioning, little race riot is a misnomer.
The paintings do not Tippex race riots. They actually depict police brutality against peaceful citizens.
The array of four panels is coded as an American flag with an extra red panel denoting blood.
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.
Decolonised, this place creates their pumped them by disrupting the functionally inert quality that now clouds much of Warhols work for,
despite whatever Power Warhols Death in America paintings once held in the early 1960s.
It is hard to view them today as chilling statements. They are clouded by celebrity money, the ego of Warhol decolonised.
This place punctures the experience of viewing familiar, canonical, iconic, reified works by suggesting that their images of police brutality persist.
These paintings are historical, of course, but also contemporary past, but also present.
Perhaps the best example of this effect is when the group reproduces war horse race,
riot paintings with photographs of their very own protest on the steps of the Whitney,
their very own protest against less lethal solutions and police brutality.
Birmingham is now the so-called race riot is now.
This idea was reiterated at the actual protest in the witness lobby,
during which activists burned sage, the cloud of smoke were intended to evoke tear gas.
The smoke set off alarms. The New York Fire Department was called to the scene.
The result was the spectacle of firefighters and demonstrators captured in photographs, photographs.
And I believe this was exactly the intention that evoke the images from Birmingham.
This effect, again, creates for me a sensation of the pumped on the sudden awareness,
the sensation of the real that ruptures the inert quality of Warhols original paintings.
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,
a new age of the silent majority now embodied by Make America Great Again.
On Twitter, someone made this argument by posting images comparing the tear gas used against Maria Layla
as a Castro and her children to the fire hoses used against the citizens of Birmingham.
Although this Twitter user has the wrong date for the Birmingham events.
The point is that these interventions are not aesthetic in a simple sense.
They are not merely stickers and graffiti merely means, but instead demonstrate how to bend the arc of history.
The arc of art history. The activists bring death in America back to life.
Mark Colvin, the fact that this controversy takes place online as much as on the ground means it is easy to
rapidly trace lines of argument in all directions and to become lost in the digital profusion.
One commentator on Twitter linked the debate to a famous anti-war song by Bob Dylan,
written in response to Vietnam and clicking through finally brought me to Dylan's lyrics.
Now relevant again, Dylan writes. Come your masters of war, you that build the big guns, you that build the death planes,
you that built all the bombs that hide behind walls, that hide behind desks.
I just want you to know I can see through your masks. The lyrics are actually describing that core concept behind the Whitney protest,
art washing uses a philanthropic activity as cover for less savoury business practises.
Or, as Dylan puts it, as a mask. Dylan Song explains that the issue is not just about tainted money.
It's about the art and about what an artistic investment does about the aesthetic transformation.
It creates the process that turns capital into cultural capital and the way cultural capital disguises masks its origins in actual money.
Activists have critiqued Canter's for these reasons before,
Kandos also sits on the advisory council of the Institute for Environment and Society at Brown University,
which some Brown alumni found contradictory to the ambitions of the institute.
Especially because of the use of Safari Lantier gas at standing rock against those protesting the construction of the Dakota access pipeline.
The Institute for Environment and Society is guided by a progressive environmental agenda.
One significantly at odds with the Dakota access pipeline and the way facilitates the extraction of fossil fuels.
In an editorial in the Brown Daily Herald, the alumni write, quote, By aligning himself with the institute,
Kandos can greenwash his career in the crowd control weapons industry,
covering up his culpability in human rights violations by appearing to support environmentally progressive causes and quote.
This episode mirrors the one that plays out at the Whitney in response to the Whitney staff letter that initiated this controversy.
Candidates claimed that, quote, I am not the problem.
The authors of the letter seek to solve and quote, since he does not determine when or why safari land products are used.
But Kanter's misunderstands the critique, which is not about the morality of manufacturing,
teargassed or deciding to use it, or even really about the money earned from the sale of that teargassed.
But the fact that giving money to the museum transforms it.
That capital becomes cultural capital. One passage in Canberra's response to staff is especially relevant.
So this is a letter he writes in response to the staff letter that Whinney employees write.
More than 10 years ago, I became involved with the Whitney because I believe its mission is bigger than any
one person and that creating a safe space for artists and expression is critical.
My involvement with the Whitney also reflects my personal values around diversity, inclusion, access and equality.
In fact, just last month I co organised a series of exhibitions,
installations and public programmes at Brown University entitled On Protest, Art and Activism and quote.
The irony is considerable, Kanter's cites the Brown University panel he Coorg Ani's, which means funded on protest,
art and activism as evidence that he should not be the target of protests, art and activism.
But by making such a statement, Canters demonstrates the critique being made against him,
namely that philanthropic activities in the arts serve as a form of art washing as
evidence of positive values that can be leveraged to disguise negative values as a mask.
This paradox also suggests how arts institutions inadvertently become entangled in these contradictions.
The protest art and activism panel that Kanter's Coorg ionised accompany to an exhibition that included
political art such as the flag by the artist Dred Scott that reads A man was lynched by police yesterday.
The flag mimics one used at the end double ACP as New York City headquarters in the 1920s and 1930s,
where it was flown whenever a lynching was reported in the news media.
The work like that of decolonise this place attempts to make the historical contemporary again to make the past present the flag,
as we presented in reference to recent instances of police brutality against African-Americans as occurred in Ferguson.
That is a location where tear gas and other products made by safari land or subsidiary defence technology were used against civilians.
The logic is illogically circuitous as legitimation.
Candar cites his financial support of a panel related to an exhibition which included works of
political art protesting the brutality of police using his products products his company manufactured.
Indeed, the Whitney stage, its very own exhibition of protest art less than a year ago, it closed last August.
The show, titled An Incomplete History of Protest, sought to display the work of artists challenging, establishing thought.
These are the museum's words and creating a more equitable culture.
The very first work on a show was Dred Scott's flag. It seems then that the Winnie wants it both ways.
They want politics and protest, but only contained inside frames, within the trees, behind plexiglass in the controlled space of the white cube.
The artist Andrea Frazier summarised this dynamic in a now canonical statement about how institutional critique,
a genre of art aimed at revealing Art's ideological context,
has become, well, institutionalised,
embraced by the museums that the art was intended to critique politics and protest are assimilated, reduced to theme.
I can't help being somewhat uncomfortable about aspects of this activism.
I'm not sure what I think about the way Declan's decolonise this place targets individuals.
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.
Decolonised, this place addressed at least some of these concerns in their open letter in a section labelled Concerns and Truisms.
They write in private. We hear questions, concerns and truisms.
Why the Widney, the most progressive of all museums? Why not focus on Kansas himself rather than the museum?
Isn't all money in the art world tainted at some level? Are you naive?
Don't you realise that this is how the world works? Would you have us bite the hand that feeds us?
Where do you draw the line? And quote. These questions all point to a structural and systemic problem in the art world.
The issue really is larger than Canter's. According to an internal email circulated between board members and obtained by Forbes magazine,
the board resented this focus on an individual, quote, We feel it is unfortunate.
This is the board's email that Forbes obtained.
We feel it is unfortunate that Warren Kanter's was singled out.
We have an extraordinarily committed, thoughtful, active and generous board.
Together, we shall get past this challenging moment and quote,
The comment is revealing in emphasising that Canters should not have been singled out their words.
The email actually points to the presence of many others who could have been targeted as well.
Consider Nancy Carrington Crown, another vice chair of the Whitney Board,
whose husband, a Stephen Crown, is general partner of Henry Crown and Company.
That company's investment branch, Long View Asset Management,
owns the majority stake in General Dynamics, one of the largest U.S. defence contractors.
General Dynamics produces advanced surveillance systems used to track migrants at the US Mexico border.
They also provide data processing services for facilities where migrant children are detained.
You might remember the news stories last fall about Trump's child separation policy and the caged like enclosures where refugees have been held.
News reports have linked as many as eight members of the Whitney board to the defence industry and another 10 to fossil fuels.
In this way, the campaign is an exercise in radical thinking.
The gesture is radical because it requires rethinking cultural institutions in their entirety.
decolonise this place forces us to imagine alternatives to negative peace.
To imagine what positive peace in the art world actually looks like.
What a museum. Liberated from compromising influence could be.
All of this reminds me again of some famous lines written by Merthyr excuse me, Martin Luther King Junior in the 1960s.
King was arrested weeks before the events in Birmingham. The events captured on camera by Charles Moore, silkscreened by Andy Warhol,
mimicked by Decolonised this place at the Whitney and reference by a quotation in the Whitney staff letter.
The most famous and often repeated line in King's Birmingham letter is a core call excuse me to moral action.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
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.
Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. And quote.
This inescapable network of mutuality is today experienced as the financial networks, we cannot escape the digital networks that we cannot escape.
These networks are not new, but they are perhaps more convoluted, more inescapable than ever before.
It is for this reason that all of us in the art world and in the academy must confront these issues.
Our artistic, academic, intellectual and creative work requires money and that money must come from somewhere.
The result is that we all have become implicated in complex and sometimes contradictory systems.
We are all members of entangled institutions.
This is precisely why the issues raised by decolonised this place are compelling, but also uncomfortable.
For me, the significance of their critique is in the questions it prompts for all of us.
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.
The first cause is obviously money, this protest and many other recent culture wars are the result of funding policies
that have made art institutions completely reliant on private financing,
at least in the U.S., in part because of the impact of an earlier generation of culture wars.
The canonical culture wars that caused Congress to slash funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
So for when there's no public financing, you need to turn to private sources.
As cultural institutions secure more financing from the ultra wealthy,
these entanglements, these networked connexions inevitably lead in all directions.
These protests work to reveal the complex relationships all institutions take on.
Once they accept private moneys, the situation is bound to get.
Excuse me is bound to become more complicated. Take this specific case study I had discussed today,
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,
with a compound annual growth rate of eight point two percent from 2015 to twenty twenty.
Kandos puts it succinctly in an interview with Forbes magazine.
I'm very comfortable with our business practises as global capitalism creates more intense crises, perpetual crises, an age of anxiety.
It is companies like Safari Land that will benefit their best business model is predicated on disaster, on death in America.
More riots, more migrants, more tear gas. The second cause for this controversy is the power of the network.
I refer here not only to the financial networks, the umbilical cord of gold, as Clement Greenberg called it,
the military industrial aesthetic complex, but also to the digital networks that pervade everyday life in profound and profoundly disturbing ways.
The networks of the Internet, of social media, of Twitter and Instagram.
It is worth returning to the image with which I started my talk.
The photograph of me as a Castro fleeing tear gas.
That image not only incited a reaction from the left, which I have presented, but also from the right.
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,
an attempt to generate sympathy for asylum seekers and thus promote an anti American pro Migrante agenda.
One Twitter user performed a formal analysis of sorts,
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,
as if it was all fake news. This reading took hold online despite the fact that it is completely false.
But such paranoid interpretations are of a piece with the image strategies used on the left.
The images made by decolonised this place are also fake news.
Notice how they are manipulated. Subway signs are all the same.
Not real at all. So, for example, you can tell.
They are photo shopped. Despite the ease with which activists presented them as actual interventions as real.
I don't want to make false equivalence, but to suggest that the aggressive manipulation of visual culture is ubiquitous.
It is digital networks that have enabled this paranoid approach to the image.
These networks create instantaneous image circulation,
but also erode epistemological truth in the images that circulate at high velocity that ricochet across the Internet.
Given the state of current events,
the power of financial networks and the pervasiveness of digital networks and the destabilisation that both have created,
it is certain that there will be many more culture wars to come.