Curating Capitalism: Centering Community Through Cultural Sovereignty in the Contemporary Art Museum

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Curating Capitalism:

Centering Community Through Cultural Sovereignty in

the Contemporary Art Museum

MA Thesis (Afstudeerscriptie)

written by Jurjen Wolven

(born October 18th, 1985 in Heerhugowaard, The Netherlands) under the supervision of Prof Dr Yolande Jansen, and submitted to the Board of Examiners in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MA in Philosophy

at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Date of the public defense: Members of the Thesis Committee: November 28, 2018 Prof Dr Yolande Jansen

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisor, Yolande Jansen, for seeing value in this project and taking it on on such short notice, and for her wonderful and insight-ful comments and suggestions. A big thanks to Elsbeth Brouwer as well, whose continuous support over the last few years has gotten me through, and gotten me here. It has been a fraught journey; thank you for standing by me.

I owe my family a debt of gratitude for untold reasons, but most of all for always being there for me, and for enabling me to pursue my hopes and dreams. Thanks to my friends, for their advice, their kind words, pleasant chats over countless beers, and for pushing me to hone my arguments. They know who they are.

This thesis is dedicated to Alison, my superlative life-partner. No other person has been as singularly important to the success of this project, and the success of my life. None of this would be without her invaluable advice, insight, support, and love.

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Introduction

One of the most prominent and critical issues facing the museum world1_{today is}

that of diversity. Museum education departments are taking steps to make the museum more accessible to ever more people, curators are increasingly staging exhibitions around the subject and related themes (e.g. migration), and the-orists are churning out publications concerning if, why, and how the museum should become more diverse and more inclusive. Yet, the concept of diversity remains relatively undertheorized within museum contexts, and one encoun-ters greatly dissimilar, often implicit, working definitions at play. One popular treatment of diversity is predicated on the idea that the concept entails a com-mitment to including and fostering the broadest array of voices, even going so far as to include what some characterize as “intolerant” voices, but which I think are more aptly and usefully described as harmful voices. I argue that this view constitutes a fundamental misconception of what diversity is, and actually runs counter to the work the concept of diversity is attempting to do. A commitment to social justice is, or ought to be, at the heart of diversity, and as such the notion is radically incompatible with the platforming and inclusion of harmful voices.

Central to the debate around diversity in the museum world, I believe, are two strains of questions:

1. What is the museum, and what should the museum be? Who is the museum for, and who is it from?

2. Who owns art/culture, and in what way? And what does ownership mean in this context?

In this thesis, I aim to shed light on these questions.2 _{The questions are both}

descriptive and normative in nature; we are interested not only in how things are, but also in how they ought to be. The first question, I think, can be distilled quite naturally from questions of diversity—what is diversity about if not the 1 A term here meant to include museums, kunsthalles, galleries, collectors, curators, art

historians, and art critics, among others.

2 I shall limit myself to a consideration of the contemporary art museum; the diversity in types of museums and the different issues facing them would simply present too big of an undertaking. Henceforth, when I talk about ‘the museum,’ ‘the art world,’ and akin terms, readers can take the museum in question to be a museum of contemporary art, etcetera, unless otherwise stated. Still, I hope some of my arguments and conclusions can be profitably extrapolated to the museum world at large.

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questions as to who is speaking, for whom they are speaking, and to whom they are speaking? The second question flows from a set of concerns closely associated with the call for diversity: that of cultural appropriation, and the role and nature of the institution of the museum as the owner or steward of cultural artefacts and expressions.

Underlying both the widespread misconstruction of ‘diversity’ and issues of exploitative cultural appropriation in the museum, I argue, we find the same logic: that of late capitalism. This late capitalist logic, with the attendant preeminence of the category of private property and characterized by the process of commodification, dominates the contemporary museum world, and has lead to an operative conception of culture and its expressions (including, of course, art) as so many assets, decoupled from their cultural specificity and significance, facilitating and encouraging exploitative practices and oppression.

Chapter 2 departs from an analysis of the concept of property and ownership. I examine the pedigree of Western property theory, and especially that of the concept of private property, followed by a look at how art has been and can be conceived of in terms of property. I examine an alternative category of property, namely cultural property, which seems to offer a more fruitful way of thinking about cultural expression in terms of property; though, as we shall see, it is not without its own complications. I end the chapter with an analysis of the changing operational context of museums, rooted in the writing of art theorists Rosalind Krauss and Claire Bishop: the museum is operating increasingly in accordance with a late capitalist logic, as a strictly corporate entity, with ever closer ties to corporations and private donors, resulting in a blurring of the boundary between private and public interest and a perspective on art that considers art works as assets, moving away from the perspective of art as cultural heritage and a repository of cultural knowledge.

The third chapter is dedicated to an exploration of the vexed but vital con-cept of cultural appropriation. I examine some examples of cultural appropria-tion within the museum context, and their resulting controversies, followed by a conceptual analysis of the concept, departing from the work done by Richard A. Rogers, whose work is located at the intersection of communication studies and cultural studies, and Erich Hatala Matthes, a philosopher whose work interro-gates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of cultural heritage. I conclude this chapter with an analysis of the phenomena of cultural appropriation in light of the art-as-private-property paradigm we encountered in the first chapter, and the late capitalist logic I perceive to be at play in most museums today. I ar-gue that the same capitalist logic that enables a view of works of art as assets also helps enable exploitative cultural appropriation practices, and undermines strategies of resistance by neutralizing them through cooptation, eroding the counter-hegemonic potential of the institution.

The final chapter relates my findings above to the project of making the museum more inclusive and diverse. I start with considering the museum as a political space, departing from the writing of the prominent political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who has worked to explicitly connect her political theory of ‘agonism’ or ‘agonistics’ to the institution of the museum. Building on this work, I clarify the need for the project to diversify the museum by examining

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the differing notions of diversity at play in thinking about and implementing di-versity policies and engaging with the underlying theory, turning to the writing of the prolific feminist- and postcolonial theorist Sara Ahmed on the language and work of diversity, and trauma- and cultural memory scholar Stef Craps’ notion of cross-cultural witnessing, establishing the relation between practices of cultural appropriation in the museum and a lack of diversity within the insti-tution. I address the misunderstanding of diversity as entailing the platforming of exclusionary, discriminatory, and otherwise harmful and oppressive voices, in addition to marginalized voices, and show that a commitment to diversity, per-haps prima facie paradoxically, is actually incompatible with the platforming of harmful voices. I then point to some examples of alternative pathways for the museum to take. This results in a reconsideration of the role of the museum, a call for action to diversify the museum, and some tentative guidelines on how this might be achieved in an ethical way. I hope to show that the late capital-ist logic still in ascendancy in the museum world today is incompatible with a true commitment to diversity. As a tentative but promising alternative, I will develop a framework in the form of a conception of cultural property enriched by a focus on “cultural sovereignty;” a framework encapsulating the impera-tives of diversity and cross-cultural witnessing, commitments to social justice and countering the harms of cultural appropriation, and inspired by concepts of sovereignty from Indigenous studies; a framework that offers an alternative perspective on art, and centers the well-being of cultural communities. It is my hope that this framework can help foster healthy cross-cultural interactions, and aids in both preventing and challenging culturally exploitative practices.

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Art as Property

In this chapter, we will examine the history and connotations of the concept of property, analyze a few different permutations of the concept, and take a look at how notions of property apply to art. This task begins with an exploration of property theory and the traditional, Western notion of property it is founded on, leading to a consideration of the category of private property: the predom-inant notion of property within capitalist societies. We will then extend the exploration with a discussion of cultural property as a category and theory of property more naturally applicable to art (at least prima facie). We end this chapter with an analysis of the ways the contemporary art museum treats art in terms of property.

2.1 Property, Traditionally Defined

In the 1978 book Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, a collection of important and foundational historical texts on property, its editor C.B. Macpherson, in one of two essays meant to reinvigorate the academic discourse around property and advance contemporary scholarship on the topic, provides the following ubiquitous traditional definition of property:

[T]o have a property is to have a right in the sense of an enforceable claim to some use or benefit of something, whether it is a right to a share in some common resource or an individual right in some particular things. (Macpherson (1978), p.3)

A key word in this definition is ‘enforceable’: the claim to ownership needs to be backed by authority, recognized and upheld by society at large, or by the apparatus of the nation-state:

What distinguishes property from mere momentary possession is that property is a claim that will be enforced by society or the state, by custom or convention or law. (Macpherson (1978), p.3)

Property can be subdivided as crowdable or non-crowdable. Property is crowdable if the use of it by one person interferes or precludes its usage by another person. Crowdability can take different forms: my using this laptop to type on precludes its usage by others temporarily, while my drinking the drink

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I ordered precludes its usage by others permanently. Intellectual property,1 a category which also (partly) covers art, is typically considered to be non-crowdable, as my reading of a text, listening to a song, or looking at a painting does not preclude others from doing the same, or interfere with their enjoyment of it.2 _{Intellectual property covers the intangible aspects of art, but a work of}

art (and this is especially evident in the visual arts) also has a tangible, material dimension: the work itself, as e.g. it hangs in a gallery or museum. A work of art can thus be property, and can be owned in two distinct ways, by different owners. The artist typically remains the owner of the intellectual property, while the physical work of art itself can be owned by anyone able to pay for it. Property can be arranged in a typology in a few different ways. One com-mon arrangement, taken from Waldon (2016), is the subdivision into common, collective, and private property. The first two are species of public property, and as such stand as alternatives to private property. Common property is governed by rules whose aim is to make the resources in question available to all the members of a community. Any restrictions placed on the usage of the resources are there to ensure that the resources will remain available to any and all. Collective property is governed by the community as a whole; collective decision-making determines the rules on use and availability of the resources in question. Collective property thus might not be accessible to all the members of a community, but the community does decide how the property is governed. Private property, in contrast, is governed by individuals or groups of individuals (treated, by law, as persons); these hold ultimate control over the property and decide who is to use it and in what way, or, perhaps more accurately, who is not to use it.3 Though the property rights lay with individuals, the system as a whole does still rest on social rules and conventions; society, or those who hold power within society (e.g. the state), has to back the system of individual rights, and has to enforce the claims of private property.

John Carman, in his book on the intersection of ownership with archaeol-ogy and heritage, Against Cultural Property, distinguishes a fourth category of property: State property. He notes, however, that in practice state property does not differ much, if at all, from private property:

In general there is no fundamental distinction between state own-ership and private ownown-ership: the state as a single corporate entity has as full and complete ownership rights as any individual, with full right of exclusion of use or access; the difference lies in who makes the decisions, the corporate state or a private individual. (Carman (2005), p.29)

1 Intellectual property, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), “refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.”

2 This might surprise anyone who has ever attempted to view any iconic work of art in any major museum; the enormous crowds of people in front of the Mona Lisa or the Nachtwacht sure make these paintings seem eminently crowdable.

3 There might still be restrictions put on the individual’s control by the state or by society; think for example of zoning laws restricting what an owner of a piece of land is allowed to build on it.

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Private property is, of course, the preeminent category of property in capitalism, with the main consequence of private ownership being “inevitably an exclusive right of access and use attached to the owner” (Carman (2005), p.119).

It is important to realize that the theory of property laid out above is a specific historically and culturally situated conception; it is by no means the universal, perennial concept some might be tempted to think it is. It is but one way among many to conceive of property, and it has always been subject to change:

The meaning of property is not constant. The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time. [...] The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve. (Macpherson (1978), p.1)

Below I will briefly discuss the history of the institution of property, both in order to underline this point, and to unearth the problematics surrounding the particular conception of (mainly) private property it has led to.

Modern property theory (in the Western tradition) is a product of the Eu-ropean Enlightenment. The most significant of the Enlightenment theorists for property theory was John Locke. Locke and others originated the idea that property was a natural right of individuals over things, pre-dating governments and thus not subject to be taken away by governments. Locke believed that nature was given to all men (a term which, to Locke, of course referred to but a very small subset of all people), and in order to solve the tension between this idea and the idea of individual property he and other Enlightenment thinkers posited the idea that property was a right gained by the mixing of one’s labour or efforts with nature, thus producing things that one then owns.

Though the Earth [...] be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. (Locke (2003), II, §27, p.287-288)

Locke’s theory of property influences the discourse to this day. Locke, according to Macpherson, “set out for the first time the case for an individual right of unlimited appropriation. [...] His justification was [...] in effect written into, or at least was implied in, the constitutions of the first great modern capitalist nation-states” (Macpherson (1978), p.13, my italics).4 We shall return to the link between property, capitalism, and nation-states in the next section. 4 Macpherson’s unlimited (individual) appropriation refers to an institution he identifies as

being central and necessary for capitalist market societies to function:

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Locke’s theory of property, equitable though it may seem at first sight from a reading of the above quote, explicitly supported the expropriation of land from Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In order to defend settler-colonialists’ right to expropriate, Locke has to make some additional arguments, as he faces the obvious objection that Indigenous peoples work the land and subsist of it, and so, on Locke’s own account, ought to have title to it. Locke’s defence is two-fold. First, he claims that there is ample land for everyone, so the appropriation of land cannot hurt anyone: “Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use” (Locke (2003), II, §33, p.291). Locke’s second argument consist of the claim that land by itself, uncultivated, is essentially valueless, “waste land” in Locke’s words: it is labor that gives land all of its value.5 The labor that Locke values is explicitly labor in the mode of Western agriculture; a mode that values maximized profits: “For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yeild the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniencies of life as ten acres of equally fertile land doe in Devonshire where they are well cultivated?” (Locke (2003), II, §37, p.294).

The European theory of property, so profoundly influenced by Locke’s writ-ing, first spread to North America, was then exported throughout the world through colonial expansion, and was further enshrined in international law and policies in the twentieth century (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.3). It was fundamental to Western colonial practices and the wholesale appropriation of land and resources; native peoples were not perceived as having transformed the land sufficiently, in accordance with the Lockean idea of property, were thus not deemed to have property or rights to their land. The Enlightenment idea of property was a major engine of settler colonialism and its excesses and atroc-ities (not least among which the continuous disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples), and, in turn, I think it is fair to say, settler colonialism served as a major incentive to cling to this theory of property.6 The traditional Western theory of property thus is tightly interwoven with, perhaps one could even say tainted by, colonial practices. As we shall see, it is similarly entangled with

patriarchal, or feudal obligations to work, and whose supporters, besides, see prospects of untold wealth under the new market arrangements if only people can be induced to exert themselves, is an institutionalized incentive to continuous exertion. (Macpherson (1983), p.163-164)

Intentional or not, seventeenth century thinkers provided the necessary theory and justi-fication for this concept, by postulating that ‘man’ was in essence a creature of infinite desires, forever seeking to satisfy those desires, making man “essentially an infinite con-sumer” (Macpherson (1983), p.164). Combining this thesis with the additional premise that “land and capital must be privately owned to be productive (a premise which Locke, for instance, explicitly made)” (Macpherson (1983), p.165) yields the conclusion that man, to realize his essence, must be an (infinite) appropriator of land and capital.

5 See, for example, Locke (2003), II, §37-37, p.293,294.

6 See e.g. Barker (2005a), particularly p.4-17, for illuminating historical examples of how Lockean ideas of property and ownership were, quite explicitly, employed within American jurisprudence to void treaties with Indigenous peoples, and deny them any title to their land.

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systems of capitalism and nationalism.

In the next section we shall shift our attention to the idea of cultural property, a concept of property that appears, at least prima facie, more congruent to art.

2.2 Cultural Property

Cultural property is a difficult term to define in any sort of conclusive, exhaus-tive manner. It is a category employed across a wide variety of disciplines and practices, signifying something different in each, and evolving over time. Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar do an admirable job of delineating the concept in all its multifariousness in their introduction to the 2017 Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, and I shall liberally quote from that article below. I hope the reader will forgive me; I believe it to be very much worth their effort.

A curious hybrid of culture (the evanescent and immaterial systems and structures of knowledge that bind human beings together) and property (the ideologies, political regulations, customs and popular consensus that establish entitlement and sovereignty, and determine claims and power over a range of tangible and intangible resources), cultural property is an evolving category used to describe ways of talking about collective entitlement, shared inheritance, the material nature of identity, and in more recent years to debate the ethics of the commoditization of culture.

[...]

[C]ultural property is more than valuable artefacts embedded within varied forms of control and allocations of rights [...] cultural prop-erty is also popular discourse, a way of describing culture, a form of sovereignty, a unit of power, a measure of value, a political in-strument, and [...] it refers to a wide range of different things, both material and immaterial.

[...]

[W]e define cultural property very broadly as the recognition of col-lective rights in both material and intangible culture within interna-tional policy, nainterna-tional law, cultural institutions, local contexts, and everyday practices. (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.1)

While cultural property theory developed out of the tradition of property theory discussed in the previous section, it also departs from that tradition in important and pertinent ways. It provides an alternative to the dominant ideas about private property, and the associated ideology of what Macpherson has labelled “possessive individualism”: the idea that a person is the sole owner of their skills, and owes society nothing (Macpherson (1962)). Cultural property theory, instead, highlights the collective and the social aspects of the relations and rights to property: it marks “interests in collective identities, social rela-tionships with tangible and intangible objects, and discourses of cultural rights” (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.3). Before we dive into how cultural property

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bears on the ownership of art and contemporary museum practices with regards to that, it will be instructive to detail the history of the concept.

The history of the concept of cultural property is inextricably tied up with the rise of European nationalism and the development of the nation-state in the long nineteenth century. The nation-state, according to the influential analysis by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities, is in essence an imagined community. Its idea is predicated on the identification of people with a community beyond the actionable reach of any one individual. Since the individual cannot have but passing familiarity with most of this collective, this community is created along necessarily mostly imagined lines (of ethnic-ity, of territory, of shared history and culture).7 _{Anderson emphasized the}

importance of capitalism in the formation of nation-states. What he terms ‘print-capitalism’, the dissemination of vernacular texts available to a wide au-dience due to vernacularization by mechanisms of capitalism (the invention of the printing press, the subsequent establishment of capitalist publishing houses, and the resulting commodification of print chief among these, with the stan-dardization of time being a second prominent mechanism), played a crucial role in the spread of nationalism and the subsequent rise of nation-states: print-capitalism cemented the vernacular languages that played such a key part in the formation of their respective nationalisms (Anderson (2006)).8

7 Anderson’s argument extends to other communities as well; it is not just nation-states that are imagined, but “in fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson (2006), p.6). A culture, or a cultural group, as we treat the concept in this thesis, also qualifies as an imagined community—though one that may imagine itself in a different style than nation-states.

8 For more detail on this process, see chapter 3 of Anderson’s book, which includes the following summary:

Nothing served to ‘assemble’ related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created me-chanically reproduced print-languages capable of dissemination through the market.

These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three dis-tinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it dif-ficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, partic-ular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community. Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.

[...]

Third, print-capitalism created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain dialects inevitably were ’closer’ to each print-language and dominated their final forms. [...] High German, the King’s English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly elevated

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The concept of cultural property emerged in the nineteenth century in re-sponse to pressures on cultural resources that the existing systems of thinking about property, centered on individual rights and pre-modern collectives, pro-vided no way of coping with. Cultural property offered a way to conceptual-ize the collective entitlements of the newly imagined national communities to the products and archives of culture, such as libraries, monuments, literatures, musical traditions, and archaeological records. These communities, and their newly claimed cultural heritage, were defined in terms of territory, ethnicity, and citizenship. Cultural property constituted an important new axis of polit-ical discourse and inter-state diplomacy, and provided an essential form with which to imagine and communicate the new idea of the nation-state (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.6). As Joep Leerssen has said, nationalism starts with ‘the cultivation of culture’ (Leerssen (2006)), and cultural property constitutes an important paradigm to think about the ownership of culture, so instrumental to producing and delineating the nation-state. In this way, then, the history of the idea of cultural property is entangled with the history of nationalism, and through nationalism, with the history of capitalism.

The discourse of cultural property thus came about to protect the interest of nation-states regarding specific cultural institutions and artifacts, and to estab-lish states’ ownership of these, opening up a new category of ownership between private and public property (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.7). When, at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the concept of cultural property was codified in international policies and conventions, this centering of the rights of states over cultural property unsurprisingly carried over into the language of these conventions, and the dominant role of nation-states remains codified to this day. As an example, let us look at the first sentences of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, perhaps the single most influential codification of cultural property:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term ‘cultural property’ means property which, on religious or secular grounds, is specifically designated by each State as being of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science and which belongs to the following categories[.] (UNESCO (1970), my italics.)

The nation-state, ever since the conception of cultural property theory, has wielded disproportionate power9over what counts as cultural property/heritage, and what is thus subject to the protection the laws and conventions offer. This is evident, for example, in UNESCO’s procedures for establishing cultural her-itage, which require its member-states to file claims for recognition. The prob-lem with the definition and designation of cultural property and heritage being the sole dominion of nation-states in international law and conventions is that nation-states are not always the best arbiter of what is and what is not cultural property (let alone of what should be protected, by whom, and for whom), as

to a new politico-cultural eminence. (Anderson,2006, p.44-45)

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they misrepresent, or do not represent at all, the interests of certain cultural communities within their borders (not to speak of the cultural communities only partly within their borders). One need only look at the past and present of various nation-states’ treatment of minority cultures within their borders to get an inkling of how and why the nation-state might not be the ideal pick as the sole institution to entrust the designation and protection of culture to (think, e.g. of the various nation-states’ relations with the Indigenous peoples within their borders in the Americas and Australia).

We ought not forget, however, that this is not the only way cultural prop-erty has been construed. The Western paradigm of cultural propprop-erty tends to obscure and indeed colonize other conceptions of cultural property (through e.g. its codification in international precepts), but it is increasingly being challenged since the end of the twentieth century. The meaning and significance of the category of cultural property is highly contested:

[B]y the end of the twentieth century, challenges to this jurisdiction [of the nation-state over cultural property] had emerged from many directions. The language of cultural property has been adopted and adapted by collectivities that actively resist the authority of the state over diverse cultural resources. (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.2) But how effective can the concept of cultural property be as a tool to chal-lenge the nation-states’ codified hegemony over tangible and intangible cultural heritage, entrenched as the concept is in the history of modern capitalist nation-states? We shall return to this important question and the concept of cultural property in4.2, where we will explore and develop a notion of cultural property rooted in a notion of cultural sovereignty, which, I shall argue, can serve as an alternative, radical and counter-hegemonic way of conceiving the ownership of culture and cultural expressions, that stands in opposition to the dominant, capitalist notion of private property.

For now, I want to leave the reader with the following quote, to impress on them that cultural property is much more than a mere tool in service of solidifying the borders and legitimacy of the nation-state, and safeguarding its cultural dominance:

[I]t is vital to pay attention to local differences as well as global histories, to appreciate the discontent with the assumption of na-tional sovereignty from both within and across nation-states, and to understand that the phrase ’cultural property’ does not simply ref-erence an international category and bureaucratic order, but is itself an active site of claim making that is about political recognition, cultural memory, and identity formation. (Anderson and Geismar (2017), p.2)

2.3 Owning Art

Building on the above analyses of property, I will survey and analyze the glob-alized contemporary art world, in order to understand how it deals with art and

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to parse what this tells us about contemporary art in terms of property and ownership.

Museums are institutions precariously situated between the public and the private. There is a definite contemporary trend towards private funding, with many publicly funded museums increasingly depending on private funding:

Although the last twenty years have seen a huge diversification of museums as a category, a dominant logic of privatization unites most of their iterations worldwide. In Europe, there has been an increas-ing dependence on donations and corporate sponsorship as govern-ments gradually withdraw public funding from culture in the name of ‘austerity’. In the US, the situation has always been thus, but is now accelerating without any pretense to a separation of public and private interests [...] (Bishop (2013), p.9).

As a result, these museums must negotiate between serving public interest and satisfying private interests that can be at odds with one another, leading to po-tential conflicts of interest. Many of these resulting conflicts have been highly-publicized. The examples below serve to illustrate some of the different ways in which the public and private interest of a museum may come into conflict. The first example concerns the recent resignation of the artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Beatrix Ruf, in 2017, who was accused of not being transparent about her dealings with friendly art collectors, and of having a conflict of interest due to her working as an art-advisor on the side. At the time of writing, independent investigations into this matter are still ongoing. Another example concerns the row resulting from the Tate’s acquisition in 2005 of a work by one of the trustees of the museum, Chris Ofili. This work was acquired way below market-value, with the help of donors who, in exchange for their donation of a piece of the thirteen-part work, received other works of art from the Tate. The museum was found to have broken the law, and subse-quently rewrote its acquisition policies, promised more transparency about the costs of acquisitions, and added an independent member to its ethics commit-tee (Higgins (2006)). One last example, this one concerning a wholly privately funded museum, concerns the exhibition the MFA in Boston put on in 2005 of a varied collection of objects of questionable aesthetic and cultural value, rele-vance, and curatorial cohesiveness, owned by William Koch (of Koch brothers infamy), who was an honorary member of the supervisory board of the museum (the display of two of Koch’s yachts outside the entrance of the museum was especially singled out for critique and ridicule). Koch carried most of the costs for the exhibition; a sound, if dubious, investment, because the incorporation of a work of art in a big museal exhibitions heightens its value significantly (King (2010), p.7-9).

Art museums are increasingly facing market pressure, and have been for some decades now, causing them to effectively function more and more as market-driven institutions. Already in 1990, Rosalind Krauss signalled this trend in her influential essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum”.10 _{In it,}

10 Its name a reference to the debt it owes to Fredric Jameson’s 1984 paper critiquing late capitalist culture, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”.

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she remarks on “the massive change in attitude now in place according to which the objects in a museum’s keeping can now be coolly referred to, by its director as well as its trustees, as “assets” ” (Krauss (1990), p.4). This change, she says, amounts to a shift in perspective, away from viewing art as cultural heritage and a repository of cultural knowledge, toward seeing art as “so much capital — as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only truly realized when they are put in circulation” (Ibid.); toward viewing art primarily as a commodity, if you will. Krauss sees this shift as a result of a change in the context in which the museum operates, “a context whose corporate nature is made specific not only by the major sources of funding for museum activities but also, closer to home, by the makeup of its boards of trustees” (Krauss (1990), p.5). The museum is no longer the guardian and exegete of (elite) culture, but functions instead as a corporate entity, focused on the marketability of its collection and concerned with growth and profit.

This changing operational context of the museum is made manifest in the increased focus on the architecture of the building that houses the art, with museums commissioning ‘starchitects’ to design massive behemoth cathedrals of art, at the cost of a focus on the works of art themselves, Krauss finds. The public’s private engagement with the individual work of art is decentered in favour of an engagement with the space first and foremost:

Krauss argued that a profound encounter with the work of art had become subordinated to a new register of experience: the unan-chored hyperreality of its architectural container, which produced effects of disembodiment that, in her view, correlated to the dema-terialized flows of global capital. Rather than a highly individualized artistic epiphany, viewers to these galleries encountered a euphoria of space first, and art second (Bishop (2013), p.5).

Krauss sees a connection between the ascendancy of this new paradigm and the rise of the Minimalism art movement. Minimalism, though conceived in opposition to mass commodity culture, carried within itself the very same late capitalist logic it meant to oppose, Krauss argues. Minimalism’s attack on the idea of creative originality and the unreproducability of the aesthetic original, through its emphasis on the replication of the works (selling the plans and/or li-censes to reproduce to collectors and museums, in lieu of the work itself), echoes the technology of mass production, as does its usage of ‘simple’ industrial ma-terials and forms. Stripping away the veneer of the unreproducible aesthetic original helped pave the way to thinking of art as a commodity. Minimalism aimed to center an immediacy of (bodily) experience to the spectator, an inten-sity of feeling when confronted with the artwork, rather than a narrative. The Minimalism movement thus opened the door for museums to re-conceive their main goal as providing visitors with this intensity of experience, rather than a narrative account of art history. It heralded the change of the museum from an encyclopedic, diachronic institution dedicated to showcasing the full depth and width of art history,11 _{to a synchronic institution committed to showing a}

11 This type of museum is best known as the “universal survey museum;” see Duncan and Wallach (1980).

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select few works, permitted the full space to affect the most intense experience: “Within this experience, it is the museum that emerges as powerful presence and yet as properly empty, the museum as a space from which the collection has withdrawn” (Krauss (1990), p.4).

Krauss’ polemic against contemporary art museums has been, as stated, very influential and is still widely cited; a fact that makes it, perhaps, all the more surprising that it has not spawned that much literature dedicated to grappling with and furthering her analysis, as Claire Bishop notes in her 2013 pamphlet “Radical Museology:”

Krauss’s essay was prescient in many ways: the decade to come saw an unprecedented proliferation of new museums dedicated to contemporary art, and increased scale and a proximity to big busi-ness have been two central characteristics of the move from the nineteenth-century model of the museum as a patrician institution of elite culture to its current incarnation as a populist temple of leisure and entertainment. (Bishop (2013), p.5)

Bishop applies Krauss’ analysis to the present, and details how Krauss’ theses are evidenced in the contemporary state of the global museum world. She argues that a dominant logic of privatization pervades the museum world today, with most museums around the world (increasingly) dependent on private donations and corporate sponsorship, and the separation of private and public interests rapidly disappearing, leading to some particularly egregious cases of conflicts of interest:12

[A]n art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, was appointed head of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in January 2010. Two months later, the New Museum controversially installed the collection of its multimillionaire trustee Dakis Joannou and employed the artist Jeff Koons—already in Joannou’s collection—to guest curate the exhibition. Meanwhile, it is well known that the Museum of Modern Art in New York regularly rehangs its permanent collection on the basis of its trustees’ latest acquisitions. (Bishop (2013), p.9)

Bishop moves beyond Krauss in mapping an alternative direction for the con-temporary art museum to take. She takes three European museums as case studies: the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the MSUM in Ljubljana, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. She examines their different practises to chart an alter-native trajectory for the contemporary art museum, away from the synchronous, ‘presentist’ corporate model serving the interests “of the one percent,” towards a more radical, diachronic model dedicated to “an attempt to represent the inter-ests and histories of those constituencies that are (or have been) marginalized, sidelined and oppressed” (Bishop (2013), p.6). This different way of conceiv-ing of the contemporary art museum, what it should be, and who it should serve, requires a rethinking of the category of ‘the contemporary,’ Bishop ar-gues. Bishop’s project here is kindred to my own, and we shall return to her work throughout the rest of this thesis.

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As we have witnessed through the work of Krauss and Bishop, contemporary art museums are increasingly under pressure from the market, functioning more and more as corporate entities. This corporate turn in the museum world and corresponding shift in how art is viewed, is tied up with, and paralleled by a similar development in the globalized art market. The contemporary art market has seen an incredible boom in the last decades, as Georgina Adams chronicles in her two books on the subject, Big Bucks and Dark Side of the Boom. Contemporary art has come to dominate the art market, growing “by 564 per cent in value – far eclipsing the previous traditional heavyweight category of Impressionist and modern art” (Adam (2014), p.10). This boom corresponds to the rapid increase of contemporary art museums that Bishop signals, and to a similar development in academia: “In tandem with this proliferation of contemporary art museums, the study of contemporary art has become the fastest-growing subject area in the academy since the turn of the millennium” (Bishop (2013), p.16).

Adams sees this extraordinary growth as a result of a combination of fac-tors. The limited supply of works in other sectors of the art market plays a role, but the increased interest of art as an investment (mirroring the ‘art-as-asset’ paradigm we have discussed above), emerging economies that create new markets, the emergence of new or newly important players, and “an overlap between the worlds of art, fashion, luxury and celebrity” all have contributed significantly (Adam (2014), p.10). Contemporary art, she says, is becoming more and more a commodity for the one percent, a form of luxury goods, with the artist’s name functioning as a powerful brand, mirroring a similar change that occurred in the fashion industry: a change away from “a personal, artisan-led trade in the 1970s to the corporate, branded behemoth companies we see today” (Adam (2014), p.11).

The boom in the contemporary art market, and the corresponding spike in the prices of contemporary art works, “has put museums in the position of being unable to acquire works of art, in a market increasingly dominated by a tiny percentage of massively wealthy people,” Adams says. She continues, bringing to mind Krauss’ findings:

Indeed, museums, in an age when public patronage is fading and private patronage is growing, are often forced to be vendors rather than buyers to survive. The increasing focus on art as an asset and speculation by a small number of influential and wealthy players have also changed the way art is created, produced and marketed. Indeed, in many cases this has challenged the very nature of a ‘work of art’ as a unique expression of the artist, as it has become a product made to satisfy an increasingly voracious market. (Adam (2014), p.181) We have seen that the contemporary art museum, whether private or (semi) public, has come to view the art in its collection more and more as private property, as so many commodities valuable insofar as they are seen to have monetary value in the globalized art market, liable to be deaccessioned and sold according to the corporate interests of the museum, with little regard to the interest of the public. Or, in the words of Krauss: “noninvested surplus capital

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[...] the hallmark of late capitalism [...] is exactly one way of describing the holdings — both in land and in art — of museums. It is the way [...] that many museum figures (directors and trustees) are now, in fact, describing their collections” (Krauss (1990), p.15).

Throughout this chapter I have signalled the commodification of art, without explaining what I take this to mean, exactly, or how the process of commodifi-cation works.13 I beg the reader for their indulgence a little while longer: I will return to this issue in3.3, where I shall detail the workings of this concept.

In the following chapters we shall see how these developments in the con-temporary museum world and its treatment of art play out in the context of the phenomena of cultural appropriation, and in the current discourse around the diversification of the museum, respectively.

13 Anderson and Geismar instead talk in terms of the related concept of commoditization, which refers to the process where goods previously distinguishable by their attributes lose their unique attributes and become interchangeable. In the writing of Anderson and Geis-mar it is meant to emphasize, I believe, that cultural products lose their cultural specificity when they enter the capitalist exchange system and are commodified. The notion of com-modification I discuss in3.3accounts for the related process of commoditization, so I shall employ the former concept instead.

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3 |

Appropriation in the

Globalized Art World

Cultural appropriation is a pressing topic within the contemporary art world. Several scandals involving appropriation have plagued the art world recently, resulting in social media outrage, boycotts and protests, an influx of (popular) literature on the subject, and serious consequences for the artists, art-works, institutions, and other parties involved. The practice and mechanisms of cul-tural appropriation, I shall argue, are enabled and emboldened, at least in part, by the same late capitalist logic paramount in the contemporary art world to-day. Furthermore, as I shall argue in the next chapter, cultural appropriation is closely connected to the issue of diversifying the museum.

I begin by addressing a few different examples of cultural appropriation in the contemporary art museums in order to illustrate the urgency of the topic for the museum world, and to illuminate some of the different levels at which cultural appropriation can operate in the museum. I will then embark on a theoretical exploration of the concept itself, which will clarify both its salience for the diversity discussion preoccupying museums today, and the late capitalist logic that partially underlies its workings.

3.1 Cases of Cultural Appropriation in the

Contemporary Art World

In the summer of 2015, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hosted a public program focused around Claude Monet’s 1876 painting “La Japonaise.” The work depicts Monet’s wife, Camille, wearing an uchikake (a type of formal ki-mono), reflective of “Japonism,” the French craze for all things Japanese at the end of the nineteenth century. During the weekly event, dubbed “Kimono Wednesdays,” visitors of the museum were invited to pose for pictures with the painting in reproductions of the depicted garment. The event met with contro-versy, with activists accusing the MFA of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, and participation in institutionalized racism, and it was widely protested and counter-protested. After an initial unsuccessful attempt to explain away the problematics of the event, the museum finally hosted a panel discussion with activists and scholars of color, inviting the public to join in a discussion

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address-ing “issues includaddress-ing Orientalism, racialized iconography, institutional racism, representation of minority groups, and cultural appropriation”, and the ques-tions of how the institution can be more accountable to its publics, and who gets to speak for whom.1

The charges of cultural appropriation against the museum in this case are, I think, twofold. Monet appropriated Japanese aesthetics and iconography in his painting, and the museum decided to display this painting (uncritically), thus becoming complicit in Monet’s initial act of appropriation. But the museum also, and separately, decided to invite its public to participate in an act of appropriation themselves by donning a traditional garment which, in the case of most visitors, stems from a culture not one’s own. The museum can thus be seen to be perpetrating two distinct acts of appropriation. The first involves the display of a work that is culturally appropriative, presented without proper contextualization and problematization of the appropriative nature of the work, thus effectively propagating and disseminating that initial act of appropriation on the part of the artist. The second involves a wholly original act of cultural appropriation compounding the first, by encouraging its public to engage in an act of appropriation themselves. The former can be said to be located on the curatorial level, involving choices on what art-works to show, and how to show them, while the latter is on the educational level, involving choices on how to reach and educate the public, separate but in addition to the curatorial choices. During the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, one of the included paintings prompted vigorous debate and controversy. The painting in question was Dana Schutz’ 2016 work “Open Casket,” which depicted Schutz’ representation of the famous photograph of the open casket of Emmett Till, the fourteen year old African American boy who was brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Activists blocked the painting from view and called for its removal, the cancellation of her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and even for the destruction of the work. Schutz, a white artist, was accused of appropriating subject matter that was not hers to speak on, of taking cultural imagery and history from a culture not hers. By displaying the work, the Whitney became complicit in this act of cultural appropriation, in a similar way as discussed in the example of the MFA: on the curatorial level. The curators of the exhibition responded to the controversy by issuing a statement saying they stood behind their decision, stating that they wanted to provide a platform for artists to explore the critical issues the painting brought up.

Similar examples of cultural appropriation sparking controversy are plentiful. Sam Durrant’s 2012 sculpture “Scaffold,” incorporating the form of a scaffold on which 38 Native American men from the Dakota nation were hanged, was displayed in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center, and after the resulting con-troversy the curator and the artist met with Dakota elders. The rights to the work were signed over to them, after which it was buried. The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis faced calls for a boycott after staging an exhibition by artist Kelley Walker, who creates works from appropriated images of Black peo-1 See https://www.mfa.org/programs/lecture/kimono-wednesdays-a-conversation.

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ple that she smears with toothpaste and chocolate. The list goes on. For my last example, though, I want to point to a less visibly controversial, more widespread pattern of appropriation on display in many contemporary art museums. I will take the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s latest staging of their main collection, dubbed “Stedelijk BASE,” as my example. BASE incorporates collections of works from two Western art movements, Die Brücke and CoBrA. Artist from both movements incorporated non-Western aesthetic styles (namely, African and Pacific aesthetics) into their work in reaction and opposition to what they perceived to be the stale world of Western art of their time. The wall-texts accompanying the works state as much, but do not critically examine this ap-propriation. Additionally, the aesthetics in question are described in terms of the ‘primitive,’ and equated to a simple, child-like aesthetic.

Of course, these two movements in modern art are hardly the only ones appropriating non-Western aesthetics (think of Picasso, Fauvism, the wider movement of Primitivism, etcetera). Indeed, the history of Western modern art appears predicated on the appropriation of non-Western aesthetics. As the incomparable Eduardo Galeano wryly observes in a short story titled ‘Origin of Modern Art,’ from his wonderful collection of literary historical vignettes Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone:

Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth cele-brating. And worth stealing. It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather ab-sentminded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency. Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how re-sponsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth-century European painting and sculpture. (Galeano (2009), p.268) The problem with displaying these works lays not just with the lack of critical framing; it is further compounded by a lack of representation of both work from artists hailing from the appropriated cultures,2_{and the appropriated aesthetics}

in any form not mediated by Western artists. Visitors of the modern art museum are thus only exposed to these aesthetics mediated through a Western lens. While the influences are often made explicit and are explained as important to the work of Western artists and, by extension, to the history of Western art, too often no mention is made of actual work and artists within the non-Western aesthetic traditions these artists take from, nor from the relevant art history. These aesthetics are portrayed as Other, not within the purview of modern art, and as only being relevant to the contemporary art institution and its publics insofar they influenced and inspired Western art and its artists.

These examples serve as a preliminary illustration of the diverse ways cul-tural appropriation comes into play in modern and contemporary art museums. As we shall see, the problem of cultural appropriation is rooted in capital-ist and colonial mechanisms underlying the workings of the contemporary art 2 Or indeed, from anywhere other than the Global North.

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world. These mechanisms manifest themselves in other, equally problematic ways as well. We shall return to these issues in 3.3and 4. Next, we will turn to a conceptual investigation of cultural appropriation.

3.2 What We Talk About When We Talk About

Cultural Appropriation

Given the salience of the subject of cultural appropriation in our current political and cultural climate, its complexity and multifariousness, and the wealth of attention it is given in popular writing, it is perhaps surprising that academia has not accorded it a proportional amount of attention. The concept is often referred to, though seldom explained in any detail, as Richard A. Rogers attests to in his important conceptual examination of cultural appropriation:

Cultural appropriation is often mentioned in critical analyses of me-dia representations and commodifications of marginalized and/or colonized cultures. Although such works in critical/cultural stud-ies often use the notion of cultural appropriation, the concept is frequently used without significant discussion or explicit theorizing (exceptions are discussed below). Therefore, although cultural ap-propriation is a common topic in cultural, critical rhetorical, and critical media studies, at times it is undertheorized in these litera-tures. (Rogers (2006), p.474-475)

The lack of conceptual clarity and precise definitions of cultural appropriation is, in part, a result of the indeterminacy of the concept at the heart of it, namely culture; a concept notoriously hard to define in any delimiting or exhaustive manner.3 Though somewhat sparse, important literature on the concept has been written within a wide variety of disciplines, including but not limited to critical- and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, legal studies, and media- and communication studies. Philosophers, however, have remained relatively silent on this issue. Importantly, the sentiments expressed in the scant philosophical writing out there strikingly differ from those expressed in most of the work done in other academic disciplines.4 The work of James O. Young, the philosopher who has written most prolifically on the topic of cultural appropriation, is an apt example of this dissimilarity.5 _{Though he concedes that cultural appropriation}

might sometimes be offensive, he is deeply skeptical of its potential harmfulness: Artists from almost every culture are constantly borrowing styles, stories, motifs, and other content from cultures other than their own 3 ‘Culture’ is often suggested to be a Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’ concept; see e.g.

Young (2010), p.15 (See Matthes (2016), p.358-359 and Killmister (2011), p.233 for a critical discussion). We will return to this issue and the difficulties and problems inherent in delineating ‘culture’ and cultures below.

4 But see e.g. Nicholas and Wylie (2012) and Heyd (2003) for heartening exceptions.

5 Young has co-edited one of the most visible collections of philosophical essays on the sub-ject of cultural appropriation (Young and Brunk (2012)), as well as authoring a monologue on the subject (Young (2010)).

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but this borrowing is only rarely wrongfully harmful. Sometimes this borrowing is offensive, but even so most of the time artists do not act wrongly so long as they observe appropriate time and place restrictions (Young (2010), p.152).

Erich Hatala Matthes wrote one of the few philosophical papers synthesizing philosophical theory with the important work done on cultural appropriation in other disciplines. In it, he observes that:

[Young’s] monograph is, by design, largely a moral and aesthetic defense of cultural appropriation. In contrast, writers outside the discipline of philosophy have expressed much more concern about the harmfulness of cultural appropriation, particularly with respect to its power to oppress and silence[.] (Matthes (2016), p.344-345) Matthes aims to stage an intervention in the philosophical literature by learn-ing from the other academic discourse on cultural appropriation out there, and employing the “powerful conceptual resources” philosophers have developed to shed light on the harmfulness cultural appropriation can cause (Matthes (2016), p.345). In what follows, I will examine the concept of cultural appropriation in light of the analytical framework developed by Rogers and Matthes’ philo-sophical ruminations on the concept. The work of these authors represent some of the most thorough and insightful conceptual investigation of the concept to date. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of their work, and their com-mitment to take serious the real-world consequences of cultural appropriation are, I believe, indispensable methodological elements for any study of a subject of such immense import.

I believe Young, and like-minded philosophers, to be on the wrong side of the divide I have sketched regarding the harmfulness (both potential and actual) of cultural appropriation. Their attempts to rationalize or explain away the harm-fulness of cultural appropriation, moreover, are potentially harmful themselves, because they silence or minimize the voices of those actually experiencing the harmful consequences of the very phenomena they claim is not morally objec-tionable; the marginalized, the subaltern. I hope to have convinced the reader of this point by the end of this chapter.

3.2.1 A Typology of Cultural Appropriation

For what follows, we shall provisionally define cultural appropriation broadly as the use, representation, and/or procurement or continued possession of a culture’s6 _{practices, experiences, symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals, or}

tech-nologies by nonmembers of said culture, regardless of intent, function, ethics, or outcome.7 _{Note that this definition is morally neutral: cultural appropriation}

can be morally objectionable on this definition, but does not need to be. 6 The concept of ‘culture’ at stake here is similarly broad, and can also refer to sub- and

countercultures.

7 This definition represents an expanded and amended version of Rogers’ definition; see Rogers (2006), p.476.

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Cultural appropriation is part and parcel of contact between cultures. His-torically, the exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices between different cultures has been well-documented, and the resulting progress and benefits are readily apparent in e.g. the technologies underlying contemporary societies around the world today. Appropriation of elements of culture is often theorized by defenders of the concept as being central to what it means to be human, fun-damental to human creativity, innovation, and progress. Rogers also recognizes that cultural appropriation is a fact of human interaction, saying that “Cultural appropriation [...] is inescapable when cultures come into contact, including vir-tual or representational contact” (Rogers (2006), p. 474). Though inescapable and potentially beneficial in some ways, cultural appropriation can also inflict real harm. The harm cultural appropriation can wreak takes manifold forms. Appropriation involves a taking (control) of cultural expressions. It is not merely the artefact, ritual, symbol, etcetera that is being taken here: through this tak-ing the control of the cultural narrative and the creation of cultural meantak-ing is also appropriated. This can result in harmful misrepresentation of a culture, potentially negatively affecting the ‘outside’ perception of said culture, and its perception of itself. A concern with this particular form of harm can be seen as informing the reaction against the MFA’s “Kimono Wednesdays.” Aside from undermining cultural identity and integrity, the appropriation of cultural narra-tive and meaning infringes on a culture’s ability to determine the meaning and use of its symbols, narratives, customs, and artefacts. This form of harm is the one at stake in Dana Schutz’ painting depicting Emmett Till: at the heart of the claims of cultural appropriation in this case is the idea that Schutz is appro-priating a narrative, a history that is not hers to tell (and, in the telling, help shape). Additionally, the appropriation of cultural artefacts can involve physi-cally removing them from their cultural context, prohibiting further engagement with the respective artefact within its native cultural context. Furthermore, the costs and benefits of cultural appropriation are not distributed equitably:

While acknowledging the benefits of cross-cultural exchange, it is important to recognize that they often come at a cost, and that this cost has largely been borne by Indigenous peoples who have had little power, historically, to determine what uses are made of their cultural and intellectual property, or to ensure that the benefits of exchange are reciprocal. (Nicholas and Wylie (2012), p.196)

It is not only Indigenous people who have borne the costs of cultural appropri-ation disproportionately: any colonized or marginalized culture, or any culture otherwise in a position of having less power than the culture it is interacting with will be affected inordinately by the harms of cultural appropriation in that scenario. The benefit of departing from a morally neutral definition is that it will allow us to acknowledge and account for both the beneficial and harmful effects of cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation is ineliminably interwoven with cultural politics: “It is involved in the assimilation and exploitation of marginalized and colonized cultures and in the survival of subordinated cultures and their resistance to dominant cultures” (Rogers (2006), Ibid.). Acts of appropriation, like all

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inter-actions, do not occur in a vacuum, but they are socially situated, shaped by the political, social, economical, and cultural contexts the actors find themselves in. Acts of cultural appropriation, again like all cultural interactions, “both reflect and constitute the identities of the individuals and groups involved as well as their sociopolitical positions” (Rogers (2006), p.476):

The active “making one’s own” of another culture’s elements occurs [...] in various ways, under a variety of conditions, and with vary-ing functions and outcomes. The degree and scope of voluntariness (individually or culturally), the symmetry or asymmetry of power relations, the appropriation’s role in domination and/or resistance, the nature of the cultural boundaries involved, and other factors shape, and are shaped by, acts of cultural appropriation. (Rogers (2006), Ibid.)

It is thus important for any theory of cultural appropriation to center social po-sitioning and the relevant contexts, and the cultural politics and power dynam-ics between cultures and between individual, differentially culturally situated actors.

Before we continue this theoretical exploration of cultural appropriation, it will be instructive to say a few words about the way cultural appropriation is perceived by scholars of art, and indeed in the art world at large. The idea of (cultural) appropriation in the arts is often seen to have positive connotations. Within theory, it is a useful corrective to the myth of artistic production ex nihilo with the corresponding idea of the artist as a sui generis, wholly original genius that dominated Western art and its theory for centuries.8 _{In a recent}

compendium on Remix Studies, for example, we find the following sentiment: As artists, critics, and philosophers have noted for millennia, the cultural production of meaning is an inherently collective process, and creation ex nihilo is not only mythical but illogical. Nobody can create a meaningful cultural artifact or engage in meaningful cultural practice without using the codes, tools and materials established by those who came before. (Sinnreich (2017), p.20)

Within art history, (cultural) appropriation is a legitimate technique associated with a plethora of artists and movements from the twentieth century onward. From Duchamp’s ready-mades through Warhol’s appropriation of commercial images to Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of other artists’ work; from Cubism and Dadaism through Fluxus to contemporary digital art: appropriation is inseparable from the development of modern and contemporary art. Impor-tantly, appropriation has been a hallmark of radical and counter-hegemonic artistic practices (anti-capitalist, anti-heteropatriarchy, etcetera) which appro-priate images and other art works from dominant cultures for radical messaging purposes.9

8 This was also one of Rosalind Krauss’ main critical projects. See e.g. the essays in Krauss (1986).

9 See Shugart (1997) for an examination of appropriation in literature as a counter-hegemonic strategy from a feminist perspective.

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The fact that cultural appropriation can be employed in counter-hegemonic, radical ways, or that it is a corrective to erroneous myths about artistic creation is then sometimes employed to argue against harmful instances of cultural ap-propriation, or to justify cultural appropriation as a whole. I believe this defense of cultural appropriation stems from a failure to grasp its full, complex nature. The debate around cultural appropriation is characterized by such misconcep-tions (mostly, I believe, the result of a failure to account for the power-dynamics and social positioning that I have claimed ought to be central to any theory of appropriation), resulting in miscommunication and both sides talking past each other. The involved parties depart from radically different conceptions of what cultural appropriation is, without making those conceptions explicit. Cultural appropriation can work in both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways, depen-dant on the intricate web of power-relations and social positioning which both shapes and is shaped by acts of appropriation. Any general defense or condem-nation of cultural appropriation represents an overly simplistic view. Moreover, a general defense entails at minimum an acceptance of the harmful effects ap-propriation can have on marginalized peoples, or even an outright rejection and denial of those effects. This effects a further silencing and harming of marginal-ized cultures, and a perpetuation of hegemonic oppression. The framework developed below can, I think, shed light on how appropriation can work both in support of, and against hegemony, and will show that a blanket defense of cultural appropriation is not only harmful, but also unnecessary, contradictory and untenable.

The Framework

Rogers argues that acts of cultural appropriation fall into four distinct cate-gories, based on social positioning and the resultant power dynamics:

1. Cultural exchange: the reciprocal exchange of symbols, arti-facts, rituals, genres, and/or technologies between cultures with roughly equal levels of power.

2. Cultural dominance: the use of elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture in a context in which the dominant culture has been imposed onto the subordinated culture, including appropriations that enact resistance. 3. Cultural exploitation: the appropriation of elements of a

sub-ordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation.

4. Transculturation: cultural elements created from and/or by multiple cultures, such that identification of a single originating culture is problematic, for example, multiple cultural appropri-ations structured in the dynamics of globalization and transna-tional capitalism creating hybrid forms. (Rogers (2006), p.477) This framework, as it is presented by Rogers, appears to categorize cultures in terms of power differentials. Though it is deserving of commendation for adding

Curating Capitalism: Centering Community Through Cultural Sovereignty in the Contemporary Art Museum