“Who is your ideal museum board member?” I recently asked a curator at a prominent New York museum, as we discussed this year’s high-profile protests against arts patrons who made their fortunes selling opioids, arms, and cyber-espionage tools. The curator’s response was candid, if somewhat cynical: he said he prefers real estate developers to sponsor his institution because their “relatively ethical” business practices were unlikely to draw fire. Though often vilified by New Yorkers for driving up rents, the business can seem, by today’s art world calculus, a benign inevitability—at least compared to the manufacture of tear gas.
The Hans Haacke retrospective on view at the New Museum in New York this fall offers a measure of how skewed today’s calculus may be. The Conceptual artist created a scandal in 1971 by proposing a photo-and-text work for the Guggenheim Museum that chronicled the dubious dealings of a real estate holding company. The Guggenheim canceled the show; the bald reality of the real estate business apparently had no place in the halls of high culture. Though not targeting a Guggenheim board member directly, Haacke’s piece established a research-intensive methodology for later projects that did. For decades, his art put a spotlight on the people paying for culture and the sources of their wealth. In this issue, Aruna D’Souza considers the artist’s practice at a moment when these matters have taken on a renewed urgency.
The most effective questioners take a long view, grounded in history. Writing about artist Rachel Harrison, poet and novelist Lucy Ives observes how the rift between abstraction and figuration in twentieth-century American art was politically coded. In Ives’s view, Harrison, whose work appears on our cover, foregrounds the paradoxes in the display and production of contemporary art that have roots in these formative debates about the very purpose of art and the composition of the public for whom it is created.
—William S. Smith
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