Making Art Elite Again

I recently had a troubling exchange with an artist. Attacks by “social justice activists” on artworks at the National Gallery cropped up in conversation and she expressed her support, explaining “people just don’t want these kinds of artworks anymore”. To her, the National Gallery was an elite institution that failed to reflect current public priorities, and visitors have the right to damage artworks as a means of self-expression. She wanted to eliminate the gap between artwork and visitor through violent protest.

The artist claimed to speak on behalf of “people” by supporting this short-termist destructive strategy. Not seeing the issue in the same way, recent spates of attacks have forced the National Gallery to tighten security as a means of protection. All liquids except from baby formula, expressed milk, and prescription medicine have been banned. Visitors must enter the gallery through metal detectors and “displayed or wearable paraphernalia deemed as offensive or affiliated to organisations that pose a physical threat to the collection” is prohibited. The National Gallery explained in a statement:

Free access to the National Gallery allows everyone to be inspired by humanity’s greatest achievements. The collection we hold is irreplaceable and with each attack we have been forced to consider putting more barriers between the people and their artworks to preserve these fragile objects for future generations.

The National Gallery emphasizes the “irreplaceable” nature of the threatened artworks. Preservation is pitted against the iconoclasm advocated by the artist, but both parties claim to work in the interest of the “people”.

The National Gallery envisages access for “everyone”. The wording of their statement – “putting more barriers between the people and their artworks” – is embarrassed and apologetic. Prohibition of liquids and intimidating security measures convey a somewhat unwelcoming message, but sadly these policies are now necessary.

By situating this issue within wider historical context, including museological and curatorial literature, the actions of protestors suggest the emergence of a “new elite” whose privileged actions renege centuries of progress widening access to visual art.

In 1977, the journalist and museologist Kenneth Hudson claimed that museums were isolated from the modern world and elitist. This critique resonates with the emergence of New Museological scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s which sought to uncover how museums are active agents in shaping discourses surrounding knowledge, citizenship, and power. Curators, collectors, and patrons are treated as “gatekeepers” – the elite who decide what artists and artworks are seen by the public.

Accusations of elitism and intimidation proffered by proponents of the New Museology were met with permanent collection re-displays and experimental exhibitions designed to widen access. One example of such a response was the display “Art on Tyneside” at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which opened in 1991. Curated in consultation with a social historian and education officer, “Art on Tyneside” focused on meeting the needs of children aged 9-12 and people with disabilities. The reworked display featured sensory stimulation and cartoon characters. Visitor numbers to the Laing increased by 60% during the first two years of the exhibition opening, testament to the curators’ success in somewhat breaking down the barriers between the “public” and the elite art establishment.

Contemporary critics of “Art on Tyneside” accused curators of catering to visitors’ needs at the expense of rigorous scholarship:

poor in design and vacuous in content ‘Art on Tyneside’ proved to be the most abysmal museum installation I’ve ever encountered. But it was clear from the visitors’ book that, with some sectors of the public, ‘Art on Tyneside’ has been popular. I suppose one must accept this. If some visitors are so unimaginative that they need such half-baked gimmicks to make history come alive, then by all means let them have them. But not in a museum.

The journalist is particularly perturbed by the fact that the exhibition has been so “popular”. Contemporaneously, we understand this slur as a disdain of “populism” – the politics of ordinary people in conflict with those of the elite. Whereas the press criticized the Laing in the 1990s for “dumbing down” the displays at the expense of scholarship, today there is a different type of elite that distances the “public” from art by damaging irreplaceable objects.

Iconoclastic interventions are comprehensible through a postmodern mindset. Tony Bennett applied Foucauldian theory to analyze the politics of museums and galleries in The Birth of the Museum (1991). In this highly influential book – a continued compulsory text on university reading lists for art historians, curators, and museologists – Bennett presents the idea of the “museum gaze”, whereby visitors’ behavior is regulated and disciplined as part of an “exhibitionary complex”. Museums are part of a governmental apparatus aimed to coerce the populace into acceptable citizen behavior. As Bennett explains, “Where instruction and rhetoric failed, punishment began.” The soft manipulation of museums constituted “rhetoric” for the larger governmental project of fashioning docile bodies and souls conducive for the creation of emergent modern states. Failing this, Foucault’s self-described penal system would punish through imprisonment.

According to the New Museology, the historical elite were curators and museum directors who imposed their own, exclusionary, vision of art history. These gatekeeping activities helped to create the so-called exhibitionary complex. Lessons in moralizing or social control seem to have passed into the hands of a new elite through their assaults on art reflecting “popular” taste. The actions of iconoclastic bandits mean that institutions must (re)erect barriers in order to protect the art but ultimately restrict its access.

According to Bennett’s theory, museums also afford a “gaze”. These public institutions are sites to see and be seen, providing a perfect performative stage to moralize with the clout of culture. Take the sentencing of the notorious soup-throwing Just Stop Oil activists in September this year. The judge issuing the sentence at Southwark Crown Court told the defendants: “The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.” Before leaving from the dock to the cells, the defendants blew kisses to the public gallery, a flagrant offense to constitutional rule.

Social justice activists simply do not subscribe to the same mode of constitutional thought of the “people”, broadly conceived, because they pursue an elite mindset. Roger Scruton describes common law akin to a conscience built from below over multiple centuries, but these self-appointed activists impose tyranny by demanding the rearrangement of society according to “power”. This tired act of rebellion makes sense only in the context of instructive manuals such as Living a Feminist Life (2017) by Sara Ahmed, who begins her tract by urging the dismantling of institutions and outlines her “strict citation policy” of not citing any white men. In this warped way of thinking, the actions of the condemned defendants seem almost logical, albeit utopian.

Institutions such as the National Gallery remain valuable protectors in defense of the public, lest they retain some form of apoliticism. This aim is embedded within its Collections Development Policy:

The Gallery’s aim is to care for the collection, to enhance it for future generations, primarily by acquisition, and to study it, while encouraging access to the pictures for the education and enjoyment of the widest possible public now and in the future

Physical conservation is a clearly measurable responsibility for institutions to fulfill, which enables the circumvention, to some extent, of cowering to ideological demands. Failure to protect precious artworks will surely see them taken away from the public and put back in the hands of private collectors or stores, as per the pre-nineteenth century.

When all is said and done, it won’t be the everyman who holds the keys to these private spaces. Physical art encounters will be restricted to the few. Artworks are tools of the new elite in this dark web of postmodern power-mongering. They are instrumentalized as political pawns, bereft of potential means for contemplation through awe, wonder, and imagination.