ISSUE 75 (SPRING 2023): The Museum Issue

The same thing that is happening to journalism, to restaurants, to bookstores to Hollywood, to everything beautiful and interesting in this country, is happening to art. Jobs are disappearing. Venture Capital funds are getting involved. In early 2020, 1,350 jobs were cut at American museums. What was barely profitable is now being gutted with the g... See more

“How do you exhibit that? Does that create a new economy for artists? Does that require new governance structures between the institution and the artists exhibiting that work? How do we show people how exciting this is?”

By encouraging contemporary art museums to experiment with similar value flow curation, we hope to initiate a friendly, positive-sum competition among cultural institutions to connect in deeper ways with the material conditions of art workers and audiences.

In the past few years, museums across the US, Europe, and Australia are trying to tackle the challenge of decolonizing their institutions. Museums are taking on this important work to try to make their museums reflect the diversity and the voices of the people within their collections and around them.

Barriers to entry for his peers, Palley explained, include a sense of ignorance. “We’re used to seeing everything online — click to browse and click to buy — and there is huge transparency and the commercial art world is very opaque and hard to navigate.”

“That doesn’t work for us,” Palley continued. “My generation, we want to see numbers, we want t... See more