The Role of the University Art Gallery Today

Octavian Esanu (American University of Beirut)

In my view, the role of the university art gallery and museum in the world today is to serve as a space dedicated to critical thinking and to the study of the conditions of artistic production, exchange and circulation. Ideally, the university gallery, or museum, should aim at exposing (and disrupting) the logic of circulation of cultural commodities that today constitutes the global system of “contemporary art.” This system, which replicates on all its levels and dimensions the highly speculative modes of neoliberal capitalism, surfaced in every corner of the world following the removal of political obstacles, including the fall of the walls preventing the free circulation of Western capital and commodities. We saw it emerging in Latin America in the 1970s, in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and in the Middle East in the 1990s and beyond. The bourgeois conception of “freedom” (which Lenin articulated in terms of “freedom to turn a profit”) manifests in the system of contemporary art in the free (that is profitable) circulation of cultural products. And even though the process of circulation of art is in itself very diverse and heterogeneous – as is the market of services and commodities today – at its top (or among the major players and institutions in the global art world) it is more or less uniform and predictable. The fact that the Empire no longer censors anything – letting us be the “pitiless censors of ourselves” (as Alain Badiou stated in his 15 Theses on Contemporary Art) – does not mean that the system permits all artistic production to circulate through its channels without restriction. Far from it. The major hubs and players in the contemporary art world are locked into closed self-serving circuits that authorize distribution only to what may have potential for symbolic or financial capitalization. This may explain why today audiences of major art institutions (be it in Kiev, Beirut, Tokyo or New York) are by and large served the same “trends” and choices of artists, ideas and theories. Many former galleries and museums (deprived of their public funding) have been turned into hubs for picking up, passing along, and maintaining the circulation of constituted cultural value, of reified cultural artifacts presented as “emerged” or “emerging art.” The very notion of art that is emerging (a keyword in the vocabulary of neoliberalism indicating commodification and monetization, or “emergence for consumption”) follows the logic of global brands. The brand-quality of “contemporary art” manifests in the tendency towards identity-thinking and homogenization of artistic and cultural experience, which is so evident today on multiple levels (from the circulation of the same ideas and theories, to the dress code for “emerging” artists and curators, making them recognizable in the ocean of other competing emerging brands in contemporary art). Trotsky had the expression “the yellow scarf of modernism,” by which he referred to Mayakovsky, who always used to wear the same yellow scarf. Today the “scarf of contemporary art” comes in many colors and shapes but it is there, inherited from modernism and raised to the level of essential attribute. And these trends and contradictions are especially visible in the post-colonial and post-socialist worlds, where emerging contemporary art has been walking in the warm embrace of the local oligarchic and speculative financial elites.

The university gallery and museum is also not safe from this logic. In recent decades, and with the increasing privatization of public knowledge, the university gallery has been also dragged into the circuits of exchange and speculation with art. In the American system of private universities, administrators often exercise increased pressure on campus galleries, demanding that the latter open up to narrow mercantile interests by providing “scholarly” legitimation (and price hikes) to particular genres or names in the local art market; transform the galleries from a place of critical thinking into arenas for restaging the old bourgeois drama of “the love of art”; or turn the galleries and museums into a prop for taking publicity photos for various fundraising campaigns (with undergraduate students making thoughtful faces in front of “emerging” works of contemporary art).

Therefore ideally, the main task of the university gallery is to stay away from these trends and to insist on fulfilling a critical role by examining and exposing major distortions in the system of “contemporary art.” The university gallery can serve as a laboratory where contradictions in the field of artistic production, the exchange and distribution of art, the relation of art to the social and historical context, and modes of production, are closely scrutinized. The university gallery must try to remain a space dedicated exclusively to the production of knowledge and to ideological demystifications of the relations between art and power. In its activities and programming the gallery should aim at providing clear alternatives to the already existing models of art institutions that are either openly dedicated to the money-making interests, or are serving as passive links in maintaining the circulation and recycling of “contemporary art” and capital. I have started, and am closing this short text with the word “ideally” because I do also realize how difficult such a task is or could be, as it may involve stepping into the frontline of open conflict with the managerial class of corporate academia and art worlds. But it is a task worth talking and thinking about, or implementing by means of small but significant projects.