That’s Infotainment!Virtual Pedagogy andInstagram Populism in

the Museum

DOROTHY HOWARD(HTTP://WWW.NEWCRITICALS.COM/AUTHORS/DOROTHY-

HOWARD), FELIX BERNSTEIN(HTTP://WWW.NEWCRITICALS.COM/AUTHORS/FELIX-

BERNSTEIN)

JAN 26, 2016

MULTI PAGE (HTTP://WWW.NEWCRITICALS.COM/THATS-INFOTAINMENT)

(http://www.gamification.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/metadata_body02-1024x412.jpg)Dorothy Howard and FelixBernstein are artists who straddle the linebetween museum and academic work(performances, lectures, classes) andbiting critique. Howard has been recentlyproducing online zines and doingworkshops in museums and libraries andBernstein’s most recent performance at theWhitney museum worked with andagainst queer pop themes. Here, theychart a symptomatology of contemporarypressures and limitations around the useof social media, digital labor,performative partying, and queer fashionin museums. Showing that one way toconfront art’s seasonal expectations is toacutely analyze its myopic particulars.

The rise to prominence of hybrid andonline learning in museum educationdepartments is the latest attempt to delaydecreased relevance in the digital age--and

to furnish what Boris Groys (http://Therise to prominence of hybrid classrooms inmuseum education have become the lateststep in delaying a collapse in relevance inthe digital age and to bolster what BorisGroys the institution’s common project:resisting “material destruction andhistorical oblivion.” Educationdepartments are good for public image.Such programming tempers the assumedinstitutional elitism of Haute bourgeoisspectators and critics and corporatesponsorship appears tempered. But theprogressive educational tech-savvy haveadded new charisma to the museum; enternew curatorial styles that utilizecrowdsourcing and Instagram #selfiepopulism, key tactics to produceblockbuster shows that emphasizedemocratized access to a newly interactive,queer, hybrid, art space. Trouble is, whenyou aestheticize community behindfashionably closed doors, you run into thecommerce and hierarchies that come fromthe gap between the promises of a “worldwide” web of inclusion.) calls theinstitution’s common project: resisting“material destruction and historicaloblivion.” Education departments are goodfor public image. Such programmingtempers the assumed institutional elitismof Haute bourgeois spectators and criticsand corporate sponsorship appearstempered. But the progressive educationaltech-savvy have added new charisma to themuseum; enter new curatorial styles thatutilize crowdsourcing and Instagram#selfie populism, key tactics to produceblockbuster shows that emphasizedemocratized access to a newly interactive,queer, hybrid, art space. Trouble is, whenyou aestheticize community behindfashionably closed doors, you run into thecommerce and hierarchies that come fromthe gap between the promises of a “worldwide” web of inclusion.

“Museums have experienced a realparadigm shift in that the core functionalmodel of a museum has expanded toincorporate publishing and broadcast aswell as locative experience,” says culturalinformation specialist Nick Poole on thepublic Museum Computer Networklistserv. Echoing for-profit onlineuniversities, museum courseware has theremedial goal of “filling in the gaps” ofpublic education—making the case for art’sutility as an interdisciplinary field that can

co-exist with STEM education and digitalhumanities lessons; see the MoMA CoursesOnline / MoMA on Demand(http://www.moma.org/learn/courses/online#courses).”The description of an recent Courseracourse, co-led by Duke professor PedroLasch, and Creative Time curator NatoThompson asks: “Can a MOOC be a work ofart?” promising to take advantage of theglobal Massive Open Online Course.Museums are only a small peg in a newindustry of cultural educational technology.For-profit online degrees and open sourcelearning are becoming a standard part ofthe Western educational landscape; at thevery same time that funding is beingslashed for the humanities and artscommunities.

(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Museums_and_education#/media/File:Anefo_910-9349_Amsterdamse.jpg )

Stedelijk Museum. 1960.

Behind the public image is the privatesystem—didactic digital media populismensures links to the federal grants systemsand technocratic funders. A not so secretsecret, since biennials and triennialsincreasingly function as showrooms foremerging startup technologies and fashionbrands. Given all the protests againstgentrification, museum expansionism, andunfair labor laws one wonders how andwhy academically sanctioned institutionalcritique has yet to tackle the post-Internetlandscape of art.

“Institutional Critique,” namely the neo-Frankfurt School methodologies of the 70sand 80s that crystallized into the WhitneyIndependent Study Program, has longserved as a check against politically naïveshows, where the critical artist receivedexemption from their art-marketposition.The Whitney ISP model, whichchurns out new artists and curators, whoread Capital and Hal Foster (perhaps, orperhaps not, to fit in) museum education

departments will hold seminars that invitea select group of people to studyinstitutional critique and theory, whichleads to curated events that serve asillustrations of the readings. Since this newlandscape of digital education departmentsborrows its stylistics from the ISP model, aswell as feminist and queer, radical critiquesissued without academic sanction; itbecomes that much harder to critique thanthe “old guard” of museums.

GULF Labor action at the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum. February 22, 2014

Take, for instance, the rise of the “art-as-education” annex, such as Triple Canopy’sEXPO 1 School in New York(http://www.momaps1.org/expo1/module/school/),MoMA PS1’s architectural domeenvironment hosted in May–July 2013, anexperiment in an institutionally-fundedclassroom collaboration, and relatedmuseum affiliated art programs such asCampus der Künste. These annexes havelittle in common with the ideal ofcommunal aesthetic politics of BlackMountain or the CalArts Feminist ArtProgram, but do echo the top-down factorymodel of Joseph Beuys, who organized his“commune” of students under the umbrellaof his charismatic avant-garde authoritybrand.

Today’s charismatic impresarios, HansUlrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbachaccelerate and globalize his utopianism todystopic scales. At best, these curators are

tongue in cheek, but at worst, theyamalgamate “art products” withoutcompensation. Meanwhile,the corporatizing art-world subsumestheory-based-activism-as-art, exemplifiedby the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition(http://gulflabor.org/2015/an-intervention-at-the-biennale-g-u-l-f-and-gulf-labor-at-venice/), a protest against thelabor practices in the UAE in the buildingprojects of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi andThe Louvre Abu Dhabi, and other brandedmuseum developments on Saudi Arabia’sSaadiyat Island. At the jet-set 56th VeniceBiennale, GULF read astatement, released its 2015 report(http://gulflabor.org/2015/gulf-labor-report-2015/), and altered and moved theGulf Labor Coalition banner to the Israelipavilion– a self-called 'intervention,' whichregisters as spectacle of the activist groupas politicalpropaganda, ambiguously endorsed as apolitical stance by the Biennale, butnonetheless showcased at one of the year'smost high brow mega-art events. DidacticPowerPoints and interdisciplinary debatesare necessary components of contemporaryart practice, à la Amalia Ulman’s June 2014Swiss Institute conversation(https://www.swissinstitute.net/event/amalia-ulman-in-conversation-with-dr-fredric-brandt/) with plastic surgeon Dr. FredricBrandt. These interdisciplinary artistpanels bring the artist-as-instructor intothe museum mainstream.

Yet in catering to the lack in publiceducation, art institutions have usedpedagogical crowdsourcing to maskoutsourcing volunteer labor and used thesharing economy(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy)to conceal the visitor’s continued role aspassive-consumer. Hack-a-thons andremedial workshops have become an“urgent,” multi-departmental, curatorialprojects at the museum. Media studieswriter Lily Irani writes of “Hack-a-thonsand the Making of EntrepreneurialCitizenship(http://sth.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/08/0162243915578486.full.pdf+html),”explicating the way cultural representationhas become a commodity, a hobby of theleisured knowledge-labor class civicallyhacking culture. Institutional hack-a-thonslike the Met Museum’s 3D Hackathon(http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-

met/features/2012/high-tech-met/3-d-hackathon), organized with staff fromMakerBot Industries, or the AmericanMuseum of Natural History’s overnight‘Hack the Universe(http://www.amnh.org/calendar/hack-the-universe2)’ event, could be read as isolatedexamples of new curatorial practicestargeting the technologically minded, butalso as deliberate targeting of the MacBookAir-wielding techno-elite that represents asignificant new funding field. In a worldwhere entering a CAPTCHA, and othertypes of challenge-response tests aredesigned to tell humans and computersapart also constitute digitized textstranscription projects, institutions have astrong interest in using crowdsourcing topick up the slack where their budgets end.Click-based museum participation anduser-generated online collections metadataenhancement, billed as global engagement,gamify archival labor. The British Library’sMetadata Games project(http://www.metadatagames.org/british-library/), The Science Museum of London-supported Museum Metadata Gamesproject (http://museumgam.es/), and theusertagging projects of The BrooklynMuseum(https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php)and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-HewittMuseum, to name a few, ask the public tohelp describe and categorize theinstitution’s scanned, digital repositories.Such events offer access to institutionalresources and archives, but also inauguratemuseum audiences into a database-driven,pedagogical arts economy.

USER GENERATED TASTE

“Software is eating the world”, MarcAndreessen(http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460)famously said. Venkatesh Rao(http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/a-new-soft-technology/) put it, "Software canincreasingly go wherever writing andmoney can go, and beyond. Software canalso eat both, and take them to places theycannot go on their own." Software has alsoeaten cultural industries; from the way artis bought and sold, to the way that it isdiscovered.

The Artsy Art Genome Project(https://www.artsy.net/theartgenomeproject),claimed by founder Carter Cleveland to be

the “Pandora for fine art,” presents acorporate form of metadata as ideology.Artsy’s metadata tags for artworks arecalled genes–binary-conforming traits like “childhood,” “reclining,” “eye contact,” or“venus,” a weird, datafied Aby WarburgInstitute of the present. Is the Art GenomeProject, the metadata search technologybehind Artsy, a democratizing force or justa floodgate for its target, new-moneyclientele, eager to gain some quick culturalcapital by purchasing art? Critic MikePepi’s class-cum-philosophical practiceCloud Based Institutional Critique(http://thepublicschool.org/node/37839)has developed a line of critique of thenetworked digital institution in a series ofcoordinated discussions.

Mike Pepi notes in an email to the author,

What is sold as access to the artworld is a really a digital landgrab, and exercise in SEO so thatnew entrants to the art marketswill be brokered through theirplatform. It is an exercise incentralization attemptedpreviously by Artnet and auctionhouses, just this time couched inthe rhetoric of openness andbreaking down walls via the web.They are among the first artconcerns to recognize that the realjudge to please are searchalgorithms. This is only meant togrow the 60 Billion per annum artmarket, and capture that value viaa yet­to­be configured mechanism.

What Pepi brings to our attention is adigital “land grab,” which serves thepurpose of enacting institutional strategiesfor maintaining relevance that pre-datedthe internet, but that uses data / metadataas ideology.

While Artsy is no museum, it bears theever-constant threat of the corporate artworld subsuming the roles of theinstitution, in this case generatingmetadata that might bring it to the top of aGoogle search for “Frank Lloyd Wright”over the territorial Frank Lloyd Wrightinstitutional heirs like the GuggenheimMuseum.

INSTAGRAM POPULISM

(http://gothamist.com/2014/10/21/koons_is_great_for_selfies_declares.php)Whereonce Cindy Sherman’s parody of thecenterfold-girl made art headlines, todaythe artist parodying the sugarbaby is aroutine cost of admissions to art world“discovery,” whether that means being re-photographed by Deviant Art world fan-artexploiters, like Richard Prince; given adatabase page on 89Plus; or being writtenabout for your ironic sexiness in Vicemagazine. The trouble is the parodying ofthe banal, however novel it was in thePictures Show generation, is now so utterlybanal and expectable that former Disneychild star Shia Labeouf watching his ownfilms at the Angelika theater for Performaas “performance art,” can hardly get aserious critic to take notice. Had this beenthe 1980s, an MIT Press art journal wouldhave devoted an issue to debating theimportance of such a gesture.

To the new international youth audience ofart, the Instagram-ready, ironically hotwoman artist is an addictive and importantentryway into the contemporary museum.Following suit, museums employ gypset(gypsy-jet set) social media excerpts likethe Guggenheim’s Director of DigitalMarketing and Instagram starlet(http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/2015/02/jiajia-fei-instagram-tips/photos/) Jia Jia Fei andother experts of the #artselfie. The#artselfie, as seen in DIS’s new #artselfie(http://artselfie.com/) publication, takesironic portraiture to its corporate extreme.“Koons is Great for Selfies(http://gothamist.com/2014/10/21/koons_is_great_for_selfies_declares.php),”declared the Whitney Museum on theirKoons tickets. Artists can hardly avoid(http://article.wn.com/view/2014/12/17/10_Artists_Weigh_in_on_the_Art_Selfie/)the question of how social media affectstheir art, and for some, the social mediastage upon which artwork is socialized andreacted to, takes precedent over objectsthemselves. The rise of the selfie can be

seen dialectically as a way to counter (atleast at “face” value) the historical avant-garde’s elitism, and celebrate goofy, cute,quotidian humanity.

FESTIVITIES

Kara Walker, “A Subtlety,” Domino SugarFactory, New York. Spring, 2014.

The recent rise of big parties for museumsincluding teen nights, sleepovers, blockparties, and music festivals (sometimessponsored by luxury vodka brands) serve toappease state funding and mask the role oflarge-property owning museums in realestate gentrification. To bolster this move,formally dissonant art that might expose orcall-out the structural/propertygentrification must be excised. Even if thegeneral punk attitude of such evenings is“fuck gentrification.”

However, the old guard of institutionalcritique remains a staple, albeit not asummer favorite. Then there are the tokenbad boys who get a general free pass,Richard Prince, Thomas Hirschhorn, theYBAs. But it’s all in framing. For instance,the Whitney installs the Jeff Koons show asa gesture of accessibility in a way that lacksironic cunning but is ratherbureaucratically banal, and completelyhides any of the charges of sexist, racist,classist, elitism that regularly comes up inreviews of his shows.

Perhaps the most daring complication ofthe banality of bureaucratic framingsis Kara Walker, who recently installedsecurity cameras to record the voyeuristictourism and blatant exhibitionism of selfie-taking art-goers at her 2014 installation “ASubtlety(http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/).”In contrast, Damien Hirst, and RichardPrince have never really risen above asophomoric obsession with recycling

misogynistic concepts from the Modernistavant-garde. Not coincidentally, they havetherefore received praise from third-generation “avant-garde” critics who clingto Frankfurt School orthodoxy, though theGuardian has lamented(http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/dec/29/unleash-the-badness-why-the-art-world-needs-more-sleaze) the loss of 'shock value' art inmuseums. 

On the other hand, as the Western museumstructure increases in visibility and globalpower, it also increasingly comes underattack. Michelle Obama offered at thededication of the new Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art (April 30, 2015): “There areso many kids in this country who look atplaces like museums and concert halls andother cultural centers, and they think tothemselves, ‘Well, that’s not a place for me— for someone who looks like me, forsomeone who comes from myneighborhood.’” And there’s always thepotential for smart infographics andcritique for museum’s elitist, racist, classist,sexist practices to go viral. But themuseum’s sneak rebuttal is absorption (forinstance, the Guerrilla Girls are now doingan event at the MoMA bookstore sellingtschackas), and festivity—neither of whichchanges or unmasks the private structureof the museum.

The festivities themselves can and do oftencontain an edge and free-spiritedness onbehalf of the artists (and sometimes thecurators) that is creatively adventurous,and exciting. On the other hand, though,there is sometimes a danger ofmuseumification becoming a kind ofmummification, not just of the artist, butalso of the culture—without spaces in NewYork for unglamorous experimentation andresidency the development of theperformer and their audience can becometotally halted. The 80s Club Kid sensibilityhitches a ride directly into the museum(before it even “experiments” anywhereelse). Such silliness led 80s diva GraceJones’ quip that queer pop performerstoday are not only copycats but moreimportantly, conceptually and aesthetically,“middle of the road.” A point that ought aswell to be applied to “queer-friendly”publications like Vice Magazine, whichfunction merely as the new New Yorker,which provide a brisk encapsulation ofwhat is “hip” for the lay spectator.

Moreover, the appropriation of “nihilistic”New York culture, particularly in theMoMA PS1 party dome, such as theSemiotext(e) festivities, or the triplecanonizations (or cannibalization) ofDiamanda Galas and Genesis P-Orridge, oreven the annual New York Art Book Faircounterculture zine-frenzy seem always ill-fitted to the space they are rendered within.After all, Galas once said she wantednobody to dance at her shows.

The idea of having a club or punk culturerise and fall only within the museum iscreatively paradoxical, though it can, attimes, be aesthetically interesting. Though,most who attend these festivities willremark at the homogenous nature of thedancing crowds, who share in ambiguouspolitics but a Marxist / anarchic hipsterdress code. Places where you can bewhoever you want to be, as long as thatlines up with what everyone else is being.And you can be new and innovative, as longas it lines up with the latest season infashion. It is a new way for everyone to getfifteen minutes of inclusion.

And yet we cannot trace the nouveau riche“block party” phenomenon to Warhol, whowas too far “outside” of politics to becommunally located, but also too “inside”aesthetic aristocracy to be celebrated as anoutsider. Rather, Keith Haring, as thePhoenix borne from Warhol’s ashes,signifies the rise of the gay male foundationsystem, and the selling of the specificmourning of gay identity politics in thesweet colors of un-ironically appropriatedhip-hop and graffiti imagery. And mostfamously, from his “pop shop,” we get theready-to-wear versions of museum art thatthe layperson can wear (be it a condom, avodka bottle, or a sweater).

Flagrant museum corporatism vis-à-vis anacademically socio-political standpoint is avery nice way to complicate high/low artboundaries, and allow a wider range ofcultural practices into the museum,including the sensibility of “complicity” and“femininity” that is not as staunchlyMarxist or avant-garde in a sense that canrightly be conflated with masculinism andold money. However, if one starts to view itfrom the perspective of cash, it becomesclear that this move appeases the public,

the donors, and the state, at the expense ofputting forward art that might be formallydisjunctive and unpopular.

In fact, a good case has yet to be made inrecent years for “unpopular” art, as mostart criticism tries to sell art from theperspective of the historical lineage ofaestheticism and academic criticism, orfrom the vantage point of politicalapplicability to everyday life and everydayemotions. So the elite academy andordinary life remain a constant dualism inthe preparation of art—simply because nomatter how populist a museum might be,the museum is an inherently anti-populistspace—it does not and cannot give a slot toeverybody and fundamentally has zero usevalue, as regards the “care” of the humanpopulation.

FASHION-AS-ART-AS-EDUCATION

This all becomes rather pricklier whenfashion itself is the object the museumplaces in its display case. Either history isused to couch the objects as “not art butartifact,” (standard practice withreprehensible images of atrocity and/orpropaganda), or theory is used to couch theobjects as guilt-free “aesthetic treasures.”For instance, The Metropolitan Museumused theories of cross-cultural orientalistcomplicity for their recent show, China:Through The Looking Glass(http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/china-through-the-looking-glass). While, in their2013 exhibition PUNK: Chaos to Couture(http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/punk),“costumes” were displayed as relics ofanarchist street culture, while also pointingto their near instant fetishization in highfashion with the change of a mere room—the first being filthy bathrooms from apunk club, the next a pristine runway.

The Met’s fashion institute is trapped in thebetween abject grime and aristocraticimportance (the sacred and the profane),

and the decadent artists they privilegeseem to mirror this trap—VivienneWestwood, openly wants her clothes to beconsidered specialties for the rich, andAlexander McQueen, whose “melancholic”solipsistic romanticism nonetheless alwayscoincided with the needs of fashion week.

On the flipside, the gallery valorization ofunderground fashion singles out artistswho fervently protested the machinationsof the market to determine value, such asJack Smith. As such, Barbara Gladstone’sprivatization of his collection into thehands of rich buyers is a dysphoric move,whereas the Met’s showcasing of McQueenand Westwood is fitting.

The biggest fashion-as-art folly in recentmemory was The Rise of Sneaker Cultureat the Brooklyn Museum. Unsurprisingly,given the corporate (Nike) sponsorship,sweatshop labor is not mentioned, even asan apologia, whereas the Met, at least,nodded to Edward Said in their Chinashow, before negating him. The showseemed to assume viewers wouldn’t do aroutine Google search on the presentedmaterials, a search that would reveal a knotof contradictions that no “professional”critic would need to deconstruct.

Due to the glaring absence of the words“sweatshop” or “labor,” the show canrepeatedly claim that “women” have littleto nothing to do with the production,design, and wearing of sneakers, as ifcaught in the snag of their own deceit.From a caption:

Female interest in sneaker culturehas largely been redirected toshoes that refer to sneakers andyet aren’t the real thing, like thewedge sneaker. This shoe is a partof a larger continuum of footwearmade for women, dating back tothe 1920s that flirts with, butdoesn’t admit, women into thesneaker game.

The language here is tellingly old-fashionedfor a show premised on showcasing thepopulist, community-aesthetic of the “new”consumer-driven aesthetics. The “realthing” is the phallic sneaker, which thewoman is denied.

Compounding the conservative values ofthis “liberal” show is the fact that a floorbelow is Zanele Muholi’s showIsibonelo/Evidence, 87 photographs fromthe “Faces and Phases” project Muholistarted in 2006 and exhibited atDocumenta 13 in Kassel, which could bedescribed as curatorially opposite in itsintrospection and density. Muholi’s biolabels her as journalist and activist, ratherthan artist, and the show depicts close-upface photographs of LGBTQ persons inSouth Africa, a mural of quotations fromthe subjects, and a timeline of the abusesthey have faced.

The curatorial fear would be of presentingspectacle and not documentary, that thephotos might be read as more importantthan the people, and the artist and themuseum might take precedence over theshows educational-political message. Thisfear is reasonable, given that the showdirectly upstairs is an apolitical celebrationof corporate culture—and people comingfrom that blockbuster show are likely toonly stumble upon these importantphotographs.

Since the sneaker show makes the “realthing” into a phallic sneaker, it’s hard toequate that definition of the “real,” with thehumanistic and politicized definition of thereal in the Muholi show (Real qua face-of-the-Other).As different as the two BrooklynMuseum shows may be, they beg the samecuratorial question—why are these objectsin a museum and not National Geographic,the Smithsonian, or a Sports Hall of FameMuseum in Hollywood. Are the showseducational, archival, or aesthetic? If it isMuholi’s craft as an artist that counts (heruse of angles, colors, framings), then why isthat not accounted for?

Why is there no accounting for the laborthat builds the shoes? The Marxist answeris that the fetishized commodity isalienated from the human labor thatconstructed it. Since this theory is wellknown in curatorial departments, how is itsabsence justified? Maybe, curators havesimply moved beyond any and all needs forjustification? Inclusivity, populism, and theinstitutional critique brand are justificationenough.

These tensions are encapsulated in theplacement of street graffiti behindmuseum-sanctioned glass—inaugurating

the visitor into the profound tensionbetween the desire to touch & be includedin the museum, and the simultaneouscriminalization of that desire.

There is always the fear the public will takeadvantage of the museum’s ever newovertures to new audiences. Within amonth of opening, the Met rescinded theright to scrawl graffiti on the Styrofoamwalls at their punk show. Evidently, somevisitors took things too far. But the realtrouble is that visitors didn’t take things farenough. These populist strategies revealtendencies towards the ongoingaestheticization of community incontemporary institutions. When yourcounter-cultural zaniness is enlisted toserve a corporate sponsored “non-profit”that claims to be educative, communal,historical, diverse, fun, hip, youthful,liberal, edgy, and commercial—thecontradictions are insurmountable. Whichis only to say that cultural critique andconsumer outreach are uneasy bedfellows.The books are cooked against spontaneity.Hypocrisy and folly may be the only optionfor that those who want to engage in thecontemporary art market. It’s anembarrassing but occasionally satisfyingpursuit

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