Rachel Spence’s Battle for the Museum reflects a growing movement to redefine the art museum as a site of activism and social change that has gained momentum in the United States and Britain around issues of race, equity, and diversity. Advocating the need for radical transformation, Spence paints an insistently bleak picture of art museums, recording their multiple failings on social, ethical, and political fronts. Forty pages in, this reader was already battle-weary, worn down by Spence’s thudding compendium of sins. That’s not to dismiss the validity of Spence’s arguments. The sector’s expansionist, exploitative, discriminatory, and profit-hungry urges warrant interrogation.

An experienced arts journalist (and poet) who contributes mainly to the London-based Financial Times, Spence’s idea for this book arose early in her career, in 2006, when she attended the glitzy launch of luxury goods magnate Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum on Venice’s Grand Canal. Here, Spence came face to face with the troubling contradictions of the art world, which she dubs ‘Planet Art’. On display was one of American artist Barbara Kruger’s best-known works, an image of a hand holding a sign stating: I shop therefore I am. ‘By displaying Kruger’s work here in his sumptuous new Venetian palace, M. Pinault is sticking two fingers up at her values,’ Spence writes. ‘You shop, he is saying, therefore I am. I can buy you and your precious leftie idealism. I can reduce your art to an ironic, hollow yelp of despair.’