Visual Arts

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.

In a 2004 article for Art AsiaPacific, Simon Winchester reflected on a ‘sermon’ he had attended by Benjamin Buchloh, one of the ‘high priests’ of contemporary art theory and criticism. To his dismay, Winchester found Buchloh’s paper (on the German artist Gerhard Richter) completely baffling. ‘Save for a scattering of prepositions, I understood not a single word of what he said that day. He spoke in a language that I found entirely unfamiliar, about a subject I found impossible to determine.’ Undeterred, Winchester set himself the task of trying to understand Buchloh’s language. After two years of diligent study, however, he remained nonplussed. His conclusion is that Buchloh speaks as Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘sophistical rhetorician’ wrote: as a ‘man inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’.