One of the great attractions of contemporary art at the beginning of this century was its hospitality to other disciplines, especially those without the economic advantages afforded by its remarkably resilient attribution of value to unique objects (or strictly limited reproductions). So it was that—as the music and publishing industries were left scrambling by the advent of online marketplaces—galleries and museums in many cities stepped in to fill the space left by the closure of independent bookshops, concert venues, fringe theaters, and other victims of falling sales, new distribution models, and rising rents.
A poet might at that time have been paid more to read at an exhibition opening than to publish their debut collection; experimental musicians found receptive audiences among the young people who showed up to art events for the ambience. That the art world became a second home for those writers, dancers, musicians, theoreticians, activists, and academics struggling to find a place in their own cash-strapped, conservative, and increasingly risk-averse fields coincided with, and accelerated, the collapse of the visual arts’ own disciplinary borders. So that these exiles in many cases became the artists—not to mention the curators, critics, and gallerists—who would do so much to shape the creative landscape of the era.
More disciplines were consequently invited in to take advantage of the art world’s enthusiasm for novelty, commercial possibility, magpie intellectualism, and (at least rhetorically) radical politics. Threatened expertise as varied as labor activism, climate science, and anthropology have been welcomed into the field, sometimes with the result that complex issues are reduced to simple curatorial tropes and storylines (though there is an argument that this is inherent to the process and, as such, a price worth paying). More recently, the abstract nouns of “healing” and “care” have proliferated in its increasingly anxious discourse.
Art institutions have thus become refuges for activities outside the traditional remits of the arts and humanities, beyond those of even the “soft” and “hard” sciences. That museums are now expected to serve an educational function—that their public funding is often made dependent upon this—might be understood as a function of the managed (which is to say politicized) decline in funding for state education (so that creative workers are now expected to pick up the slack). Likewise, talk of transforming museums into spaces of “healing” and “care” begs the question of why our governments are not purpose-building new institutions dedicated to those values—perhaps equipped with doctors and therapists and child psychologists—rather than ascribing the responsibility for society’s mental health to the arts.
This isn’t to argue that art’s accommodation of other disciplines is a bad thing, any more than the transformation of train stations into temporary hospitals during the pandemic was. Rather it is to suggest that it might also be the consequence of a much wider emergency. We watch forensic investigations into state criminality in group shows as more of the newspapers that once funded serious investigative journalism are taken over by oligarch lickspittles; historical archives of photography from oppressed communities are incorporated into biennials not so much because the work is formally adventurous but because there is nowhere else for it to be shown.
Critics have spent lifetimes debating whether these imported activities might be categorized as art by virtue of being presented in its contexts. But in the historical moment, this can feel at best like theological quibbling and at worst like missing the point entirely. A more pressing risk might be that staging acts of “healing” or “protest” inside the museum encourages the substitution of symbols for the real thing, so that they might unwittingly become crucibles of that form of “catharsis” that purges the viewer of energies that might otherwise be devoted to revolutionary activities and thus conspires in the production of compliant citizens. In which case, art workers might need to be more honest about the transformation of the field into a redoubt for critical social functions that have been displaced from their proper homes (to stop dressing them up as art, put simply, except as a strategy to avoid censorship).
Alternatively, we might reassert the capacity of art as an independent discipline to catalyze the kind of complex intellectual and emotional responses that cannot easily be articulated in language, that by embracing ambiguity and conflict are not therefore politically quietist but instead inherently resistant to the oversimplifications of propaganda and authoritarianism. Or perhaps some combination of these two principles, according to the local needs and circumstances. There is no obvious answer, but it grows clearer by the day that the remaining redoubts of free thought and expression—if you accept that museums and galleries are among them—must reflect upon and rearticulate their fundamental missions if they are to survive as such.