The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property with EUNSONG KIM

Today, I'm delighted to talk to Jonson Kim about her stunning book The Politics of Collecting,

Race and the Asceticization of Property. It is remarkable in its theoretical conceptualization,

argument, and archival work. Kim argues that the beginnings of elite art collection in

the United States coincided with the rise of the Robert Barons and the suppression of the

labor movement. She connects this to Taylorism and the idea of scientific management that further

extenuated the rift between the mind of the body, between intellectual activity and labor.

Not coincidentally, this distribution of kinds of work created a new distribution of value.

In each case, Kim argues, race played a fundamental role.

Ranging from the found art of Duchamp to the pseudo Marxist conceptual art of Sierra,

Kim eviscerates both pretension and cruelty and restores the liberating body

and what it produces to prominence, along with a truly reinvigorated and capacious sense

of the imagination outside the constraints of neoliberal aesthetics.

Speaking of places produced in collaboration with the creative process

and is made with support from Stanford University, I alone am responsible for his content.

We hope you enjoy this and other episodes.

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You can give me your feedback, suggest people to invite, and topics to cover.

Also, please check out my book of the same title, published by Hey Market Books.

Kiyanka Yamata Taylor calls it, quote,

the exact book we needed for the troubled historical moment through which we are living.

So, let's begin with you just telling us,

I know this is a big task because you have, it's a big argument, but it's so important.

Could you just tell us what your basic argument is?

And then in what follows we can discuss a number of cases that illustrate some of the key points,

but what's the main argument of your book?

Yeah, so the main argument of my book is,

I look at the site of the personal collection or the museum in the US

or the development of the personal collection museum and the rise of philanthropy.

And I think through the ways in which you do not have the rise of the museum form,

the poetry archive, without the acceleration, the mutations of racial capitalism,

or colonialism, of a huge, a friend and a scholar I admire, Gerard Drake,

he says he doesn't study museums, he studies slavery, and he studies fascism.

And I think that I would extend that and say,

I'm not studying the museum, this isn't like a case study of the museum form.

I'm really thinking about the ways in which art spaces, in particular,

cultural spaces, the space of poetry often advertises itself to be an exceptional site,

a site that's removed from the world, but it's actually in those very spaces

that you can so clearly see the ways in which the trenchant dynamics of racial capitalism

but also colonialism manifest.

I use Cheryl Harris's formative legal article,

Whiteness's property to really think about not just the museum as a kind of segregated space,

which it is, but also the various forms that it supports,

so like the artistic and aesthetic forms, so the form of the found object

or the forms that become denoted as the elevated form.

So there's multi-layered moving parts to the argument.

And I guess maybe the last thing that I would say is,

because I pay so much attention to the rise of philanthropy,

which I connect to the Personal Collection Museum by thinking about Carnegie Steel Company,

Carnegie, who's considered the father of US and modern philanthropy,

I look at his business partner, Henry Clay Frick's Personal Collection Museum,

now called the Frick Museum, which was like recently renovated for millions of dollars

and just had a new unveiling.

I think about the ways in which both of their philanthropic projects,

but also the project of the museum,

could only really begin post the violent de-unionization of the steel mills,

the ways in which the forms that become elevated through the museum's site

actually mirror the loss of labor autonomy that we witnessed in the 20th century,

but also throughout the 21st century into this moment.

To make one of the benchmarks of the book is the question of value.

What is available to be valued and that hyper-value, inflationary,

cycles of valuing and valuing the intellect of the manager and the disappearance

of those things that go into the making?

You counterpose the creation of the Frick and the homestead strike.

Could we talk about those two things in conjunction with your discussion

of Taylorism and the notion of scientific management,

especially when this notion comes about that management is presented as a kind of art in itself?

That's such a wonderful question.

My original sort of conceit was that I would do all of that in one chapter

and then I ended up going to break it apart.

So I really like this question because it's one that I was hoping to work through

the first time I drafted that chapter,

but David is pointing to how I pair the acquisition history

or like the development of what becomes the Frick collection in New York City

with the labor history from the homestead strike of 1892.

So the homestead strike of 1892 is considered one of the most violent strikes in USS Street.

I think Rockefeller is responsible for the most violent,

but this is one where Carnegie and Frick coordinated with the police

and also hired private militia, the Pinkertons, to open fire on striking workers

and effectively de-unionized that steel mill and then by 1900s,

there are no recognized unions in any of the steel companies that they operate

and this was important at the time and into the present

because the steel unions were some of the strongest unions

and the things that they were able to organize and win for themselves

in a moment when the eight-hour workday was not the law,

was an eight-hour shift.

The thing that I really noticed reading different labor history books

that were thinking about this but also looking through the main newspaper

that was reporting on worker strikes was that it wasn't that Carnegie and Frick

that particular homestead steel plant was not profitable.

It had made something like four million in profit that year where the cluster had made

and adjusted for inflation that was like a hundred million dollars.

So they had described in their press releases that this is the thing that has to be done.

But I think the wonderful thing about archives and thinking through the past in this moment

as you can go and see actually it was not about a profit incentive.

Historians across the political spectrum agree that it really is the de-unionization

that leads to the philanthropic projects that Carnegie and Frick are known for.

So Carnegie goes on to build 2,611 libraries

and workers notice that you get a library after he breaks the town's union, right?

So something like 225 communities turned them down.

And when I started looking at the acquisition records for the Frick collection,

my thesis was like, oh, perhaps like the two of them were too involved in philanthropic projects

and this was the motivator for de-unionization.

But it was very clear that the acquisitions really begin post the union busting.

So it's not just like the wealth accumulates.

It's like the wealth accelerates repatiously because this goes on.

I think by like the early 1900s under JP Morgan is like a malgommation of the various steel mills

and Carnegie selling it, it becomes like the first billion dollar company in the world

called US deal, not adjusted for inflation.

So I'm laying this all out to say, none of this is like an act of generosity on their part.

There's a complete loss of not just worker autonomy, but it's of an understanding,

a collective understanding of labor, of work.

And then it's redesigned paternalistically in the ideals of the robber barons.

So the kind of library that Carnegie wanted to build had like useful knowledge.

So these are conversations that I think we're having to this day.

Who is living? Who must live?

This like utilitarian, pragmatic life.

Should your education just be of use?

And he gave speeches.

There are speeches where you should not read Shakespeare.

This is like a line from one of the speeches.

You should just have useful knowledge.

You should learn like stenography.

This is the thing that would be best for your life.

And simultaneously, he's trying to write a novel.

Simultaneously, his business partner is collecting art.

So I think that the disparity of what is the life you can live.

You want to live.

I think that the conclusion is supposed to be well like they are successful capitalists.

And only successful capitalists can live the life that they want to live and remake society in that way.

So to bridge all of that to your question.

I lay this history out because I think that this argument is too often naturalized and not just polite society, but also academia.

Shouldn't you do something useful?

I heard this word use really be weaponized against students, against a faculty staff, so forth.

It's in the de-unionized steel mills that we have Frederick Taylor's first quote-unquote experiments for this thing called scientific management, which is not a science.

It's just called scientific management.

Frederick Taylor was someone who had also grown up fairly affluent.

And in the early 1900s was accepted into Harvard, but rejected going to Harvard and asked a friend of his father to essentially take a management position at one of the steel mills.

And he thought the most efficient site of management was to sleeve plantation.

I'm worried about talking about him this way because I do think even today there might be a startup founder who like appreciate and really this man's approach or call him a visionary or something.

But he really thought that he could have a reorganization of the workplace by splitting what he said was mind work to this thing called handwork.

So he wanted to have central planning where those who are involved in mind work could decide how the hand workers would operate.

When he was attempting to do all of this, the workers rejected every single one of these experiments, these these measures, he tried to time the workers at some point to see how fast should someone be doing something and it was all rejected essentially.

But nevertheless, he wrote a book and this became very popular. This is why it's so important to stress this is not a science.

It's grounded in an anti-black legacy of what he thinks the world should look like who one Sylvia went her in plantation plot.

She's everywhere you go in capitalism. The plantation will be there. He's really thinking, okay, like who is not of the mind who can just kind of instructions and who has a mind.

Catherine's Joan in one of her reviews of Taylorism and scientific management describes how four men had to be retrained to be quote unquote managers wanted to do the work.

Like they this is what they were accustomed to and so many people had to really be convinced and almost coerced into not doing the thing that was quote unquote supposed to be beneath them.

So the naturalization of this kind of worker hierarchy. This is all part of the argument for the book because I'm really thinking about the rise of what's now considered conceptual forms like the found object.

I'm also thinking about the aestheticization of property that can be traced to this understanding of mind work and hand work.

Taylor has this very eerie line that you alluded to that people will begin to understand like management as a kind of an art. It's called scientific management, but it will be like elevated to this art form.

And there were worker unions like IWW very much resisted the divisions that were being created and then naturalized by him.

Harry Braverman is important to invoke at this moment. He wrote this very thorough critique of scientific management and Taylorism as someone who was a steel worker at a certain point, it's called labor monopoly capital.

He situates how it's through this process. You can see that there are no unskilled workers. It's that workers are deskilled. This is a process in which workers who have knowledge are being forced and separated in order to extract the knowledge of production so that there can be a situating of this thing called management that thinks about how to do the work and then everyone else who does the work.

So he says that this is a process of de-skilling and I actually think that the word de-skilling is really important today because I really wonder about the process of de-skilling that's occurring right now across the board.

But secondly, he situates that he's not making this critique to argue that there's like a past where exploitation was better. So Braverman's not making a nostalgic argument like, oh, 40 years ago in capitalism, it was better.

It's a trench and critique and that he's saying that there was a different kind of organization of work. It was still exploitative.

But now we can really understand and see how if the workers had some sort of ways in which the production was coordinated, it's been completely extracted to this thing called management and central planning.

And the process of de-skilling is something that he really wants to materialize but also have us kind of work through.

I just wanted to add a couple of tiny footnotes, the violent suppression of workers, Carnegie and Rockefeller, etc.

Wasn't that the birth of public relations? This is when public relations comes out. So they had Rockefeller go down to the workers quarters and shake their hands.

And so this is the beginning of another kind of management skill, which is management of public opinion. And also when you're talking about de-skilling and we'll get to this later in the next cluster, maybe the following cluster after that.

The interchangeability of labor of workers, that the person who is irreplaceable is the artist, right?

It's the particular genius that they have tapped into this uniquely theirs and that capacity is so rare that it has to be protected and then embellished and represented in the archive.

But workers come in their faceless, their dysfunction, right, of this.

So great discussion of Duchamp and Sierra. Could you talk about both of them together again, coupling these two chapters and then just for the hell of it, but importantly, throw in the purifies colored white colored.

But let's first talk about Duchamp and Sierra because both wonderful discussions. The Sierra one was horrific.

I wasn't sure what was more horrific. Him as a person or his self promotion or what you call the shielders, the people that promoted anyway jumping way ahead.

Do Duchamp first because that's necessary for us to understand how horrible Sierra is.

Yeah, but before I go into that, I want to say that I think that your articulation that this is like the birth of PR is so important because I was just reading the other day about how

there's a moment in the early 20th century where you can track the rise of PR and even the beginnings of the training of journalism and thinking about how much of the PR that they have paid for continues almost voluntarily.

I saw a whole interview on the daily show of a scholar talking about how the rubber burns of the past, like they built libraries and they built museums and the rubber burns of this current moment, they don't build anything.

The past, they had like an obligation to society and like every single part of that, the kind of articulation, I wanted to break down and situate how they didn't build anything though.

Like I think that the language here is actually very important, even if we were to give them quote unquote credit for paying workers now de unionized worker for building the libraries and building the museums workers who are not named built all of the libraries, the museums and so forth.

And also, how was it built and why was it built? There seems to be a under examination of the ways in which they were functionary PR objects and perhaps a more interesting question than why don't the rubber burns of the present build anything has the sort of PR of the past been so effective that we now naturalize the existence of billionaires so the current ones don't have to build anything.

I think that there's a way in which we can re situate the PR question so that it isn't ever the oligarchs that receive some kind of credit because when I looked through the national labor tribune when I was doing research into the homestead strike and research into the violence directed towards workers, it wasn't even just open firing on striking workers murdering them.

The national guard was brought in the case of homestead to reopen the plant. So the government is involved. The workers are tried for treason. What does that mean actually Carnegie and Frick had sold really bad steel to the US government, but that never resulted in anything except for a fine.

The national labor tribune has case after case of a worker dying because of quote unquote workplace injuries or one of the blast furnaces or something to do with the ways in which the working conditions are just so unsafe and unbearable.

And I think that with that kind of spectacularized violence, the level of PR they would have had to do is pretty clear that this was not an act of generosity in any way, shape or form.

My my sense is they don't need to build anything because they destroyed everything. In other words, they're destroyed. It was neoliberalism, right? Destroy the federal government, destroy the unions and made us happily dependent on them. Think about things like technology.

This whole notion of what's called effective altruism.

This is that these we don't need all these petty donors because we with wealth know best how to serve your interests and that pivot in PR has now naturalized itself.

Yeah, but I think that paternalistic grounding I think is the foundation for this moment like you can trace them together and that's what you're saying.

Okay, so to answer your question on Duchamp and Sierra, I feel like the Duchamp chapter is probably for those in art history and I'm not an art historian will be the most contentious because I am really pushing against like formative readings of him, but I'm less interested in actually him the character and really interested in processes of collecting institutionalization also wealth accumulation.

So I should bracket that and say that when I was thinking about looking through the acquisition records of the Frick collection, which meant that I was examining the no-dler gallery archives, but also someone like Joseph DuVine's personal papers.

So DuVine was a private art dealer for all the Robert Barons. It was a kind of brokering between European aristocracy to the new moneyed Robert Barron class of the U.S.

Like the national gallery was essentially Andrew melons private collection and the majority of the objects are ones that DuVine introduced him to and I'm situating this because I think when we think of something like the Frick or something like different sections of the met which Rockefeller was a huge donor for we think of this as old European masters or like the old masters.

And then we're supposed to in these aesthetic periodizations think of someone like Duchamp as a modernist or someone who really opens up the realm of institutional critique I read that he's considered the father of institutional critique and the inventor of found object art and the ready made and so opens up this realm for artist but also a different kind of art exist in the world.

And so I thought it was really fascinating given the sort of differentiation between something like the Frick to the Ahrensburg collection which was Marcel Duchamp's primary collector that actually Bergwelf also comes from steel so even when the aesthetic differentiation is really pressed upon and there's all this kind of theoretical work being done to say this was then this is like the sort of distinction.

This is the freedom which is often the word that's used to describe the ready made the financial history of patronage remains consistent maybe that will feel very familiar to us today when we think of something like Silicon Valley.

But if we're thinking of cost of something like steel of something like coal the environmental cost is something that scientists continue to calculate so in order to make steel you need coke.

Coke requires coal coal mining isn't just detrimental to the earth it depletes the topsoil for a thousand years that it becomes land that is more or less not farmable for that time.

So you can't really talk about these spaces and you can't really talk about this art without thinking about racial capitalism and settler colonialism because this is the root of not just the finances but this is the root of how the authority takes shape in Spurgs.

Spurgs invite Duchamp to live in a studio that they own in New York City.

Walter Arnsberg's father owned a steel mill in the same kind of Pennsylvania area that the Carnegie operations existed and his wife also came from old money dynasty.

So the two of them did not have in any sense reshape reform a conventional job in the archives at the Philadelphia Art Museum you actually can see his father writing to him and asking him if he needs more money.

So the archival correspondence is a fascinating.

But yeah like they work together I situate how like the Arnsberg and Duchamp work together to facilitate everything what they call the Arnsberg arts alone but also work on art shows that becomes scandalized there's a society called the society of independent artists and they make an advertisement that any artwork submitted will be accepted Duchamp is like on the committee and it's supposed to be every artwork is submitted will be shown.

So this is supposed to be a critique of gatekeeping I think this is the sort of wish that you have these people you have all these artists and our collectors that do it the old way and we're going to do it a different way anybody can be an artist and if you submit something then we will exhibit it.

Duchamp and his patron work together to submit what is now what they call the fountain and he submits it under the pseudonym are much and it's it's a urinal turned upside down more or less the society rejects this submission because they say you didn't make it so it's not going to be displayed at this point.

Duchamp quits the society and him and his patron Arnsberg they have a like there's a journal that he financed called the blind man and they write a review of the rejection critiquing the rejection saying you didn't hold up your end of the bargain why is this not a work of art so this is the origin myth of the found object art right so it's I think that the generous readings of it are things like it's a critique of the artist genius.

It's a critique of artists needing to make things it's an opening up of the artist's category so that every day objects and objects being situated together can be like a way that we can see art so it uses like the language of kind of collectivity of like freedom to really situate okay this is this is liberation like you don't have to make it you can just situate a urinal into a fountain and here you are now liberated so that is one reading and then we can see it.

There's like many layered readings to this but if I'm just for the purposes of explaining perforia and then Sierra that I have for a while even when I was learning about this I was like oh like 1917 New York which is when this whole thing happened that's not that's not like an abstract space that's a very particular landscape 2025 New York is a particular landscape but 1917 New York like from the little that I knew new then when I started researching is there were different kinds of

segregation laws there were different kinds of public and private codes when it came to spaces written about throughout by wonderful scholars but also reported by the newspapers and the most kind of contentious place all across the US 1917 but in New York would be the bathroom so would be the urinal would be the fountain and so I just was like I don't think that this is an accident that like this is the thing that's submitted.

It doesn't seem random and when I was looking at the work of Nora Perfoy and the various sculptures he did for the outdoor museum which he also describes this found object he has a piece called white colored which is like a drinking fountain and a kind of toilet flipped right so I think that like it's through his work you can reread the liberation or the freedom narrative around something like the film's fountain.

And which is that the freedom is really predicated upon a racial violence and the freedom it's a kind of white freedom that's imagined that comes through a property that is Harris and so many others have shown is rooted in an anti-bath violence and child slavery but also indigenous dispossession.

So I think about like how Nora Perfoy could really reform the reading of Duchamp but I'm also really interested in how the narrative I think often that young artists receive an even non artist receive is that the museum displays the things that it displays because this is the best work of art.

It is there's a sort of implicit and naturalized meritocratic argument and I think that through acquisition records and archival correspondences through patrons and curators you can see how there's nothing meritocratic about this.

Because these are a series of financialized relationships essentially.

Duchamp acted as the Ahrensburg's primary dealer so helped them buy more art but also acted as their representative in meeting with different museum curators to figure out which museum will hold on to the Ahrensburg collection which Duchamp has invested interest in because he's one of the primary like his objects are like overly represented

in the Ahrensburg collection but like they they met with or Duchamp himself met with the Art Institute of Chicago the Met and the Philadelphia Art Museum and at some point like Walter Ahrensburg is like hey the walker is interested and Duchamp breaks back and says I don't know anyone who will go there and so this is to illustrate that the whole procedure was over 15 years long.

This kind of meeting of different institutions to institutionalize the collection was not like a meritocratic process it was financially backed supported there was a plan in a design.

So the Philadelphia Art Museum agrees to the longest conditions which is 20 years it will be on display for 20 years.

And I think it's still up actually but if you think 20 years is bad David when Don Fisher donated his collection to SF MoMA he stipulated 100 years that 100 years and 60% of SF MoMA has to come from his collection so what's on display at SF MoMA at any time for public viewing 60% comes from his from his collection that's 100 years.

So a conversation around what do you see when you enter these spaces becomes entirely different if you think about the ways in which the financial relationships really inform the collections.

So I wanted to look at the case of something like the Frick where someone builds a collection ground up but I also wanted to think about like how do the collections become part of a pre existing institution what are the differences any kind of debate around we are seeing this because it has

the highest merit can be fundamentally questioned something like the found object and something like the ready made if we're situating how Taylorism and scientific management is also coming into fruition at the same moment in the early 20th century.

And I'm not making this kind of didactic argument that because you have Taylorism you have found object are but this is the economic and social backdrop like this is the conversations that are happening unions are protesting other factories are applying some of these methods which are not science but nevertheless they're being applied.

And then you have wealthy patrons managing collections growing collections so in that how does something like a quote unquote ready made object how does that configure into a process of naturalization for patronage class you mentioned 1917 1920 and you talk about segregation.

And remember this is also the time that a lot of black GIs are coming back from Europe and they're coming back demanding democracy they come back with communism anarchism socialism in their heads and they have to be brought down from that a lot of repression of particularly leftist politics at that time.

So let's transition from this to Sierra who's not making the argument for democracy but making a argument for Marxist Alvin guard notion of representing the oppression of people I'll let you describe it tell us about Sierra.

Yeah, I think whether it's to shop or whether it's Sierra the fact that their art is all being laundered through the language of openness because who doesn't love this beautiful idea that we can all be artists right but I'm really thinking about like how it's still not true it's not true that quote unquote everyone can be an artist but the forms available to a recognized artist him right is now expanded I think that's actually the project of the ready made.

But whether it's this kind of here's an everyday object can you look at the beauty of the everyday object there's a dimension to a deskilling process or a kind of evasion of labor that I really wanted to provoke because yes, we can look at the beauty of everyday things but how does the labor become removed from the beauty of the everyday thing.

So for thinking of someone like Santiago Sierra, a Spanish artist who has I think been trolling the world for 20 plus years maybe I shouldn't say that but like he is an artist who may I don't know people can decide whether the word troll is apt but he has essentially had one argument for 20 plus years which is not there is nothing outside of capitalism and so he has to make art that is.

replications of capitalism but he does this under the banner of a kind of ornamental Marxism like there's a kind of dedication to workers but the dedication to workers is actually humiliation of the workers so for being concrete for those who do not know then I actually don't know what to call his genre that I don't think it's a performance because I don't think that he's not in them and he's not hiring performers.

But if we're taking something like 250 centimeter line tattooed on six backs the narrative he presents is that he wanted to look for day laborers who couldn't find work that day and once he found them he offered to pay them their day rate.

And this was in a gallery in Cuba so he would have paid them their day rate but that they would agree to go back to the gallery and have a tattoo artist tattoo align straight across their back he is not the tattoo artist he's not in the images and so their backs are bare and you just see a line being tattooed on the backs the photograph of this scene was then taken.

It was then made to look like it was an older document they're made to look almost like grainy black and white even if it's not taken that way I think that there are people who've written about how like they're actually color photos that just become filtered as black and white at times and then sold in limited editions so in this case it's less than five.

Through his gallery on gallery then in England so the layers of complication here is what is a photograph what is it ever mean that a photograph is limited edition for sale I think a materialist reading of that sentence should explode my mind but you know what the last time I checked one of the photographs it was priced out 70,000 euros he then will sell limited edition CD images a different documentation of this scene.

So I analyze him because someone like Claire Bishop has written that he makes better art because he has better politics and they have written about him as someone who is dedicated to a quote unquote realistic depiction of workers and of people who are the most precarious and that this is.

Important art so they'll use like Marxist language feminist language or language of performance to situate how this is daring this is something that other artists don't do so another scene that I mentioned is at the tape modern he hired as hired the right word he found once again I don't even know if he found the women someone found a group of homeless women.

And offer to pay them what the daily rate at a hostile would be if they returned to the museum and so you can see footage from the tape modern where people are just taking pictures of a group of women mostly black and brown who are facing a wall you can't see their faces their backs are turned and the audience is there it's unclear if they know what's happening or if they think this is a performance.

But in the chapter I analyze a few different dynamics one the ways in which he has become a triumphant orthodox Marxist which I think is a complete failure of a materialist reading but secondly how it's not just that he depicts he enacts the humiliation so he's in system that he cannot pay them more than the twenty five dollars or the fifty dollars because then he would be showing you something outside of capitalism and.

He can only show you something in capitalism and then he calls in collaborators right no one an art historian calls even worse and my god even worse and art historian calls them collaborate is someone called them volunteers and I was like I do not know how the homeless are volunteering in this performance it's like all of the language I think really falls apart what's very clear is this disciplinary move of perhaps protect

the artwork and the artist. I don't think that this is just about art history I think across fields you can see a sort of teleological argument where there is a text that is going to be defended protected valorized, reified, and then you're back.

Yeah, immunized and elevated at the same time yes and then when you look at like auction sites they list people who have written about the work so it ends up aiding in a kind of monetary value in an auction circuit.

It's not as readily apparent in literary studies or like in English but I think that the method of picking an object to defend the object is already a kind of strain.

It's citation all the whole matter of footnoting citations. Yeah, yeah, but yes because Sierra must be protected like homeless women are volunteers and collaborators and day laborers or collaborators actually the only thing that I think is important about his work is that there are people who do say no to him and the people who say no to him are

museum curators and people who don't need whatever small amount he's throwing their way actions. I write about in the chapter how he wanted the museum staff to take off their shirts and line up according to their salaries or their pay scale.

And it was a museum in Europe where he requested this but he basically could only get the maintenance and janitorial staff and this sort of like non senior staff to quote unquote be in this thing.

And then when he reproposed it elsewhere but to curators they just said no that's it like no because here is an actual experiment that would be of interest like how much would he have to lose.

If he was having to negotiate or barter or pay someone who he has maybe the same level of power maybe he has less power what would you have to do to like how he would be humiliated it would not be a process of humiliates another be he would be humiliated.

And there are art historians that have really written defenses where they're like oh I've spoken to the participants which is another strange word and they don't seem to mind but this kind of ruins the thesis because the whole thesis is that he is brave for showing us this cruelty.

The thesis that you can make work like this sell it in a gallery it's probably not to defeat capitalism because I can't really see that thesis working out because

people who purchase limited edition photographs it's well documented it may be that it's never displayed on any wall it could be part of like a storage on a free port.

So it's the layers of disconnection and the analysis are the beer yeah.

It's also under the guise of empowerment but it's actually so disempowering right it's not like you can't you can't go and see a homeless shelter and see those things with your own eyes right.

You need him as the mediator and the representor it that gives it the kind of luster and political punch that you need when he's just it's terrible.

Yeah and I think that even the notion that we need to see it in order for things to change.

I actually wonder about the thesis of this the theory of change do you need to see violence for the violence to be transformed destroyed.

I think right now we can all answer no because we're living in a world where you can see images yeah constant images of a genocide and it does not seem to stop the violence.

It's a convenient thesis that you have to do the re representation you have to do it again and again because this will lead to a transfer but it will not lead to a transfer.

I think it's a department and so many others have pointed out how it perhaps it leads to a naturalization exactly yeah but Sierra really is the contemporary manifestation of the artist CEO artist manager.

This has nothing to do with the artist making or touching anything it's really about him crafting his song you to learn something and then the various art historians theorists that are brought out to defend.

This kind of project who it harms how it harms that's never analyzed there's a kind of protection of this movement because I think that there is an academic impulse perhaps to protect the manager that's so much of our training yeah.

I can't help but ask you to talk about neoliberal aesthetics.

Neoliberal aesthetics is something that I was able to think about while reading the defense of Sierra in particular and also reading interviews of Sierra so I situate neoliberal aesthetics as the insistence that nothing else but this kind of capitalist neoliberal present can be not just depicted but it's like the valorization in the repetition so like Sierra saying I can't do anything else because I would show you something else.

It's a there's a sort of implicit valorization that it's the repetition and the replication that's important rather than any kind of openings to someone else any other thing and I situate how the neoliberal aesthetics if we're thinking about him but also protectors of him it's the cultural and visual and aesthetic realm that really insists on only replication and a replication of a very particular kind of neoliberal capitalism.

But the replication is not enough it has to fundamentally suppress anything but that might be emergent that might be countering so I see a kind of defensive writing for him as part of the project to suppress anything but the replication of neoliberal capitalism yeah I forgot I wanted to ask you one more thing it's just relatively ordinary event but it's such a good illustration of the core of the book.

Talk about the anti Vietnam War protest of the Whitney because we've all witnessed an equivalent to it right but this is so staged in the museum but the premise is equally terrible but talk about it.

Yeah it's in the code that you're referencing so I end by thinking of two or three different scenes and maybe I'll just talk about two of them first is the anti Vietnam War protest and this is something that comes out of the book artworkers

radical practice in the Vietnam era which I think is a really interesting book but also I had lots of questions like lots of questions on like race in particular one reading this book but she does a really fantastic job of presenting the ways in which the gorilla art action group in 69 went and dumped red liquid on the floors of the Whitney

and would repeat this is what the what they repeated we've got to clean this place up this place is a mess from war which I as a kind of visual you can imagine how powerful that might have been for the museum goers but also for the artist to partake in this.

She then narrates how the one person who went up to the artist was a member of the maintenance team and the artist respond like they want to speak to one of the museum directors or managers and refuse to speak to the maintenance team and then they leave the paint there and just leave the museum.

But what does it mean for the artist to refuse interaction with the workers and only insist upon discussion with the managers, especially because it's the workers that will be brought in to clean up their quote unquote protest and I situate this concern with an organizing attempt that occurred in the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and two artists wondering and surprised that their solidarity

solidarity with the labor coalition was not considered part of their art performance right so the artists are saying there's a labor coalition and they want to support them and they've been using their platform as an artist to support them and the museum doesn't really seem to respond to this as an art project.

They seem to be responding to it the way that I think institutions do to unionization efforts which is to fundamentally shut them down and I think about these two scenes together because both scenes very much depict a moment where there's an institutionalized agreed upon boundary for the artists, which is the artist is a manager right so bringing up the sort of Taylorist de-skilling because I'm wondering have artists been de-skilled.

This isn't my own question it's a question that people have been asking to are to see themselves as workers or are they in a position where they can actually decide between are they a worker they manager are they are they like a mixture what does that mean and in this case it's in the case of the Vietnam War protesters it's very much saw the people that they can speak to you but they left the mess because of who they also thought they were right and then in the second case it's

as an artist the agreed upon boundary is that you are not the worker you are not the person organizes and that is not considered defiance or that's not considered like performance that's considered a threat to the institution so when you're a threat to the institution that's not going to be considered a performance they're not excited.

by threats to the foundations of their existence and so I think that when people remark this is daring this is exciting and the museum and the institution seems like very invested and also narrating it that way I have a lot of questions because I think that the institution is skilled and reversed in the procedure of co-optation but also the procedure of de-politicization and I think that there are things that remain contentious for the people who are interested in the institution.

It's just for not just museums but also universities and other places exactly is a boundary if you go over that boundary you're no longer the celebrated XYZ and an observance of what that boundary is the word artist doesn't cover that boundary I think that's what I wanted to show is that once you start like maybe doing active labor organizing maybe the institution witnessing something as performance is something that is also agreeable for them.

They also might decide that is not a performance that they can recognize so like that kind of back and forth now as you were speaking of course I thought about grad student organizing are they workers are they students and then the way the management the university can cut in parts and redistribute either those as to their benefit.

I was also going to tell you that and I don't expect you to have read all the footnotes but one of the reasons you and I can't unionize is because we're considered managers.

Yeah exactly.

Yeah and northeastern the university of which I'm employed was the second plaintive in the lawsuit that ruled that private university professors or managers are not workers.

I think that there was a moment in the adjunct professor organizing where that is what the orange dictator man and all are be threatened is that they would also fight and say that they were managers.

One of the clear implications for not just academics but universities and maybe the term worker and manager seems like the separation is too simple.

There's a legal understanding of the definition of manager that I want to point out that is upheld in the case of someone like David or someone like myself like private university professors tenure and tenure track private university professors are not allowed to unionize

because we're considered to be managers and not workers and this was something that was decided in Yashiva versus NLRB and the case is a fascinating kind of read of how the professor becomes the manager in this case.

And in 2016 when adjunct professors were organizing towards unions and private universities that is also what the NLRB sort of threatened as the as that was the push that like they might be considered managers.

So the ways in which manager is weaponized is fascinating also the identification with them the manager position because as you pointed out who wants to be the replaceable.

No one is replaceable but I think it's a category where the worker category or the quote unquote unskilled worker category is really situated as the category of replaceability the managers supposed to be irreplaceable.

Did your university do this thing that Stanford did which is pretty chilling which was to have I don't know if it's mandated but we are invited to meet with one of the university's lawyers.

And so we were on the zoom call and this person actually said this he said I think a lot of this agitation and use that word stems from George Floyd I think this is all sort of the atmosphere that you have in the world today about people protesting and this and that and the other thing.

And trying to get things for themselves well and I said look I think they have other things to complain about this is a real issue A and B they know that whatever benefit happens is not going to happen immediately is going to happen down the line they're doing it as solidarity and when you call us managers you're basically saying we can't talk to students because that's another way of disrupting the conversation but the mentality of lawyers that the university hires this gets back to Rockefeller and Carnegie it's that brutal.

Yeah so many of these categories have nothing to do with the individual it's like almost structurally define into that once you are elevated to this kind of administrative position where they're looking at abstract budgets abstracted budgets the person who's like in that position is completely not to I don't know think about education or think about students or think about they're just like now making deals with tech people to like get subscriptions of.

Oh yeah large language models I think that it is a kind of abstracting process I teach this like race and AI class I've been teaching it for a number of years even before chat GBT it's basically like a technology thinking about colonialism and technology together like the development of technology as a way to think about colonialism the inseparability and it's all the students I was like I'm sorry but I cannot partake in the de-skilling of your mind and so we are going to have to write things by hand.

And we're just going to have to do things differently because you you knew how to summarize an article and now you can't summarize exactly very worried that what this does is it's not just a form of alienation from labor it's an alienation of self and thought exactly I know too much about de-skilling it's I can't do this yeah that's exactly it I want to say to our audience we have just barely scratched the surface of this amazing book and it really is everything I said at the beginning of the podcast.

It has so many evocative details and framings of things that are both in and of themselves, scintillating and vibrant but then aggregated together in this really powerful argument about the separation between the body and the mind and the way that we've come to accept the primacy of one over the other has so many implications broadly across art and the academy into life itself.

So I want to recognize and thank you for that too and thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me David. I'm so honored to be here and I look forward to not just listening to this but to all the other future guests that you'll have.

Thank you for doing this and you'll come back when I have more conversations.

Okay, okay, thanks so much. Take care. Bye bye.

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