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In November 2021, the artists Mendi and Keith Obadike declined to accept an honourable mention for the Giga-Hertz Award of the ZKM Center for Art and Media after a representative of the German exhibiting institution made reference to a choice between quality and diversity in a rehearsal of the awards ceremony. The implication was that the ZKM could award either high quality or diversity, but not both. In a statement explaining their decision, the Obadikes denied the ZKM’s authority to evaluate them: their work, they wrote, is “informed by the world”, and the ZKM is “in no position to honor or rank us” (Villa 2021).

I begin an essay on Black music’s institutional critique with this incident not simply because the Obadikes criticised the organisation, but rather because they posit (at least) two systems of aesthetic value: one, local, in which the historically white European institution has the authority to judge, and another, global, in which it does not. Cultural prizes bestow as much legitimacy upon the institutions who distribute them as they do to the artists who receive them (English 2005). By refusing the legitimacy of the ZKM to evaluate their art, the Obadikes appealed to an aesthetic system beyond the European fine arts, a possibility that has existed, at least in some germinal form, since the art nègre movement of the 1910s and 1920s (Biro 2020).Footnote 1 I use the phrase aesthetic system to distinguish my meaning from a more general aesthetic ‘experience’, which has always existed outside the narrow band of experience analysed so thoroughly in the European philosophy of the eighteenth century. By ‘aesthetic system’, I refer in the first instance to a discursive formation of value, a coherent field of concepts that inform debates about standards and theories of art and that make possible distinctions and oppositions, within tacit limits of relevance. But I also refer to the infrastructure that licenses this discourse and contributes to the distinctions that it makes: a set of often implicitly ranked, interlinked institutions that manage exhibition and dissemination, critical commentary and interpretation, and education and appreciation.

By the 1930s, when it began to appear in long-running conversations about ‘good’ music in the vernacular press, jazz had developed just such an aesthetic system. Its participants took agonistic positions in a discourse about progress vs. tradition, stylistic evolution, aesthetic autonomy, historical preservation, and authenticity (Gendron 1993; Lopes 2002). These debates played out in specialist periodicals and books and eventually moved into the mainstream, middlebrow press. For musicians, prestige (and compensation) was organised around live venues, broadcast media, record companies, and management agencies, all of which contributed to the permanence of the formation and the production of a set of ‘experts’ whose judgements about the music were viewed as authoritative. In the 1950s, a new web of associations with other high-status cultural sites—concert halls, art museums, college campuses—cemented jazz’s aesthetic system.

When I say that jazz advanced the ‘first’ alternative aesthetic to the European fine arts, I do not mean to imply that Japanese court music or Hindustani classical music, for example, had no aesthetic system, or that they had no modern aesthetic system. I mean that Black aesthetics, and particularly jazz, offered the first challenge from inside Europe and the US to a hegemonic disciplinary arrangement that consigned any cultural production that was non-European or not Fine Art to the domains of anthropology or folklore.

Any discussion of ‘institutional critique’ in the art world of the 1960s and 1970s must begin from this premise of more-than-one aesthetic (Wynter 2014). I concur with critic Simon Sheikh, who expresses confusion about why so much art world discourse about institutional critique upholds “a ‘we’ of the art world itself”, he writes. “Who exactly is this ‘we’?” (Sheikh 2009, 30–31). In fact, the de-universalisation of the European aesthetic tradition may have been noticed the least in the visual art domain, for the challenge first emerged most clearly in jazz and then in the drama and poetry of the Black Arts Movement.Footnote 2 Accordingly, the classic theoretical texts on institutional critique produced by visual artists and critics exhibit a certain blindness to the wide range of institutions an artist might face depending on their position in the social and artistic fields (or indeed within the legacy of that most peculiar institution of all, chattel slavery in the US south [Stampp 1956]). Blake Stimson explains that, for these influential writers, “Institutionality was another name for received thought congealed into a social form that veils or otherwise inhibits the possibility of self-creation” (2009, 23). For another set of artists, namely, the musicians of the black avant-garde, such an opposition between social forms and self-realisation would not play a meaningful role in the interpretation of the art-making process. In fact, a close connection between individual and group achievements was one of the central tenets of the jazz tradition (Monson 2007).

Moreover, the Black aesthetic had a distinct relationship with the notion of the autonomous artwork that, as Benjamin Buchloh and others have demonstrated, was rendered increasingly obsolete by the post-conceptual artists. Buchloh writes,

Any historicization has to consider what type of questions an art-historical approach […] can legitimately pose or hope to answer in the context of artistic practices that explicitly insisted on being addressed outside of the parameters of the production of formally ordered, perceptual objects, and certainly outside of those of art history and criticism (1990, 105).

The creative practices described by Buchloh aimed to exceed the limits of their institutional framing as (autonomous) art by addressing political, economic, and social life. Outside of the European fine arts, however, such interanimation of aesthetic and social practices was unremarkable. Yet I am less interested in pointing out the ubiquity of heteronomous art practices outside of the European aesthetic tradition—and especially in the Black radical tradition, which conflated the aesthetic and the ethical to productive ends—than I am in accepting Buchloh’s perceptive comments as an invitation to circulate the themes and concepts of institutional critique in an overlapping cultural space.Footnote 3

By desedimenting these concepts, or releasing them just a bit from the tightly argued positions and players of a specific aesthetic system—once thought universal, now with some company—I hope to do a little more than transpose the critique of institutions into a different disciplinary topos. I mean that, although a search, in music, for the “rigorous redefinition of relationships between audience, object, and author” (1990, 140), to quote Buchloh on institutional critique again, might lead naturally to John Cage (or, at least it would for this Cage scholar), and specifically to the radical collaboration he essayed with David Tudor in the 1960s (Piekut 2022), my intuition tells me that it would be more productive in this case to consider early minimalism, not least because the series of practical and theoretical steps leading through conceptual art to institutional critique began with minimalism’s phenomenological investigations.

Centrally important to the development of minimalism’s aesthetic concerns, La Monte Young had already by the late 1950s begun to reformulate the role of the listener in his music. Static and long sounds, he explained in 1960, encouraged one to listen from inside the sound and to pay attention to one’s experience of it (Young 1965). With the Theatre of Eternal Music after 1962, he and his collaborators examined the other two terms of Buchloh’s triumvirate, the (musical) object and the author. By dispensing with the score in favour of sound recording, they threw into question the ontological specificity of their musical work, and by proceeding by improvisation and collective decision-making, they likewise unsettled the secure authorial position of the composer (Nickleson 2017). Yet Black music formed the basis of these reformulations of ontology and authorship, evident in Young’s emulation of John Coltrane’s style of improvisation and his switch to the soprano sax in 1961. As Patrick Nickleson argues, the Theatre of Eternal Music’s challenge to single authorship and the stable musical object

took place through several interrelated aesthetic and political priorities: the different though related prior impacts of models of textual and organizational egalitarianism in free jazz; the emergent supremacy of their drone over any single performer’s virtuosity or individuality […]; and their collectivist and deliberative practice of daily rehearsal and listening. (Nickleson 2022)

Given the importance of Black music in establishing models for Young—and given the importance of Young to the post-Cagean avant-gardes of Fluxus, minimalism, and post-conceptualism—we might say that something of this Black aesthetic—its possibility, its difference, its supplementation—remains threaded through all the developments of post-conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Young’s close associate, Henry Flynt, author of the 1961 essay “Concept Art”, was certainly aware of the reasons for and ramifications of a de-universalisation of the European aesthetic by 1964, when he led demonstrations against the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in New York City. In his leaflet, “Picket Stockhausen Concert!” Flynt excoriates European musical aesthetics for supporting political claims to global supremacy by “develop[ing] the most elaborate body of ‘Laws of Music’ ever known: Common-practice harmony, 12-Tone, and all the rest, not to mention Concert etiquette” (1964). He also targets the musicologist Alfred Einstein’s denigrating statements on jazz—“the most abominable treason against all the music of Western civilization”—as an example of a powerful intellectual apparatus that produces the standard by which all musical value is assessed. “Everywhere that Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner and Stockhausen are huckstered as ‘Music of the Masters,’ ‘Fine Music,’ ‘Music Which Will Ennoble You to Listen to It,’” Flynt wrote, “white aristocratic European supremacy has triumphed” (1964). In an unpublished document from the following year, Flynt notes that the modern colonial powers had left a legacy of conservatories, international competitions, and music appreciation courses in European art music throughout the Third World, cementing the normative assumption that the European aesthetic was the universal standard to which all nations should aspire (Flynt 1965).

Frantz Fanon’s “Racism and Culture” essay, published in French in 1956, indicates that Flynt was certainly not alone in thinking through the implications of de-universalised European aesthetics—or what we might call, following Souleyman Bachir Diagne, the aesthetics of a ‘post-Bandung world’ (Diagne 2020, 24)—but it is exceedingly difficult to find other writers taking up this subject in music with the clarity and prescience that Flynt’s texts display. In fact, one of them, Amiri Baraka, observed one of Flynt’s anti-Stockhausen protests from across the street. Baraka had recently published Blues People, a landmark text in US music studies that closes with a thoughtful consideration of the then recent emergence of an alternative system of aesthetic value distinct from the hegemonic, European fine-art formation. “The important development, and I consider it a socio-historical precedent”, he wrote,

is that many young Negroes no longer equate intelligence or worth with the tepid values of the middle class, though their parents daily strive to uphold these values. The ‘New Negroes’ produced a middle-class, middle-brow art because despite their desired stance as intellectuals and artists, they were simply defending their right […] to be intellectuals, in a society which patently denied them such capacities. And if the generation of the forties began to understand that no such “defense” or explanation was necessary, the young Negro intellectuals of the fifties and sixties realize […] that a society whose only strength lies in its ability to destroy itself and the rest of the world has small claim toward defining or appreciating intelligence or beauty (Jones 1963, 231–232).

Black intellectuals of Baraka’s generation, he observed, no longer felt beholden to the European aesthetic values of their parents. His colleague, the drummer Milford Graves, wrote, “Western thought in this sense has only limited and deprived the Afro-American and his own inner knowledge” (Graves and Pullen 1967). Because the power brokers of the swiftly institutionalising jazz world—its journalists, its club owners, its label bosses, its impresarios, its broadcasters—were almost entirely white, its dissenters and critics were inclined to understand their project in the terms of Black liberation. Baraka made this point explicitly in his 1963 essay, “Jazz and the White Critic”, in which he takes to task the white writers who, after only knowing about Black music for about 30 years (since, presumably, around 1917), were “already trying to formalize and finally institutionalize it” (Jones [1963] 1967, 18).

Yet Baraka critiqued the deficiencies and errors of this white and middle-class taste formation, not the very idea of institutionalisation itself. The ‘bad taste’ of the blues and jazz, he argued, advanced unique aesthetic virtues that remained unassimilable to middlebrow tastes, white or black. In other words, the two aesthetics were incompatible: expertise or aspiration in one ruled out the cultivation of taste in the other. The Black writer of decades past with ambitions in literature, he wrote, “was likely to have developed so powerful an allegiance to the sacraments of middle-class American culture that he would be horrified by the very idea of writing about jazz” ([1963] 1967, 12). White critics, on the other hand, were only ‘hobbyists’ who lacked expertise in the basics of Black experience and therefore could not properly evaluate the music produced by it (15). In sum, Baraka’s critique of institutionalised jazz criticism turned on his contention that the institution was illegitimate. In order to produce “valid critical writing”, he argued, Black music had to establish a different institution, one based on “standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz” (20; see also Smethurst 2020, 59–89).

If the system of modern aesthetics sought a standard of taste to help bourgeois Europeans sort through the flood of consumer goods coming in from the colonies, as Simon Gikandi has suggested (2011), the fraught entwinement of art and commerce would continue in the new Black aesthetic in music. In this latter domain, however, the debate over institutions played out in a decidedly commercial context: Black music’s governing institutions in the 1960s were the recording label, the night club, the summer festival, and the mass periodical. As Peter Bürger has written, the European, historical avant-garde attacked the autonomy of the bourgeois institution of art in order to open it up to the praxis of life. With his frequent use of the terms middle-class and middlebrow, Baraka targeted a different aspect of bourgeois culture, namely, its commercial exploitation of art. Therefore the jazz avant-garde, in Baraka’s formulation, had to preserve and protect the spirit and social force of the Black aesthetic from its desiccation and exploitation at the hands of a white institution devoted to the middlebrow. As McCoy Tyner is said to have remarked about club owners facing the ambitious music of the 1960s, “Usually they liked the music to stop at a certain point, so that they could make more on the drinks” (Priestly, 1947, 49). This sceptical, if not critical, stance towards the institutional conditions of jazz performance extended to countless artists in the post-war period.

The many short-lived entrepreneurial ventures of Charles Mingus attest to the entwinement of Black music’s critique with the culture industry; he targeted jazz’s commercial infrastructure, not museums, academies, or concert halls devoted to art-for-art’s-sake. Mingus founded three artist-run record labels, two publishing companies, an alternative jazz festival, and a musicians’ collective (Saul 2003, 147–79). Across all of these endeavours, he pursued the goal of eliminating the mediating apparatus that stood between artists and their audiences (and between them and their fees). These projects succeeded as pointed interventions or statements of dissent more than they did as enduring alternative organisations. The Newport Rebels festival of 1960 articulated a critique of the bloated commercialism of George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival and its racist programming and fee structure. Shambolic in its organisation and underattended, the Rebels festival nonetheless created intergenerational collaboration among musicians and allowed a glimpse of another future for artists in the jazz world. The Jazz Artists Guild, formed by Mingus, Jo Jones, and Max Roach shortly after the Newport event, suffered similar problems of a vanishing audience during its brief existence, but it produced press coverage that directly inspired later ventures. “If you care about progress you will be pleased to know that the new Jazz Artists Guild […] represents the first clear-cut mass break by Negro jazz-men from their former economic strangleholds”, one journalist wrote (quoted in Saul 2003, 127). The industry’s blacklisting of Abbie Lincoln in the years following her strong public stance on the exploitations of the jazz industry stands as an important example of the consequences of such “clear-cut mass breaks” (Porter 2002).

Composer Bill Dixon probably had the example of the Newport Rebels and the Jazz Artists Guild in mind when he produced the October Revolution in Jazz over four nights in October 1964 at the Cellar Café in New York’s Upper West Side. There, the audiences were comparatively enormous, but the goal was the same: to share artistic work outside of the stultifying conditions of the jazz establishment. Big names like Sun Ra, Paul Bley, and Jimmy Giuffre drew crowds, but the October Revolution found its greatest significance in the platform it offered for a whole generation of younger players who had not yet broken into the name clubs; these included Milford Graves, John Tchicai, and Don Pullen, among many others. Exasperated by the poor state of intellectual discourse about the art in the jazz press, Dixon also programmed nightly panel discussions on economics, genre, race, and composition at the festival.

In the weeks following the Revolution, Dixon joined several musicians—Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others—to announce the formation of the Jazz Composers Guild. It aimed to change the terms upon which club owners and recording companies would negotiate with its members, who brought individual opportunities to the Guild for discussion about whether they would or could be advantageous for all. The effects of withholding their creative labour from the market may have been diminished by avant-garde jazz’s small economic footprint on the scene to begin with, and the Guild only lasted a short 6 months, but it garnered considerable critical attention and succeeded in asserting a critique of jazz’s existing institutions (Piekut 2009).

Its legacy included the Jazz and People’s Movement (JPM). Lasting about as long as the Guild had—from the summer of 1970 into early 1971—the JPM staged noisy disruptions of the Merv Griffin Show, the Tonight Show, and the Dick Cavett Show. The message: television had a responsibility to educate viewers about the history of Black-US music, and it should commit to increasing exposure for well-established and up-and-coming Black artists. JPM demanded that the networks hire more Black studio musicians to modulate the glaring uniformity of white bands on air, that they increase hiring of Black producers, directors, and talent scouts, and advocated for giving Black musicians the option to be interviewed after a performance.

In the petition he circulated in the summer of 1970, JPM instigator and multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk wrote, “The media have been so thoroughly effective in obstructing the exposure of true black genius that many black people are not even remotely familiar with or interested in the creative giants within black society” (quoted in Tress 2008, 133). JPM’s specific demands about Black labour at the broadcast networks drew the support of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket (Tress 2008, 84). The interventions of JPM had consequences: members had interviews on the Today Show and the Dick Cavett Show, and Kirk famously rushed an all-star band through a raucous rendition of Mingus’s Haitian Fight Song on the Ed Sullivan Show in January 1971. Later that year, composer Archie Shepp, who had played in the band that night, led the JPM offshoot Black Artists for Community Action in a protest at the offices of the Guggenheim Foundation to pressure that body to increase its support of Black artists. These chaotic confrontations remind one of roughly contemporaneous actions of the Art Workers Coalition analysed by art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, yet, again, Black protest largely aimed at a commercial institutional framework, not the fine-arts establishment (Bryan-Wilson 2011).

In concert with these explicit attacks on Black music’s material conditions of existence in the 1960s were more indirect, speculative, and experimental forays into a world not yet defined by those institutions or their dismantlement. Ornette Coleman’s decision to take a break from public performance and recording at the height of his career in 1963–64 is one example of an artist reflecting carefully on how he wanted his music to be experienced. Coleman’s compositions for chamber ensemble and for R&B band (already in 1962!), his ‘return’ to thematic bebop in the mid-1960s, his collaboration with Gnawa musicians in Morocco, his symphony (Skies of America), his formation of the fusion band Primetime—all of these activities outlined an almost programmatic experiment into what his music was, what it could do, and where it could belong or visit. The large live/work space on Prince Street that he acquired in 1968, known as Artist House, was but one outpost in a vibrant archipelago of downtown lofts where both junior and senior members of New York’s jazz community gathered to essay new forms of life and work, whether by listening, cooking, playing, eating, hosting, or discussing (Heller 2017).

Don Cherry’s itinerant musical life in the 1960s, as well as his marriage to Swedish textile artist and designer Moki Cherry, meant that the New York loft jazz scene was never really his home, but he and Moki nonetheless cultivated the same sense of domestic experimentation in the late 1960s and 1970s (Kumpf 2021). In their projects Movement Incorporated and Organic Music Theatre, they militated against the strict demarcation of the performance from the living environment by decorating the stage with tapestries and carpets, inviting audience members to do the same, and cultivating a hospitality and openness to the musical contributions of their listeners. Don declined the authority of the composer by pursuing collaborative musical arrangements with non-Western artists, and his keen interest in learning and trading songs expressed an abiding love of pedagogy and playing with and for children.

Indeed, Don Cherry’s exploration of non-commercially mediated social frameworks for music-making brings to mind the contemporaneous journey of Alice Coltrane, who underwent a spiritual transformation between 1968 and 1970, eventually withdrawing from conventional public performance, founding a Sufi spiritual centre in Southern California, and recording several albums of devotional music. These activities were less motivated by a direct ‘critique’ of Black music’s institutions than they were by an experimental impulse to rethink art itself and its place in social life, a point made by Addison Gayle in his 1971 introduction to The Black Aesthetic, where he considered the deeply entwined practices of ethics and aesthetics in Black traditions (Gayle 1971).

Jazz was not the only site hosting such profound challenges to the pillars of a universal European aesthetic. Few musics of the 1970s matched the philosophical depth of dub in its deconstruction of authorship and subjectivity (Veal 2007), or in its reconfiguration of the recording studio as a place of improvisation and incompletion. One searching for Buchloh’s “rigorous redefinition of relationships between audience, object, and authors” could do far worse than considering the work of King Tubby or Lee Perry and the sound system culture that supported and enabled their innovations.

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On the whole, Black music faced institutions that were distinct from the ones that mediated the work of Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and, on the music side, John Cage and La Monte Young. Its artists directed their critiques at the white-owned culture industries that failed to understand, support, or represent the full range of their creative expression. Yet in addition to these fresh insights on art’s institutionality revealed through the example of Black music, one must also consider the creative and emancipatory uses of institutionalisation for Black activism of the 1960s and 70s. Gerald Raunig would call these “instituent practices” (Raunig 2009). They were centrally important to Black activism of the post-war period (Smethurst 2021). Indeed, for those populations who did not ‘have’ the institution in the first place, the predominant mission was to build, to revise, or to defend—not to dismantle. As Russell Rickford notes in his book on Black nationalist schools of this era, parallel institutions “offered a means of pursuing self-reliance, meeting social needs, and conveying moral and political principles” (Rickford 2016, 13). In Baraka’s estimation, a nested structure of institutions would keep “energy” within the community:

We must control the spread of the new music. We must receive the energy because we produce it with our energy it is our energy. But the institution to be powered with the resources must be formed in our mind before we have sense to harness the energy in them. Community Cultural Institutions; Municipal Cultural Institutions; State Cultural Institutions; National Cultural Institutions; PanAfrican Cultural Institutions. Dig? (Baraka 1971, 7)

Not everyone approached the matter of institution building with Baraka’s ambitious optimism. His colleague in jazz criticism, A. B. Spellman, surveyed the new initiatives in Black studies emerging in universities across North America in the late 1960s and warned of “new subtle forms of cooptation of articulate black people” (Spellman 1969, 22). He continued, “I think that in 1980 we will find dozens of colleges turning out hundreds of black-talking bourgies with PhDs in Malcolm X and John Coltrane. What a horror!” (22).

Spellman may have found himself collaborating with many of those scholars in his subsequent career as an administrator at the National Endowment of the Arts, and he certainly would have taken note of the maturation and success of several institutions devoted to the support and dissemination of Black music. Such initiatives spanned the range of Black musical expression. Experimental musicians in Chicago founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965; dedicated to the support of composers writing original music, the AACM created a framework for its Black membership to explore musical styles and materials that exceeded the narrow expectations of jazz (Lewis 2008). In addition to producing and publicising concerts by members, the AACM ran a music school on the weekends, and among its significant achievements was an organisational structure that far outlasted its founders: leadership has been passed down across generations of members, and the group also founded a New York chapter in 1983. Another example of the institutionalising impulse in Black music was the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) and its working band, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, both founded under different (though related) names by pianist and composer Horace Tapscott in 1961–62. Aggregating various strands of the Los Angeles avant-garde, the UGMAA, like the AACM, prized collective artistic and organising labour, maintained a pronounced commitment to education about Black cultural traditions, and eventually formed a non-profit entity to receive grant funding (Isoardi 2006). The Black Artists Group (Looker 2004) and the Black Rock Coalition (Mahon 2004) offer further examples of creative institutionalisation as an emancipatory practice for Black musicians and artists in the US.

All of these organisations “produced a conceptual approach and practice”, as Herman Gray has written about the AACM, “that considered exploration and experimentation as the rule rather than the exception” (Gray 2005, 59). They all relied, he explains, on an infrastructure built upon social and professional networks, collaborations, and local performance and community venues—their institutionalisation, in other words, often remained provisional, low-budget, and noncommercial. But another very different type of venture was based on ties to dominant and powerful institutions; the most important example of this type of organisation was Jazz at Lincoln Center, founded in 1991 with Wynton Marsalis as artistic director. According to Gray, such institutions fostered a conventional understanding of the jazz tradition through a discourse of “greatness”, genius, canonisation, and careful policing of genre for impurities. Although one might view such intractable concepts as precisely the point of institutional critique, Gray urges caution in the rush to condemn such aesthetically conservative ventures in the late 1980s: “In a climate of political conservativism, attacks on affirmative action, and suspicions about multiculturalism, this view defends important cultural terrain” (71). Indeed, as I hope this brief essay has made clear, basic questions of institutions and critique must be formulated differently and with greater complexity when taking into account Black aesthetic traditions and their socioeconomic conditions of possibility.

One final example that tests the very meaning of ‘Black music’ will serve to solidify this last point. In 1964, fourteen activist musicians (12 Black, two white) founded the Symphony of the New World, “with the purpose of righting the wrongs in hiring practices of major symphony orchestras and establishing a highly artistic musical aggregation that would bring great music to the regular concert audiences and to the communities” (“TOWARD A REAL NEW WORLD”, n. d. [1975]). By no means the first such effort, the Symphony of the New World joined a decades-long history of Black institution building in classical music that went back at least as far as the Clef Club (founded in 1910), the Negro String Quartet (founded in 1919), and the Cosmopolitan Symphony (Lewis 2008). This last group had been founded in 1947 by the Black violinist and conductor Everett Lee, who assembled the interracial and gender inclusive orchestra with “a civil rights mission at the core of its organizational philosophy”, as musicologist Carol Oja has put it (Oja 2014, 194). Lee’s departure for a career in Europe in 1952 spelled the end of the Cosmopolitan Symphony, but he would frequently return to the US as a guest conductor, as he would do in the early years of the Symphony of the New World. In fact, Lee was named Music Director of the Symphony in 1973, a post he held until the ensemble’s dissolution in 1978. The Symphony, which was 40% Black and 30% female, aimed to integrate and diversify not only its musicians, but also its conductors, composers, soloists, directors, and audiences.Footnote 4 Joining Lee as guest conductors were George Byrd, Denis de Coteau, Leonard de Paur, James De Priest, James Frazier Jr., Paul Freeman, Charles Ketcham, Kermit Moore, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and Leon Thompson, many of whom were introduced to New York audiences by the Symphony. They commissioned new works from Arthur Cunningham, George Walker, Howard Swanson, Noel Da Costa, and performed music by a long list of other Black composers: TJ Anderson, Talib Rasul Hakim, Hall Johnson, Tania León, Randy Weston, and many others. The orchestra persisted through internal struggles among white and Black personnel, and between the musicians and management (including its first music director, who was white), and through disagreements about whether the Symphony should concentrate solely on the music of Black composers (it did not) (Handy 1975). Presenting about six concerts per year at Avery Fisher Hall, Symphony of the New World ultimately folded in 1978 due to financial mismanagement and poor leadership (Vaccaro 1976). Beyond these immediate reasons, one might interpret the organisation’s ballooning debt in the 1970s as sharp evidence of the near impossibility of running a $300k-per-year orchestra without the material, structural benefit of a Board of Directors well connected to circuits of power and affluence. In spite of these difficulties, the Symphony made contributions and critiques that exceeded their many concerts. They built a pipeline into professionalism for talented young musicians of colour, and several alums of the organisation found permanent spots in other symphonies across the US. And, through well-placed op-eds, representatives of the Symphony drew attention to the woeful state of racial discrimination in orchestral hiring (estimates put the number of Black musicians in major and regional orchestras at around 1 percent in 1975) (Dixon 1971, Campbell 1975).

The case of the Symphony of the New World suggests that Black music’s institutional politics extended beyond Black music itself; for many members of historically oppressed populations, a ‘critique’ of traditionally racist cultural formations was best delivered through hard-fought and -won participation, not abandonment. (See also the Society of Black Composers and the Collective Black Artists for further examples of this kind of activist institutional formation.)

To conclude this essay on institutional critique from the perspective of an ‘other’ aesthetic system, I will turn to Gerald Raunig’s creative interpretation of the history of the practice in the art world, as well as his proposal for reconceiving it in the twenty-first century in terms of “instituent practices” (Raunig 2009). Raunig draws on Michel Foucault’s lecture, “What Is Critique?”, where the philosopher reformulates the problem of power in the modern period as one of governmentality, or conducting the conduct of another through a politics of truth. The critical attitude that responds to the arts of governing might be expressed not in an absolute refusal of government itself, but rather in a refusal to be governed like that, in those terms, or to those ends. While the former negates power absolutely, the latter carries out its struggles on the plane of immanence: escaping, revising, or transforming the arts of governing by “question[ing] truth on its effects of power and question[ing] power on its discourses of truth” (Foucault 1997a, 47). Such a critical attitude might be brought to bear on the institutions of governance or on the self that has been formed through them; in either orientation, critique “takes the form of a possible crossing-over”, to quote Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” ([1984] 1997b, 315)—a line of flight to some otherwise possibility, beyond the limits of the known.

According to Raunig, the first generation of institutional critique in the European fine arts (i.e. Buren, Broodthaers, Haacke, Smithson, and so on) sought ‘distance’ from the institution, which I understand to refer to the purported negations of the historical avant-garde. And the second generation of the late 1980s (Fraser), for Raunig, asserted the artist’s own internalisation of the museum’s power relations and the impossibility of escaping the art institution through critique. He argues that there may yet be room for a third approach to institutional critique that follows Foucault more closely in declining a politics of negation as well as the examination of the self as mere evidence of subjectivation (assujettissement). This third approach would test existing arrangements for immanent openings and lines of flight that elaborate new relations of power and practices of self-making: “Flight and exodus are nothing negative, not a reaction to something else, but are instead linked and intertwined with constituent power, re-organizing, re-inventing and instituting” (Raunig 2009, 8). In recognition of one’s necessary embroilment in relations of power, a Foucauldian critique would proceed through strategies and tactics of de- and re-institutionalisation, undermining and revising existent material and discursive stabilities without ever fully escaping them.

Foucault scholars have documented and discussed the importance of Black-US theorists to the development of the French philosopher’s analytic of power that culminated in Discipline and Punish.Footnote 5 Texts on race, class, and incarceration by George Jackson and Angela Davis, in particular, reached Foucault and other members of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons through the Black Panther Party’s newspaper, which had established an international distribution network by the end of the 1960s. Although their influence on Foucault’s thinking on genealogy, discipline, and biopower was neither exhaustive nor exclusive, the importance of these writings nonetheless suggests a fascinating parallel with the matter under discussion here. Indeed, the Foucauldian instituent practices described so persuasively by Raunig as a kind of programme for institutional critique in the 2000s appear to be prefigured by Black music’s institutional politics in the post-war period. Largely shut out of the fine-art institutions devoted to European culture, Black musicians dipped and weaved in the commercial marketplace, where they improvised protections, alternatives, and refuge from the predations of the music’s white owner class, but rarely had the option of withdrawing from the market completely. They experimented with exodus from the governing categories and sites of musical production, not in pursuit of artistic hermitage and isolation, but rather with an aim of inviting community invention and collaboration. And they took advantage of jazz’s increasing sacralisation to create new institutions that could foster self-reliance, support, and shared responsibility for the production and presentation of their art.