Sheltering Each Other from the Storms to Come. Why We Need to Become Allies Rather Than Critics of Liberal Cultural Institutions

Abstract

This polemic chapter reflects on strategic conundrums and blind spots in the discourses and practices of activist and academic critique of powerful liberal cultural institutions. Why do we mostly censure those who already want to listen to us? Why do we shame mainly those who can at all be shamed into reactions? Are we not neglecting possible and necessary effects of our demands for diversity, equity and inclusion when we only focus on those who already see such issues as their concern, even if they have not yet been able to implement them within their institutions? What, in turn, do we do about cultural institutions and artistic traditions in authoritarian, homo- and transphobic, misogynist, xenophobic societies—not only those in Europe and North America, but everywhere? Do we have activist strategies and cogent arguments for those contexts? And should we not stand closer with and more emphatically support our allies within the liberal cultural institutions in operating in liberal democracies.

1 .

At the end of August 2022, the Berlin Academy of Arts hosted a gathering of sound artists and sound researchers entitled “Soundings. Assemblies of Listenings and Voices from the Souths”. This meeting was intended to develop new models for aesthetic and structural equity that would give adequate and audible voice to artistic and theoretical concerns emanating from Asian, African, Latin American cultural contexts, explicitly including Indigenous and Folk practices in the so-called ‘Global North’. About a hundred participants from these contexts, the overwhelming majority so-called ‘people of colour’, passionately and intelligently demonstrated and argued against the many ways in which sonic and aesthetic, but also structural bias in cultural and academic institutions ‘in the West’ propped up its cultural ‘soft’ power. They looked for common ways to deal with this situation, for networks and—not the least—for mutual comfort and support.

One participant even questioned the place chosen for this gathering: was it not strange and illogical to initiate these important and ground-breaking discussions within one of the hegemonial cultures? Why had we not held this gathering in, e.g. India, China, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mozambique, Senegal or Nigeria? A collective discussion of this question boiled down to: because then it would have taken years (or forever) to convince local ‘non-Western’ authorities and funders of the usefulness to spend a considerable amount on a non-glamourous critical reflection event on sound practices (instead of the 8 months from idea to realisation it took in this case). Moreover, many of the participants might not have been able to attend—e.g. because of political/religious tensions between their countries, or because of their unacceptable gender orientation or unwelcome political stance.

As one of the initiators of this conference, I know that all the flight tickets and hotel rooms for the participants had been paid for by a Canadian academic grant,¹ that the meeting spaces, tech, diplomatic work and personnel had been donated by the Academy of Arts, that the organising team and the contractors for catering and website and design, publicity and video documentation sent their bills to a Norwegian festival, a Berlin-based new music magazine and a Dutch cultural fund. Not a single cent had been sourced from the cultural contexts or countries the participants came from.² Yet none of these institutional funders in the so-called ‘Global North’ ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the curatorial, academic, even organisational choices of the globally sourced steering committee, quite to the contrary: they explicitly styled themselves as ‘the silent partners’. Their leading representatives and some of their staff were present throughout the gathering and listened intently to our discussions, curious and non-confrontational, as if asking for their minds to be changed.

Only in the aftermath, at our de-briefing meeting, did one member of the steering committee begin to wonder about this behaviour. He usually is a vociferous critic of Western cultural hegemony, ready to apply the epithets ‘autocratic’ and ‘colonialist’ to any perceived constraint or power imbalance. But now he musingly asked himself and us: How it could be that institutions and funders of ‘the Global North’ would not only allow such a gathering to take place on their premises, but to also support it substantially—not grudgingly, but rather with a friendly readiness to fulfil almost every need, wish and demand of precisely those people who came to criticise the way they were doing things, who attacked the very foundations of the place that hosted their meeting?

2 .

Cultural institutions in many ‘Western’ countries indeed seem to be under attack—and this from multiple directions. On one side, activists argue convincingly that most of them embody and practice hegemonial systems of privilege slanted towards white, male, Eurocentric thought and aesthetics. They ask these institutions to open up their programming, to diversify it, to make it more inclusive (of the particular social section that this activist has chosen to focus on). From another side, traditionalists and self-declared defenders of tradition (canon fundamentalists, as they have been dubbed) warn institutions to not change their programming focus, to not adapt mindlessly to the current zeitgeist, and to ignore or actively counteract what they perceive as ephemeral and spurious claims against time-honoured practises and behaviours. Both groups of critics, radical and intemperate as their language may sometimes be, do not usually question the very existence of the cultural institutions they criticise. They just want the largely undisputed ‘good(s)’ that these institutions can deliver to confirm and support their own perspective.

Two other schools of thought, however, tend to see public funds spent on cultural institutions as a waste of resources that should better be put to use elsewhere. Depending on their political persuasion, they believe that public funds sunk into ‘unpopular and unproductive’ culture should rather benefit social needs, the fight against climate emergencies or, alternatively, as tax cuts, wander into their own, often already well-lined pockets. Extremists even sometimes demand to defund cultural actors if their practice does not fit within the framework of the critics’ ideological criteria. Such detractors are convinced that they would not miss cultural institutions promoting the freedom of expression of arts and artists, should they disappear. Scandalisations of the work done in these institutions, from whatever direction, in a media landscape that thrives on minute breakdowns of scandals, are water on the mills of such activists who are opposed in principle to liberal public cultural institutions: ‘Look’, they will say, ‘how corrupt they are!’.

None of this is new in substance—yet: the conjunction and mutual amplification of all these de-legitimising streams within the scene comes at a time when real economic and ecological crises offer facile outside arguments for those who would love to either align publicly funded cultural institutions to their own agenda—or abolish them altogether.

3 .

For most of the cultural institutions upbraided for not being inclusive enough of people or practises that the critic would like to see in their programming or their staff have something in common: Their funding comprises a big share of public funds (i.e. taxes). They thus have a mandate to attract (or provide experiences to) a general public. They are therefore usually managed by people accountable to the public—people who for the most part came to their job through a procedure-driven hiring process. Most importantly, these institutions are almost all situated in or financed by liberal civil societies where misdemeanours, corruption and misuse of public funds can be career-ending offences, sometimes even before allegations are proven to be true: where the mere whiff of scandal can pose a serious risk to one’s reputation—both that of an individual or that of an institution.

Only this type of public cultural institution working from a liberal political context will at all be amenable to publicly voiced institutional critique or moral arguments, from academic tut-tutting to public debates, from demonstrations to viral shitstorms. Apart from reconfiguring their personnel towards more equity through changes in hiring policy, they also have the option to optimise their processes to enable more transparent, more inclusive decision-making on curatorial and artistic decisions. They can make efforts on all levels of their activities to become more equitable and more considerate. And, most crucially: such changes are not alien in principle to their desirable mode of operation. As publicly accountable institutions and as artistic tastemakers, a drive towards more equity and diversity will help them to become truer to their idealistic brief.

Agreed: not all—maybe not even most—Western cultural institutions have taken advantage of these options yet. Not all people working in and for them already see a necessity for or the benefits of the changes these efforts would afford. But only when an institution is at all able to evolve within the confines of its mandate, when all it requires is tweaking a few parameters, can a critic have any realistic hope of ever experiencing such a change.³

Critique of other types of cultural institutions (and here we speak about the majority of cultural institutions in the world), not surprisingly, is therefore much rarer. When an institution is financed by private funds and does not lay claim to a broad public mandate or does not need/want to attract a general audience (say, a private collector’s museum or a oligarch’s yacht cinema or a religious minority’s ritual performance, a concert solely financed by subscriptions, a privately owned punk or hip-hop venue, or a commercial arts gallery), public criticism of their aesthetic bias, social discrimination, or even corruption would have nothing to bite into. One cannot really criticise someone for not being something they do not claim or want to be, and it would be disingenuous to demand a say in something you clearly have no stake in.

One might, of course, desire that the world be rid of oligarchs—or of that obnoxious private music club that noise-pollutes one’s sleep. Or be idealistically convinced that the arts would be more noble without any commercial or political agenda interfering with our access to it. One might even hope that private funders of such institutions care for their public image enough to at least pretend to mend their ways—a vain hope in many cases, as we know. In such cases, moral outrage seems like a waste of breath—which is precisely why it is so rare. Shooting shrapnel at the fog, hoping it will change into a frog, is never a fulfilling pastime.

Finally, moral outrage may be outright stupid when an institution is tax-funded, but unfortunately located in a (semi)-authoritarian state and thus managed by corrupt politicians appointed ‘from above’ (e.g. for their loyalty rather than for their expertise). Public or academic criticism will most likely not really inconvenience such an institution nor its leadership. In some cases it will, rather, endanger the personal safety of the critic. The infamous ‘tin ear’ that indigenous music scholar Dylan Robinson has attributed to the colonial mindset is a well-oiled organ much employed by cultural institutions in autocratic contexts: Even when their functionaries work in sound or music, their primary job skill is their ability to not listen to dissenting voices.

It cannot be a surprise, then, that we see almost no local public or academic institutional critique centred on the non-inclusiveness, aesthetic bias or moral corruption in cultural institutions situated in current Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, India, Brazil, China, Myanmar, Indonesia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and many other locations around the world. And why we rarely read tweets asking why there are so few works of Kurdish and Armenian artists in Turkish museums or why so few Uighur or Taiwanese musicians appear on Chinese concert stages, why so few women perform anything publicly in Afghanistan, why so few South Korean or African American artists are invited to perform, exhibit or speak in Pyongyang’s cultural institutions, or why there are almost no publicly funded expressions of queer culture in the Russian or Nigerian cultural scene. We know why. It is obvious to everyone that most cultural institutions in these countries are exponentially less diverse and more morally and financially corrupt places than almost any contemporary publicly funded festival or cultural institution in most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Argentine, Japan, South Korea or North America, etc.But no one harbours the illusion that any single or even sustained critique might lead to significant change in the behaviour of these autocracy-infused cultural institutions.⁴ And there is no certainty that those who voice their criticism from within those countries will be able to enjoy their freedom or any equity—artistic or otherwise—for a long time to come.

4 .

All this is painfully obvious—and to many this state of affairs seems too trivial to even mention it. This is why texts that drive the discourse on institutional critique focus mostly on publicly funded institutions in liberal societies: Most people lack the quixotic stubbornness that will pick fights even when you have no chance. It seems more effective to direct critical words only at those who are willing to read them—and who are able to improve themselves. It seems intuitive to shame only those who are prepared to feel shame. But this stance leads to a slightly worrying consequence: for as justified and valid and genuine their concerns may seem to their proponents, cultural criticism, institutional critique and moral outrage that only address public cultural institutions in liberal societies might not actually bring about the change that activists desire—and might indeed be counter-productive.

If you only preach to the converted, you do not need to make your arguments watertight and persuasive—often a bold claim will be enough to provoke a desired reaction. If you blow your trumpets only at those walls that you know to be already rattled, you will not develop new intellectual and political strategies to confront the ideologically fortified. If you weaponise shaming, you will trigger defiance and an emotional closing of the ranks even among those who might otherwise agree with you. It is therefore somewhat astonishing that the general thrust of institutional critique around equity, diversity, inclusion still mostly does precisely this: preach, trumpet, shame those who already are closest to your own worldview. We content ourselves with pointing out the blemishes in low-hanging fruit—and leave those higher up and out of reach alone. We just let them rot or flourish, whatever.

Maybe this skewed perspective also is the reason why institutional critique of cultural institutions likes to exaggerate the actual influence of liberal cultural institutions on society—and why it so often morally pimps up its language. As a composer trained in the eurological ‘new music’ tradition who has extensively written on and criticised flaws in the self-image of this musical praxis for over 30 years, who has deconstructed its claims of universality, its colonialist missionary zeal, its limited and self-serving perspective on musical evolution, its geographically and racially myopic and misogynist canon, and its classist and capitalist concept of musical performance and creation, I have certainly contributed my share of over-emphasised rhetoric to such discourses. As my polemic list above shows, I have no intention to qualify my criticism, but: when I travel the world and see how music and its institutions try to survive elsewhere, I begin to sincerely doubt that those ‘Western’ cultural music institutions (festivals, orchestras, opera houses, etc. and their respective curators and canons) that are most often criticised should continue to serve as the primary objects of our legitimate concerns.

5 .

Perhaps it was necessary for Pierre Boulez in the 1960s to exclaim that he would like to ‘blow up all opera houses!’. His was a time when not only the entire social body of European/North American culture was much less open-minded and diversified than it is today, but also when opera and classical music audiences unfailingly comprised the most powerful (and socially brutal) people in society. He said this at a moment when it seemed as if calculated violence might be the only way to shake off constraining shackles of prejudice, entitlement and hegemony in Western societies.

This is no longer the case in our day. Opera houses, orchestras, concert organisations and the society in liberal democracies at large, in many ways and for even more reasons, have come a long way and have demonstrated their own inner potential for change. Awareness raising by activists over the last 50 years—with growing momentum over the last two decades—has already engendered a widespread re-thinking of the biases inherent in the structures of cultural support in the West. New funding bodies and private foundations have offered financial alternatives to institutions hampered by bureaucratic constraints so that they can hire more diverse staff, or engage with individual artists, activists and institutions in other countries. Thinkers on these issues from around the globe have become much sought-after leading voices in conversations on institutional change. In some cases, they even have been invited to lead the very cultural institutions they once confronted.

Today, far from stone-walling calls for more aesthetic openness, inclusion and diversity, many of the people who work on programming in cultural institutions, most of the curators and artists, most of the audience members I have met over the last 15 years would immediately agree on the need for continued work on internal re-makings of these institutions—in order to better fulfil their own stated mandate not only for their own social contexts, but in a global perspective. All of these people, however—and precisely because they operate in societies where public money is expected to be handled transparently and equitably—often come up against fiscal rules that were once made in an attempt to counteract the rampant abuse of public money by multinational corporations and international crime. They also often come up against their counterparts of the canon fundamentalist variety—often working with them side by side in the same cultural institution—who desire no change, and who sometimes even aim to roll back the social, aesthetic, artistic and cultural emancipations of the last 100 years: who want ‘their’ art to remain more or less true to social concepts and cultural practices of the nineteenth century—even though they often see themselves as part of an artistic avant-garde.

In this situation, activists and critics for equity, diversity and inclusion alike may well need to alter their modus operandi. The heatedness of confrontational and accusatory critique that many activists for various EDI causes still employ, their joy in subverting and toppling establishment symbols, as well as the often triumphant gesture of pulling off the masks of ‘the establishment(s)’ to shame them for their ugly face might well be strategies unfit for engaging with the current reality, the current predicament of cultural institutions. Engaging in the battles of today using yesterday’s strategies can often harm one’s own cause. And why harass those who already want to join in walking one’s walk, when they all they can do right now is limp—or when they do not always go in the ‘right’ direction? Would it not be better to assist and guide their moves in a friendly and cooperative manner?

Counter-intuitively for many, the most effective strategy for activists like myself to achieve their stated goals in today’s often toxic media and political landscape may well be: to help strengthen these people, and thus the liberal institutions they work in—if they are already on the way to more inclusion and equity. Thus, instead of attacking them publicly for their currently unsatisfactory achievements in this area, it might be wiser to include the pro-active people working from within these institutions in an allyship: by providing them with more intellectual tools as well as with more (not less) emotional and structural support against their other detractors—and thus prop up their (and our) hope of a sustainably diverse aesthetic agency against both the growing tide of conservative rollback and the foreseeable financial and social turmoils that will unavoidably be occasioned by the growing pressures of climate-occasioned emergencies. As the world we live in grows darker and more turbulent, as we confront an ever-gathering storm, we all will need these open-minded and publicly financed institutions and the aesthetic, intellectual and societal benefits and potentials they can afford us—perhaps more than ever before.

6 .

What precisely are these benefits and potentials of publicly funded cultural institutions in liberal and democratic societies? A historically deep and detailed discussion would exceed the confines of this text. But here is a sketch—admittedly idealised for the purposes of argument.

Autonomous and self-conscious public institutions as described above are a rather recent invention in the history of European civilisation. They were established to shelter cultural activity from the harmful influence of dogmatic theology, autocracy, populism, political posturing, anti-liberal ideology and wilful control by powerful individuals. Like all democratic institutions, they essentially operate through a kind of jiu-jitsu strategy: in their case, they absorb attack and critique by converting them into artful expressions, just as other institutions convert them into the protection of individual agency, social inclusion, environmental awareness, etc. The freedom of artistic expression held aloft by these institutions (even when their behaviour in hindsight sometimes seems myopic) has always amounted to a precarious balancing act on societal forces: as each powerful critic wants different things from them, they try to briefly stabilise fleeting opportunities for free thinking and expression wherever they may emerge from the violent interplay of opposing forces. They aim to view and interact with the world from the eye of its societal storms—much as mediaeval Christian monasteries with the support of nobles and kings all around the Mediterranean endeavoured to preserve (or re-import from Arabia) the virtues of knowledge and discourse through the violent turmoil that followed the collapse of the Roman empire.

Liberal public institutions offer shelters of various kinds: shelters for artists to create under significantly reduced financial pressure, often in connection to other creators and thinkers, and with practical support—this is such an elementary service that many artists take it for granted or feel entitled to it. Private sponsors may provide similar shelters, sometimes better equipped—but also more dependent on the sponsor’s personal whim, taste—and lifetime.

Liberal public institutions provide shelters for socially endangered groups to work and meet in safe, protected spaces—this is especially true for public institutions in contexts of contestation, such as foreign cultural centres in authoritarian states. This role as a shelter for dissident discourses has proven valuable time after time—and if the next ‘Soundings’ event were to take place in Modi’s India, Erdogan’s Turkey or Bolsonaro’s Brazil, it is a reasonable assumption that the local organisers will still need to involve the funding—and most likely also the offices and spaces—of one or more liberal ‘Western’ liberal public institutes for cultural exchange—at least until locally funded and managed institutions can truly work for free expression in arts and culture, until the people who work in them are able to inhabit their eye of the storm with dissident expressions.⁵ Sometimes it seems quite inconsistent when harsh critiques of Western public institutions, of colonial time and access structures, of hegemonic bias are voiced by people who themselves hail from societies where diversity of opinion or liberty of artistic expression is under severe pressure. Even when their analyses of Western institutions are essentially correct, even when they as individuals cannot singlehandedly untangle their home context. But is it truly strategically wise to pounce on untoward facets of a privilege you enjoy (even if only partially)—while others who have no access to any facet of it are left to fend for themselves?

Equally important is the role of liberal public institutions as shelters for the nurture of incipient, emergent and local political/artistic ideas that would not survive in an art fair or at a political rally—the odd, the timid, the quietly believing, the nerdy, the modest, the unkempt, the neighbourly, the unspectacular, the inward and awkward, the un-contemporary, the Bartleby-esque, etc. If art consisted only of the critical, the brash, the convincing, the compelling, the loud-mouthed, the coherent, the internationally relatable, the relevant, the zany, the well-coiffed, the incisive, the ardently visionary, the current, the Instagrammable, the actionable, etc. it probably would most likely not need the shelter of cultural institutions. But the resulting cultural environment would not be true to the full range of human artistic sensibilities. And it would be a profoundly and structurally hegemonic and ableist affair—and thus precisely what one has railed against.

7 .

Liberal public institutions will not always fulfil their equitable, illuminating, safe, protective role to a T—this may to a certain amount be due to the things they are justly criticised for: unacknowledged bias, indolence, ideological and structural discrimination, etc. But instead of standing aside and seeing this as a built-in failure, instead of asking them to re-invent themselves from the ground up, it might also just be possible that despite best intentions the people working in these institutions just lack some tools and conceptual knowledge to keep them afloat in a new configuration of winds and crosscurrents. It would not help anyone, and least of all their post-colonial, de-colonial, feminist and queer critics, if these shelters for free thought and free expression were washed away.

In such situations, the robust debate culture that we usually associate with free expression can easily veer into toxic corrosion. Ernst Fraenkel, persecuted as a Jewish socialist by the Nazis and, then, after World War II one of the foremost political thinkers on post-authoritarian democratic Europe, once stipulated (in response to the viciousness of political discourse in the 1968 student protests which made him consider emigrating from Germany a second time) that in addition to the conflictual negotiations and political fights which are essential to any democratic process in a liberal society there also need to be non-controversial areas of mutual consent—such as institutions that safeguard these debates and ensure their continuing impact on societal processes. These institutions must of course be open to reform—but if their purpose of safeguarding the debatability of issues is itself eroded or denied, they will become prey to partisan, ideological, commercial and thus: authoritarian players who prefer to keep their machinations out of public scrutiny.

How about not just dashing off a shocked or accusatory tweet about a perceived bias—and instead making a serious and well-thought-out offer to co-develop a policy or a curatorial concept that would address that bias head-on? How about not once more pandering to a prevalent (right-wing) populist perception that public cultural institutions are corrupt, inept and irresponsible—but instead finding ways of highlighting the democratic and tangible benefits to society and arts that they provide, especially by giving voice to and nurturing marginal and controversial artists and thinkers like oneself? It may seem hard to accept for minds predicated on the assumptions that their primary role is critical opposition to the status quo, but: in dangerous and uncertain times like these, the established status quo of liberal public institutions may not be the most problematic issue that one needs to confront—especially when it is already being eroded by forces that are much more inimical to the issues we care about than these institutions ever could have been.

It may be time to enter the fray—in outspoken alliance with the same so-called institutions one had grown so fond of criticising to the core. To become their ally in order to keep afloat these precious shelters for values that we as cultural actors all cherish alike: openness to fundamental and incremental change, to the margins and the unpopular, to the inarticulate and the controversial—and to the politically or socially undesirable. Shelters for all the words that need to be said, all the images that need to be seen, and all the sounds and cries that need to be heard. It might be time to help these institutions balance our precarious cargo through the many storms to come.