Of course, museums do not produce art; neither do they distribute art. They sacralize it. It’s important to underline the connection between property and the sacred. To sacralize is to exclude; it’s to set something apart from the world, whether because it is sacred to an individual (“private property”) or sacred to something more abstract (“art,” “God,” “humanity,” “the nation”). Any revolutionary regime changes existing forms of property, and the organization or reorganization of museums plays a crucial role in this process, since the forms of property that exist within museums represent the summit of the pyramid. They are the ultimate wealth that police protect, and that the industrious poor can only see on weekends.
Virtually all museums today operate in a way that produces and maintains hierarchy. By archiving, cataloging, and reorganizing the museum’s space, they draw a line between “museum” quality and “non-museum” quality objects. But there is no ultimate contradiction between commoditized art and art considered inalienable and not to be sold, because they are simply two variations of the sacred as radical exclusion. The fact that these objects are surrounded by armed security and high-tech surveillance simply serves to underline to any visitor how much their own creative acts (songs, jokes, hobbies, diary entries, care for loved ones, and precious mementos) are of no particular significance, and therefore, that visitor will need to return to their non-museum life and continue to carry on their “non-inessential” job producing and maintaining the structure of relations that makes museums possible. Much like the cathedrals they were meant to replace, museums are there to teach one one’s place.
In the same way, the art world—as the apparatus for the production of objects, performances, or ideas that might someday merit being sacralized— is based on the artificial creation of scarcity. In the way that police guarantee material poverty, the existence of the art world—in its current form—could be said to guarantee spiritual poverty. What, then, would an abolitionist project directed at the art world actually look like?
David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, "Another Art World, Part 3: Policing and Symbolic Order" (2020)
