metropolis m

Perhaps one of the original narratives surrounding the question of ‘diversity’ in contemporary art can be traced to the open-endedness of medium forms that contemporary art inaugurated in its break from the modernist tradition. The legacy of Duchampian liberalization has been firmly encoded in the contemporary art object’s hypothetical possibility to be of any material composition that its author desires. At the same time, the fine print that delimits this seemingly unfixed horizon is the pragmatic need for the critical-institutional complex of the art world to legitimize an entity as art in order for it to work as art within the ecology. Despite institutional conservatism and anxieties surrounding the introduction and normalization of new object forms as art, it is certainly the case that the art historical and institutional evolution of the twentieth century (and particularly its second half) are distinctly marked by material diversification of the art object.

Still, an important caveat must be made as there is a critical difference between acknowledging the defining force of material diversification of art objecthood within contemporary art and the enduring monopoly of art objects as the defining category of contemporary art. Put another way: contemporary art puts diversity of object forms at its very heart while at the same time it does not let go of ‘objecthood’ as its primary modality. The division is clearly problematic insofar as the promise of object-form expansiveness via material diversification has the potential to explode the spatial and temporal limits of discrete objects, as we can clearly observe in performance or social practice. Yet somehow, the conceptual image of an object1 continues to preside over the contemporary art imaginary, making it easier to conceive performance or social practice as proto-objects rather than as phenomena that demand new conceptual images of what — and crucially, how — art can be. At the same time, as both performance and (certain forms of) social practice attest, the attempts to shoehorn these works as ‘art objects’ into the critical-institutional complex of contemporary art is closely interlinked with the type of categorical modalities that the practice of collecting demands and the kinds of exchanges that can be underwritten by existing structures of the art market (the primary and secondary market) as well as (diminishing) governmental subsidies.

These latter nuances — or should we say, structural conditions — immediately appear as more than just limiting economic backdrops. Instead, I would argue that they function as policing devices within the contemporary art world ecology. Their power lies in a historically contingent consolidation between an institutionally embedded bias towards art objects as the privileged conceptual image of art and a political economy that has highly established pathways for capitalization within the object-based paradigm. While some might despair that this is a paralyzing condition, I would argue that such an approach is wrong-footed as the condition is in flux (as all conditions ultimately are) and although its dynamics seem to be pivoted more towards actors who are already in the business of upgrading object-based capitalization towards the interests of the existing financial sector (think Deloitte’s Art & Finance reports), art has much to leverage by taking its ecological frontier as a key site for struggle.

To do that, we would need to reconsider what diversity means and how it operates within the contemporary art ecology. A key dimension of this has been captured by the emphasis on the need to increase demographic diversity in the art field to make it more representative of populations at large. Here again, a series of institutionally embedded biases inherited by the contemporary art ecology have translated into a systemic homogenization of the contemporary art ecology, in this instance along socio-economic and racial fold-lines. For example, the taste-making and bourgeois value-forming functions of the museum of the late nineteenth century may have been ‘democratized’ but never eradicated or succeeded to displace the white (Euro-American) middle-class subject as the privileged position of the field. With the advent of nineties’ globalization, that model with all of its implicit organizational deficiencies has been naturalized as a universal benchmark for contemporary art. The struggle to have greater diversity amongst those who are represented within the field — as its agents, content producers and its audiences — has been on the one hand driven by policy-making (at least in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands) that targets public or publicly funded art institutions, and on the other hand by contemporary art’s preoccupation with issues relating to diversity and structural injustices at the level of content, programming and discourse. Admittedly, the reach of the former has been delimited from the start as the state does not have decisive jurisdiction over the transnationally constituted and largely privately funded contemporary art field, although legally speaking, there are plenty of options for setting transnational regulatory standards, if only there was political vision and will.2 As a result, today, it is the sheer incongruence of art claiming the right to represent and critique structural injustice at the level of content while being representative of structural injustice at the level of its institutional and ecological composition that offers one of the greatest leverages for racial and socio-economic diversity campaigners.

Simultaneously, it is strategically important to consider what other forms of ecological diversity would be necessary in promoting diversification away from objecthood as the dominant conceptual image of art. It is precisely at this juncture that creation of new institutional or proto-institutional entities becomes a critical vehicle for injecting and embedding new standards of practice and economic exchange. New missions, new organizational models, new lobbying mechanisms, new solidarity alignments, new models for economic circulation and distribution are required in order to diversify the contemporary art ecology from its current politically ossified constellation into a multilateral array of vibrant spaces for art, ideas and progressive visions. Crucially, the question of ‘new’ (missions, organizational models, et cetera) is not so much about ground-breaking novelty as it is about strategic and imaginative intelligence that has a clear systemic understanding of how the current contemporary art ecology functions, can learn from emerging possibilities that are surfacing within this field and other fields (tech, finance, activism) as well as various historical precedents, and understands how to integrate these facets into an organized force within the art ecology. While in and of itself ‘diversity’ is not a panacea, within the predicament that we find ourselves today, in art and geopolitically, it may just offer the right kind of sign-post for mid-term reform horizon.