Knowledge Cultures 4(5), 2016

pp. 28–42, ISSN 2327-5731, eISSN 2375-6527

CONSENSUS AND DISSENSUS AT

THE NEOLIBERAL ART MUSEUM

NADINE M. KALIN
nadine.kalin@unt.edu
University of North Texas

ABSTRACT. Rancière’s dissensual politics is used to consider art museums’ efforts toward
social work through institutional outreach and participatory strategies within art and
education. While such foci hold the populist aura of inclusion through increased public and
civic engagement, I lay out how these practices do not compromise democratic politics or
civic subjectification, but, rather, further neoliberal distributions of the sensible as a
manifestation of the hatred of democracy. One mode of critique and dissensual resistance of
this distribution is apparent in the Occupy Museum (OM) movement, which highlights the
abuse of labor in the name of the public good within museums. OM uses the art of protest
to confuse the political distribution of art museums by exposing their neoliberal
managerialism. This spurs a call to action for those who might be incited to radical politics
through holding the police to their word and staging a dispute in the name of equality
within public spaces such as art museums.

Keywords: art museum education; participation; social work; democratic politics; protest;
neoliberalism

In this essay, I use Rancière’s notion of dissensual politics to consider art

museums’ social work efforts through institutional outreach and participatory
strategies. While such foci hold the populist aura of inclusion through increased
public and civic engagement, I lay out how these practices do not compromise
democratic politics or civic subjectification, but, rather, further neoliberal
distributions of the sensible as a manifestation of the hatred of democracy. One
mode of critique and dissensual resistance of this distribution is apparent in the
Occupy Museum (OM) movement, which highlights the abuse of labor in the name
of the public good within museums. OM uses the art of protest to confuse the
political distribution of art museums by exposing their neoliberal managerialism. I
consider how this might incite radical politics through holding the museum police
to their word and staging a dispute in the name of equality.

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 To set up my argument, I begin by outlining the current regime of common
sense in relation to the “social” within art museums, art, and their education. This
common sense, I call participationism (see Dean, 2009). At first blush,
participationism might appear emancipatory in that it involves audiences in the
activity of engaging directly with art and art making. Yet, I will argue that
participationism is part of the displacement of democratic politics by the social as a
form of administered life. The goal of the paper is then to establish how the claims
of equality found in participationism can become points of real disagreement, and
thus actual democratic struggle. As an example, I will conclude with an analysis of
the recent work of OM.
But before I begin, it bears noting that I maintain politics can occur in, through,
and around institutions such as art museums. This does not suggest that I believe
institutions can be democratic. It merely means that institutions can be sites where
democratic subjectivation can occur. In this, I follow Biesta’s (2011), Mouffe’s
(2013), and Rutenberg’s (2015) lead. Biesta (2011) brings together the writings of
Chantal Mouffe (2013) with Rancière’s perspectives in order to allow for politics
to occur through disruptions within existing institutions in addition to democratic
politics that establishes new police. Ruitenberg (2015) (citing Balibar, 2008) also
embraces this inclusion of existing institutions in democratic politics and equality
as sites where contestation over the exclusions of a police order may occur. Mouffe
(2013) challenges art museums as institutions to concern themselves with how they
and the artists they work with might play into both the reproduction and/or
dismantling of capitalist hegemony. I would enlarge this concern to also encompass
the propensity of art museums to at once enact a claim for and “hatred of
democracy” (Rancière, 2005/2009) in their language, practices, goals, and
benevolences. It is this ambiguous ground that demands theorization, for it is only
against such ambiguity that the struggle offered by OM can be seen as a democratic
form of disagreement both within and against the art museum police.

The Social

Rancière (1995/1999) claims that

[i]f relations between the police and politics are determined by a few key
words, a few major homonyms, we could say that, in modernity, the
social has been the decisive homonym that has caused several logics and
intertwinings of logics to connect and to disconnect, to oppose one
another and to blur. (p. 91)

Moreover, in “the modern era, the social has been precisely the place where
politics has been played out, the very name it has taken on” (Rancière, 1995/1999,
p. 91). Here, Rancière (1995/1999) refers to “the interplay of politics and the social
as the relationship between a system of institutions and the movement of the
energies of individuals and groups who would find themselves more or less
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adequately expressed in this system” (p. 98). The art museum is one such
institution wherein the relationship between the social and politics play out through
both art and education. This is apparent in the current trend encompassing social
work and/or social services within museums and institutional outreach, more social
conceptions of meaning making through participatory approaches, and increased
efforts toward social inclusion of diverse publics within museums, as well as civic
engagement and democratic politics in the public sphere as a part of social life. The
manifestations of the social as the determining logic of the museum corresponds to
our current neoliberal order, which itself has a tendency to replace the economic
and the political with the social.
Neoliberalism privileges open markets liberated from governmental regulation
in order to increase the power held by the private sector while devaluing the role of
the public and state supported social services. Just like forms of education under
neoliberalism outside of the museum (see De Lissovoy, 2015; Saltman, 2013), the
museum experience is increasingly defined through instrumentalism and
commodification. Certainly, art museum education is instrumentalized for many
purposes, as museums need to affirm their places within the public sphere by being
accountable for their spending and programming. Most recently, this has involved
claiming utility within civic engagement and political activity through monitoring
social inclusion, public participation, and outreach in the cultural sector.
Governments and corporate funders see art museums as a tool for social, political,
and economic purposes. Museums represent
the functionality of culture as a democratizing entity [establishing] a link
between cultural freedom, cultural promotion, and democracy, with the
goal of expanding individual choices, encouraging the active participation
of the people, respecting other cultures, promoting the freedom to choose
one’s own identity (and to respect the identity of others), and so forth.
(Emmelhainz, 2013, p. 4)

Museums have elected to mediate these economic and political relations through
new forms of education and social programing.
Concurrently, museums need to compete for visitor numbers within the
experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) that has amplified the event-based
nature of exhibitions with more socially-driven intentions including participatory
practices of engagement (see Simon, 2010) highlighting poly-vocality and shared
authority within art museum education. Case in point, Silverman’s (2010) recent
volume investigates the social work of museum education. From a systems theory
perspective, Silverman claims that learning can be individually beneficial and
highly transformative when based on open-ended and relational forms of dialogue.
The social work of museums can produce different types of knowledge transfers
and platforms that might lead to more civically-engaged practices within museums,
but there seems to be more of a focus on sociality, conviviality, active meaning
making, networking, and hospitality so that visitors will want to return to this hub

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for edutainment (Hooper-Greenhill, 2007) purposes. Meanwhile, from a social
work perspective, it appears that politics is something that happens outside of
museums, when in reality, the museum itself is a neoliberal contradiction of assets,
inclusive participation, and social outreach that is constricting any space for
critique, dissent, and confrontation.
Neoliberalism obliges art and its education, along with its participants, to be put
to use in the museum. User value does not consider the reception of art as valuable
on its own. Livingstone (2005) claims today the private leisure of citizens “is
scrutinised and judged—as successful or failing—for its potential or actual
contribution to the public sphere” (p. 31)—to the social and political realm. This
turn falls under the “critique of the spectacle,” which, according to Rancière
(2008/2009) refers to “the idea that art has to provide us with more than a
spectacle, more than something devoted to the delight of passive spectators,
because it has to work for a society where everybody should be active” (p. 63).
Furthermore, institutions are expected to provide outreach in their communities as
part of their mandate and funding. Here, museums are actually engaged in social
work (for instance, art institutions [such as the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St.
Louis, Missouri1] are hiring social workers and holding town-hall meetings for the
purposes of institutional outreach) that performs social responsibility and civic
engagement2 to make up for inequities in our society. The shift toward augmenting
governmental social services through the social work of museum outreach occurs
at the same time as funding for social services and institutions wanes from public
bodies under perpetual austerity so synonymous with neoliberalism.
Artists are also embracing this shift toward social work through the means of
social practice art, service aesthetics, participatory art, and legislative art. Some
examples include artist Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International in
association with the Queens Museum of Art, the re-creation of the childhood home
of the artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) as a social-services site at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Detroit, and the revival of Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture in
artist Rick Lowe’s Trans.lation: Vickery Meadows in conjunction with the Nasher
Sculpture Center in Dallas. It is strange to experience these social services under
glass, so to speak, enabled by corporate and individual donor sponsorship in
conjunction with art museums vying for visitor numbers through expanded access
and a wide array of program offerings. Nevertheless, artists are invited and/or
sponsored by museums to play a role in local social contexts that are perceived as
lacking political action. These forms of inclusion actually extend the current
regime in that they are invited, consensual, and make sense to the current order.
This is another form of new institutionalism in art that invites critique so it can
mute its power (see Alberro & Stimson, 2011).
Like most visitors’ engagement with art museums, many of these art projects
are short-term, reflecting “a convenient tendency for quick consumption and
exclusivity that garnered favor among museums and galleries,” but without long-
term investment, these undertakings revealed political limitations (Thompson,

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2012, p. 30). This mandate operates under the assumption that political change will
emerge out of art museum social participation while leaving the museum as an
institution of the late capitalist order intact. Moreover, this assumption also
expands the devaluation of governmental support for the common good as it can
now be covered through fragmented art projects and cultural institutions, among
others, that further splinter and individualize social responsibility away from the
state.

Active Spectatorship: Emancipatory or Stultifying?

If we contextualize this participatory turn in the art museum within the thinking of
Rancière, we gain additional perspective. Rancière (2008/2009) maintains
spectatorship can be re-construed away from passivity toward active looking,
interpreting, and translating that hold the potential for a redistribution of roles and
expectations. In line with Rancière’s equality of intelligences, viewing art can be a
site of emancipation and equality through the redistribution of the sensible within a
given political system. Under the principle of equality, any viewer is deemed
already active and capable of understanding an artist’s work without explanation.
Past practices of museum education conceived of the viewer as passive relying
on the expert to explicate the “correct” meaning of images and artwork amounting
to a stultification wherein spectators are taught that they are incapable of seeing
and speaking in relation to what they are viewing (Rancière, 2008/2009).
Increasingly, as stated above, this stultification is being amended toward a more
active and empowering mode of engagement on the part of the viewer. The starting
point is that the viewer is capable of interpreting artworks on their own and with
others, they just need to participate in museum education to activate these
capacities. Museums in the business of social work, make use of educators to look
after their publics—“those who do not know how to see, who do not understand the
meaning of what they see, who do not know how to transform acquired knowledge
into activist energy” (Rancière, 2008/2009, p. 47)—and treat their incapacities.
This cause and effect equation has moved from art interpretation to participation
through social work, keeping intellectual emancipation limited under the façade of
equality. In this sense, we have a paradox: intellectual equality that is stultifying
rather than emancipatory.
While Rancière might argue that participatory activity offers a sign of equality
as opposed to the inequality of passive spectatorship, we have to be cautious and
question how audiences are asked to participate and what they are invited to
participate in. Participatory art museum education approaches seem to increasingly
value visitors’ enacting of their equal capacities as speaking beings in relation to
the interpretation of museum exhibitions, but not in relation to the art museum
itself as an institution or social order. In other words, the act of interpretive
intelligence is predicated on a deeper assumption of passivity and inequality (the

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audience remains dependent upon the social goodwill of the museum which
benevolently offers up experiences in the name of social inclusion).
Participatory art museum education, along with inclusionary mandates,
facilitate a form of “good police” (as opposed to a worse police) (Rancière,
1995/1999, p. 31), while still curtailing politics or the challenging of police order.
Politics here is eschewed since inclusion fits the neo-management ethos, thereby
maintaining the current partition of the sensible while desiring for absolute
participation or inclusion from the public. Better police tend to not adhere to the
natural order of a society, but are more readily penetrated by egalitarian logic
(Rancière, 1995/1999, p. 31) that comes across as an improved way to police while
keeping said order fully in tact and uninterrupted. For example, participatory
approaches in relation to the museum as a form of good police have nothing at all
to do with politics in that these forms of engagement do not invite subversion to be
taken up by the people and activated as sites of dissensus. Within Rancièrian
perspectives, democracy requires disagreement, incongruity, and disruption, which
might present themselves as the nonsensical and uninvited at their entranceways,
lobbies, rotundas, and galleries at any given time.
Increasingly, practices such as agonism, inclusion, engagement, social work,
social justice, and participation are co-opted, commercialized, consumed, and
seamlessly integrated into the very neoliberal institutions they might problematize
(see Kalin, 2016, 2015a; Kundu & Kalin, 2015). While the overtures to
participation, civic engagement, inclusion, and justice might appear as examples of
the democratization of the neoliberal art museum, they actually illustrate a hatred
of democracy (Rancière, 2005/2009). Rancière (2005/2009) claims that democracy
provokes hatred that is always present in some disguised form manifested in the
reduction of the possible spaces of politics. As Chambers (2011) states, “it is not
just that neoliberalism is not politics, but that neoliberalism seeks the end of
politics” (p. 25, italics in original). More often than not, institutions, under
perpetual austerity and oligarchical governments “[p]roclaiming themselves to be
simply administrating the local consequences of global historical necessity” are
compelled to “banish the democratic supplement” (Rancière, 2005/2009, p. 81) and
depoliticize political matters, shrinking the public sphere into the private domain.
The public sphere where museums reside operates as if it were purified of
private interest while actually working toward privatizing and limiting the public
sphere. The art museum is a public institution that works in the interest of capitalist
wealth “under the mask of the equal rights of all” (Rancière, 2005/2009, p. 58). Art
museums have embraced the participatory and the social, thereby satisfying
consumer demand for personalization and choice in regards to how they spend their
free time while increasing their caché and value in the experience economy.
To summarize, I would argue that the social engagement offered by art
museum experience is a form of participationism. By participationism I mean a
form of participation that is linked to social inclusion (consensus), neo-liberal
individualism, and economic free choice. As such, it is separated from political

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participation in disagreement which concerns social division (dissensus), political
subjectivation, and collective equality.
But this leaves us with the following central questions:3 Does participationism
mark the end of democracy? Does the depoliticization of civic engagement
foreclose upon any view of museum education as a site of struggle and
contestation?
Here we are presented with a quandary for both education toward civic
engagement and participation, in that intellectual emancipation “cannot be
institutionalized without becoming instruction of the people” (Rancière,
1995/1999, p. 34). Such instruction is a problem precisely because it reinscribes
inequality into the heart of the very practices that promise equal participation.
Museum educators (as I have outlined above) assume a need for civic participation
through socially-engaged programming (participationism). This programming is
taken to be democratically progressive, and thus “emancipatory.” Yet such thinking
remains in line with “the fiction of inequality” (Rancière, 1995/1999, p. 34) that
does not embrace democratic participation or the enactment of citizenship
(Ruitenberg, 2015). For instance, museum education that already knows the type of
participation it expects of its publics delimits itself to the reproduction of what is
already in place, thereby effectively displacing participation and civic engagement.
Museum education maintains its focus on the personal and social aspects of civic
engagement, leaving out political disagreement or critical confrontation as an
ongoing commitment on the part of citizens to the practice of democracy (Biesta,
2011). This amounts to consensus instead of struggle, effectively taking the politics
out of the museum experience completely, for consensus democracy as a police
order aims for its perpetual preservation through an opposition of politics
(Chambers, 2011; Rancière, 1995/1999). Stated bluntly, the democratic social
engagement of the museum all too easily becomes a form of the hatred of
democracy, replacing disagreement over its very form and function with
participatory exhibits that give their audience a “choice” and a “voice.”
Yet, the call to equality and participation found within the rhetoric of
contemporary museums might be more than mere ideological ruse. Indeed, it
would be too quick and easy to foreclose on the museum just yet. Museum
education might be reimagined as a site of experimentation with democratic
political engagement despite the inequality which exists in its current
manifestations. As a first pass at reinvisioning this political turn, Biesta (2011)
argues educators can facilitate subjectivities where learning “is not about the
acquisition of knowledge, skills, competencies or dispositions but has to do with an
‘exposure’ to and engagement with the experiment of democracy. It is this very
engagement that is subjectifying” (p. 152). In light of this, Biesta (2011) introduces
the ignorant citizen “to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on
particular knowledge about what the good citizen is, so that the task of education
can be conceived differently from that of reproducing the existing political order”
(p. 142). The ignorant citizen defies any preset civic identity or domestication by

34
education into what might be considered a “good citizen.” This potentially re-
characterizes museum education as an opportunity for the creation and
transformation of political subjectivities not “driven by knowledge about what the
citizen is or should become,” but “engendered through engagement in always
undetermined political processes” (Biesta, 2011, p. 142). If museum educators
might avoid determining in advance specific civic identities that facilitate the
domestication of the citizen, this might lead to “the erosion of more political
interpretations of citizenship that see the meaning of citizenship as essentially
contested” (Biesta, 2011, p. 142) and a ripe opportunity for dissensus. This would
mean reclaiming equality of intelligences by putting the political back at the center
of museum education, thus displacing participationism (and its social role) as its
defining feature.

Dissensus: Within and Against the Museum

For Rancière (2005/2006), the public sphere is a site of conflictual encounters and
renegotiations of the logics of police and politics which are based on principles of
inequality determining who can govern and who cannot. Rancière (1995/1999)
differentiates between policing and politics, with the police referring to the
legitimization of powers and the distribution of roles and places aligned with their
appropriate and perceptible ways of seeing, saying, being, and doing. In this light,
the notion of the art museum “refers not only to a specific building but also to a
form of apportioning the common space and a specific mode of visibility”
(Rancière, 2008/2009, p. 69). Conversely, Rancière’s (1995/1999) conception of
politics encompasses the disruption (otherwise known as dissensus) of the roles,
places, and inequality associated with the partition of the sensible of an existing
social order so that the invisible can become visible, noise can be understood as
discourse, and new social orders can be established. Politics involves the
confirmation of equality of the police order through the meeting of egalitarian and
police logics (Rancière, 1995/1999). Therefore, politics and the police are
heterogenous, yet intertwined.
Rancière starts from a premise of equality that seeks to verify this premise in
relation to actions. Ruitenberg (2015) adds,
[t]aking equality as presupposition means we don’t ask how we may help
people achieve the equality of consciousness that would allow them to
reflect on their situation intelligently; rather, we ask what new
possibilities emerge when people are treated as if they already have
equality of consciousness and already reflect intelligently upon their
situation. (p. 2)

Equality is always there; it isn’t an end goal. Equality needs to be verified through
acts of dissensus. Dissensus doesn’t aim for an overall just society as that would
amount to the creation of another police order. For Rancière, critique is about
35
verifying the equality always already operative in order to break it free from any
police hierarchy/ordering principle.
Relating Raniere’s radical politics to the topics under examination in this essay,
if we commence from the assumption that participation, inclusion, social work,
justice, or civic engagement are part of the police order, we also must acknowledge
that they offer points where people can commence a dispute—the equality which
they proclaim could be verified through dissensus. Here people can call these terms
to task, holding a museum to its word: “You say you want participation. Well, you
are going to get it!!” By leveraging the language of the art museum, particularly
language associated with discourses of equality, people can hold the museum
police order against itself. The goal is to verify the equality, which inclusion and
participation, for example, implicitly assume, through disagreement. As I will lay
out, democratic participation as dissensus is different from participationism or
participation as part of the neoliberal order. My wager is that the existence of the
language of participation can be picked up as a location for dispute by the people,
thus causing a division between participation and participationism. Ultimately,
democracies are not lived in; they are struggled for through “action that constantly
wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the
omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth” (Rancière, 2005/2009, p. 96).
Below I will argue that the work of OM can be seen as a disagreement over the
term “participation” splitting democratic participation off from participationism.
OM actions do so through the politics that lies at the heart of the aesthetic regime
of the arts. As such, I will briefly outline what Rancière means by the aesthetic
regime before finally turning to OM as an occupation of the concept of
participation within, yet against the museum police order.

Art as Politics
Aesthetics to Rancière (2008/2009) should be rethought as the invention of new
ways of being and knowing. Moreover, within Rancière’s (2008/2009) aesthetic
regime, art and metaphor also create forms of subjectivity which can reconfigure
“the distribution of the sensible” (p. 12) within the arrangements of a community,
thereby disrupting a current and contingent logic of inequality. Art as politics
moves toward a dissensus, a rupture, or productive gap in common sense and the
distribution of the sensible to the invention of new forms and arrangements. This
movement of dissensus and conflictual inventions of subjectivities could be incited
by demonstrators and activist artists who rearrange public spaces of circulation,
amending what can be seen, heard, named, or counted. Furthermore, art holds
political potential when it posits new ways of living by engaging in acts of
disidentification by challenging the distribution of roles (Rancière, 1995/1999).
Heterologous activity reanimates fixed positions and hierarchies between viewer,
artist, citizen, student, and teacher. In art, we do not know in advance how actions
will create new subjectivities as art is interpreted and taken up in unpredictable
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ways by audiences; “[t]here is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a
spectacle to the fact of understanding the state of the world; no direct road from
intellectual awareness to political action” (Rancière, 2008/2009, p. 75). This aligns
with “aesthetic efficacy” which refers to “a paradoxical kind of efficacy that is
produced by the very rupturing of any determinate link between cause and effect”
(Rancière, 2008/2009, p. 63) with regards to art. If these artistic practices facilitate
the creation of political subjects who aim to disrupt the distribution of the sensible
within a given society, then we are within democratic action. Here political
subjectivity through action brings together art and democracy, artist and ignorant
citizen. While these are rare occurrences (as politics occurs infrequently),
nevertheless, these interventions may still leave an imprint within a reconfigured
police order.
In lieu of waiting for museum administrations and workers to more ethically
serve their publics and voluntarily unhinge their own sensibilities, Rancière
maintains the public itself instigate the reconfiguration of what can be understood
and stated, as well as who can speak and be heard in relation to the police order,
such as art institutions claiming to serve the public. This dissensus begins with a
disagreement, not a misunderstanding or misconstruction, but when “[t]he
interlocutors both understand and do not understand the same thing by the same
words” (Rancière, 1995/1999, p. xi). Here disagreement sounds a wrong, miscount,
or dispute in the name of the equality of every- and anyone, by those speaking
beings within a community with no position or part on a common stage (Rancière,
1995/1999). This egalitarian interruption of a nonexistent right of an order through
speaking beings in public space is where the contingency of any order is called out
and where politics occurs.
Language itself is ambiguous, unresolved, and conflictual in how it can be
understood and this heterogeneity is ripe for misconstruction and constitutive of
politics (Rancière, 1995/1999, pp. 49-50). The existence of the language of
participation can be picked up as a location for dispute by the demos thus causing a
division between participation and participationism. Members of the art museum’s
publics could verify the equality that inclusion, social work, justice, civic
engagement, and participation all implicitly assume through disagreement. As
Rancière (1992/2007) states,
[g]enuine participation is the invention of that unpredictable subject
which momentarily occupies the street, the invention of a movement born
of nothing but democracy itself. The guarantee of permanent democracy
is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms
of participation or of counterpower; it is the continual renewal of the
actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-open possibility of the
fresh emergence of this fleeting subject. (p. 61)

This democratic participation as dissensus differs greatly from the participationism

offered as part of the neoliberal order within art museums.

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OM
One call for the reoccupation of art museums as sites of dissensual struggle is to be
found in the actions of Occupy Museums (OM). Since 2011, OM, an ongoing
offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has focused on economic disparity bringing to
light the fundamental antagonism of the art museum as a corrupt pyramid
scheme—a contradiction the museum system works hard to ignore and/or
normalize often through museum education, programming, and outreach (Kalin,
2015b). OM uses the art of protest to confuse the police order of art museums by
exposing their neoliberal managerialism and values reflecting the priorities of the
wealthiest 1% of society in order to reclaim the art museum spaces for the 99%.
This reclaiming places the art museum into confusion and dispute as OM marks art
museums’ current partition of the sensible and the inequalities located therein. In
this sense, they are ignorant citizens but also artists who introduce a split within the
social, allowing for a political dispute over what counts as participation to be heard
as a legitimate complaint. Note that such a move is not outside the museum police
order but rather a dis-ordering maneuver that takes up the concept of participation
in order to verify it. Here the art museum as conflictual space is staged within the
public sphere instead of settling into consensus before it is allowed to develop due
to a fear of inefficiency and loss of control within neoliberal managerialism.
In a sense OM demonstrates a paradox and exposes a wrong within the notion
of universal participation that excludes it from this very claim of universality. OM
stages this contradiction both in and outside of art museums that prioritize public
participation. This universal participation is actually a particularized universal. It
has a particular type of participation and participant in mind in regards to the
museum (see for example, Jamieson, 2015). Through this seeking of a post-
consensual, critical practice that unravels the innocence of participation as
collective passivity by a conflictual interpretation of participation (Expothesis,
2011), people might be activated to go beyond compromise and view public space
as holding antagonistic and democratic potentials. OM’s staging of a dispute may
incite the people to recognize that museums are spaces that need to be occupied
forcefully as sites of disagreement.
Ultimately what is at stake here is the verification of equality that is
presupposed by neoliberalism yet always co-opted and thus made to function
within its logic of participationism. OM, by acting on the basis of their own
equality as capable citizens in expressing disagreement with the inequality among
allotted roles, ranks, and spaces of the art museum, disrupts an order through civic
action. Yet, OM has not initiated an alternative partitioning of the sensible on their
own; they can and do link forces with other groups in working toward altering
relations and sensibilities that might budge the neoliberal art museum’s moorings.
Ongoing acts such as OM not only remind us of the hegemony of current orders,
but they can also lay out marginalized perspectives so that others might join in the
ongoing effort headed for further verifications of equality (Rancière, 1995/1999, p.
31) and expanded notions of the common (Rancière, 2011). OM stands for greater
38
equality for art workers, but it also represents a form of civic engagement and
participation that is not included, that has no part within participationism. They
stand as a dispute of this miscounting of the public and public institutions’ hatred
of democracy.
OM might prompt those working within and running museums to recognize that
unlike participationism, some institutional critique and forms of participation aren’t
invited, facilitated, or sanctioned. Through its radical activism, projects such as
OM plea with art institutions to leave their doors open so that “all the breaking and
entering perpetrated by egalitarian logic” might jolt museums out of their “natural”
logic (Rancière, 1995/1999, p. 31). In this way, OM disputes the police logic
regulating the count of worthy participants—participationism is not equal for
everyone.

“shake us up”
Instead of just collecting prints of posters from the Occupy Wall Street protests, the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City could have considered
engaging with the OM protest at its entryway during Occupy Wall Street by
hearing their voices in lieu of brushing them off as mere noisemakers. Ironically, in
2013 Glenn Lowry, director of the MoMA, during his keynote address at the at
Asia Society Arts & Museum Summit in Hong Kong, called on his colleagues
around the globe “to be subversive” (n.p.). Further, he claimed that MoMA wants
to
build in our own disruption. We want to find artists and institutions that
will shake us up. We want to take risks, to take the museum out of its
walls. We want to be a place where people participate, where social
engagement is absolute. (n.p.)

In light of his institution’s non-reaction to the OM disruption, this claim, perhaps at

its best, amounts to a call for continued institutional critique that is sanctioned,
participationist, co-opted, and in line with the new institutionalism, which changes
little, if anything, of the current police order. His words “go against the evidence of
a common world of reason and argument” (Rancière, 1995/1999, p. 53, italics in
original) that OM put on the table.
Regardless, if we take Director Lowry at his word, one way to reinterpret
absolute social engagement is by seeing MOMA as a site of dispute and democracy
where neo-managerial participationism butts up against democratic participation.
In this sense we should read “MOMA” as “M-O(ccupy)-M(useums)-A,” thus
lodging dissensus within the aesthetics of the museum. It is the ongoing task of
activist artists to hold Lowry to his word and thus struggle to be heard as a voice
within the museum community. Yet as it stands, OM is not considered a form of
rational speech and thus not part of the art museum conversation. Until a platform
for disagreement is established, it isn’t possible to argue, discuss, or submit the
39
issues for validation—OM’s metaphoric speech doesn’t count and remains at the
level of dispute over the possible existence of a dispute. The assertion of a common
world—a compelling case for universality or absolute engagement—is denied.
In short, what is needed is democratic vigilance on the part of OM to force a
verification of the equality and participation called for by MOMA. According to
Rancière (2011), emancipation entails ongoing effort to recreate the common in
different forms than we are currently offered. It is an enduring practice of
emancipation that those of us involved in art institutions and their educations need
to continually engage in and support in order to push back on consensual politics
and the erosion of public space. Chambers (2011) too maintains that there needs to
be a “democratic vigilance” in the cultivation of democratic politics that remains
“committed to and concerned with the politics of the police in the sense of
changing, transforming, and improving our police orders” (p. 36). And yet,
[t]he folly of the times is the wish to use consensus to cure the diseases of
consensus. What we must do instead is repoliticize conflicts so that they
can be addressed, restore names to the people and give politics back its
former visibility in the handling of problems and resources. (Rancière,
1992/2007, p. 106)

The current mode of participationism within the social work of museums inspires
consumption through participationism over civic subjectification, dissensus, and
the politics required by a democratic public life. As Rancière (1992/2007)
articulates, “[d]emocracy does not exist simply because the law declares
individuals equal and the collectivity master of itself. It still requires the force of
the demos” (Rancière, 1992/2007, p. 32, italics in original). This obliges the
democratic passions of the public to not be diluted, diverted, or delimited. It is up
to us as people to seek out political disagreement or critical confrontation as an
ongoing commitment on the part of citizens to the practice of democracy (Biesta,
2011).

NOTES

1. See, for example, Kennedy, R. (2013, March 20). Outside the citadel, social practice
art is intended to nurture. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/03/24/arts/design/outside-the-citadel-social-practice-art-is-intended-to-nurture.html
2. Additionally, the Queens Art Museum is a unique exemplar here as they claim to
have been the first museum in the nation to have hired a full-time community organizer to
their staff in 2006 (Garz, 2013, p. 41). According to Thompson (2011),

[u]sing an on-staff community organizer, the Queens Museum works to

engage the local audience in a borough with the greatest diversity in the
United States. These community organizers are multi-lingual and operate
as emissaries to local populations, identifying specific cultural, political,
and social concerns; essentially, the job is to talk to members of local

40
 communities and get to know the different organizations. The community
organizer is not there merely to market the agenda of the Queens
Museum. Rather, the goal is to listen, learn, and act as a bridge to the
complex arrangement of people in the complex matrix that is Flushing
and Corona Queens. (p. 7)

3. I am grateful to a reviewer for these questions.

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