I saw a work of art in a museum. Content-wise, it could have been a YouTube video, or even just a blog post. And if it had been, I wouldn't have watched/read/clicked on it. But it wasn't; it was in a museum. I stood still and spellbound for about fifteen minutes engaging reflectively with its content.
This happened at MOMA in NYC, where I am visiting as part of a trip to see family and old friends. It is a high-prestige context. The art was a multimedia work about "the unspoken labour force that digitises books for Google" created by Andrew Norman Wilson. Essentially, it was a voice-over narrative about Wilson trying to engage with the people in this labor force during his time as a contractor working for a company working for Google, and how he got in trouble for it. Alongside the voice-over there were large, simple, projected images of the Google complex where it all happened.
The work drew me in and I stayed to hear the whole story about what he was trying to do, and how Google responded, and how Google Legal got involved. It was interesting, and in the museum it was situated with other works of art engaging AI, systems of control, and 21st century capitalism. Very effective. I thought to myself "I am so glad I came to MOMA and had this cool and informative art experience."
Then I thought about context. The voice-over was a simple narrative. The images were recorded and projected onto a screen. The content did not need a museum at all. But if I had seen a link about this, it would have looked to me like a million other links about a million other similar topics and I probably wouldn't have clicked. Even if I had clicked, I wouldn't have sat quietly, listening, paying the kind of attention you pay in a museum.
For better and for worse, for me the museum context makes the work into a different kind of thing, involving a different kind of attention.
It is "for better" because the kind of attention the museum facilitates is so important. I am not knowledgeable about the theory of this topic, which I'm sure is out there, but from a personal point of view, there are a lot of art things I just can't engage unless I slow way down and pay "art attention." But slowing down mental attention is hard, and paying art attention is hard. I can't just turn that on and off. Sometimes art is novel, challenging, or disturbing. Sometimes art seems boring, and you're wondering what you should be getting out of it. For me, museums -- like opera performances and things like that -- create the context I need in order to get into the frame of mind to engage a thing in an art-mode, and not merely an entertainment-mode. So Yay MOMA.
But it is "for worse" because not only is the infrastructure for something like MOMA massively expensive, its expense and prestige reinforce the worst hierarchies about whose voices get heard and who we're paying attention to. Think of what a small percentage of artists get into a gallery at all, never mind a big New York museum. Think how wealth, class, etc. create the kinds of conditions you need to make art and to make it in the kind of way that it will be selected for a museum.
In this case, the art was a story about Google's hidden workforce -- as the artist explains, this workforce is largely made up of people of color, and unlike all the other workers at Google, these workers get no perks: they can't ride the shuttle, or eat in the free cafeteria, or go hear famous authors and get signed copies of their books -- perks the artist is eligible for, even though he is not even a Google employee. While the artist initially tries to involve the workers in the art by engaging them in conversation, that gets shut down immediately.
In this case, the artist is a well-educated guy, tech savvy enough to have a job with the Google perks. I found myself thinking that there are probably podcasts and blog posts where I could learn more about Google's "hidden workforce," and from people closer to what is happening -- like workers themselves, or labor activists, rather than artists in MOMA.
But I will struggle to pay the right kind of attention in the absence of the context that creates art attention.
Of course, it's not news about museums being filled with art by white men, and you can tell MOMA is trying to change that. And this isn't a criticism of the artist, whose work I certainly appreciated. It's just a personal perspective on the well-known dilemmas arising from the fact that what you want to pay attention to and what you ought to pay attention to are often not the same things.
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