How do you navigate a profession where the title is offered before the skillset? A career that for many starts with nothing more than a business card and email address. Throughout history, art collectors have relied on counsel when it comes to determining what to spend their money on and how much it should cost. What we now call “art advising” is a profession that does not come with a handbook or certification. There is no one way to conceptualize it as a practice or define it as a service.

Still, there is a right way to do things.

I decided I wanted to be an art adviser when I was 25 and quickly realized that just because I could call myself one didn’t mean I had any business doing so. The fact is, anyone can call themselves an adviser and that, in my mind, was the problem; the lack of barriers to entry was the greatest barrier of all. While knowledge can be learned, wisdom must be gained and there are no shortcuts to experience. As the German poet Heinrich Heine said, “experience is a good school. But the fees are high.”

There are few roles in the art world that collaborate as extensively across its ecosystem as art advising. Over the course of helping our clients conceive, build, and steward their collections, we are essential conduits that help facilitate the broader functionality of the art market. While we first and foremost serve the needs and interests of our clients, we are also communitarians within a cultural economy that we help sustain and grow. We bring efficiency, transparency, and rectitude to one of the largest unregulated industries, a marketplace obfuscated by the fact that transactions are based on a form of value that is socially constructed rather than intrinsic. Such an environment can be easily exploited by bad actors who see opportunity in the blind spots and a job title that requires no accreditation other than the aforementioned email address and business card.

At the outset of my career I sought the advice of as many leading advisers as I could and found that more times than not the common denominator was their membership in the Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA). Eventually, I, too, became a member and, as of last month, am the organization’s president, a responsibility I do not take lightly.

From time to time, circumstances arise in art advising that occasion a reminder of why the APAA exists. Founded in 1980, the APAA is the only standard-setting organization for the practice of art advisory and is dedicated to promoting standards of connoisseurship, scholarship, and ethical practice in the profession, and to increasing public awareness of the role and responsibilities of reputable art advisers. APAA’s members commit to a code of ethics that was designed to always prioritize the best interests of the client. How we do so is the lodestar that should guide our practices and inform how we aid and navigate the collecting process with transparency and objectivity. It’s the foundation on which we are then able to deploy our art historical and market knowledge to educate our clients and help them transact with confidence.

The irony is that when art advisers do their job well, they all but “disappear.” In its most reductive and elemental state, the collecting process and the commercial art world require three key constituents. Spoiler alert, art advisers aren’t one of them.

First and foremost, the artist — they are the starting point that seeds all art-world activity, both through the creation of objects and the pursuit of enlightenment. From there, the gallerist presents, contextualizes, and commoditizes the artwork, a somewhat paradoxical process of pricing the priceless and quantifying the intangible. In the words of the famed dealer Leo Castelli, “My responsibility is the myth-making of myth material.” Growing the myth creates symbolic value and belief, the glue that holds the art world together. The third and final cornerstone to the commercial art world is the collector. At the most basic level, their acquisitive behavior helps underwrite cultural production and its dissemination. That is what “buying” does, but collectors do more. They are custodians and apostles that reify the belief. In the words of renowned collector Howard Rachofsky, “What starts as a pastime evolves into a hobby and then it becomes an obsession, and then a disease.”

How then does an art adviser participate and add value within this framework? The ambivalence with which many gallerists, dealers, and auction house specialists view art advisers is owed in part to whether an adviser is considered to have made the transacting process more efficient or convoluted. When an adviser is properly aligned with their client in mission and has garnered trust through transparency, they ameliorate the whole process. They can shepherd a client through an abstruse marketplace with ever increasing optionality to identify, access, acquire, and live with meaningful works of art. If the adviser can adopt their client’s taste and refine it to its most sophisticated and idiosyncratic form, they can develop a collection that is true to its owner and does not bear the “fingerprints” of the adviser. Put another way, each collection should say much more about the collector who owns it than the adviser who helped build it. This is what it means to “disappear.”

In contrast, the practitioners who give the field a bad name favor opacity over transparency and, more times than not, comport themselves as a principal instead of an agent. Rather than endeavoring to mitigate conflicts of interest they focus more on how to conceal them. For instance, many of the masterpieces that anchor the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s collection were acquired by Gardner under the direction of her adviser, Bernard Berenson. Considered the preeminent Renaissance scholar at the turn of the 20th century, Berenson advised Gardner on the acquisition of more than 40 masterpieces by the likes of Botticelli, Titian, and Rembrandt for which he charged a 5 percent advisory fee. Unbeknownst to Gardner, Berenson was also accepting kickbacks from the dealers. Most egregious was his clandestine arrangement with the famed dealer Joseph Duveen for whom Berenson would authenticate Old Master pictures and receive a share of the profits once sold. As many of these works would end up in collections for which Berenson was the adviser, he was “double dipping” to the detriment of his client.

As the art market has grown in scope and scale, rapacious intermediaries no longer need be as scholarly as Berenson; access supersedes intellect. Consider the ongoing case of Yves Bouvier and Dmitry Rybolovlev in which Bouvier stands accused of leveraging the proprietary information afforded to him as the owner of a freeport to source and sell 39 artworks to his client Rybolovlev, but not before purportedly inflating the prices by nearly $1 billion. This was all purportedly unbeknownst to Rybolovlev who believed he was paying his adviser a fixed and transparent fee. Like Berenson, Bouvier structured himself as an agent in the eyes of his client, when, in reality, he was operating as a principal. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior continues to this day as “advisers” posture as being scrupulous while surreptitiously exploiting the faith and trust of their clients.

As the APAA’s next president, I hope to facilitate greater clarity on how we as a field conceptualize our practices and serve the best interests of our clients. The common denominator among APAA members is a deep commitment to adding value to the collecting process rather than extracting it for personal gain. What the APAA does not do is require that its members be bound procedurally, nor should it. Collecting is an experiential economy and a deeply personal pursuit so it would stand to reason that there is more than one way to facilitate it. Therefore, rather than attempting to standardize methodology, the APAA should work to elucidate the different theoretical and practical approaches to collecting.

By encouraging greater dialogue among APAA members and the advisory field more broadly, we will not only strengthen our own practices to the benefit of our clients and broader ecosystem, but also further define and distinguish what constitutes art advisory best practices.

Earlier this year, Avrum Gray, a Chicago businessman, donated a major gift of 74 Edgar Degas bronzes to Purdue University in Indiana. The market value of the collection, which includes the famed Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, is said to be around $52 million.

This gift, ARTnews wrote at the time, “transformed the university into one of the top stewards of artworks by the famed French Impressionist in the country.” Further details about the donation, however, suggest that stewardship may be more challenging than the university initially anticipated.

The bronzes gifted to Purdue were created by the Valsuani Foundry in France, which began marketing Little Dancer casts in the late 1990s and sets of 73 Degas bronzes several years later. One set of bronzes acquired by the M.T. Abraham Center For the Visual Arts in Paris has been shown in several venues outside the U.S., including museums in Athens, Israel, and Russia.

Across the years, experts have raised concerns about the authenticity of these works, and now, those allegations need to be considered anew in light of the Purdue gift, the announcement of which did not mention the controversy over the sculptures.

Valsuani casts in the U.S. were acquired primarily through art dealer Walter Maibaum, who sold the bronzes to the Purdue donor, and Gregory Hedberg, a senior consultant for European art at New York’s Hirschl & Adler Galleries. Maibaum markets Valsuani casts under the rubric “The Degas Sculpture Project,” a private company owned by Maibaum and his wife. For more than a decade, these dealers and the Valsuani Foundry’s owner, the late Leonardo Benatov, have been protagonists in international disputes about the history, merits, and monetary value of these Valsuani casts. With this gift, apparently the first of its kind in the US, Purdue now becomes a new venue for the ethical issues Maibaum and Benatov’s work entailed.

Beginning in 1919, the Hébrard Foundry in Paris produced the familiar Degas bronzes of dancers and horses on view in major museums in Europe and the US. Degas created wax and clay sculptures for more than 40 years, and the Hébrard bronzes were cast from 73 of the 150 sculptures found in the artist’s studio after his death in 1917. The Valsuani bronzes, in contrast, originate from a previously unknown cache of plaster replicas of Degas sculptures Benatov discovered after he purchased the Valsuani Foundry properties in 1981. Many of these plasters depart in various degrees from the well-known Hébrard bronzes, especially Valsuani’s plaster Little Dancer. In 1997 and 1998, Benatov began creating bronze copies of his plaster Little Dancer, marketing them as high-quality copies. On sale for $60,000 each, these replicas were commercially quite successful. 

In the early 2000s, by coincidence, Maibaum and Hedberg each encountered a Benatov Little Dancer bronze in Paris. Both decided the figures were superior in demeanor and anatomy to the well-known Hébrard casts. Maibaum concluded that “only Degas himself could have created something so masterful,” and agreed to buy several Benatov Dancer bronzes. 

In 2004 Maibaum arranged to purchase Benatov’s entire ensemble of plasters, except the Little Dancer, and negotiated exclusive rights to sell complete sets of the plasters that would be cast in bronze at Valsuani. Hedberg, who was especially enchanted by the Valsuani Little Dancer, bought the plaster version for Hirschl & Adler and sold it to a Los Angeles collector for $400,000, with the condition that it could not be re-sold and must be donated to a museum.

Hedberg had already begun to convince himself that the Valsuani plasters were made during Degas’s lifetime, with his approval. Certain facts complicated his supposition: the provenance and history of the Valsuani plasters is unknown, except for one possibly unreliable reference to their presence at the foundry in 1955.

Many of the Valsuani plasters differ in structure or detail from the Hébrard bronzes cast from Degas’s original wax and clay sculptures shortly after the artist’s death. All but four of the original sculptures cast by Hébrard still exist. Most are in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and can be aligned with corresponding Hébrard bronzes.

In his dedicated quest to validate the Valsuani “lifetime” plasters, Hedberg has approached scholarship inconsistent with his convictions as impediments to be ignored or re-managed. For instance, Hedberg points to Degas’s long friendship with the artist Albert Bartholomé. Bartholomé was a painter who, with Degas’s encouragement, turned his attention to sculpture in the mid-1880s. Hedberg asserts, as if it were a matter of historical record, that plasters found at Valsuani were made by Bartholomé during Degas’s lifetime. The inconsistencies between the Valsuani plasters and Degas’s extant wax and clay sculptures and the Hébrard bronzes, Hedberg maintains, are evidence that Bartholomé’s plasters record Degas’s original versions of his sculptures before later or posthumous changes were made. The face depicted in the Valsuani Head, Study the Portrait of Mme. Salle, for example, is an almost unrecognizable variant of the original wax study accurately represented in the Hébrard casts. This kind of deviation, in Hedberg’s view, illustrates Bartholomé’s role in documenting the progression of Degas’s creative practice.          

Advised of Hedberg’s claims, French scholar Thérèse Burollet, the leading authority on Bartholomé who has studied his life and work for more than 50 years, replied to ARTnews, “Nothing in the documents consulted, letters, archives, press articles or family traditions allows one to think that Bartholomé cast in plaster a single work by Degas in his lifetime.” Dismissing Burollet’s statement as “categorically false,” Hedberg remains undeterred in his matter-of-fact statements about Bartholomé’s lifetime production of Degas plasters and the history of corresponding Valsuani casts.

Hedberg’s plaster Little Dancer narrative is especially creative. Degas exhibited his wax Little Dancer at the Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, the only time a sculpture by him ever appeared in public during the artist’s lifetime. His Dancer is now in the National Gallery’s collection and differs conspicuously from the Valsuani plaster version in its body type, pose, face, and hair.

Hedberg insists that the Valsuani plaster represents the wax Dancer as it actually appeared in the 1881 exhibition. After 1903, he says, Degas radically revised his 1881 wax sculpture, converting the figure into what he describes as the “inferior” wax version now in the National Gallery and replicated in the Hébrard bronzes. The National Gallery’s extensive scientific testing and structural analysis of the wax Dancer do not confirm the conversion, but Hedberg and Maibaum continue to take exception to this analysis.

In his 2016 book, Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The Earlier Version That Helped Spark the Birth of Modern Art, Hedberg makes other astonishing claims. The lower-class identity and iconic frontal pose of the wax version of the Valsuani plaster shown in 1881, he argues, impacted the aesthetic of pioneering modernists such as Whistler, Manet, and Seurat, and initiated a formal and conceptual legacy echoed, for example, in Frank Stella’s late 1950s “black paintings” and Warhol’s frontal soup cans.

The cumulative effects of Maibaum’s marketing strategies and Hedberg’s campaign to establish a history for the Valsuani plasters have already encircled Purdue University’s reception and planning for their gift. In an announcement of the donation, for example, the university reports that the late Alex Rosenberg provided the appraisal of their collection, “valuing the donation at just over $21 million with a market value of as much as $53 million.” What the release did not mention was that Rosenberg had organized exhibitions of the Valsuani bronzes titled “All the Sculptures of Edgar Degas” in Tel Aviv and Havana. He was clearly not a neutral arbiter. The $53 million “market value” he assigned to the university’s gift is a speculative figure derived from the value of Hébrard casts on the open art market, not private sales of the Valsuani casts.

Optimism about meeting the challenges of responsible stewardship of the collection prevails at Purdue, nevertheless. University spokesperson Dr. Arne Flaten, a professor of art history and head of the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art and Performance, acknowledges that “the university is aware of the debate surrounding the collection. Beyond the beauty of the objects themselves, we look forward to the exceptional educational opportunities the gift provides for engaging with complicated questions regarding the art world, the art market, and notions of originality and reproduction.”

The “alternative facts” in play around the Valsuani casts will increase the complexity of these objectives, as will Hedberg’s new book on the Valsuani plasters, to be released in July. As conversations around the Valsuani casts continue, perhaps other educational institutions will be encouraged to consider with great care the acquisition or exhibition of these contested sculptures.  

It’s only logical, then, to assume then that the art world would make the perfect subject for reality television. When you start to unpack this world, taking into consideration the larger mechanisms of power at work, however, it becomes even more fraught.

Whatthe art world is, whoits main players are, and what it takes to make it as an artist form the premise of MTV’s latest reality competition show The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, which aired its season finale on Friday night. But what is this new show doing to shed light on the art world? And how is it helping to break down stereotypes that exist?

Set at the Maryland Institute of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, The Exhibit follows seven artists over the course of six weeks as they duke it out for a $100,000 prize and a presentation of their work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. In typical reality TV fashion, it also features several art insiders as their guides, among them Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu, MICA president Samuel Hoi, and writer Sarah Thornton (Seven Days in the Art World).

The six-episode show follows a familiar format, giving artists a weekly “commission” topic and a set time frame (as little as seven hours in one episode), and culminates in the artists displaying the finished work in a gallery space at MICA. There is also a critique-style format, in which the judges provide feedback and the artists present their work. However, for the final episode, where the winner was announced, the artists and judges got a change of scenery, and the drama unfolded at the Hirshhorn’s Annual Ball.

The weekly challenges themselves are not as engaging as they could have been. One week dealt with the role social media has come to play in the art world and the notion of “15 minutes of fame,” often misattributed to Warhol. This is all a bit limp: any artist can gain a following on Instagram now. Khan wins the episode with a photo-based sculpture showing them in a costume made from molds of their breasts and buttocks. For week 3, titled “Survive or Thrive,” the show focuses on how the pandemic impacted the artists, a topic that now feels tired. That week the Atlanta-based printmaker Jamaal Barber won with his touching prints based on his mentor, the football player George Nock, who passed away in the pandemic. The episode also produces one of the season’s most uncomfortable moments when Barber, who is clearly still grief stricken, has a breakdown on camera; production’s handling of that incident feels invasive and disrespectful to the artist’s loss. This might be the show’s only high-drama moment, as The Exhibit lacks a competitive spirit among the artists in general. There are no malicious takedowns in confessionals, and everyone seems friendly with each other. The net result: dull story lines and not a lot of action.  

The Exhibit wants viewers to feel like they are part of a larger conversation around art, providing a crash course in art-historical jargon and artistic giants along the way. But as a show for mass consumption, it does little to decode the inner mechanisms of the art world for a general public or that it’s actually tuned into them. Not only does The Exhibit manage to fudge the idea of what an “emerging” artist is, it also uncritically showcases how privilege operates within this industry in general, without critiquing it.

The Exhibit is by no means the first reality competition show to pit artists against each other. The first of its kind came via taste-making art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who carved out this space with Artstar. That was followed up four years later with Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,which lasted two seasons and saw 14 contestants each season competing for $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Artstar and Work of Art had a transparency to them that felt novel. Most of the contestants weren’t widely known at the time, and details about the shows’ sponsors was made explicit, in keeping with a trend that can also be seen on competition shows like Project Runway and Top Chef. By contrast, The Exhibit feels like an advertisement for the Hirshhorn and MICA, and it offers little in the way of information about its funding. In a moment where museums have been facing difficulties recovering from the pandemic, where exactly is this money coming from?

A quick Google search shows that three of seven artists on The Exhibit are deeply entrenched in the New York art world, and that several others have also experienced professional success. Most have already had their first big break.

Before this show aired, Khan, a Brooklyn-based artist and graduate of Cornell’s architecture MFA program, won the second UOVO Prize, which comes with $25,0000 and Brooklyn Museum show that opened in 2021; they’re also represented by Simone Subal, a respected gallery known for working with intriguing artists. Khan ended up taking home the grand prize. Meanwhile, Jillian Mayer, a Miami-based artist who works in a range of media and is represented by leading Miami-dealer David Castillo, has staged performances at about a dozen institutions, including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others.

Additionally, work by Frank Buffalo Hyde, a Minnesota-based Onondaga painter, has been acquired by several major institutions, including the National Museum of the American Indian. His presence on the show is also helping to a larger “Indigenous renaissance” that he discusses through the show. Clare Kambhu has an MFA from Yale and was included in the Bronx Museum of Arts’s Fifth AIM Biennial in 2021.

While the idea that all of these artists are emerging was stretching the truth, the bigger crime is that the show operates on some of the bad art-world stereotypes. Several of the artists seem to represent personality tropes: Khan is the larger-than-life performance artist, Mayer is the quirky filmmaker, and Kambhu is the quiet and contemplative painter.

The dynamic between the artists and judges functions as yet another microcosm of the art world, i.e. whose work makes it, and who makes those decisions. As a main judge, Chiu can be found in every episode engaging with the artists and providing feedback. While she is meant to anchor the show, she also wields an immense amount of power as the Hirshhorn’s director, not just within the confines of the show but in the art world in general. In episodes five and six, Keith Rivers, a former NFL player turned art collector who sits on the Hirshhorn board, makes an appearance as a guest. Were it not for this competition, the artists might not make these kinds of connections that could change their career, which in and of itself is a flex on the museum’s part.

The imbalanced dynamics don’t end there, however. Due to the tight time frame for each week’s commission, the artists have to divide their time between finishing the work and installing it, which for some means showing a piece that is half-finished. For me, this conjures aspects of “wet paint” deals, where a work by today’s hottest artist is so fresh from the studio the paint is still drying. Over the past couple of decades, this has placed an inordinate amount of pressure on emerging artists to find monetary success right at the beginning of their careers, leading to a crash in their market or a career that isn’t sustainable. In the context of The Exhibit, this is only amplified, as the artists not only have to show works that are not fully realized but also defend them to the judges. Taken with the show’s definition of making it as an emerging artist means nabbing that a museum exhibition, the show presents only one form of art world success. The fact of the matter is that there are many ways to define and achieve success. There are many important and deserving artists, at all stages of their careers, who have not received the kind of institutional support that this show proffers, often from a combination of factors like systemic racism, sexism, politics, and more.

Art in some ways is meant to stand the test of time, and while some works age better than others, shows like The Exhibit won’t. While there were sometimes engaging side conversations among judges, the show overall trades on the gimmick of how important having a museum show is for an artist. In the process, it cheapens the very concept. Ultimately what could have helped to shed light on what happens in a world that can seem so impenetrable to outsiders falls flat on its face.

Correction, 4/12/23, 10:10 a.m.: A previous version of this article stated that both Baseera Khan and Jillian Mayer appeared in the show’s finale. Only Khan did. Additionally, this article incorrectly stated that Frank Buffalo Hyde’s work is already owned by the Hirshhorn.

Daskalopoulos, who started collecting in 1994, has long served on the boards of these institutions, as well as on the Leadership Council of the New Museum. He is a founding partner of the Whitechapel Gallery Future Fund, and is also responsible for establishing NEON, a nonprofit committed to bringing contemporary culture to audiences in Greece.

What distinguishes his collection is its focus on large, complex, and difficult artworks, such as Helen Chadwick’s 1991 Piss Flowers sculptures, cast in bronze from patterns made by the material in their title, and Annette Messager’s sprawling 1995 installation piece Dépendance/Indépendance, which comprises fabric, photographs, ropes, fishnet stockings, stuffed animals, netting, plastic, and lamps. The following is condensed from an interview with Daskalopoulos conducted by ARTnews editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice this past April.

My collection was about contemporary art from the beginning. It wasn’t about my home, it wasn’t about wealth creation. That’s why I was bold enough to buy all kinds of big works. I believe my collection became respectable because it has coherence. It never deviated into must-have artists or the new artist or the new star. It was very clear to me what to buy and what to reject. I always say, when you’re building a collection, it’s more important what you reject than what you buy. A few years ago, I stopped collecting when I came to feel that my collection says what it has to say.

Because my collection comprises mainly very large artworks, I—perhaps more quickly than someone who has 25 great paintings in their home—came quickly to a sense of responsibility for these artworks. I have given the bulk of my collection—350 artworks, all the most important—to the EMST, the Tate, the Guggenheim, and the MCA Chicago. I’ve kept some things that I love to live with. And I’ve kept some things that may eventually become a financial asset, or go into another gift or public benefit activities in the future.

As a collector, my starting point was always a particular notion that, although I was buying artworks and had title of ownership, I never felt I was the owner. I felt a respect for the artwork; I always bought artworks for their power of expression. I respect that power, and I think of the artist behind it, the human being who struggled, perhaps, or got inspired, and made this thing.

Another important value of mine is how I’ve always admired the interaction of human beings with art. As much as I look at artworks, I look at people looking at them, conversing with them, and conversing among themselves. Art is important to many people for unknown, magical reasons. That too is something that pushed me to the idea that I cannot own these works and just do whatever I want with them. When you put together an important number of artworks, I think you have a responsibility for their future. I think it is wrong to say, as too many collectors do, “I don’t care; my inheritors will figure out what they want to do.”

Ten years ago, I created a foundation, NEON, with two founding principles: it will not have its own space, and it is not about promoting my collection. It is about exposing the public, from Greece and elsewhere, to the challenges and ideas of contemporary art. That was my mantra. I avoided lending to the foundation from my collection, because I wanted it to be very clear what the foundation does: at NEON, we commission new artworks and borrow works from others with the purpose of making exhibitions for the people. It’s not about showing the artworks that are in my collection—though we did present one exhibition from the collection itself, and now a second one, currently titled “Dream On.”

As for my conviction that I didn’t want to have our own space, I had seen a lot of collector friends doing that. It is a very noble undertaking to want to show your art and open it up to the public, but I never felt it worked. I always felt there was an anxiety in these organizations to merely create something that is attractive, and to repeat something that is attractive if they have a success. I felt they were stuck in their own construction—whether a building, a museum, or whatever—shouting to the outside world, “Please come see, we have nice things here!”

Creating a private museum is a very expensive exercise if you want to do it right. You have to endow it—not just with money but with management capabilities. And my business background says that good companies and good foundations are run by the people who start them and are passionate. They are never run by boards or family. Those people lose track after a while—think of foundations that have no compass, no money, and no connections to the management originally dictated by the founder. You can then get situations where there are multiple legal issues having to do with trying to interpret the founder’s intentions long after they are dead. Trying to hear a voice from the grave is a grave mistake. The world changes.

And then, when you look at Greece specifically, my small country has its own contemporary art museum, which doesn’t need competition—it needs support. If you want work to be seen by people, and for those people to be kept in dialogue with other important art in a way that allows them to keep conversing with art that is yet to come, there is no better solution than public museums.

In the gifts I have made, there are not stipulations as to how often the works need to be on view. I have heard all the negative criticism of collectors who do that and of museums that accept those kinds of terms. It is something that irritates museums and the public and everybody. I’ve been on museum boards, so I know how tough it is for museum management to follow these kinds of rules.

And, anyway, it doesn’t fit with my character. Why would someone impose things on a museum? For egoism and personal vanity? When museums and curators who love the artwork feel the work belongs to them, they are more motivated to do things with it. They want to put it to use, to show it to the public, to encourage dialogue, to get new people and new ideas involved, instead of having to read a contract every month to see what they can or cannot do. I want to give museums and their audiences freedom to enjoy the benefits that artworks have to offer. 

A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “Give and Let Live.”

Reuniting with new artworks and old friends—artists, collectors, curators, and gallerists—from all over the world was hugely emotional for me, like picking up the thread after the fragmentary experiences of the past almost three years.

April was the month of Venice, with the opening of the 59th Biennale, which curator Cecilia Alemani placed under the poetic title “The Milk of Dreams.” This precise and intense exhibition takes us into a surreal space, dense with visions, outlining an imagery that associates art with Earth and metamorphoses. I came across artists on whom I started building my collection 30 years ago: Rosemarie Trockel, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Katharina Fritsch. Along the way, I immersed myself in time capsules, similar to historic wunderkammern, meeting my beloved Carol Rama in the “Witch’s Cradle” section. From there, I passed under dead dance, a nearly 150-foot-long overhead installation by Giulia Cenci at the Arsenale, to whose production I contributed. I found works by a number of artists that I have been following for years with love and interest: Andra Ursuța, Jana Euler, Christina Quarles, Marguerite Humeau, June Crespo, Sandra Mujinga, and Louise Bonnet. In the Giardini, I admired Simone Leigh’s precious sculptures in the US Pavilion; in the French Pavilion, I found myself immersed in Zineb Sedira’s film sets; in the British Pavilion, entrusted to Sonia Boyce, I walked through a large multimedia installation, comprising videos, sounds, and sculptural objects.

This Biennale in particular was important to me because on April 21 I realized my own dream of launching a new location for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo on the island of San Giacomo, a small strip of land in the Venetian lagoon. For their performance in the tired watering, Jota Mombaça laid the foundation stone in a place for the new venue which I intend to dedicate to the production of artistic projects, designed to host research and discourse on art, music, cinema, theater, and contemporary culture.

A few weeks later, Frieze New York was a wonderful opportunity to finally fly overseas and catch up with friends and visit galleries and museums. Among others, I visited this year’s Whitney Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Kept.” I took the exhibition’s title as an invitation—and a warning. Quiet, silence, and, at the same time, the sense of the secret and the repressed that this colloquial expression carries. The exhibition opens up a reflective dimension and questions the current meaning of “American.” Among the works that struck me most were 06.01.2020 18.39 by Alfredo Jaar; A Day Is a Day, Yto Barrada’s film installation on the ideas of motherhood, inheritance, and subjectivity; Alex Da Corte’s video ROY G BIV, which tells a story of love, loss, and transformation; Little Island, an interesting green monolithic sculpture by the very young Aria Dean; and the beautiful painting The Guiding Light by Harold Ancart. Artists of different generations explore stories and geographies in all their layers and complexities.

With the beginning of June, two exhibitions of works from my collection took me to my beloved Spain, to the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville and the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, with around 60 artists, 30 of them women, exhibited in each museum. I took the opportunity to pass by the Prado to see Philippe Parreno’s new work, a film about the last works of Francisco Goya. The film is introduced by specially composed music by Juan Manuel Artero that gives it a ghostly and intimate feeling.

Before heading to Kassel, Germany, for Documenta 15, I dedicated a few days to Art Basel, with a careful visit to the stands of major international galleries, to breathe in the latest trends. Despite the current complexity of the geopolitical scenario, this year’s exhibition was once again exceptional and successful. As a collector, I look forward to Art Basel all year and experience it as a truly essential time to discover.

The fair offers a detailed map of 289 international galleries—an incredible number—giving visibility to their work, which is indispensable to the art ecosystem. Art Basel is huge, and there is a good energy, with a lot of painting on offer and great installations.

As always, I visited the Unlimited section of Art Basel on Monday with great pleasure: here, I lingered over Andrea Zittel’s A-Z Uniforms presented by Regen Projects; Isa Genzken’s installation presented by Neugerriemschneider and also shown at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007; and Ursuţa’s Vandal Lust presented by David Zwirner, an impressive installation that I decided to acquire for the collection. Later that day, I visited the Liste fair with great interest. I missed the chaotic energy of previous editions at the fair’s former home in a disused brewery, but appreciated the proximity to the Messe, where Art Basel takes place, and the linearity of the layout.

Tuesday morning is the time for the main section of Art Basel. I started on the first floor: among the highlights were a new abstract work by Tauba Auerbach from Standard (Oslo); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler’s booth featuring new works by Ambera Wellmann, Klára Hosnedlová, and Katja Novitskova, whose new site-specific sculpture will be inaugurated in the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Art Park in the fall; and Daniela Ortiz’s puppet show performance about European bureaucracy, courtesy Laveronica arte contemporanea, in the fair’s Statements section.

As always, the city is full of great exhibitions, among which I visit the exhibition of Michael Armitage, an artist I have been collecting and following since 2015, at the Kunsthalle. His exhibition occupies the Kunsthalle’s entire ground floor with works created in the last two years, undoubtedly an exhibition not to be missed. The extraordinary Mondrian solo exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, which traces the evolution of the artist’s work and celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth, deserves a special mention.

Upon arriving in Kassel, I immediately had the feeling that I had entered another world. Recently opened, Documenta 15, curated by the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, is a radical exhibition, a platform for experimentation from which I expected a reflection on the very idea of the biennial format and large-scale exhibitions. Based on the link between art and activism, Documenta 15 takes a stance, touching on open and sensitive issues, some of them unresolved and divisive. The very heated debate over allegations of anti-Semitism that it has raised should be followed closely because it concerns the relationship between art and politics, art and history, reflecting in a certain sense the dramatic and conflicting times we are living through.

Finally, I arrived in Athens where I visited an exhibition of beautiful works from the collection of Dimitris Daskalopoulos, and an exhibition devoted to the work of Kaari Upson at the Deste Foundation that really moved me. I reached the island of Hydra aboard the marvelous yacht Guilty, designed by Jeff Koons for collector Dakis Joannou. Here, in the evocative spaces of the Slaughterhouse, framed by the sea, I visited Apollo, Jeff Koons’s latest incredible project. Thanks to Dakis Joannou, among friends, collectors, artists, and gallery owners, we celebrated the summer solstice in these magical places, before we all meet again at the next occasion. 

A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “Surreal Reunions.”

Jina (Mahsa) Amini was a 22-year-old Kurdish woman visiting Tehran with her family when she was arrested by Iran’s Morality Police (Gashte Ershad) for wearing “improper” hijab on September 13. 

Every word in the above sentence probably needs unpacking: what is “Morality Police,” what is “improper hijab,” and did they have an arrest warrant? There are no short answers to these seemingly simple questions. But the arbitrary way the Morality Police functions in Iran has, by design, turned them into a source of harassment for women for nearly 20 years. Even though the Morality Police is a fairly recent offshoot of the Iranian police or Niruye Entezami (The Disciplinary Force), the everyday systemic harassment of women in Iran has a long history. 

Those of us who grew up in Iran have childhood memories of being abandoned or waiting, terrified, as our mothers, aunts, sisters, and even grandmothers were taken into a tent, a van, small room, detention center, or police station (comitée) to “correct” their appearance. This could mean removing their eye makeup or nail polish, putting on thicker or longer socks, or covering their hair. These were everyday occurrences at book fairs, the amusement park, the airport, hiking trails, the entrance of a women’s gymnasium, university, school, or one’s workplace. 

As children who witnessed our mothers being harassed and humiliated in front of us, we grew up to be the young women who would eventually be harassed by the Morality Police on the street, at school—and in all public spaces. It is now our children who are the main target of these harassments—the 18- to 22-year-old Iranian women you may recall from their heroic acts in videos circulating online with the hashtag #MahsaAmini over the past week.

Amini was taken in the police van by force and transferred to the dreadful Vozara detention center in Tehran to undergo a “re-education” program to be “corrected,” fined, and then released. This is a detention center where the darkest memories of countless young Iranians are made, where young people are flogged, interrogated, burnt by cigarettes, violated, and humiliated. Their crimes? Being at a party where men and women are dancing, drinking alcohol, or any other insignificant actions the regime deems “immoral.” Amini was taken from the detention center in an ambulance to Kasra Hospital where she lay in a coma for three days until she died on September 17 in the custody of Iranian police. 

The state has so far denied having anything to do with her death. They claimed she died of a stroke due to underlying conditions she had—among a slew of other lies the police, everywhere, are good at telling. A leaked C.T. scan of Amini later revealed clear marks of head injury and a fractured skull. This was in addition to the visible signs of bleeding from her ear and the bruises under her eyes when lying on a hospital bed. 

In cases of violent death at the hands of the state in Iran, it is common that they hold the dead body hostage. Sometimes police attempt to “negotiate” with the victim’s family that if they keep quiet, don’t release a statement, or do an interview with foreign or opposition media, they would receive the corpse and can bury it themselves. Other times they kidnap the corpse, and threaten the family to “agree” with an overnight burial. In some cases they have buried the body of the victim overnight and poured concrete over it, lest the truth be revealed through an exhumation. Lest the dead speak. Amini’s family resisted such intimidations and buried their child in Saqqez, Kurdistan, where her family and community are.

In response to Amini’s death, Iranians took to the streets, first in Saqqez and other parts of Kurdistan, from there the protests grew both online and offline. Iranian celebrities and actresses released videos cutting their hair in videos on social media as an act of solidarity. Iranian hijabi women (who practice wearing a headscarf by virtue of their faith) appeared on interviews with opposition TV channels (outside Iran) without hijab in solidarity with the protestors and the mourning families in Kurdistan, and Iranians all over the world. A celebrated Iranian football player put out calls to support his fellow Iranians, asking the government for transparency and accountability. And people have stormed the streets in every corner of the country crying for justice, freedom, and an end to patriarchy: The chants of Jin – Jiyan – Azadi (“zan, zendegi, azadi,” “woman, life, liberty”) have traveled from Kurdistan to Baluchistan and all corners of this country of 80 million people and onto its 6 million people in diaspora. The protests have been continuing for over a week at the time of writing.

The Iranian government has shut down internet access in the country. They have shot and killed hundreds of protesters, stormed their homes, and arrested and kidnapped an unknowable number of people. The crackdowns have been significantly more brutal in the northwest Kurdish region, within Iran’s borders, with reports of the IRGC using heavy artillery and ballistic missiles against the Iraqi Kurdistan region. There is so much blood on the streets of our homeland which we dearly love, although many of us live far away from it because of the same conditions people have taken on the streets to protest. 

This is a feminist movement. All the talk about intersectional feminism, Third World Women, and Global South solidarity is here, in this movement and on the ground. This is a movement about breathing: from having the right to clean air to being a woman under a gender apartheid. Women are burning the symbols of their oppression that’s been choking them for more than 40 years, mandated by a patriarchal regime by any other name. We are united in our anger and uncompromising in our demands. There is so much that each of us carry from the wounds of this policing our entire childhood and adult life. It’s chilling to see that we are the parents of the generation leading the protests on the ground and to see our mothers and grandmothers standing alongside them. 

What is unique about these protests is the incredible acts of bravery by young women the age of Jina (Mahsa) Amini who are on the front lines. They have ignited a fire that has reminded all of us of our burning wounds, wherever we are. They are leading this movement and showing us what it means to demand liberation, to demand the right to breathe without compromise. They are burning their hijab as a symbolic protest against the patriarchal religious rule that has been the law of the land since 1979. In this context, burning the hijab is like burning any symbol of tyrannical control, any symbol of fascism. It is as monumental as taking down the statues of our oppressors made of concrete, bronze, or marble elsewhere around the world.

My generation, who was born during an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, grew up under different circumstances. We were too preoccupied with staying alive and having enough food to eat in a time when the country was united against a foreign invader backed by the US. But the generation of Jina (Mahsa) Amini is fighting the war at home, and they have turned the tools of the oppressor into fuel for their fire. As an oil rich country drowning in poverty, joblessness, and inflation, it is not a coincidence that the protesters’ main tools of resistance and fighting is fire: from police stations and municipalities to banners, monuments, public sculptures, and billboards are set aflame. As they have set police vans and stations on fire, the protesters have thrown their hijabs into the fires through the windows. They are burning the master’s house and throwing the master’s tools in the fire. This smoke is necessary in order to breathe. 

As videos of horror emerge from Iran—the police directly shooting at protesters, through the windows of people’s homes, chasing and dragging protesters’ bodies, kidnapping, wounds, blood, and gunshots—Instagram keeps censoring the content to allegedly protect its viewers. This is symbolic of the many ways in which the people in the West are sheltered from seeing the material living and dying conditions of other people, which their governments, with their actions and inactions, have played a significant role in. This so-called protection always comes at a price. For the soft power of a culture with haughty claims of justice and care to remain uninterrupted, there is always a price paid by those living and abandoned under conditions of injustice which get abstracted in the arts and culture.

It is possible to stand against the empire and stand with the people of Iran: it is one and the same resistance. It is possible to fight Islamophobia in the West and stand with Iranian women burning their hijab even though it is not the same fight. This is not the time for opportunistic hijacking of a grassroots feminist movement led by young women to justify imperialist agendas. We know and have lived the devastating consequences that US sanctions have had on the lives of ordinary Iranians. We know how these sanctions have only empowered and emboldened the state and the IRGC , the main oppressing force of this very revolution and previous uprisings since 1979.

The only way we can approach and understand this revolution is through a paradigm shift. We cannot and should not flatten this movement within the Western liberal frames of reference. Words like privilege, oppression, and justice, thrown around our world of art, need unpacking. What makes one marginalized in one part of the world, or one political context, gives the same person a considerable amount of privilege in another place, another context. The dynamics of power and privilege in Iran cannot be considered only through a Western, even intersectional lens, unless that intersectionality takes into account not only gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion, class, and ability, but the context of specific vectors of power and privilege. 

Under an Islamic so-called “republic,” where wearing a hijab is the law of the land, being a hijabi by faith—and a practicing Muslim by choice—gives one relative privilege. In this context, if you belong to a Shia Muslim family with close ties to the government, you are already extremely privileged. On the other hand, religious minorities like Baha’is or ethnic minorities, in particular Kurds, are marginalized and subject to historical and systemic discrimination. Having an Iranian and a US passport and visiting Iran as a child every year during the summer break is an immense privilege compared to those who live there with only an Iranian passport, which only ten or so countries welcome without a visa. I’m not even going to start on being queer, but earlier in September a court in Urumia sentenced two female LGBTQ activists to death for “spreading corruption on earth.”

It is a complex history with so much to unpack. But we need to start talking about it, and the lack of public understanding of this movement in the West, the confused faces of my peers, and the basic questions that are only now being asked testify to how little these histories have been engaged with. We need to write and talk and listen from a genuine place of inquiry and investment, outside of the orientalist and orientalizing narratives, and outside of the savior narratives of the West. This requires space, time, patience, and a real investment in learning and expanding our horizons. It will not be resolved quickly.

The violent killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was a guest in my hometown of Tehran, reminded all of us of how vulnerable women are in Iran. We find ourselves asking how do we—and did—we survive? The wounds we carry are like nodes in a system of pain, grief, and anger that get awakened when another one of us is brutalized the way Amini was. This revolution is a feminist one, and wherever it goes from here, we are already victorious. The images, the strategies, and tactics might change but we are united and uncompromising in our demand to be free. 

As we sing in our iconic Iranian feminist Song of Equality: 

I will grow a sprout

from the wound on my body

for being who I am

a woman

Another world

we will build of equality

solidarity and sisterhood

a happier, better world

Weyant is currently the youngest artist represented by the Gagosian gallery empire, a move that almost certainly influenced her high prices at auction. But, as the Journal notes in their recent profile, “it’s complicated.” Because, for the past year, she has been supposedly dating her dealer, 77-year-old Larry Gagosian.

What emerges from these depictions in the press is a portrait of Weyant as an innocent: blonde and beautiful, she hails from a small town in Canada, signs her paintings with heart emojis, and bakes chocolate chip cookies for studio guests. She is painted as a bystander to her own success, with Smithsonian Magazine suggesting she “didn’t aspire all her life to be a world-renowned artist; it just sort of happened.” Gagosian told the Journal that Weyant “doesn’t speak all the art lingo” and that he’s “just trying to protect her from the big bad wolves,” a phrase the publication used as a bolded section heading and that conjures an image of Weyant as Little Red Riding Hood walking unguarded through the mean art world forest. 

This depiction of Weyant has prompted a backlash. Commenters on the Journal article call her gross and calculating for sleeping with the 77-year-old man, more wicked witch than fairy princess. “Moral of the story—,” says one commenter, “be hot and sleep with Gagosian and thou shalt be successful.”  Says another: “This lady one-upped some of those housewife women – only a 50-year age difference. LOL Interesting how money can make what most would consider gross – appealing.” Even the South China Morning Post expresses disbelief, ending their article’s title with the question, “— but is she really dating a 77-year-old gallery founder?” Not addressed in any of these articles is Gagosian’s own participation in a system that elevated artists’ prices to an unsustainable level such that their markets topped out.

Stories like Weyant’s, as it is told in the press, reinforce the belief that the best way for a woman to have a seat at the table of money and power is through the trading of youth and beauty for the attention of a powerful older man. Adding to this picture is the one of Weyant as a woman over whom men get in spats, with Artnet reporting that Tim Blum of Blum & Poe, her dealers before Gagosian, was the consignor of her 2020 painting Falling Woman, which made her auction record of $1.6 million in May, and that “some tongues are whispering ‘revenge consignment.” (Weyant confirmed to the Journal that Blum was the consignor and said that she and the gallery had fallen out.)

Again, back to one of the commenters: “All of those men wanting to protect her – I thought we were past that but apparently not if you are young, blonde and pretty and ambitious.”

Falling Woman by Anna Weyant on display at Sotheby’s as part of “The New York Sales” art auctions held in New York, NY on May 6, 2022.

The reality of Weyant and Gagosian’s relationship lies beyond the knowledge of the best-placed reporter. Perhaps, the two are soulmates and will live happily ever after. The far more common scenario with women who enter power-imbalanced relationships with powerful men in their industry is that it ends up being damaging for those women, the more so the bigger the power disparity. I learned that lesson the hard way in my years as a 20-something-year-old art dealer and then-co-owner of Night Gallery. Influential men can open doors to success, manipulating prices and getting one’s name in the press, but it is a temporary, delicate relationship. So often, once the attention of the man is lost, so goes the “success.”

Historically, such relationships can be a way of working within a sexist system — one solution to the problem that the Guerrilla Girls, longtime protestors for gender parity in the art world, laid out in The Guardian in 2020: “There’s so few people who pull the strings [in the art world]…It’s a smaller place than you imagine when you climb that ladder.” It remains the case that most of those who pull the strings are men. The problem is that so many women believe there is no alternative. They believe they need the alliances of such men, however conditional and temporary, because there simply is no other viable route to financial or professional success, both in the art world and the world at large. 

Weyant’s story comes along at a complicated time for women in the art world. Even as many women artists are achieving meteoric success, wider developments, like the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, remind women that their bodies and life trajectories are not their own. Even after #metoo brought a comeuppance for Harvey Weinstein and his ilk, the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial, with its internet-viral vilification of Heard, threatens a step back for women coming forward about abuse.

The depictions of Weyant rife through the mainstream press emphasize a dynamic in which women need the protection of men, however fleeting, because they do not have the power to protect themselves or be their own best advocate.

In the Journal article, Ellie Rines, the art dealer who gave Weyant her first show in 2019, says that anyone who factors the artist’s dating life into her odds of success is being misogynist. But what if we do factor it in, but in a different way. What if these very depictions prompted us to remember that we live in, and are indoctrinated by, a fundamentally sexist world? What if we acknowledged that in the art world, which continues to suffer from gender imbalances, a woman attaching herself to a powerful man is not gross, but one simply adhering to the terms of a sexist system? 

We need to do better. We need to talk openly about how sudden success is not the same thing as power. We need to discuss the reasons—both systemic and personal—that women settle for the muscle of men as a proxy for real strength. We need to create powerful networks that remind women that they—and no one else—are their own best advocates, their own best protectors, and that there are other sustainable avenues to success.

We need to change the system, but first we need to talk about it.

I immediately thought of Instagram’s upheaval as a kind of glitch—to use curator and writer Legacy Russell’s word—and hopefully, a productive one. “We change course,” writes Russell, in her book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, “when confronted with systems that refuse to perform.” 

For Russell, a glitch can refer to a technological failure, such as a computer virus or blackout, and also to “glitched bodies,” those that do not fit into white supremacist, patriarchal, and heterosexist ideal norms for how a person ought to look, think, and behave. Her book highlights the work of gender binary–challenging artists of color, many of them trans and queer, who embrace the interconnectedness of the digital and the “real,” and also challenge their hegemonies. Russell adds, “Glitched bodies pose a threat to the social order. Range-full and vast, they cannot be programmed.” 

I am a queer feminist artist who is active on Instagram, and weary of struggling with being censored there. Many of my peers depend on Instagram for their livelihood. Many use it for community-building, which can also be life-sustaining. Like many queer, feminist, trans, POC, fat, disabled, and sex worker artists, I use Instagram in constructive ways, but struggle with the platform’s constant censorship of my work. From the perspective of algorithms and content moderators, the bodies I depict in my paintings are legible only as “inappropriate”—read: pornographic. These bodies do not feed the capitalist machine of essentialized “female” bodies as consumable—as selling agents. They are queer, trans, old, fat, disabled, multiracial, and often female-identified. They have breasts that sag, nipples that tell stories, asymmetrical parts, arms that are wrinkled, scars from surgeries and body modification, synthetic hormones that make it all unreadable to the gender binary-entrenched system.

One of the author’s deleted Instagram posts.

If all of that sounds vague, let me give you a concrete example: Recently, I posted on Instagram a photograph by the artist Laura Aguilar, who died in 2018, to mark the appearance of her long-overdue traveling retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York. The image shows Aguilar and another woman nude, from a distance, in a desert landscape as Aguilar lifts the other person up in the air. The post was taken down, so I reposted it. This went on eleven times. 

The image only marginally violates Instagram’s “Community Guidelines,” which state “[F]or a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram. This includes photos, videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks. It also includes some photos of female nipples, but photos in the context of breastfeeding, birth giving and after-birth moments, health-related situations (for example, post-mastectomy, breast cancer awareness or gender confirmation surgery) or an act of protest are allowed.” The women’s genitals are not clearly visible in Aguilar’s photograph and their nipples meld with the landscape. There was nothing graphic or even overtly sexual here; there was simply Aguilar’s beautiful, fat, Latina lesbian body in a desert landscape.

Instagram’s policies, however, make an exception for nudity in painting and sculpture, in essence declaring that photography is not a true fine art form. After the 11th time I posted the work, my own account was threatened with removal.

This kind of censorship does not exist in a digital vacuum. It took Aguilar decades to get recognition for her work, which is still undervalued, arguably because of subtle and entrenched racism, homophobia, fatphobia and misogyny—biases that existed long before social media.

Clarity Haynes’s Davi, 2019.

The digital world, Russell points out, is not separate from “real life.” It is one and the same, exhibiting the same white supremacist violence, the same heteronormative, patriarchal aesthetic standards, the same erasure of marginalized bodies and voices.

With uncanny timing, on the same day of the Facebook outage this week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and now whistleblower, unveiled her exposé of the ways Facebook encourages hate and misinformation on their platforms. Since then, social justice groups have taken steps to hold Facebook accountable. Kairos, a technology-focused racial justice group, is organizing a nationwide boycott of Facebook on November 10. Among the demands of the boycott are the removal of Mark Zuckerberg as CEO and an overhauling of content moderation policies. Free Press, a media and technology activism and advocacy group, is petitioning Congress to pass legislation that would regulate Facebook with the goal of minimizing hate speech, misinformation, and discriminatory algorithmic practices.

I believe that as art workers, we must participate in activist measures against Facebook, so that as new possibilities are envisioned, our concerns about art censorship aren’t swept under the rug. The platform’s erasure of certain kinds of work—not just Aguilar, but also the photographs of Robert Andy Coombs, the performances of Lena Chen, and the paintings of Alannah Farrell, to name just a few—has the net effect of discouraging the making and exhibiting of that work. It erases art that is confrontational, that expresses points of view outside of the mainstream, while promoting art that is decorative and/or unchallenging, that looks good when scrolled past but not engaged with at length. 

A screenshot of the notice of removal for the author’s posting of an artwork by Laura Aguilar.

We must wake up to the fact that, with the art world so reliant on it, Instagram has far more power than it should to dictate the present and future of art and culture. Many of us have said that if there were an alternative to Instagram for the art world, we would use it. But no other similar app exists, and with the way larger tech companies acquire would-be competitors, it feels almost unlikely that one is forthcoming. 

Russell sees a glitch as a kind of “joyful failure,” and if this outage makes us more conscious of these problems, and prompts us to act, then it has been productive. As we topple monuments, and as museums acquire more works by women and people of color, we must also consider how to reformat the digital realm and the ways in which certain artists—mostly LGBTQIA+ ones—are marginalized there. Culture has become inextricably bound with the virtual, as has our cultural future. If we don’t care about digital freedom and equity on Instagram, then we won’t achieve it anywhere else.

Social media can be a place of refuge, creative community and self-definition. It can sustain artists’ livelihoods. It is worth fighting for. We must hold these enormous companies accountable for their abuses of power, and continue to find ways to carve out space for ourselves, for our honest and brave work. Spaces for celebration, and for survival.