Noah Fischer — Occupy a Museum Near You
Reconstructed from the original truthisconcrete.org via the Wayback Machine. Source: wayback:truthisconcrete.org/interviews/occupy-a-museum-near-you/:20220116
A conversation with the artist Noah Fischer, initiator of Occupy Museum New York, about how the 1 per cent controls what the 99 per cent gets to see as art. New York, 6 November 2011, updated via email in January 2012.
Fischer describes Occupy Museums as a consensus-run collective that emerged from the broader Occupy Wall Street movement: ‘We are trying to forget about the drive toward individualism and hierarchy, which is so much a part of the capitalistic regime.’
The core argument: today museums are an important part of the neoliberal system. ‘Museums are like temples of this system, actually; they reproduce the values of capital and the taste of the 1%.’ Occupy Museums organised protest marches to MoMA, occupied the New Museum, and staged interventions at art institutions to ‘open up a conversation about economic injustice and abuse of the public values for the gain of the 1% in the art world.’
The conversation reveals how Occupy’s logic — the 99% vs. the 1% — translates directly into the art world, where museum boards populated by hedge fund managers and real estate developers determine what counts as culturally significant.