An institution is de-facto a power structure – something that must constantly be regulated to avoid abuse-of-power – in the art field this requires more open discussions about ethics of museums.
A museum is composed of a series of power hierarchies that require discussions on ethics. In the following article case studies illustrate the lack of discussion on this theme and the necessity for demanding transparency.
Many roles, public-facing and behind-closed-doors, make up the power structure of its day-to-day operations. Whether representing a public or private museum, the director is the public face of the institution and held to public scrutiny. While the director’s role is one of visibility, they are not at the top of the institution’s pyramidical power structure. Here lies the board of directors—a group of elected or chosen members who occasionally meet to discuss the institution’s direction and policy, and to review the director’s performance.
The board of directors can be chosen by various means. Sometimes the board of an institution is composed of people from the world of business since they need to oversee the organisation’s financial feasibility as well as yearly reports and bookkeeping. However, recent moves have campaigned for the inclusion of artists and curators on institutions’ boards to represent these professions and cater to more diverse audiences. The board is responsible for hiring and firing the director, which means they need to find suitable applicants and discern who will fit the job.
Because the board has the power to dismiss a director, many rules and ethics have been written by various organisations such as the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CiMAM)1 and the International Council of Museums (iCOM)2 to regulate abuse-of-power and conflict-of-interest. There are strict ethical standards regarding the private collecting practices of members of boards and, in the case of them being artists or cultural producers, including their work in exhibitions. For instance, the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization clearly writes out the following guidelines:
“Private business interests should be declared and the trustee should withdraw from any decisions on purchase of goods or services that might benefit the trustee directly or indirectly. Consultants who are trustees should not do paid work for the museum while serving on the board. Artists who are trustees may not donate works of their own art to the permanent collection or be considered for an exhibition of their work, either solo, group or juried.”**3**
Yet, these rules and ethics are scribbled paper so long as there is no watchdog institution or consequences for breaking them. While CiMAM could serve this role, there is a focus on rewarding good practices rather than whistleblowing bad practices. In recognition of the extent of the impossibility of whistleblowing in the artworld, the examples below are samples of platforms, artists, and cultural agents working for public and private institutions that represent good ethical examples of how art institutions are run. Even so, it is not clear which policies they subscribe to since board members are publicly listed as participating in the programming, but no disclaimers are deemed necessary.
When active board members participate in an institution’s programming, we should ask under which conditions they were invited. For instance, it seems to be common practice at Haus der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin to invite the advisory board to participate as speakers in programmed events. In 2019, for instance, sitting Advisory Board member Ranjit Hoskoté participated in an event series called “New Alphabet School #1 Translating.”**4** And in 2017, Mustafa Hussain Shabbir gave a lecture at the same institution.5 The board should be well aware of programming and be involved where it can help in its individual members’ areas of expertise, but we should also be able to demand more transparency about an individual’s role within the institution and to know if these are paid roles going out to the very people who are supervising the programming. But the HKW is far from an outlier in these practices. Private organisations follow suit, such as TBA21, where artistic board member Janet Cardiff hosted a conversation with the current commissioned artist Ragnar Kjartansson.6
Political intervention in museums has also been heavily criticised, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the UK,7 which makes it odd that HKW would appoint the German Minister of Culture Claudia Roth as the Chairwoman of the Supervisory Board of their institution.8 In fact, political intervention is woven into the fabric of public institutions in Germany as well as Spain, but for unknown reasons this is not criticised. Spain’s flagship modern and contemporary art museum, the Reina Sofía, has a board of trustees stacked with members of the current ruling PSOE political party. This board is chaired by the minister of culture and sports Miquel Iceta Llorens, and is also composed of current and former ministers including Ángeles González-Sinde Reig, Beatriz Corredor, Víctor Francos Díaz, and Eduardo Fernández Palomares among others.9
In theory, each institution should draft and provide transparent access to a code of governance and a good example of this is the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.10 This museum not only lists the members of the board of directors, but cross-references their other public roles in institutions as well as financial and corporate boards transparently to the public. They also provide the end of year report, which the board is responsible for preparing in a publicly accessible PDF on their website.11 But this well-designed end-of-year report seems too clean: it includes no mention of complaints, and serves to justify the museum’s existence to funders. There is no incentive to write about problems, mistakes, or admit accountability. On top of this, the year report is only available in its summary form, which might make the public wonder why they don’t want to publish the full report. One institution that publishes a full and fun report with graphics that make it user-friendly is the Kunsthalle Basel, which also happens to clearly write down its commission policy for governance.12
Transparency is one of the biggest problems around artistic institutions and their board of directors. Most museum boards remain in a simple and difficult to access list without term dates, or simply, not mentioned at all. Legal expert on governance Paula Cozzi Goedert assures that “leaders of non-profit organizations should always act assuming that everything they say and do is on public display. If disclosure of the facts would make the leaders proud, then they are probably headed down the right path. If not, stop, think, and get advice before proceeding.”**13** Transparency is the single best anti-corruption policy available and one used far too infrequently among artistic institutions.
The artworld has a strange tendency of believing that cultural institutions are de facto good and that cultural agents are ethical in comparison to the world of business. Yet, when it comes to boards of directors, ethics and codes of conduct are far better developed and implemented in the world of finance. Artists and curators are some of the most devoted audience of museums and are also the first to lose out when corruption, gatekeeping, and cronyism remain unchallenged within the contemporary art museum sector. Therefore, artists and curators must demand that ethics are defined and followed within the art context, and successful examples abound. Art schools don’t teach about the power structures of museums, and as such, many people who live attempting to enter this shadowy world are left without knowing what to expect and how to protect themselves when interacting with these structures for the first time.
There are examples of institutions that go so far as to feature works of board members within their exhibition space—which will not be mentioned here—but the problem remains that there is no ethical watchdog organisation in the arts. Nobody reviews the behaviour of boards and nobody is held accountable for errors; funders continue to support institutions that have regularly violated ethical boundaries; codes are written only as suggestions that are never fully applied or enforced anywhere. This means all of the work, studies, and rules written for boards of directors by iCOM, CiMAM, and other organisations are structures as strong as a wet paper bag.