Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada

Titanium Motherships of the New Economy: Museums, Neoliberalism, and Resistance

Titanium Motherships of the New Economy: Museums, Neoliberalism, and Resistance KIRSTY ROBERTSON I n 2006, just before the museum re-opened, I took a virtual tour of the Michael Lee Chin Crystal Gallery, the name of the new Daniel Libeskinddesigned wing of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), located in Toronto, Ontario. The new wing, which looks remarkably like a UFO that has crashed into the nineteenth-century stone building that is the ROM, was one of the first major“facelifts”to Toronto’s cultural institutions.As construction progressed through 2006, it appeared to be taking place from the outside in; beginning with the“crystal”extension, its steel girders, jagged lines and suspended glass windows hovered over a busy Toronto street, while the gallery, not yet reopened, existed for the public only in virtual replicas of light-shot open spaces, huge windows, and computer-generated imagery of happy and 197 Fig. 17.1. The northeast corner of the Royal Ontario Museum, with the Hilary and Galen Weston Wing to the left and the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal building beside it. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum satisfied visitors (customers) to the museum reproduced on the ROM’s website. Even after its reopening, the ROM “transformation” revelled in its exteriority , seeming to deny the very existence of the museum, and the history, within. Wandering (or more accurately floating) through the clean spaces of the new wing (so different from the cluttered brick interior of the old building), I was beset by a sense of irreality—as someone who had closely followed the various debates over inclusion and representation in the museum,the redesign of the ROM seemed to have more in common with the sleek lines and minimalist displays of high-end fashion stores such as Prada than with either traditional or recontextualized museum display. My experience of virtually touring the ROM was plagued with an anxiety over the ambiguous role of museums in the current stage of capitalism and the role of resistance therein. Was it the criticism, the experience, or the new space of the museum that was groundless? This example is a metaphoric entry point into exploring the role of the Western museum as a cultural ambassador within capitalism. There has been much discussion of late on the role(s) played by culture in “new economies,”“knowledge economies,” and “creative economies”—the latest labels used to describe the apparent envelopment of all aspects of life (and perhaps even of life itself) into the smoothly circulating machineries of postFordist , neoliberal capitalism.1 As outlined in the introduction to this book, neoliberalism does not distinguish between the economic and the cultural; the social sphere is recast not as an appendage of the economy but as itself an economic domain. This difference has fundamentally changed global economies and living conditions. These are economies based on speculation, and a formula of privatization, downsizing, flexibility of labour, and deregulation , colonizing articulations of “creativity” and translating the formerly immaterial and non-material into profit. Neoliberalism is phantasmagoric— based on an illusion of ever-growing profits found in increasingly virtual locations and futures. Floating through the new galleries at the ROM, the distance between the history of the objects and the currency of the spaces seemed even more palpable, gracefully flowing around any contestation that might disavow the neutrality of the setting—as capitalist cathedral or otherwise. I started this chapter with a question: what is the position of the museum within contemporary articulations of cultural capitalism? In fact, as Ruth Phillips shows in chapter 15 of this volume,museums are often chosen as choice locations for the very meetings through which the future of global capitalism is negotiated. Though this chapter takes a different focus, it is Imagining Resistance 198 worth briefly pointing out the growing role of museums as cultural brokers, where the grand halls and displays are often chosen as backdrop for international negotiations, or as sites for elite parties and receptions. Occasionally, the relationship is a bit more canny. In 2007, at that year’s G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, for example, socially conscious art interventions and exhibitions were specifically organized in a festival titled Art Goes to Heiligendamm, designed to“complement”protests taking place in the streets. The idea is that the museum can (and should?) be both a locale where systems of power are put in place and are also resisted. In order to investigate the role...