1% Museum: The Guggenheim Goes Global

One evening this March, a bell rang out in the Guggenheim museum. A deluge of what looked like thousands of dollar bills rained down from the museum’s ramps onto the heads of puzzled museumgoers below. In an agitprop-style intervention reminiscent of Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 stunt on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, members of the activist art group Global Ultra Luxury Faction, or G.U.L.F., dropped the fake bills in protest against degrading labor conditions in distant Abu Dhabi, where the Guggenheim is building a new satellite museum.