Red Line Service Collaborative Rehabs the House of Art History: Engagements between Traditional and Untraditional Producers and Consumers of Art

Red Line Service is a cultural collaborative. One of our aims is to question the institutional structures through which art is sanctioned. The increasing neo-liberalization of the academy has led to precarity of academics, underpayment of curatorial staff, and alienation of audiences. We aim to rehab the house of art and art history so that it can accommodate people who don’t have access to the structures of power through which it gains legitimacy. To this end, we collaborate with persons with a lived experience of homelessness, not to make them the object of art history’s powerful gaze, but to turn our collective critical gaze on art history. Our challenge is to our colleagues, to practitioners of art, and to the institutions through which art is bought, sold, and displayed, to ask what space we can make in our discipline for others to research, proclaim, enjoy, and own cultural production. In our current project, participants attend art history lectures and writing workshops by leading scholars and then craft art historical essays. They present these essays to professional and cultural audiences. What the engagement between unlikely colleagues and professional art historians, curators and traditional museum audiences shows is that when we redistribute the authority to make meaning out of the canon, its significance is personalized – it’s no longer for profit or for discipline but for remaking the self. It becomes a space where a wider community owns cultural production, thereby breaking familiar patterns in the authorization, distribution, and consumption of culture.