Institutional Fatigue in the Twenty-First Century

Has institutional critique run out of steam? For the past two decades, it has felt increasingly inadequate to voice criticisms from within the established frameworks of the art world’s institutions—its museums, its galleries, its publications, its schools. Instead, the rhetoric has shifted to occupying, liberating, or decolonizing institutions. Reform-minded recommendations for granular measures, like divestment or unionization, are balanced against calls for boycott and abolition. Meanwhile, multiple institutions have seemingly imploded from within, unable to reconcile their founding principles with current political realities. Have we grown tired of our institutions, or are our institutions simply exhausted? This session calls for papers that foreground the changing relation between art and its institutions in the past two decades, against the backdrop of unjust wars, financial upheavals, rising nationalism, and environmental catastrophe.