Screaming

Content warning: sexual violence, genocide, ecocide.

I’m working on a long, deeply researched essay on “artwashing.” Its elevator pitch might be… “The genocidal, ecocidal people who fund ‘the arts’, the professionals and institutions who launder their reputations, and the artists building power, solidarity, and stunning works of art to fight back.” Here is one tangent that has made me screech with rage. I wish this were an exceptional anecdote, but it isn’t remotely; big arts money is blood money.

Sarah Arinson is on the board of most of the fancy arts orgs you can think of (American Ballet Theatre, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, among many others). She is a third-generation “philanthropist.” She also comes from a line of Israeli billionaires, with ancestors stretching back to very early zionist settlers in 1882. Her mother, Shari Arinson, is Israel’s richest woman. Her grandfather, Ted Arinson, founded the Carnival Cruise Lines and fought in the Israeli Occupation Force during the Nakba.

In researching Sarah Arinson, I read a doting interview in Frieze. When asked how she balances being on so many boards, she says (emphasis mine),

I screamed.

As I’ve been researching this essay and talking with people about it, I keep hearing well-intentioned folks say “…but all money is bad money. How can artists get paid without taking money from philanthropists?” I’ve been reckoning with this line of reasoning. As someone who believes in fair wages for artists, who believes that art is labor, am I being naïve to dream of the abolition of the arts institution as we know it?

But us artists in the belly of the empire owe it to our brethren across the globe to zoom out; the goal cannot be to just cash bigger checks from billionaires’ genocide dividends. Sarah Arinson—or Leon Black, or Paula Crown, or Shelby White, or Larry Fink, or the Koch Brothers, or other right-wing billionaires—intentionally donate to arts institutions not because they think the paintings are pretty or the symphonies resplendent, but because they understand (while we often forget!) how powerful art is. They are purchasing cultural power and artwashing their reputations so we don’t see their violence. And it’s working: Google Arinson and it’s nothing but puff pieces, despite the fact that the family plasters their history of violence on their “about” page. These arts oligarchs could end the “limits” on resources in the arts with a fraction of their fortunes, but they intentionally maintain false scarcity to keep us artists fawning, competing, making work that will sell, writing grants, and shutting up. It’s embarrassing how cheaply we can be bribed!

The alternative is to pick a side, to make work that’s insulting to Arinson and her ilk, and most importantly, to imagine a world beyond the gala and the grant, the biennale and the Broadway stage.

In 2021, it came out that Leon Black—a billionaire, major Zionist donor, board member at the Museum of Modern Art, and the owner of the Munch painting The Scream—had paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 Million dollars for tax evasion advice. Tragically, that is not the only service Epstein provided him: Black was also accused of raping a sixteen-year-old, developmentally disabled girl at Epstein’s New York townhouse. In response, artists and organizers came together to create Strike MoMA, a coalition demanding that the museum remove Black from the board of directors. But they did not stop there: they brought to light the atrocities committed by nearly a dozen MoMA board members (including Arinson)—profiting from weapons sales, creating the Puerto Rican debt crisis, leading major zionist institutions, poisoning water sources through extractive mining, and more. “When we strike MoMA, we strike blood-soaked modernity,” they wrote.

So, through ten weeks of art and action, these artist-activists organized for a world after modernity, calling themselves “Artists for a Post-MoMA Future.” They wrote:

These organizers called for an “indeterminate, ongoing charette” (a collaborative planning and design session) to envision what a museum could look like after abolishing the violence that undergirds it. The question is not whether to take the falsely scarce blood money or not; the question is how we, as artists, organize to end the genocides, to reclaim the galleries, to redistribute the wealth, to create an “earthshaking” home for art and artists.

The corollary of my scream, this rage, is faith. My belief in art is devout—more than ever before. I genuflect before it. As artists in the imperial core, it is our responsibility to build this power, to seize it back from those who are using it against life. May our talent be a covenant.