The head of the Serpentine Galleries has resigned after the Guardian revealed she is the co-owner of an Israeli cyberweapons company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents.
On Tuesday, Yana Peel announced she was stepping down as the chief executive of the prestigious London art gallery so the work of the Serpentine would not be undermined by what she called “misguided personal attacks on me and my family”.
— The Guardian
Announcing her unexpected departure from the Serpentine Galleries in a statement, Yana Peel said, “I have decided I am better able to continue my work in supporting the arts, the advancement of human rights, and freedom of expression by moving away from my current role.”
Peel added, “The work of the Serpentine – and its incomparable artistic director – cannot be allowed to be undermined by misguided personal attacks on me and my family."
Issuing a warning to her peers, Peel added finally, “If campaigns of this type continue, the treasures of the art community – which are so fundamental to our society – risk an erosion of private support. That will be a great loss for everyone."
Peel's resignation comes as the art world begins to take stock of its dependence on unethical funding, board members with questionable business ties, and other problematic sources of income and support for its survival.
The culture shift is led by artists, academics, activists, and other groups who seek to not only have major arts institutions divest from these sources of funding, but also implore organizations like the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to cut ties with board members who maintain unethical investment practices.
ArtNet, for example, reports that MoMA has been criticized for having the CEO of Blackrock, a company with deep investments in the for-profit prison industry, on its board of directors. Meanwhile, Hyperallergic has chronicled the fight to have tear gas manufacturer Warren B. Kanders removed from the board of directors of the Whitney Museum. In February of this year, according to The New York Times, activists with the group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) occupied the Guggenheim Museum, which has accepted money from the Sackler family, a wealthy clan with ties to OxyContin manufacturing.
The art world is waking up to its dirty money problem, is architecture next?
6 Comments
It should be the Sackler family
“If campaigns of this type continue, the treasures of the art community – which are so fundamental to our society – risk an erosion of private support. That will be a great loss for everyone."
This statement makes me want to vomit. "Let us rich people keep abusing others so we can maintain our lifestyle or we'll stop giving you plebes event the few crumbs we give you already."
Criminals try to launder their reputations with proceeds they're stolen.
I have a friend who is a Buddhist monk. He says, "If you are a good person, we wish you long life and good health. But if you are a bad person we hope you die quickly because there is already too much trouble in the world."
The question becomes at what point do we help them along?
mmm sanctimony!
like many criminals and immoral people, i use an iphone. i also own apple stock, and made some fine profits off of it.
now it turns out apple knows some of the people who buy its phones are bad people. it's likely they are even aware their phones have been instrumental in committing crimes (calling hitmen, stalking targets, etc...) And yet apple makes no efforts to screen their customers, even though they know some of those customers will misuse the iphone to commit crimes.
Am I a bad person, and is my money too dirty for you?
this is hyperbolic, but only by some degrees. the situation is largely the same as in the article, only that my control over apple and apple's relation to their customers are more distant.
articles like this make accusations that assume a truth which a thoughtful person might regard as unproven. that's a low threshold for exile.
Said neocon did not deny responsibility, so that eliminates your accusations argument. Said neocon was not "exiled" but resigned after being outed, so that eliminates you hyperbolic argument.
Apple is a voracious monopolistic corporation that benefits from sweatshop labor, near complete tax avoidance, surveils users (coordinated with the NSA), uses planned obsolescence and throttling to 'encourage' upgrades (exacerbating already awful environmental practices), etc. Nothing hyperbolic here, just facts.
Does that mean you support all this if you use Apple devices? In a word, yes. There are degrees and conditions of course as well as limited choices (such as which voracious monopolistic corporation you 'choose' to be a subject of), but that does not change anything.
This is pretty much the same as an arms dealer claiming social responsibility by being on a museum board. The only difference is a matter of degree. Behavior has consequences. Act in accordance with your beliefs.
Lots of Trump-aligned Republican Billionaires feeding the MoMA cash (to tear down FolkArt, no less). It's all connected! The new Nouvel tower is nice tho.
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