Occupy Museums, Debtfair (2017).
The 2017 Whitney Biennial, the seventy-eighth installment of the longest-running survey of American art, arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics. Throughout the exhibition, artists challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community. The Biennial features sixty-three individuals and collectives whose work takes a wide variety of forms, from painting and installation to activism and video-game design.
Occupy Museums
Floor 5
(Arthur Polendo, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fischer, and Tal Beery)
Founded 2011
Formed during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Occupy Museums connects the struggle for economic and social equity to art institutions, highlighting instances when they propagate and normalize injustice. In 2012, the collective launched Debtfair, an exhibition platform that categorizes artists according to their debts and other financial realities. The system reveals the relationships binding individuals to the banks holding their loans—a hidden but highly consequential factor underlying American art.
For the new version of Debtfair, Occupy Museums produced for the Biennial, the collective generated a survey for American artists (with a focus on those from Puerto Rico) on the website debtfair.org, gathering data from over five hundred applicants. Selected works from thirty of these indebted artists were then literally embedded into a wall of the Whitney Museum and organized according to the type of debt that they owe. The arrangement points to the ways in which the art institution itself benefits from the debtor economy. Debt markets produce lucrative profits for wealthy individuals, who make up the majority of museum board members and the collector class. In the Biennial, this relationship is embodied in the figure of Larry Fink, a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art and the CEO of mega-asset-management company BlackRock (which trades on every debt represented on the wall). Works in Debtfair are plotted on a graph that situates an art object’s precarious value between the fault lines of an increasing trade in debts on one hand and the ultra luxury asset market for contemporary art on the other. With Debtfair, Occupy Museums calls on artists and the art-viewing public to recognize that rising debts destabilize American art communities while delivering profits to elites, therefore necessitating resistance.