Book review. Shaked N (2022) Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections
2025/03/27 by Tobin Ripley, Amanda
paper · doi:10.60633/tfj.i04.106
Abstract
This review focuses on Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (2022) and its dissection of the system of philanthrocapitalism in the financing of museum operations. The review asserts the importance of engaging with Shaked’s analysis as a means of recognizing the complicity of museum workers with these systems of wealth accumulation. Shaked demonstrates how existing systems of philanthropic giving uphold white supremacy and imperial hegemony by concentrating wealth and decision-making power in the hands of boards of trustees. To enact liberatory museum practices and ethics, therefore, museum workers and activists must also transform funding and governance.
Related
- The Political Economy of Museums
- Garthe C.J. (2022), The Sustainable Museum. How Museums Contribute to the Great Transformation, London: Routledge, 260 pp.
- ‘Towards a truly global art history’. Review of: 20th Century Indian Art: Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary by Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, Rakhee Balaram, London: Thames and Hudson 2022, 744 pp., heavily illustrated, £85.00, ISBN-10: 0500023328, ISBN-13: 978-0500023327
- Meaningful Engagement With an Art Museum Collection
- Title: ‘Changing images: reciprocity between nineteenth-century paintings conservation and art history’. Review of: Matthew Hayes, The Renaissance Restored. Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in nineteenth-century Europe, Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2021, 208 pp., USD 65,00, ISBN 9781606066966 (paperback)