The following is deeply indebted to Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies.”[1]

Two years ago, in June 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, under the shared moniker The Carters, produced one of the better music videos of the teens, APES**T. It’s an art history major’s wet dream: the couple take over the Louvre with a company of pristinely choreographed dancers. As the couple’s first release together since Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade, which famously indicted Jay-Z for his marital indiscretions, APES**T is an image of the Carters as very much in love, exuding sheer joy in the hallowed halls of the Louvre. Beyoncé and company dance in front of Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Napoleon. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa backs up Jay as he raps “tell the Grammy’s fuck the oh for eight shit, have you ever seen the crowd go apeshit?” He doesn’t need the Grammy’s to reward him, he’s taking what’s his.

It’s a major power move for the Carters, and an unequivocal rebuttal to the fashionable academic idea that the art, philosophy and institutions that emerged in modern Western Europe are at best irrelevant and at worst violent to people of color.  Jay and Bey claim the Louvre. They exploit the tension between their black bodies and the (mostly) white subjects of the collection’s paintings. They don’t burn it down, they transform it. No permission needed.

The Radical Louvre

When the French definitively overthrew King Louis XVI on August 10, 1792, they were presented with a problem and an opportunity: the vast horde of works of art once held by the Church and the King that, seized from those institutions of the ancien régime, were now in the hands of the nascent French Republic. On the one hand, these objects were embodiments of the aristocratic power they had fought so hard to overthrow. On the other, all those paintings and sculptures, not to mention the palaces and sanctuaries from which they were taken, presented themselves as malleable servants to the establishment of a new French identity, an identity no longer dependent on the figure of the King. What once belonged to the First and Second Estates would now belong to the nation, and would serve a critical role in modeling that nascent state to itself; the deployment of art in the making of French Republican national identity is the most ambitious and successful public art project of modernity. 

After the storming of the Tuileries Palace and the arrest of Louis XVI, it took the National Assembly barely more than a week to recognize the “urgency” of aggregating and re-presenting its aristocratic and theological loot. [5] The project was entrusted to Minister of the Interior Jean-Marie Roland, who in turn enlisted the help of preeminent French artist Jacques-Louis David. Roland wrote to the artist:

The museum must demonstrate the nation’s greatest riches… France must extend its glory through the ages to all peoples: the national museum will embrace knowledge in all its manifold beauty and will be the admiration of the universe. By embodying these grand ideas, worthy of a free people… the museum… will become among the most powerful institutions of the French Republic. [6]

On the one-year anniversary of the fall of the Bourbon Monarchy, August 10, 1793, the Palais du Louvre was opened to the public as the Musée du Louvre, inaugurated by an elaborate parade designed by David in which crowds were guided from their gathering point at the Bastille through symbolic displays of the defeat of feudalism and triumph of the people. The museum and the objects it held were hardly ancillary — or even secondary — to the project of revolution. On the contrary, letters and documents from the time clearly demonstrate that it was an integral part of the establishment of a new form of political life and a new form of political subject. 

It is difficult to overstate the sheer radicalism of the Louvre or the ambitions of its humanism. Cold, unfeeling logic would have deemed the paintings and palaces symbols of the dangerous power of the vanquished and directed the revolutionaries to vanquish those symbols post-haste. But art saved itself from this fate precisely because it belongs to the domain of feeling; it is irreducible to the chilly determination that sent so many to the guillotine. By reconfiguring the presentation of works of art, Roland, David, and their committee radically changed the meaning of thousands of works of art without altering a brushstroke. They would no longer be the singular property of a sovereign despot, but the shared tradition of a nation of sovereign men. In the halls of the Louvre, every man is king. 

In the years to come the Louvre’s collection would be expanded with art and artifacts from across the world, often pilfered during the Napoleonic wars. We may take issue today with the methods by which these items came into the collection  of the Louvre and other survey museums throughout Europe and North America, but there is something undeniably utopian about the impulse to display the full material record of human existence under one roof, to incorporate all places, times, and peoples into one shared history. 

You are, no doubt, already seething with objections. It is true that the “every man” who was king, was, undeniably, a man, and a specific kind of man: a bourgeois man educated in the history and culture of Western Europe. It is also true that the display of art pilfered from colonized peoples pictured their humanity in museum halls at the same time that it dehumanized them in every way that matters. Museums, like the bourgeois revolutions that birthed them, are unfulfilled promises. The bourgeoisie cannot deliver on their promise of universal freedom because they are doomed to shoot themselves in the foot at every turn. Capitalism, which made the freedom we aspire to today possible, simultaneously makes it impossible. 

Art museums have never been as radical as they were at their inception, for at that moment, the radical bourgeois aspirations of the museum were identical to the most radical politics of the day: the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The distancing of museums from public vitality and revolutionary character is not because museums failed to change. It is because we — our society, our politics, our aspirations — have failed to change. Attempts have been made, but to date we have yet to make the promises objectified in the form of universal survey museums come true, or even seem possible. 

It did not take long for the nonidentity of art (museums) and political life to explode into conflict. As Linda Nochlin points out, even in the 1793 “liberation” of aristocratic art that allowed for the invention of the museum, “an unavoidable relationship was created between art and vandalism.” [7] In 1815, the proletarian mob had the good sense to stand outside the Louvre in consternation as works of art were shipped away from the Museum and back to their previous owners. In a stark visual display of the fall of the First Empire and restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy, the people watched their hard-won treasures slip through their hands. 

Art and the Paris Commune: An Emerging Contradiction

By 1870, the sentiment had shifted considerably. Vandalism was ripe to outpace liberation. Following the surrender of Napoleon III in 1870, the mob quickly set themselves the task of looting and destroying museums and monuments. It was artist Gustave Courbet who, as newly elected Chairman of the Art Commission, worked tirelessly to save France’s cultural treasures. The Louvre, in this moment of crisis, served more as a bunker than a museum, as Courbet and his colleagues rushed to move works from smaller museums in and around Paris to the more easily protected palace. [8]

In 1871, as an elected delegate to the short-lived Paris Commune, Courbet took on the leadership of art and artists. He called upon artists to

...take over themselves the direction of museums and the collections of art, which while being the property of the nation, are theirs above all, from the double point of view of intellectual and material life. [9]

Artists, Courbet proposed, could be empowered to elect museum directors and curators. He also suggested that academic schools of art, long held to be bastions of conservatism, be done away with. Led by Courbet, the artists of the Commune further insisted that the institutions of art be governed by artists who would be well suited to the critical tasks of conservation, display, and education. The group published a bold manifesto, concluding:

Finally, through speech, writing, and illustration, by means of the popular reproduction of masterpieces, through intellectually and morally uplifting images to be widely circulated and hung in town halls of the humblest communities of France, the committee will take part in our regeneration, and in the inauguration of public luxury, in the splendors of the future and universal Republic. [10]

The fundamental, utopian mission of the 1793 Louvre remains in these statements: to wrest art from the hands of the few and deliver it to the many, and by these means train the many to be the public. 

A twofold anxiety emerges here that was not felt in 1793. On the one hand, the experience of the vandalism of the prior years taught Courbet and his colleagues that the appreciation of art by the masses is neither given nor guaranteed. The inventors of the Louvre imagined that the museum itself would be an apt schoolmaster. By 1871 it was clear that bestowing works of art on the people would not be enough. On the other, the breakdown of the Revolution and decades of political tumult and authoritarian interventions had taught the artists of the Commune to be wary of entrusting art and museums to the state.

More importantly, the diminishing returns of bourgeois society were, by this point, undeniable and painfully felt. The liberation of artworks from the aristocracy (and artists from their patronage) was no longer radical. The state that acted as liberator in 1793 was now a state of violent domination. Socialist uprisings had emerged and been put down across Europe, a fate the Commune would soon suffer. The horizon of political possibility was already receding, and with it, the self-evident value of art and museums. 

One hundred years later, when Nochlin wrote her 1971 essay, even that which was so self-evident to the Communards was cast into doubt:

Thus, even under the most radical and proletarian of revolutionary governments, the art of the past was still viewed as part of the heritage of the people rather than a hateful symbol of oppression. It is hard to imagine the intellectual revolutionaries of May 1968 agreeing with their Communard predecessors of a hundred years earlier. For the artists of the Commune, there was no sense of contradiction inherent in the protection and enshrining of the museum: the values of the old humanism were far from dead in 1871. On the whole, as far as radical leaders were concerned — Marx included — it was simply a question of making humanist values available to more people. [11]

What a difference a century makes. Indeed, by 1968 humanism itself had become suspect. Today even more so — and in an even more degraded form. Not only those who levied attacks on museums (albeit in the 20th century in the far more civilized form of academic articles and polite protests) but also museum administrators and curators seemed to agree that preservation, display, and education were no longer the driving principles of art museums, or at least they were insufficient justifications for their existence. [12] Their existence, it appeared, may not even be justified at all. Perhaps not even the existence of art. 

Nochlin provides one of the better expressions of this despair:

Art — what is in museums, and especially that created by the self-conscious avant-garde after the middle of the nineteenth-century — was rarely intended for the delectation of the vast masses, but rather for a select group of cognoscenti or esthetic sympathizers.

The demand, voiced by advanced artists, ex-artists, and new-left radicals, that art “come out of the museums,” cease to consist of valuable, market-oriented objects, merge with life — or, in effect, simply disappear — is in many ways an admirable one, and one can, of course, only applaud efforts to get art into the streets and into the lives of ordinary people in the form of community controlled art projects, wall paintings, and workshops. Yet, on the other hand, such demands may simply be the ultimate act of the avant-garde, elitist hubris. Once more, the art world tends to overestimate the power and range of its actions by imagining the drastic effect that the disappearance of all those canvas rectangles would have on the social system. The death of art? The destruction of culture? The demise of the museum? These phrases tend to ring hollow: for the vast majority of people throughout the world, struggling against poverty, decimated by war and hunger or crushed by demeaning life-styles, neither art nor culture nor the museums themselves have ever really been alive. [13]

These questions remain valid. It’s true; avant-garde attempts to merge art and life have more often accomplished the opposite, producing ever more rarefied and academic art. Yes, the fate of museums in the 20th century (and the 21st) is all but irrelevant to the toiling proletarians we aesthetes profess to champion. But if we take Nochlin’s conclusion at face value, we forget the radicalism of the history she recounts just a few pages prior. 

A better question, one that has become quite pressing since the late 20th century is: why is it no longer self-evident that museums are valuable to anyone but professional artists, critics, administrators, and scholars? Why are the humanist values embraced by the artists of the Paris Commune now so suspect? Why are we so inclined to protest museums and curators, preening for their attention and permission? //

[1] Linda Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies,” Art in America, August 1971.

[2] Lucy R. Lippard, “Dreams, Demands, and Desires: The Black, Antiwar, and Women’s Movements,” in Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973, ed. Mary Schmidt Campbell (New York: Studio Museum, 1985), 75–81.

[3] Elvan Zabunyan, Black Is a Color (Dis Voir, 2005, n.d.).

[4] Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).

[5] Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (University of California Press, 1999), 91.

[6]  Quoted in McClellan, 91.

[7] Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies,” 12.

[8]  Nochlin, 17.

[9] Gustave Courbet quoted in Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies.”

[10] Manifesto of the Fédération des Artistes de Paris quoted in Nochlin, 19–20.

[11] Nochlin, 20.

[12] Neil Harris, “The Divided House of the American Art Museum,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (July 1, 1999): 33–56.

[13] Linda Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies,” Art in America, August 1971, 36–37.