Lesson Text

“IT’S IN THE GAME '17 contrasts the colonialist histories of art museums with the true story of Perry’s twin brother’s likeness being used without permission in an NCAA March Madness video game.” ⁣ -Hammer Museum⁣ ⁣ Capitalism, and the colonial logic that supports it, call for the commodification of all life- everything from plants to people, become fodder for extraction. Perry creates an interlinkage between the practices within museums and video games on how the experiences and identities of blackness have been tokenized and universalised for the taking. Her brother, along with many other black athletes, have been reduced to property, exhibited in the games. ⁣ ⁣ Earlier last month, we explored display as an exhibition technology that creates an ‘other’, and a captor, whose curiosity needs to be satisfied. In Our ‘Confronting The White Gaze’ Channel, we began to unpack how The British Museum upholds this violent legacy, from the founder’s involvement in slavery in Jamaica to the glorified pillaging that form their collections.⁣ ⁣ This film provoked a question that we have been exploring: how does the art world as we know recreate these exploitative practices? In this dynamic, pleasure comes at the cost of the designated other’s suffering; take the histories of the production and ‘trade’ of sugar, spices, coffee, cocoa, and cotton for example.⁣ ⁣ The logic extends to the practices that are inherent to the functioning of the museum. To learn, someone else must be a subject - dissected, disembodied, displayed - all up for grabs and ready to be consumed.⁣ ⁣ Like Sondra’s brother comments in the film, “I’d say that’s  kinda f@#s”.⁣ ⁣ @stolenartifacts writes about specific looted ancestral art and their whereabouts, please share if you know of additional sources doing this kind of work.⁣ ⁣ Update: The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward A New Relational Ethics, a 252 page report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, is now uploaded in our ‘Restorative Justice’ channel.