Critique and Struggle. Racial Capitalism, Social Reproduction, and "The Uses of Art" in European Museums

Supervisor/s: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marcus Verhagen

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Funding: FCT

This thesis examines the program "The Uses of Art - The Legacy of 1848 and 1989" (2013-2017), the first long-term collaborative project of L'Internationale, a European confederation of museums known for their critical approach to art institutions. Initiated in the wake of the post-2008 dismantling of European welfare systems and funded by the EU's Creative Europe program, "The Uses of Art" posited that museums must transform into platforms capable of mediating new political subjectivities and renegotiating the social contract of culture in response to the perceived decline of European social democracy. Focusing on three institutional projects - the exhibitions Museum of Arte Útil (2013-2014) at the Van Abbemuseum, Really Useful Knowledge (2014-2015) at the Museo Reina Sofía, and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art's subsequent commitment to a user-generated museum model - this thesis contends that a fertile critical perspective on "The Uses of Art" emerges precisely in the space that separates the art museum as "a space of permissible critique" (Black, 2016a) from the collective struggles that target the modes of reproduction rendering feminized and racialized lives unlivable.

Drawing on Marxist-feminist art criticism that situates the appeal of "useful art" and propositions for a "useful museum" against the backdrop of "austerity" and the so-called "migration crisis" - twin phenomena that exposed the systemic dismantling of European welfare states through policies privatizing social reproduction while expanding police and border controls - the study deploys the concept of "non-relation" to describe the gendered, racialized, and migration-related invisibility of workers that stands disconnected from the radicality professed in institutional discourse, despite those workers' essential role in reproducing the museum's infrastructure. To this critique, the thesis engages with a second, indispensable pillar: the Black radical tradition's dismantling of the post-Enlightenment regime of humanity within which the social contract of culture - the very contract to be renegotiated - is embedded.

Methodologically, the study approaches the museum as a "set of relationships" (Gilmore, 2007), drawing loosely on institutional ethnography to examine the (dis)articulation between the museum's public frontend and its workplace backend. Through interviews conducted across institutional hierarchies, it traces the gap between what museums say they do and what they "do do" (Ahmed, 2012).

The final chapter examines practices that treat the institution's internal contradictions as a site of political organization. These practices, theorized through the lens of "infrastructural critique" (Vishmidt, 2017; 2021), do not offer a fixed blueprint for reform but delineate a "negative space" of possibilities. At its core, this thesis asks whether the horizon of art - that space of "permissible critique" that is nevertheless not conducive to collective struggle - is the institution, or the social world.