<nettime> Marco Baravalle: The Battleground of Art

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

[ Hyperallergic just published this review of Marco Baravalle's important
new book. Kudos to them! BH ]

How to Free the Art World From Its Neoliberal Capture
Nitasha Dhillon
https://hyperallergic.com/how-to-free-the-art-world-from-its-neoliberal-capture

In “The Battleground of Art,” curator and activist Marco Baravalle dissects
the art establishment’s co-optation of radical politics and uplifts the
stories of collectives that resist it.

***

We first met Marco Baravalle in 2015 at the 56th Venice Biennale, All the
World’s Futures, when we were organizing with the Gulf Labor Coalition. The
group and our autonomous direct-action wing, Global Ultra Luxury Faction
(G.U.L.F.), had been invited by curator Okwui Enwezor to present our
research and organizing against migrant worker exploitation in the
construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. An artist boycott was underway,
direct actions were escalating, and days earlier, on May 1, we had shut
down the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Through Baravalle, a longtime researcher, curator, and activist, we
encountered a network of autonomous spaces in Venice and Milan. These were
not simply cultural centers; they formed the infrastructure for collective
organizing, resistance, and enacting other worlds.

Eleven years later, The Battleground of Art: Radical Curating in the Crisis
of Neoliberalism (2026) extends this praxis into an important and timely
call to action. Drawing on his two decades of experience, Baravalle offers
what we have called movement-generated theory and practice, rooted in the
dialectic of doing and knowing. The book confronts the neoliberal capture
of the art world, while also excavating histories and practices of
abolition and autonomy that offer other possibilities.

Across seven chapters, Baravalle traces the Italian art scene from the
rupture of the 1968 uprising through the emergence of the independent
curator and consolidation of the neoliberal art world. Informed by
Operaismo (the 1960s Italian Marxist workerism movement) and decolonial
theory, the book restores institutional memory around resistance, reminding
us that the art institutions of today were never the predominant spaces for
cultural gathering.

One of Baravalle’s central contributions is his analysis of neoliberal
capture and co-optation in the arts. Art institutions have long absorbed
radical aesthetics, imaginaries, and discourses critical of capitalism,
patriarchy, and coloniality, stripping them of political substance. For
example, Baravalle compares two 2022 exhibitions: The Milk of Dreams, the
59th Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani, and documenta 15, curated
by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. His analysis shows how the former
leaves the status quo structure and institutional context unquestioned,
while the latter engages with and challenges it. In this way, Baravalle
examines how collective knowledge generated through social movements is
individualized, defanged, and converted into cultural capital. Artists and
curators become entrepreneurs of the self, competing for visibility,
recognition, and legitimacy. Even identity becomes commodified as a
personal brand while oppressive structures remain intact.

From our experience organizing against the Whitney Museum of American Art
and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through Decolonize This Place and
Strike MoMA, this framework sheds light on the counterinsurgency strategies
cultural institutions use to co-opt dissent on behalf of the state.
Institutions do not simply exercise soft power; they determine what can be
said, remembered, recognized, and valued. Co-optation is not simply the
appropriation of radical aesthetics, but a political process through which
movements and their demands are contained and neutralized. When those
demands can no longer be absorbed through representation, institutions
resort to censorship, exclusion, and discipline.

Baravalle’s second important contribution offers “alter-institutionality”
to describe forms of collective non-neoliberal organization of the art
field. Drawing from cultural and activist collectives including Taring Padi
in Indonesia, the Owneh Initiative and The Question of Funding in
Palestine, S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice (which he has been part of for two
decades), and Strike MoMA in New York, he identifies forms of
self-organization grounded in cooperation, collective care, and the defense
of ways of practicing art that do not abide by the market.

These abolitionist practices are oriented toward life and land. They create
spaces where the rigid roles of artist and curator loosen, instead forming
a collective that gathers, organizes, redistributes resources, and
prioritizes solidarity, autonomy, and mutual aid over individual
advancement and careerism. They mark a shift from the individual curator to
the assembly, from temporary events to rooted organization, and from
neoliberal nomadism to what Baravalle calls “radical permanence.” That
process requires mutually reinforcing methods of abolition and autonomy:
dismantling structures of domination while also building the coalitions and
frameworks through which other ways of living become possible.

Strike MoMA, for example, was not simply a protest against a museum.
Through 10 weeks of art and action in 2021, it sought to create another
world outside the museum’s doors, bringing together food, care, collective
education, and political organizing. People gathered beyond issue silos,
and interconnected struggles were the foundation for collective action and
aesthetics. Baravalle’s concept of radical permanence is particularly
generative here. It resonates with the Palestinian practice of sumud, or
steadfastness: persisting, connecting, and building under conditions
designed to make it impossible to do so.

Palestine brings the limits of neoliberal capture into sharpest focus.
Baravalle observes that Israel’s genocide in Gaza has exposed a shift
within cultural institutions from co-optation toward censorship and
“colonial disciplining.” Following October 7, 2023, museums and
universities increasingly relied on coercive measures when solidarity with
Palestinian liberation could no longer be contained through representation
alone.

We have organized around Palestine and the art system since 2010 and
encountered these mechanisms long before October 7. What has become
increasingly clear is that museums can accept the representation of
Palestine as identity, suffering, or cultural expression, but not as a
structure of settler colonialism or a liberation struggle that calls the
institution’s relationship to philanthropy and colonial power into
question. Palestine gets invoked while the conditions producing Palestinian
dispossession remain untouched.

This contradiction is not unique to Palestine. During our organizing at the
2019 Whitney Biennial against then-Vice Chair Warren Kanders, who runs the
company that owns weapons manufacturer Safariland, a celebrated exhibition
of diversity was housed in a museum whose leadership was implicated in the
same violence that many of the participating artists were challenging in
their work. During Strike MoMA, the museum became something resembling a
fortress, defended by a militarized security apparatus. These experiences
laid bare how cultural institutions mediate a reality propelled by war,
colonialism, and capital, and will crack down on dissent when their
legitimacy is threatened.

Ultimately, The Battleground of Art is a book about worldmaking. Baravalle
advances what he calls “insurgent universality” as a method for connecting
linked struggles without erasing their histories and specificities. In the
settler-colonial United States, this requires confronting stolen land,
stolen bodies, and the institutions built through their dispossession. Each
institution has its own relationship to land, capital, and colonialism; its
archives are our receipts. Palestine is not the exception. Palestine is
everywhere. What it exposes are structures of dispossession,
militarization, and capitalist domination already operating across the
world.

The task is to move beyond representation and token solidarity and toward
autonomous, networked infrastructures connecting struggles in Venice, New
York, Palestine, and beyond. In this way, Baravalle has not only given us a
relevant book but a toolkit for focusing on infrastructure and collectivity
as ways to build power and transform our reality. The question is not
simply what kind of art institutions we want, but what kind of world we are
prepared to create together.

The Battleground of Art: Radical Curating in the Crisis of Neoliberalism
(2026) by Marco Baravalle is published by Verso Books. It is available
online and through independent booksellers.
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