The research project The Museum as a Common Good is based on a critical analysis of the contemporary art world, which is structured as a deeply unequal and competitive system. The reality is that people working in the art world are subject to a casting economy, processes of social exclusion and the hoarding of opportunities that result in competitive advantages, which are reflected in their incomes. This ‘tragedy of the arts’, analogous to the tragedy of the commons theorised by Garrett Hardin, is not a natural and inevitable fate but the result of an artificially created scarcity and a hierarchical management of access to resources.
In the face of this situation, the work of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles stands as a central and inspiring argument. In her maintenance art, Ukeles shows that domestic and cleaning work –historically rendered invisible and feminised– is the foundation upon which any artistic or cultural practice is sustained. There is no freedom or autonomy without the labour involved in reproducing the conditions of production. Her proposal to transform the museum into a home, where all necessary tasks are visible and shared, anticipates the model of contributive justice advocated by the project.
Drawing on the research of Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, who demonstrated that common-pool resources can be managed collectively in a sustainable manner without the need for privatisation or authoritarian state control, the museum or art centre is reimagined as an ecosystem of the commons. Ostrom shows that cooperation, mutual trust and collective action are possible. Applied to the art world, this means rethinking museums and art centres as commons: infrastructures whose maintenance and management must be the shared responsibility of all those who contribute to them –be they artists, professionals or maintenance staff– once the class-based, hierarchical divisions of labour that prevail in today’s institutions have been overcome.
Finally, contributive justice is proposed as a normative model. Equality of opportunity is not achieved solely by redistributing goods (opportunities, resources, recognition), but by sharing the work, including routine and less rewarding tasks. If everyone participates in the tasks necessary for the upkeep of the institution, then everyone also has the opportunity to develop complex skills and to be involved in the management of the space. Examples such as the deliberative practices of the PSJM art collective, with its neighbourhood assemblies and processes of direct democracy, illustrate how a horizontal aesthetics is possible. A museum conceived in this way ceases to be a mausoleum or the playground of the elites (philanthrocapitalism) and becomes a true common good, a home where freedom and equality are inseparable
