The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum

Abstract

May 1, 1983: I remember the drizzle and cold of that spring morning, as the feminist section of the May Day parade formed up at R6publique. Once we started moving out, carrying our banners for the march towards the Place de la Bastille, we began our chant. "Qui paie ses dettes s'enrichit," it went, "qui paie ses dettes s'enrichit," in a reminder to Mitterand's newly appointed Minister of Women's Affairs that the Socialists' campaign promises were still deeply in arrears. Looking back at that cry now, from a perspective firmly situated at the end of the '80s, sometimes referred to as "the roaring '80s," the idea that paying your debts makes you rich seems pathetically naive. What make you rich, we have been taught by a decade of casino capitalism, is precisely the opposite. What makes you rich, fabulously rich, beyond your wildest dreams, is leveraging. July 17, 1990: Coolly insulated from the heat wave outside, Suzanne Page and I are walking through her exhibition of works from the Panza Collection, an installation that, except for three or four small galleries, entirely fills the Mus&e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. At first I am extremely happy to encounter these objects many of them old friends I have not seen since their early days of exhibition in the 1960s as they triumphantly fill vast suites of galleries, having muscled everything else off the walls to create that experience of articulated spatial presence specific to Minimalism. The importance of this space as a vehicle for the works is something Suzanne Page is conscious of as she describes the desperate effort of remodeling vast tracts of the museum to give it the burnished neutrality necessary to function as background to these Flavins and Andres and Morrises. Indeed, it is her focus on the space as a kind of reified and abstracted entity that I finally find most arresting. This climaxes at the point when she