Dana Kopel | A Few Notes on Forming the New Museum Union
photo: Tony Cenicola, The New York Times
Dana Kopel is the Senior Editor and Publications Coordinator at the New Museum, where she was one of the organizers of the New Museum Union. Her writing has been published in Art in America, Flash Art, frieze, Mousse, X-TRA, and several exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Lubov, Knockdown Center, and Interstate Projects in New York; Celaya Brothers Gallery in Mexico City; and AA|LA in Los Angeles. She lives in New York.
In January of this year, workers at the New Museum—including office staff, front-facing staff in visitor services and the store, and part-time art handlers and registrars—voted to form a union. We won our vote by a huge margin, and then entered contract negotiations that continued from March until late September 2019, when members of our union voted to ratify our first contract. I have been deeply involved in the process of forming the New Museum Union, first as one of the organizers and then as a member of the bargaining committee, negotiating with museum management for our first contract.
We decided to unionize for a confluence of reasons. Some were specific to the New Museum, including egregiously low pay and a huge disparity between executive and low-level salaries, a culture of disposability that resulted in massive turnover, and a real gap between the museum’s outward-facing progressive politics and its internal dynamics. Other issues that prompted our unionization campaign are endemic to much of the art world: low salaries for most workers, lack of accountability, and a prestige-job mentality (i.e., “you’re lucky just to be working here, that’s payment enough”), all of which tend to prevent people without outside sources of financial support from getting a foothold in art institutions. We wanted to change the landscape, not just our own conditions.
We started all of our meetings—even well before we decided to unionize—with a salary share. This was a useful exercise for us, and has proved to be a powerful organizing tool more broadly, as we’ve seen with Kimberly Drew’s keynote presentation at the American Alliance of Museums in May and the Art + Museum Transparency salary spreadsheet that started circulating in the art world shortly thereafter. Unsurprisingly, salaries were one of several crucial concerns in our contract negotiations: we established fair minimum rates and raises for everyone in the union, with a particular focus on improving wages for the lowest-paid workers. Every detail of our contract represents a tooth-and-nail fight with management—but also our commitment to moving the museum toward real justice.
I think this is a moment of serious reckoning for museums, particularly modern and contemporary art museums, many of which profit from a veneer of progressive politics and a surface-level commitment to representation but actually function according to capitalist principles of profit and growth rather than any sort of ethics or drive toward justice. We’ve encountered this contradiction repeatedly at the New Museum, particularly during museum management’s anti-union campaign in January and their continued hostility throughout much of the bargaining process. Elsewhere, critiques of the art world’s performative politics have manifested in Nan Goldin’s P.A.I.N. group pressuring institutions to refuse funding from the Sacklers while they profit from the opioid crisis and the protests against this year’s Whitney Biennial sparked by the presence (until recently) of Warren Kanders, CEO of the tear gas manufacturer Safariland, on the Whitney’s board—protests that ultimately pushed him out.
What does representation actually do if it’s funded by pharmaceutical profiteering or brutality toward activists and protesters in Ferguson, in Standing Rock, in Palestine, in Hong Kong, and around the world? As Aria Dean writes in her piece for X-TRA on the Whitney Biennial, “Representation is betrayed by its own nomenclature, which alerts us to the fact that it is not real and it does not make it its business to intervene into material conditions. Representation is a gloss.” This gap between what museums do in terms of representation, or what they say they’re doing, and how they actually function internally, at the level of material conditions and geopolitical impact, is a space in which unions can intervene—to improve conditions for workers within the museum but also to hold the museum accountable and to set higher ethical standards for art institutions generally. Unions will not fix all the art world’s problems, but they are an important place to start.