After the Corona shutdown, public life is slowly waking up in New York. However, cultural life continues to take place mainly on the Internet. Chelsea, the legendary gallery district, is still dead and the major music houses and theaters are not planning to resume the program until early 2021 at the earliest. Many cultural institutions are wondering how they can financially survive the coming years.
But existential fears are a bad prerequisite when it comes to implementing the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement: In the course of the current anti-racism protests, the focus is again and again on the cultural sector. In the management floors of the major New York cultural institutions, between 70 and 90 percent of the employees are still white, African-Americans and people of color mainly work in the cloakrooms or as cleaners, said the New York cultural journalist Sacha Verna in the Dlf.
Guggenheim Museum under fire
In the last few days and weeks the call for reforms has been loud: for example, current and former employees of the major New York museums recently wrote an open letter to the management of their houses. In it they criticized the “unbroken exploitation and unjust treatment of blacks” and called for reforms. Also accused curators of the Guggenheim Museum specifically this house of a corporate culture that makes racism possible.
So there is great pressure to initiate the long overdue structural change and finally to ensure more diversity in the large cultural institutions. If this were the only item on the agenda of the culture industry, the chances for real change would be good, says culture journalist Sacha Verna. The problem, however, is that the cultural scene is still in the middle of the Corona crisis. Nevertheless, in the past few weeks it has become clear that it is no longer enough to decorate the facade with anti-racism slogans: “Now we have to prove that what is written on it is inside.”
–
