Tim Barrus: NYTimes: We Need A Revolution in Art Museums
I work with young adolescent boys at-risk who do sex work and have HIV. Mainly, I teach photography and video art. The traditional museum and the traditional foundation would be appalled by us. Sex work is a crime.
That makes the boys criminals. The issue is actually poverty, and that is not an issue foundations and museums deal with anywhere outside the box. Our voices are always kept outside the box with its institutionalists, traditions, and money, always money. The boys know they have no voice.
But that does not stop them. Once they discover the power of creating something, whether it has value to the culture that has never valued, and never will value, them, the boys cannot be kept in their place.
This makes them outlaws who were outside the law anyway.
The only value they have to the culture at large is that you can and do pay them to have sex.
They reflect that in their art in ways where there is no convenient escape for the culture that cannot take its eyes off what they make.
The street is a museum, too.
They have all read this piece and we find it a great read because it hits on what value is and who gets to define it.
And it’s not us.