The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM)* is tasked with generating debate and encouraging cooperation between art institutions and individuals at different stages of development around the world.
Last week (20 November), it tabled a new landmark paper that aims to redefine how museums collaborate with living artists. It is bold, honest and refreshingly forward-thinking.
The paper was commissioned by CIMAM’s Museum Watch Committee and authored by Belgian cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts).
He says: ‘While writing this position paper and speaking with artists and museum professionals across five continents, I realised that the question of ethics in art reaches far beyond the museum walls.
‘It mirrors a global crisis of trust between people, communities and institutions, fed by repressive liberalism, illiberal regimes and geopolitical conflicts.’
What the paper essentially delivers is a Memorandum of Care and Understanding (MoCU), but it is so much more.
So, what’s in it, and how is it helpful to artists in Australia?
CIMAM’s rethink of artist-museum relationships
CIMAM recommends the need to work beyond the contract
The Executive Summary states the paper has arisen ‘from the recognition that current practices are often reduced to administrative, legal, or economic formalities, while the relational, affective and civic dimensions of collaboration remain insufficiently articulated.’
As the art world has become more alert to – and driven by – notions of ‘best practice’, ‘accountability’ and ‘fair pay’, this paper argues that these values ‘tend to stop short of something more fundamental: the ethical, affective and civic texture of collaboration itself. (Simply), ethics in art cannot be reduced to administrative correctness or economic equivalence.’
What Gielen and his team propose is a framework based on three principals necessary to sustain artist-museum relationships: integrity, reciprocity and care, with the recommendation of Memorandum of Care & Understanding (MoCU), and a next step, a suite of five legally-binding modules, including Fair Pay, Fair Care, Fair Green, Fair Culture and Fair Aesthetics.
CIMAM defines integrity: ‘In the field of artist-museum relations, integrity mediates by requiring coherence between what museums declare and what they enact, and between what artists promise and what they deliver.
‘It demands that museums not reduce artists to mere producers of objects, and that artists not imagine museums as abstract machines of validation.’
Understanding reciprocity & care in artist-museum relationships
The paper continues: ‘Sometimes institutions overshadow artists; at other times, market fame or gallery backing allows artists to dominate institutions. Reciprocity makes such imbalances explicit and negotiable.
‘It recognises both economic and non-economic forms of contribution: visibility, knowledge-sharing, rehearsal space and community hosting. It also includes collective and indigenous protocols, where authorship is distributed, custodial, or more-than-human.
‘Reciprocity therefore broadens fairness from the contractual to the cultural, communal and affective.’
What is interesting about this paper is that it is hyper alert to the power imbalances between museum and artist relationships, and to conditions that remove an element of agency in our times, such as repressive liberalisation, post- and neocolonial entanglements and financial precarity.
CIMAM opens the can on repressive liberalisation in artist-museum relations
In an earlier paper – also authored by Gielen (2014) and quoted in this new report – he says that, ‘repressive liberalisation has pushed museums into output-driven metrics, project-based funding, and managerial audits.’
He continues, ‘Their survival increasingly depends on quantifiable performance indicators, visitor numbers, and fundraising strategies. This narrows institutional autonomy and burdens curatorial agendas with bureaucratic reporting and administrative fatigue.’
Gielen writes that artists experience similar dynamics with the relentless competition for grants, which shift the risk shifted onto the individual and forces them to become entrepreneurs and demonstrate productivity, self-promotion and expressive individualism.
He believes that this path we are heading down is eroding artistic autonomy, and measure need to be taken to pull back on this imposed managerial rationality – and administrative burnout.
Alarming global precarity in the museum sector
Gielen spells it out simply – a narrative we are all familiar with in the Australian art landsap: ‘For museums, precarity manifests in unstable public funding, political inconstancy, dependence on private sponsorship and the widespread use of short-term or part-time contracts for staff.
‘This fragility undermines long-term artistic programming and discourages risk-taking. For artists, precarity is embodied in irregular work, the absence of social security and the personal assumption of production risks.’
The paper posits that it is vital to recognise precarity and restore integrity in the face of normalised flexibility, self-exploitation and exhaustion to just cope.
The report adds: ‘Reciprocity and care can only emerge when the shared exposure of artists and institutions becomes visible and politically acknowledged.’
This has a further problem as an outcome, what the report describes as ‘a civil legitimacy deficit – that is art institutions often fail to justify their social value beyond self-referential logics of expertise or prestige.’
CIMAM states that one of the pressing agendas globally across museums is to ‘realign recognition. For museums, this means balancing the distribution of resources – budgets, fees, visibility – with the recognition of diverse cultural identities, epistemologie, and authorships.
Many artists receive symbolic recognition only within narrow professional circles, while their contribution remains invisible to the wider public.’
This is a notion of fairness that extend beyond mere payment for services, but a broader sense of fairness in recognising contribution.
Post- and neocolonial entanglements: CIMAMs recommendation for today
A topic that is very much present in the conversations of artist-museum relationships in Australia, is how postcolonial and neocolonial dynamics that challenge authority, ownership and epistemology sit within the public domain.
The paper states that museums must ‘move from ownership to stewardship, from possession to relation,’ when it comes to rethinking collection policies and custodianship.
The paper also warns against the slippery territory where, artists face a ‘risk of being instrumentalised by institutions seeking diversity optics,’ while on the other hand, ‘Representational inclusion can slip into tokenism when artists cultivate their social, gender or cultural background for personal success rather than to exercise collective agency.’
Care and clarity in the face of censorship
Following from that conversation of diverse positions and respect, CIMAM’s report also emphasises the need for care, integrity and respect when it comes to sensitive topics.
‘Museums are pressured to align with state narratives or face censorship and defunding. Their autonomy is curtailed by politicised governance structures, often disguised as administrative reform.
‘Artists, especially those critical of dominant power, face censorship, persecution or exile. In such contexts, museums may become both complicit and refuge: spaces where critical voices are muted or protected, depending on institutional courage. Integrity here demands a stance of moral clarity.
‘A museum cannot claim ethical legitimacy while silencing dissent or staying “neutral”. Nor can artists pretend neutrality in the face of systemic oppression. Care, in these contexts, extends to the existential: safeguarding freedom of expression and offering sanctuary to the vulnerable,’ states the paper.
Similarly, these issues arise around nations facing conflict and geopolitical instability, making the point that ‘networks of care that resist the weaponisation of culture’ are a transnational responsibility.
Balancing environmental reporting and action with greenwashing
Today, institutions are increasingly scrutinised for their ecological footprint, whether that be through the relationship with resource-industry sponsors, to international shipping, energy-intensive storage and day-to-day gallery operations.
Good headway is being made in the choices museums are making, but continuing pressure needs to be applied to make for a rigorous carbon responsibility.
Gielen writes: ‘Artists face similar constraints: local sourcing, carbon budgets, restrictions on materials. The emerging micro-bureaucracies of ecological compliance can paradoxically stifle experimentation and spontaneity.
‘Artistic autonomy is thus being reshaped by green governance. Fairness, therefore, must include ecological justice. Museums and artists share responsibility for sustainable practice but must also resist the reduction of art to environmental reporting and greenwashing.
‘Care for the planet should coexist with care for artistic freedom. It is often a matter of fragile balancing.’
CIMAM’s Memorandum of Care & Understanding (MoCU)
The paper’s primary outcome is a MoCU that articulates these concerns as a kind of living framework, which is then complemented by the aforementioned modular contracts: Fair Pay, Fair Care, Fair Green, Fair Culture and Fair Aesthetics.
These translate the paper’s ethical intention into enforceable form when needed – and while the paper doesn’t not extend to those kinds of legal conversations and legislation – the seed is planted.
It invites museums and artists to adopt their own context-specific embrace of these modular contracts – and to bring those conversations openly to the table when negotiating artist-museum contracts to enact change.
Gielen concludes: ‘CIMAM’s position paper does not decree. It invites. It asks museums to declare their budgets as clearly as their intentions, to align missions with means.
‘It asks artists to articulate their limits as openly as their desires. It asks both to recognise that fairness begins not in legal text but in the shared willingness to appear vulnerable.’
The paper was been tabled ahead of the CIMAM Annual Conference, which will be held later this week in Turin, 28-20 November.
*CIMAM is an Affiliated Organisation of ICOM (the International Council of Museums), and is the only global network of modern and contemporary art museum experts. Its members are the directors and curators working in the top modern and contemporary art museums, collections, and archives internationally.
