ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the relationship between art activist groups and cultural institutions. It looks mainly at the work of groups such as BP or not BP? and Liberate Tate, part of Art Not Oil, a coalition of groups that stand against oil sponsorship of the arts and for a culture beyond oil. It also looks at the work of other groups such as the independent arts festival P A N D E M I C, and the international museum liberation movement, particularly the work of art activist groups in the US. The chapter argues that there are multiple and nuanced ways in which art activist groups can embody an oppositional stance to the art world and to institutional practice. This chapter not only looks at the way in which groups navigate and oppose those spaces and reclaim them for their own aesthetic-political practices, putting forward particular versions of site-specific work, but also looks at the ways in which these protests present a challenge to various levels of institutional practice and cultural practice more broadly, enacting in this way new and distinctive forms of (institutional) critique that illuminate the role of museums today as contested sites of culture and power.
