Crawford, Jackson, and Hartzel on Stealing Culture: The Internalization of Critical Race Theory Through the Intersection of Criminal Law and Museum Studies

Nicole Crawford, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Darrell Jackson, University of Wyoming College of Law, and Toni Hartzel have published Stealing Culture: The Internalization of Critical Race Theory Through the Intersection of Criminal Law and Museum Studies in Critical Race Theory in the Academy (V. L. Farmer and E. S. W. Farmer, eds., Information Age Publishing, 2020). Here is the abstract.

Consider this scenario: You walk into a museum or a collector’s home and take the most valuable item located within. Society, via criminal laws, would label you a thief and your actions as theft, robbery, or some other heinous activity. Yet, when the actors are flipped, and the museum (via its agents) enters the homes or lands of certain peoples, the law labels that 'an acquisition' and the thief turn into 'a collector.' Critical Race Theory (CRT) gives us a legal analytical tool to reconsider these labels, definitions, and outcomes.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

Feminism and the Museum

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has published Feminist Engagement and the Museum in volume 1 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2012). Here is the abstract.

One day in the summer of 2011, Los Angeles law professor Yxta Maya Murray visited the Tate Britain and was shocked to see there Cathy Wilkes' installation (We are) pro-choice, a phantasmagoria involving a "weeping" naked mannequin sitting on a toilet, as well as a ladder and some banged up kitchenware. Murray gleaned that something feminist was in the offing, but couldn't tell quite what that might be. It seemed evident that Wilkes was making a case that women are miserable in today's brutalist western-capitalist society. However (she wondered), were there any other, more hopeful, conclusions to draw from the work? Pro-choice sent her off on a six-months long adventure of trying to understand this amazing art – intellectual travels that drew her to the lands of French/Bulgarian feminist Julia Kristeva, U.S. legal theorist Drucilla Cornell, and to the strange ways of Irish Wilkes herself. In the resulting essay, Murray asks the following questions: What is this suffering that Wilkes' describes in (We are) pro-choice? How does art help us understand subordination that might be reversed through legal reform? And what kinds of radical changes have to be made to museum law and policy that would allow art institutions to help us liberate the oppressed?

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

A Museum For the Mob

Las Vegas offers a museum you can't resist. More here from the New York Times.