Art galleries must stop paying lip service to work from around the world and use the unique opportunity created by Black Lives Matter and the Covid-19 crisis to completely alter their approach, the artist Anish Kapoor said.
As he prepared to open the UK’s first large-scale art exhibition since the lockdown began in March, Kapoor delivered blistering criticism of the museum world. “Contemporary museums, they need to stop tokenism. Collect an Iranian artist here, a South African artist there or whatever. They need to really begin to try to properly take on … what is contemporary culture today? How do we represent it in objects in our museums. It is not straightforward. But tokenism can’t happen any longer.”
