The real price of admission for Julie Mehretu’s Subprime Mortgage Mural.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
A very distressing thing happened recently: I agreed with Steve Bannon. In a recent interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat (more distressing still: being at such a loss about our hellscape slide into dictatorship that I voluntarily listened to Ross Douthat), Bannon said, “The financial crisis of 2008 brought on by the established order…is one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of this country.” By most estimates, over 8 million jobs were lost, and unemployment in the United States more than doubled. When the housing bubble burst, 3.1 million Americans filed for foreclosure—or one in every 54 homes. Meanwhile, the banks that helped perpetrate the crisis profited handsomely, as they successfully gambled on the country’s housing market collapse. This titanic feat of moral turpitude and greed was dissected by Michael Lewis in his book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, later made into a film. “None of the crooks or the criminals that did this were ever held accountable,” Bannon insisted, and, yes, I agree. ”None of the elites in this country were ever held accountable for it.”
The elites who benefited weren’t just bankers, either. In the midst of that crisis, artist Julie Mehretu received a $5 million commission from Goldman Sachs to dominate its headquarters’ lobby in Lower Manhattan. Goldman, of course, was one of the banks most embroiled in the Subprime Mortgage Crash—and by accepting its money, Mehretu indirectly became embroiled in it, too. Completed in 2009, the commission, titled “Mural,” was described by Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker in 2010 as “[h]undreds of precisely defined abstract shapes in saturated colors—small dots and squares, straight and curving lines, larger geometric or free-form shapes ranging from several inches to several feet in length—[moving] across [the wall] in an oceanic sweep.”
For the sake of clarity and precision, this article will henceforth refer to the work as the Subprime Mortgage Mural. And while at the time it was unveiled, Tompkins alluded to a touch of hand-wringing, he very quickly exonerated the artist for accepting Goldman’s money:
“Financial institutions have been taking a lot of hits lately for their role in precipitating the fiscal crisis. The behavior of Goldman Sachs, in particular, has infuriated nearly everybody, from Congress and the Federal Reserve to the New York Times editorial board and Rolling Stone, which described the firm as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’…None of this was in the air in 2007, though, when Goldman commissioned Mehretu to do the painting.”
For the record, the crisis definitively started in August, 2007. But regardless, Tompkins further exonerates Mehretu by claiming that, allegedly, most of the money didn’t end up in her pocket: “The firm paid five million dollars for ‘Mural,’ about eighty per cent of which went into fabrication costs (including salaries for up to thirty studio assistants) during the two years she spent working on it.” (I would love to see a budgetary breakdown of these expenses given what I know of the lives of my peers who work in the arts and in fabrication, but alas.)
Mehretu has been back in the news as of late—this time not for accepting a large sum of blood money, but for spending it. Last autumn, it was announced she had dropped a $2 million donation to the Whitney to ensure anyone under 25 would have free admission. On the face of it, this was a lovely gesture. However, it begged the question: If the end goal was to make the museum more accessible to all, regardless of income, why was that inclusion sponsored by someone who could only afford to pay for it as a result of perhaps the most violent shift of capital and wealth redistribution in our lifetimes?
It wasn’t the first time the museum had accepted this kind of money, either indirectly (through donors like Mehretu) or directly (the Whitney is also sponsored by Goldman and Bank of America and many other fiscal institutions). But if homeownership is the main means of creating generational wealth in this country—wealth that BIPOC have been historically and repeatedly shut out of in the United States—it should feel especially troubling when a cultural institution is being funded by the banks most responsible for why so many people can’t afford the price of admission in the first place.
This problem isn’t uniquely American. Whilst grappling with its own quaint connection to empire and looting, the British Museum is also struggling to make the museum free for all…whilst taking money from British Petroleum to achieve it. France and Italy, though historically proud of their august, state-sponsored cultural institutions, are increasingly taking large-scale cultural funding from the private sector, including fashion conglomerates such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Kering. Those two companies largely underwrote the recent restoration of Notre Dame.
But in the United States, museums have always leaned more heavily on private funding, and the government has for decades aggressively policed cultural institutions’ values and slashed budgets accordingly—long before DOGE was even a glimmer in Elon Musk’s eye. For these reasons, the situation here arguably feels most dire. Mehretu’s donation is just the latest iteration of a fundamental problem with how we fund the arts. It was just a couple of years ago that photographer Nan Goldin dragged her protest against the Sacklers, who funded an entire wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art among many other projects, all the way to Oscars season in Laura Poitras’ harrowing documentary about the opioid epidemic, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The family name was subsequently removed from the Met. (However, the David H. Koch Plaza remains out front.)
Yes, ghastly people have been patrons of expensive art throughout history. But they did so, in many if not most cases, to trumpet their own glory and paint what we might call the victor’s narrative. Then, as today, we need to ask who is letting us in the door and what they want us to see and why. If we continue to let such people and corporations fund publicly accessible art in the United States—which could charitably be called an endangered democracy—what stories will our cultural institutions tell? What values will they have? If we are having this conversation around painkillers and petroleum, then it is essential that we have it about banks, too.
Let us begin with the Subprime Mortgage Mural itself. In that same New Yorker piece, aptly titled “Big Art, Big Money,” Tompkins describes the Subprime Mortgage Mural thusly: “There are four layers of markings in ‘Mural,’ and many of them implicitly refer to the history of finance capitalism—maps, trade routes, population shifts, financial institutions, the growth of cities.”
However, you almost definitely wouldn’t be able to identify any of this when looking at it. This is work that is, in a word, corporate—as is much, if not all, of Mehretu’s work. It won’t inspire the security guards to discover class consciousness when they clock in. It won’t drive the bankers to jump off the ledge in shame (not that the windows open wide enough). Mehretu’s work is slick: so slippery that meaning slips away, elusive as that subprime lending rate or 20th-century retirement plan. It is as vague as the name of a new miracle drug: No one knows how it works, only that it costs a shitload of money.
And, lest you doubt my judgment on this, or Tompkins’, or the fact that Mehretu took $5 million from Goldman right after the fucking Subprime Mortgage Crash (did she ever stop and wonder…too soon?), American Express also entrusted Mehretu to “re-imagine” teeny-weenie murals on limited edition Amex Platinum cards in 2021, a collaboration dressed up as a “sponsorship” of the Studio Museum in Harlem. It is hard to imagine how anodyne art must be to literally grace the front of a credit card, but one has to hand it to Mehretu: She is a very canny capitalist at any scale. Her work thrives on institutional affiliation.
Indeed, what does it mean to be a corporate darling of an artist? What does it mean to take such ill-gotten gains and produce what purports to be social commentary? After all, Mehretu’s stated aim is to marry political commentary and landscape art. In a talk with Art21, titled “Politicized Landscapes,” she said, “The abolitionist movement, the Civil War, the move towards emancipation, all of these social dynamics that are a part of that narrative we don’t really talk about in regards to American landscape painting. And so what does it mean to paint a landscape and try and be an artist in this political moment?”
In this regard, Mehretu’s success has everything to do with the kind of identity politics this country and its art world cannot shake. Her background boasts what might be called a DEI hat trick: Ethiopian, Jewish, lesbian. Accordingly, it features front and center in most press about her, including Tompkins’ standard visitation in his New Yorker profile. This is hardly Sydney Sweeney taking commercial work because acting simply doesn’t pay her bills. This is also not Diego Rivera trying to take Rockefeller money to sing a love song to the USSR. No, it is actually something more sinister: an artist who is playing with notions of network and inclusion and accessibility while pocketing the dirtiest money in the land.
Cosmetics, of course, is essential to the politics of the Subprime Mortgage Mural and the Whitney donation it enabled. And Mehretu poses an especially illustrative case of the ethical dilemmas incurred by funding a museum with private sector money. This is because the optics of her donation involved not merely her art, but also her own biography. The Whitney has courted its own fair share of controversy around such treacherous PR terrain, from a curatorial scandal around a painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Biennial and a board member’s ties to tear gas to accusations of union-busting and exquisitely ham-handed social media that gets no love in the comments section. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a museum named after a robber baron is slow to realize it has to cover its woke bases.
Unsurprisingly, articles about Mehretu tend to spill a fair amount of ink on her identity, as does the Whitney’s artist biography of her. However, I would wager that you wouldn’t be able to guess one goddamn thing about her if you looked at her paintings. Yet, she insists they are political. In a Guardian profile titled, “Julie Mehretu paints chaos with chaos – from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park,” Mehretu says of her process of creating a large-scale abstract work about the uprising in Egypt, “I don’t ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that, I was in here working on New York, and I’m drawing, and this thing is unfolding: I have al-Jazeera on the computer livestream, I’m paying attention to NPR…So I was looking architecturally at New York, and then suddenly I’m back in Africa. And then the painting grows through drawing after drawing, layer after layer.”
Looking at the piece one wonders: Is it insidious? Is it beneficent? It is the upholstery on my Aunt Sarah’s couch and curtains in her high-rise on Yellowstone Boulevard in Queens? Shapes skip and scamper about, lines zig and zag, maybe to evoke a network of some kind. There is color, pop, crackle, lacquer. There is balance, there is motion, there is form. There is sinew, texture, chaos almost threatening to find order and just the reverse: a hint of breakdown and frenzy. This is probably the most compelling aspect of the work to my eye, but also a damning endorsement of stasis: No matter which way you view it (a wave good-bye or hello to a world order), flux is the norm. Change is a threat never realized, reduced to a flat trophy on an enormous wall. The work is fundamentally corporate in that, it’s decorative and, upon viewing it, mostly you will glean that it is a megalithic mural that occupies VERY expensive real estate. That is what matters most to corporate art, ultimately: The placement is where it derives its power. In this light, it’s ironic if not hilarious that Mehretu often claims to reference the Occupy Wall Street movement, including in her Guardian interview. She has, if nothing else, come to occupy Wall Street.
The Whitney’s website states, “Mehretu’s work does not represent specific locations but rather takes up the radical possibilities of abstraction.” In fact, it does just the opposite. Her work proves exactly why Abstract Expressionism was the US state-sponsored school of painting during the Cold War: You can project anything onto it at all. This is also why Mehretu’s art succeeds in a corporate space. Absolutely no one wonders what a Soviet Socialist Realist painting is about. But you can look at a Jackson Pollock or a Julie Mehretu, scratch your academician goatee, and mutter something fatuous about velocity or uprisings or commerce or democracy, or whatever other bullshit is handy to spew at the uninitiated. Better yet, such jargon can be used to gatekeep art from those deemed not elite enough to understand it. The ambiguity becomes a cudgel.
Is Mehretu’s identity or community conveyed in her paintings in any meaningful or discernible way? Her work is often quite beautiful and inarguably well made. And art, of course, doesn’t have to say anything about politics at all. However, if you are going to spew political opinions, as she did for the Guardian or for her show at the Whitney in 2021, maybe don’t take that Goldman money when all those dreams of home ownership and generational wealth are barely cold in the ground. One cannot speak truth to power when one is on power’s payroll. In that sense, truthfully, it doesn’t matter what Julie Mehretu looks like or to whom she is married: She has still been bought.
Much has been made recently of how our so-called Culture Wars have distracted from a more obvious Class War. America is famously allergic to the idea of class, even if it’s as endemic and obvious as our obsession with faith, all while we claim to be secular. Last month, Laverne Cox spoke incisively of how America likes to scapegoat trans people, who make up less than 1% of our population, while billionaires, who also constitute 1% of our population, are actually the source of our woes. Indeed, just how badly have we all been played when Laverne Cox and Steve Bannon can agree on something?
As both museum patrons and people, we deserve public art and institutions that are better than the identity politics pushed by those who do nothing but take the money and run—only to pay lip service to inclusivity during New Yorker interviews. But the same political class of billionaires that has bought both political parties has also bought all of our cultural institutions. The big donors are the same on every wall and at every gala. If this tautological clusterfuck feels familiar, it should come as no surprise that Mehretu is one of the Obamas’ favorite artists. Of course the Democrats have that special distinction of believing the lie that they, too, can take billionaire money but somehow represent the marginalized. In reality, they are spineless whores bought by the same tax evaders as the Republicans—and the Whitney—just less honest about it. Mehretu is tellingly on Obama’s walls and on Amex cards alike—much like the Democratic party is enamored of the image of politics while taking objectively filthy money. Representation and promises of accessibility feel pretty hollow when they are sponsored by the same people who screwed millions of Americans out of their homes. This is a form of representation that is optics and optics only when people’s actual lives are getting crushed by a larcenous economy.
Sure, art does not have to be explicitly political to be good, but this art in particular is looking an awful lot like the worst of neoliberal politics right now: girl-boss abstraction about commerce that took subprime lending crisis blood money from Goldman and gave it back to the Whitney as penance. Mehretu’s art and the economy surrounding it encapsulate how identity politics have been cynically manipulated by big money on the alleged left, which isn’t left at all: It is money serving money, which is all money will ever serve. It is art about ignoring the little people. It is art for a media landscape that has no idea what the hell anyone in this country is thinking and cannot predict a single fucking election. It is art that restates the obvious opaquely and with no particular flair, like Pete Buttigieg explaining why all the planes are falling out of the sky on MSNBC. It is art that has the gall to reframe a whole lot of nothing as something beneficial, when all it does is launder the money and decorate the walls of the very, very rich, while lying about inclusivity to the poor. In short, it is art that confirms this sinking feeling that we’ve all been had by some great circle jerk every time oil execs, technocrats, bankers, and other swindlers hold open the museum doors for us: Have a little culture! As a treat! And it’s another reminder that, like our political institutions, we need our cultural institutions to represent something other than big donors who preach inclusion while robbing us blind.
