Activist Artists Hack the New Museum’s Hans Haacke Survey in an Effort to Expose the Museum’s Hidden Capitalist Agenda

The long-awaited New Museum retrospective of conceptual art
pioneer Hans Haacke fell victim to internet
hackers over the weekend trying to make a political point.
The intervention drastically skewed the results of an
iPad-based artwork that was meant to record real-time visitor
responses.

“Hans Haacke: All Connected,” which is due to close on
January 26, showcases decades of politically motivated work by the
New York artist, who is considered one of the progenitors of
“institutional critique.” In its final weeks, two New York
hacktivists have taken it upon themselves to interfere
with New Museum Visitors Poll (2019), a
interactive work that asks a series of multiple choice questions
focusing on visitor’s political and economic views.

Grayson Earle, an artist and professor at Parsons, and his
anonymous partner, an artist going by “M,” wrote in a manifesto
shared with Artnet News that they gained access to the poll from
outside of the museum by creating software that would interfere
with the survey, ultimately “boosting the number of respondents by
upwards of 50,000.” Though most of the responses Earle and M
created were random, they homed in on one question in particular
for targeted manipulation:

A global wealth report of 2013 by Credit Suisse, a major Swiss
Bank, stated: “…the lower half of the global population
collectively owns less than 1 percent of global wealth, while the
richest 10 percent of adults own 87 percent of all wealth, and the
top 1 percent account for almost half of all assets in the world.”
What is your opinion on this?

Respondents were asked to select one of three
answers: “Such inequality needs to be corrected,”
“Accumulation of wealth should not be interfered with,” and “I
don’t know.” Following the hack, the response “accumulation of
wealth should not be interfered with” swelled from 8 percent to 85
percent.

In essence, Grayson explained in an email to Artnet News, he and
M thought that by highlighting this question, “it better expresses
the current political position of American museums like the New
Museum, in light of the museum’s response [to] staff unionization efforts, the anti-gentrification protest
against the New Museum’s Bronx iteration of Ideas City, and
more broadly the work of recent activists who have highlighted the
corporate stranglehold on museums.”

New Museum Visitors Poll is part of a body of
work going back to the late-’60s that attempt to uses surveys and
polls to raise political awareness among museum goers. When a
similar question on wealth inequalities was posed to Haacke’s
audience in 1971, responses overwhelmingly responded in favor of
correcting such large gaps in wealth, with 81 percent as compared
with the pre-hacked 85 percent in 2019.

“We hacked the survey results as a means of questioning the
efficacy of sanctioned institutional critique,” Earle and M say,
though they stress that that shouldn’t be the main takeaway.

Instead, the duo are hoping that the New Museum will take a hard
look within itself and consider how it dealt with the staff’s
recent push to unionize. In their letter, the
two write that the Museum had a chance to make a real difference
toward correcting economic inequality, which their audience clearly
supports, if only they had “agreed to meet workers at the
bargaining table, committed to reducing the income disparity
between executive and low level staff, and ensured their annual
budgeting fell in line with the sorts of progressive values they
are trading off.”

After public disagreements with museum management, UAW 2110,
which represents New Museum workers, announced in October
that it had agreed to a new five-year contract that resulted in
increased wages, additional paid time off, and lower health care
costs.

Asked about the unsolicited intervention, a spokesperson from
the New Museum responded to Artnet News, “An external server
hosting Hans Haacke’s New Museum Visitors Poll was
hacked over the weekend. The breach has since been fixed by the
programmer who worked with Haacke on the poll, and the work has
been returned to the artist’s [Haacke’s] intent.”

The post Activist Artists Hack the New Museum’s Hans Haacke
Survey in an Effort to Expose the Museum’s Hidden Capitalist
Agenda appeared first on artnet News.