“Museums are full of opportunity in the way that they confer legitimacy on certain ways of seeing the world, on certain ways of acting. They normalize them. They take on unpopular ideas and make them seem normal. They take ways of behaving that seem strange, and make them seem like that’s how everyone now behaves. A museum can be a really powerful point of doing that – that’s the reason that corporations are interested in museums and that’s exactly the same reason that we should be interested in museums if we want to change things.”
Gavin Grindon is a post doctoral researcher at Kingston University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His research is located within the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on activist-art and its theoretical contexts. He is currently preparing a monograph on this topic, and has previously published in The Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art Monthly, Radical Philosophy and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Grindon is a co-curator of the exhibition Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014. He also organized the conferences The Politics of the Social in Contemporary Art at Tate Modern, 2013; Art…What’s the Use at Whitechapel Gallery, 2011; and Revising /Revisiting the Avant-Garde at Kingston University, 2009.
