The authority of traditional public art galleries comes from the dissemination of official or national culture as the repository of upper-class tastes and dispositions. According to Tony Bennett, museums and art galleries mask their social, economic and class functions through the mission of education, philanthropy, and public engagement (Bennett 1995). “Museums and art galleries and exhibitions,” he writes, “helped play the role of civilizing agent of the state within the formation of modern government” (1995: 66) The esoteric aspects of culture are class-specific, he argues, and are directly related to the class interests of boards of directors, wealthy patrons, art dealers and collectors.
Since their earliest days, public art galleries have been influenced by the private interests and personal tastes of those who sit on the boards of these institutions, who work as directors and curators, and who also support galleries as members and volunteers. Although the radicalization of art in the 1960s and 70s, with the consequent development of artist-run culture and artist-run galleries, has altered this tendency, the lower circuits of production and consumption tend to function as stepping stones to larger institutions, where galleries maintain modernist definitions of autonomy that define the work of art as an end.
The introduction of dialogue into contemporary art practices marks the emergence of cultural engagement in the public sphere and opens a space for a plurality of voices to enter art system. Participatory and collaborative activist art has developed out of many streams of contemporary art that have challenged modernist understandings of autonomy. The use of dialogue in art projects introduces collaboration with communities at multiple levels, including the conception, production, and reception of the work. As a constructive principle, dialogue encourages the co-production of new meanings and perspectives. The question of novelty in this case is not defined as the need for the art institution to renew itself, but for society to be organized on an inherently new basis. This means that galleries and museums need not be abandoned as bourgeois institutions but can be made into dialogical spaces of communicative interaction. Art galleries can better serve their mandates by providing opportunities for engagement with working-class communities that become conscious of culture as a public resource.
Dialogue through art helps class constituencies become aware of the culture of the elite and look beyond their own, narrowly defined perspective. The valorization of community-based ways of knowing transforms public institutions into spaces of inclusion, emancipation, and change. In the words of Paulo Freire, “consciousness evolves through voice and in dialogue with others, and as learners begin to see themselves as knowers in relation to the world, and as part of an evolving, changing world” (Freire 1970: 40). Freire developed a critical, self-reflexive model of pedagogy that makes learning into an ongoing process of transformation.