What Would a Museum of Capitalism Look Like?

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Blake Fall Conroy‘s “Police Flag” in the Museum of Capitalism, an installation that envisions a world in which capitalism is obsolete.Photograph by Brea McAnally / Brea Photography

In 2010, in a speech at the Marxism Festival, in London, the political theorist Alex Callinicos speculated that, someday, he would like to visit a museum of capitalism—an institution akin to South Africa’s Apartheid Museum. When the Oakland-based curators Timothy Furstnau and Andrea Steves first learned of Callinicos’s comment, they wondered what such a museum would look like. The duo, which operates under the moniker FICTILIS, makes exhibitions and interventions animated by a playful interrogation of social institutions and blurred boundaries between fiction and reality. In 2015, they began searching for a space to house their museum, focussing on Oakland’s semi-industrial waterfront and partnering with a local nonprofit organization, the Jack London Improvement District. In 2016, FICTILIS received a two-hundred-and-fifteen-thousand-dollar curatorial grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and secured the use of a cavernous, two-story commercial space in Jack London Square that had gone unleased for years. The space still holds vestiges of the previous tenant, an upscale market that never fully materialized. (Quotations about food by Virginia Woolf, Julia Child, and James Beard adorn the walls downstairs.) “There’s no way in hell we’d be able to pay even a fraction of the asking price for a space like this,” Furstnau, who is mild-mannered and thin, with a puff of brown hair that looks like the inside of a dandelion, told me in June, shortly before the museum’s opening night. “I guess you could say we’re being generously hosted by the landlord.”

The installation was well under way. The Museum of Capitalism takes a retro-futuristic approach, envisioning a world in which capitalism is obsolete. “Capitalism may one day end, although that, in itself, shouldn’t be all that controversial,” Furstnau said, citing Stein’s Law, coined by the economic adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” In the center of a wraparound mezzanine, above a red metal structure originally built for food-vender stalls, a collection of banners, by the Danish artists’ group Superflex, painted with the logos of banks that went bankrupt (or were acquired) during the 2008 financial crisis, were being hung.

Oakland is the third city to house a museum of capitalism, joining Berlin and Brussels. There have also been exhibits on the subject that opted out of critique: in 1982, Oklahoma Christian University constructed Enterprise Square, a collection of multimedia exhibits—including an arcade game, “Protect Your Rights,” in which players shot at aliens encroaching on their private property, and an animatronic display of singing currency, which extolled the virtues of the free market and the hazards of government overreach. (That museum closed in 1999.) Though FICTILIS has been working on the Museum of Capitalism for years, the housing and homelessness crises and yawning economic inequality in the Bay Area have made the exhibition feel particularly timely. Nevertheless, FICTILIS has fielded complaints that its project, previously seen as too political, is, in light of the current political climate, no longer political enough. Furstnau also confessed that the project had attracted interest from people who might not have understood its tone. “We’ve gotten a few e-mails from people saying, ‘Oh, this sounds great, I would donate to such a museum’—kind of like a Randian pro-free-market museum or whatever,” he said.

Steves, who was wearing overalls and a tool belt, dropped by the boardroom table where we were sitting, on the edge of a gallery that would house Oliver Ressler’s piece “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies”—which consists of videos of economists and historians discussing systems like libertarian municipalism and anarchist consensual democracy. She produced a small cardboard box. “Do you know about deal toys?” she asked. “If Morgan Stanley invests in the Olive Garden, then a deal-toy company might be hired to make a Lucite tombstone with little pieces of salad and tomatoes in it that celebrates that deal,” she said. Jasper Waters, an industrial designer, had designed a deal toy for FICTILIS’s project, a monument the size of a paperweight, with a marble base. “Congratulations on the Investment from the United States Department of the Treasury,” it said, above the names of several banks and firms—Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citibank—and the dollar amounts each one received in the 2008 government bailout. Inside the Lucite was a graph of the Dow plummeting. (The Museum of American Finance, on Wall Street, also has a deal-toy collection.)

When I visited the space earlier this week, the exhibition was in full swing. Small museum labels, written in the museum’s future-anterior authorial voice, had been installed, offering commentary on the neighborhood, the space, and the art itself. (Affixed to the display for Jordan Bennett’s “Artifact Bags,” a collection of grocery bags rendered in leather, was a tag explaining that plastic bags, “made of thin, flexible, petroleum-based film,” were once ubiquitous, and controversial, in capitalist society.) Pieces ran the gamut from explicitly political to ironic or satirical. An installation by Packard Jennings, “Mindfulness Meditation Booth,” purported to create a relaxing space intended for police officers, with foam-padded lounge chairs and low, soothing light; a robotic feminine voice delivered empathetic wisdom—“as anger and frustration build all around you, your task requires the presence of mind to maintain calmness and a level head”—over spacey electronic music, and presented a mantra that concluded, “I am one with the cosmos. Namaste.”

A small group of teen-agers argued about whether it was appropriate to introduce children to the concept of police brutality, and ogled Evan Desmond Yee’s “Shop of Dreams,” a mirror-image replica of the museum’s actual gift shop (where visitors could purchase branded Museum of Capitalism totes and T-shirts, and also computer-shaped stress balls and elegantly packaged coal) but with barren shelves. Both shops, painted “millennial pink,” were tucked behind a community library, which held early-twentieth-century tomes from the U.S. Patent Office and annual reports from the National Labor Relations Board, alongside political theory and Marxist philosophy.

In Tara Shi’s “A People’s History of Capitalism,” visitors were invited to record videos of their own lived experiences of capitalism in a large wooden structure with a cutout the size of a refrigerator. A small screen inside offered prompts: “What’s the best thing you ever bought, or the worst?” Around the corner, a glass display case held “Magic Wands,” a collection of oblong technologies—remote control, bar-code scanner, Hitachi personal massager, mascara brush—curated and labelled by the Center for Tactical Magic.

“We think a lot about what’s in the museum and out of the museum, and the idea that the exit to the Museum of Capitalism is the entrance into the real Museum of Capitalism,” Steves told me. She hopes that people will “start to see things as exhibits or as museum pieces, and can carry that way of looking with them.” The museum will move out of the Jack London space this weekend. Renovations were already under way on the first level, which will house Tartine Bakery’s new roastery, Coffee Manufactory. A well-coiffed real-estate broker in a shiny purple button-down shirt ushered other potential tenants past the exhibits, gathering them around a glass display that holds the museum’s only permanent installation, a slightly battered leasing model of Jack London Square that has been in the space since 2008. An architect passed through, bearing an armful of plans. Steves glumly pointed out a hole in the gallery floor, where workers had accidentally drilled through the ceiling. Apart from a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts this fall, the institution’s future—subject, as anything, to precariousness—remains to be seen. Furstnau speculated that, perhaps, the museum was simply moving from a contained gallery space to encapsulate everything outside of the building. “In that sense, it’s a major expansion,” he said.