Recently, the culture wars reared their ugly heads across Ivy League campuses. By sounding anti-semitism and plagiarism alarms, billionaires like Bill Ackman – a hedge-fund manager and Harvard graduate who has donated tens of millions to his alma mater – helped oust Claudine Gay, the school’s erstwhile president whose appointment last year was seen as a “breakthrough” moment for the school.

Ackman et al dismissed the appointment of Gay – a black woman, and the daughter of Haitian immigrants – as the consequence of the hiring office’s diversity, equity and inclusion criteria, suggesting she would not have been hired were it not for diversity quotas. Reportedly, the Pershing Square Capital founder has “steamed” at Harvard for several years for not accepting his “paid-for” counsel. This is just a recent example from a track record of using his money to bend organizations to his will.

Similarly, Amy Magill – until recently the President of the University of Pennsylvania – was pressured to resign when Stone Ridge Asset Management CEO Ross Stevens threatened to rescind $100 million of donated shares in his holding group if she did not after Magill made what many perceived to be anti-Semitic comments after Hamas attacked Israel last month.

In both accounts, whatever your take on the accusations (and there are many), money talked. “We can’t function as a university if we’re answerable to random rich guys and the mobs they mobilize on Twitter,” Ben Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School, said in response to Gay’s case. 

Replace the word “university” with most anything else and that statement will still hold merit. Private capital helps fund the culture wars, and it plays an integral role in industries whose operations rely on procuring healthy endowments. Museums, which typically depend heavily on endowments and charitable giving, are not immune from this pressure.

Read more: Deanna Hood, a Roboticist and ETHGlobal Lisbon Finalist, Has a Message for Women Interested in Web3 

In December, I sat down with visual artist and technologist Diane Drubay to discuss her work with museums, and her efforts to balance patronage with an activist mindset. Drubay is the Founder of We Are Museums – a community-powered think-tank on the future of museums that focuses on ensuring the institutions are good for people and the planet. 

More recently, alongside the Tezos Foundation – the organization formed to support the Tezos protocol and ecosystem – Drubay created Web3 for Arts and Culture (WAC) to help museums find new ways to navigate the fraught nature of encouraging patronage without giving away the institution’s soul. To do so, she set out to learn how to use blockchain technology to achieve that delicate balance.

“I was just reading an article about a new museum director who said that museums cannot be activists,” she told me, exasperated, “because it will mean the rejection of some potential sponsors and opportunities.”

Drubay’s surprise was not that this type of relationship exists – it was that it still exists. It’s a drum she’s been beating for years – and so have others. Recall the recent journey of photographer Nan Goldin, whose documentary All The Beauty and The Bloodshed lambasted museums for accepting donations from the Sacklers – the ultra-wealthy family who made billions through the sale of OxyContin, which was accused of exploiting the United States’ opioid addiction. 

“All the museums and institutions need to stop taking money from these corrupt evil bastards," Goldin says in the documentary. Bowing to pressure, many did stop taking Sackler money, but this process remains fraught and fragile. Without patrons, museums must rely on other elusive forms of capital, and without curatorial agency, culture becomes gilded by the wallets of the random rich guys.

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Disruption is a word that often gets bandied about in startup land – it’s the prevailing approach for mucking up some outmoded industry hegemony. And it was how I framed Drubay’s approach to museums in my first question to her.

“I don't know if disruption is the right word,” she responded. “Adapting, transforming, developing, evolving, yes, but disrupting is still not a word which is easy to use in the museum scene.

“Most of the time museums are adopting change because it's useful,” she continued, “because they think that they can reach new audiences and there are metrics that they need to meet. But they don't really embrace change. They just use change as an excuse or as a reason to react.”

Technology has long been the backbone to Drubay’s work, and when she first discovered the blockchain, she thought it might offer a tool set for transforming museums. She spent a year researching how they might benefit from the technology, but it was fruitless. “I basically concluded that the value systems and cultures of blockchain and museums were just not a match at all,” she said.

Her attitude changed, however, when she started minting her art on the popular Tezos-based non-fungible token (NFT) platform, Hic Et Nunc. “When I discovered this community, I saw the value system – which was all about diversity, inclusion and impact – was really similar to the museum value system,” she told me. “It wasn’t important if you come from France or Indonesia. It wasn’t about who you know, or any kind of economic model, or exclusivity, or diplomas. It was really about who you are. And finally I saw that a bridge can be created and the same language can be used.”

In 2021 Drubay founded WAC, focusing first on creating that language. She started hosting WAC Weekly, a discussion series that explores blockchain applications across cultural heritage, audience engagement and social justice. Soon the WAC Lab emerged, a more formal fellowship that helps museums achieve blockchain literacy and then guides them through their first blockchain projects via the WAC Factory.

Predictably, the initial tranche of fellows were tech-savvy museums – like Basel’s HEK, Berlin’s Light Art Space Foundation, Amsterdam’s NEXT and London’s Serpentine. The second season attracted broader institutions, like The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Sri Lanka and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

“Every museum is different and everyone is looking for different things,” Drubay said. She’s designed handbooks to build a “panorama” of WAC Factory use cases, from proof of attendance protocols (POAPs) to NFT augmented reality exhibits that bring Ukrainian art to the world while the country’s museums remain shuttered due to war. 

At the MMCA, the education team explored ‘Proof of Learning’ modules to provide foundational knowledge to its young museum professionals, incentivizing them to complete courses by using NFTs as credentials. And with the Musée d'Orsay, WAC created a Tezos-based souvenir program for the museum’s Van Gogh exhibit that doubled as a membership program. 

The use cases are as diverse as the museums themselves, but one inquiry Drubay frequently receives, she told me, is how to use the blockchain to unlock new revenue streams. Money talks, after all. “This is the hardest type of request,” she said. “There are no fast solutions – there is no recipe.”

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One of the focal points of WAC Lab is the pursuit of "new economic models for fundraising, membership and revenue distribution” – to provide that ever evasive financial sustainability, and to reckon with the same culture-money push-and-pull that threatens institutions like American education. 

The US government is notoriously absent in funding the arts and education, and with the ongoing reduction in state funding across European countries, museums around the world are beginning to seek alternative models.

Some institutions are using WAC Lab to innovate in this space – despite there being “no recipe.” The Institute for Sound and Music in Berlin, for instance, used their time at WAC Lab to explore a perpetual donation model, and HEK is experimenting with NFT art commissions and drops and a new on-chain membership program. But these approaches remain experiments, and time will tell if they can functionally transform traditional models.

As WAC Lab accepts applications for season three, they must continue to tow the line between transformation and preservation. During the pandemic, Drubay told me, France’s President Emmanuel Macron declared that museums weren’t necessary for well-being.

“Museum professionals, most of the time, don't do what they do for money – they do it for passion,” Drubay said. “I’m not talking about museum directors – I’m talking about the small people. They dedicate their lives to a museum or two, but they know that it's highly fragile – that it's not something that is essential, as the president said. 

“It's really part of the DNA of the museum professional,” she continued, “this constant fear, this battle between the fear of insecurity and fragility of a museum’s place in culture and their passion and dedication. But they also know and believe that without culture, without art, there is no soul left.”

lead image: Diane Drubay