Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP) is a socially engaged art project that pays people who don’t visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and its institution.
Critique is a hallmark of the art field yet the vast majority of cultural critics, curators, art museum leadership and board members, artists represented in museums, and museum visitors are affluent and white. What is critique without diversity? What possibilities and truths are we missing?
As pressure builds for museums to change, it remains a challenge to make conversations about the future of museums accessible to individuals who aren’t already visiting them—particularly communities of color and working class communities.
Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP) is a socially engaged art project that pays people who don’t visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and its institution. LAAGP reverses the relationship between the educator and the educated, the paying and the paid.
It centers lived experience as expertise and offers community members a seat at the table without asking them to assimilate or donate their time.
Cash payment names and compensates the emotional and intellectual labor of visiting a historically white space and voicing one’s honest opinion.
““It made me feel important—like we’re here to see what can be changed about the museum. Our words count. We’re going to be heard. I feel like—especially since I was being paid—that helped a lot.” ”