As part of an investigative report for the well-known news platform Tichys Insight, the Austrian journalist David Boos and a colleague posed as the “last generation” climate glue and contacted numerous European museums. They asked the directors about their climate protection efforts.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna offered him an interview with an executive at the Weltmuseum in Vienna. And: The museum management wanted to cooperate with the alleged climate adhesives immediately and set up a joint “adhesive project”. In addition to the in-house budget of 7,500 euros tax money, the director also wanted to request funding from German foundations such as the Gerda Henkel Foundation and Siemens, reports “Tichy’s Insight”.
“Yes, I know, that’s problematic, because they all make their money with something like that and greenwashing is of course an issue. Of course, OMV would like to buy in, but I said: ‘The moment I let you in as a sponsor, all the partners and artists will jump out of me because it’s not an option for them and neither for me’,” she said World Museum executive in a Zoom meeting.
Asked how the museum would handle it if museum-goers were frustrated by such a collaboration with the “Last Generation,” the museum director, a federal employee, replied, “So what?”
“I have to be careful, of course I can’t give the green light for something like that, unfortunately (!) I can’t,” explained the manager when asked where the activists could stick themselves. And stressed: “Let’s put it that way. If you do this action, it has to be done with people from Oceania. Because I think if white people come into this museum and possibly use “sacred objects” from Hawaii for this message, and people from the communities of origin are not in it, it sends a difficult message and could be read as intrusive. If someone from Hawaii is there – and there are people here to discuss it with – it’s a different story.”
The museum director also said that he was “surprised” that a colleague from another Viennese museum “completely rejected the gluing and described it as a sort of terrorist action”. And further: “I believe that if museums want to be relevant at all, they must at least provide a forum for these discussions and not relativize them.”
exxpress.at will ask how the political leadership of the museums will react to this unveiling story. The fact that a museum director might even have paid €7,500 in tax money to climate chaotic people so that the image of the house looks a little better on the left-wing woke scene can hardly remain without consequences.