In Sarah Vos’s documentary White Balls on Walls (2022), new director Rein Wolfs spearheads a government-initiated effort to diversify the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s collection: Only 4% of its art was by women, no works by artists of color were exhibited, and they only had a single curator of color, Charl Landvreugd. The proceedings keep you on tenterhooks, but nuanced discussions and good faith see them through.
Initially, quotas are discussed. To stay flexible, the curators set only one: At least 50% of the collection should be works by women. In the hands of inertial bureaucrats this would be a formula for disaster, but here, everyone agrees that the overrepresentation of White men in relation to the general population of the Netherlands is a genuine problem. When one researcher notes that a space exhibiting a “diverse” work is a space not exhibiting a “classic” (in my words), Landvreugd—the researcher’s boss—agrees the point isn’t a revolution; it’s an expansion of perspectives. Similarly, a security guard voices his opinion that turning all the restrooms gender-neutral is “a step too far,” but he respects the director’s authority and doesn’t make a fuss about it.
They hire Black critic (of the Stedelijk specifically) Vincent van Velsen to be curator of photography. When Vos asks him about tokenism, he says, “If they hire you because they have to reach a quota, that’s their problem. But once you’re in that position, you can achieve something.” Vos is always the person to bring up tokenism; for the other artists she interviews, the Stedelijk’s overtures are apparently satisfactory.
The curators are careful to ensure proper contextualization for the two exhibitions shown: on the “Surinamese School” (it pains Landvreugd’s ego that his own work can’t be included due to conflict of interest), and on the coloniality of Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. But curation is only half the equation. Dutch critics ended up savaging the Expressionism exhibition—which Landvreugd describes as “whiteness looking at itself. . . . The fact that black people are present . . . is circumstantial”—for political correctness; Wolfs’s response: “Should we be politically incorrect?” Most of those critics are presumably old White men; actual visitors gave high marks when surveyed, despite how the film only interviews confused White visitors.
Vos, it seems, felt it necessary to play devil’s advocate to heighten conflict. Why can’t we just watch a group of conscientious people doing something nice?
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