Like Florence, Oaxaca is a small city that is also a museum in itself, full of sixteenth-century churches and monuments. It’s a tourist city but also a state governmental and mercantile capital and a center of contemporary Mexican art. I’ve just come from visiting the recently restored Santo Domingo Church. Directed by the famous local artist Francisco Toledo, the restoration employed sixteenth-century methods and materials, a hybrid of the European and the indigenous. The tunnel-like corridors of its convent, ending in arched openings that catch the rays of the sun as it rises and sets over the mountains, have walls and ceilings painted with a mixture of egg whites, clay, and baba de nopal, from the green pulp of the nopal cactus. The long corridors glow with the most extraordinary green-blue-golden light, a soul-stirring celestial glow if ever I’ve seen one.

As I walked back from the church to my hotel, black-clad police in riot gear had set up steel gates, letting people into and out of the zocalo one by one. Today’s forecast includes sunny skies and street protests. Though the situation has calmed recently, since 2006 Oaxaca has been the sight of regular clashes, many of them violent, between members of the APPO teachers’ union and the many other activist groups arrayed around them and the often repressive security forces of the governor, an office held for eighty years by the PRI party. The central role played by street artists in the Oaxaca rebellion awoke interest all over the world.

Over the last few days I’ve received an informal seminar in the history of the movement from video artist Isabel Rojas, performance artist Gabriela de Leon, and curator Talia Castillo. Much of it is familiar: kids from the poor barrios finding political expression and activism through street art: graffiti and the production of icons (a punk Zapata and so on.) The venerable walls of the “museum city” themselves came into play. The kids would graffiti; almost immediately, brigades of police would hit the streets with paintbrushes, covering subversive slogans and images with bold colors. (“The police and the graffiti artists were making a political statement together with paint,” my hosts told me. “The city looked like a huge Rothko painting.”) By defacing many of the city’s most beautiful buildings, the activists displayed their immaturity, giving the governor rhetorical cover for some of his government’s excesses, including murder.

Four years later, some of the street artists still languish in prison. Others have hit the world art market, reproducing their iconic activist images in chic galleries. Others anguish over what the next step should be. In recent elections the entrenched PRI finally lost its grip on power in the state. The evolving Oaxaca remains an open-air museum of classical architecture and a vital site of activist art.

At best, they locate and establish good work; at worst, they use art to promote other agendas. If, from the nineteenth century onward, museums served as storehouses for national treasures and the spoils of war, then we should be wary of their walls, too often tombs for societies reduced to symbol as they are displaced, misconstrued, and dissected. As I mentioned earlier, these secular temples have come under productive attacks, e.g. Hans Haacke at MoMA, Fred Wilson at the Maryland Historical Society, and Mona Hatoum at the Querini Stampalia, with artists as agents provacateurs excavating unsavory evidence buried in the histories of institutions.

But museums should be credited as well for changing themselves. The controversies and protests of the 1960s and ’70s pushed them to be self-reflective, to establish education departments with film screenings and other activities open to a broader public. Museums also host critical discussions, charged engagements, and new narratives that attempt to enrich their social function. If museums assumed the form of the classical temple as a strategy both for protecting and proclaiming their wares, they have more recently taken on a different aspect of the classical. Lively spaces of education, conversation, and entertainment, museums aim to be closer to the agora than the temple, privileging the secular over the sacred.

With regard to architecture itself: cultural institutions self-consciously premised on thinking about their own histories offer up more than white cubes for viewing contemporary art: P.S. 1, the school, and the 1970s in New York; the Reina Sofía and the eighteenth-century hospital in Madrid; Hamburger Bahnhof and the railway system in Berlin; and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. These exhibition sites stage the apperception that I mention in my second posting by playing on their own pasts. With different degrees of cynicism and branding, the détourned site inscribes art into the context of architectural history. I would argue that this kind of classicism provides a respite from the reductive and reintroduces a consideration of history into contemporary art.

But in accounting for the different producers of knowledge and power in our discussion, it strikes me that one agent has been omitted. Curators, whether working in institutions or independently, play just as critical role in the production, dissemination, and analysis of art as do its makers and consumers. No longer charged with mere custodial duties, they discover, commission, and critique; they serve as cultural moderators, stirring up discussions and posing difficult questions about what art can do and what it has already done. This kind of discourse, both spontaneous and scholarly, is the inclusive net that draws together disparate authors of both art and its analysis in forums more dynamic than academic scholarship can generate on its own.

I would like to swerve a bit to invoke here the tripartite schema of art and its relationship to philosophy (and to the uses of art by political regimes) put forward by Alain Badiou. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics (2004), Badiou presents us with the categories of the didactic, the romantic, and the classical modes, noting that the Aristotelian classical “dehystericizes” art. In Badiou’s account, in the classical schema art is not a form of thought; rather, its function is to allow for catharsis through what he calls (in translation!) “liking.” But the function of liking—appealing to taste, to the senses, but not to truth—makes art a service, and it is as such that states employ it. Badiou reminds us that in the past, absolutist states “vassalized” art and artists but that at present it’s art’s funders who do so. It is possible to see in this catharsis a certain therapeutic function, a soothing of any lingering disconnect or antagonism, intentional or otherwise.

The Latin Americanist George Yúdice, in his Expediency of Culture (2004), makes much of the fact that the imperative to artists to adopt a seemingly vanguardist merging of art with everyday life—which is, under present conditions, effectively a call to art as service—is derived from the state and from powerful foundations. The same applies to the corollary imperative to museums to fill an educative role. These are frightening thoughts for those of us interested in critique, or even simply in art enacted in the wider world outside the white cube. Since vanguardism is distinctly anticlassical, we may easily wind up with opportunism, in the circuit between artists’ desiring to evade the institutions of art and state but not wanting to cede the ground of either those institutions or their funding. If we find in European architecture a neoclassicism built partly out of the language of modernism, perhaps it can remind us that this architecture is at present not vanguardist but corporate. And the persistent framing up of art, of whatever stripe, in the confines of the white box or its symbolic equivalents is all too often similarly opportunistic and driven by the imperatives of capital.