How Did Paul B. Preciado Call To Devise The Museum As Crime?

This review questions philosopher and queer activist Paul B. Preciado´s call to devise the “museum as crime” in order to abolish the censorship that capitalist and colonial powers exert over curatorial judgment. The motives for such call lie in the censorship of The Sovereign and The Beast, an exhibition that the philosopher organized, along with other curators, at the MACBA, in 2015. This exhibition analyzed a list of binary themes—“class, gender, species, sexuality, race, health, etc.”—that, according to Preciado, “articulate structures of social domination.” Revealing the museum’s institution binary condition and control over public access to specific content, the MACBA’s self-imposed ban prompted Preciado to urge the renewal of the institution’s ethos via self-eradication.

Crime is a form of censorship; it is no more legitimate than institutional reprobation. As Noam Chomsky says: “If we don´t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don´t believe in it at all.” (Berk and Cartuccio 228). On the other hand, a “museum as crime” would threaten the culture that feeds it and would erode the democratic values assigned to it. What public, democratic service can thrive without jurisdiction? The crime call is appealing, but Preciado does not explain what exactly is to be gained with it, or how to dodge its side effects. Without a well-planned plot, the crime´s passionate drive risks ironically self-erasure. Furthermore, is not Preciado´s nihilism itself inherent in the colonial and capitalist forces that, according to him, govern the museum? Is not crime already perpetrated enough behind the institution´s