Mass Frustration: On the Historical Hunger for Cultural Openings and Inclusion: Inclusive Exclusions: Victor D’Amico and the Management of Diversity at MoMA Education (1935–1970 and beyond)

Abstract

As a corollary, museums tend to exclude – as local, contingent and particular – anything that questions or fails to fit their universalizing master narrative. Victor D'Amico sensed this exclusionary drive at the heart of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in a peculiar way: “the other” (singled out on the basis of age, race and gender) was not so much excluded anymore, but rather included, albeit only, or primarily, as an “other”. The solutions he imagined, though undoubtedly progressive for their time, seem to us today to be insufficient and unsustainable, perhaps even racist.