Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls tell ANIMAL: “We support all the Occupy groups and that includes Occupy Museums! We wish we could have been there yesterday.” While the Guerrilla Girls were busy with activist workshops in Chicago this week, we spotted this protestor at Zuccotti Park referencing the collective.

Kathe Kollwitz says:

“The more people realize how corrupt the system is, the better. The 1% have a stranglehold on museums. Wealthy collectors fund them and influence what gets shown and collected. We’ve been ranting about this for over 25 years!”

We see where the protest’s organizer Noah Fischer takes a cue from the legendary Guerilla Girls, who began to challenge major museums with actions, shows and “weenie counts” after MoMA’s 1985 “International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” only included 17 women out of 169 participating artists. Fischer takes aim at the institutions’ non-gender-specific elitism:
“…Witness an era of luxurious art fairs while millions are losing home and jobs. So much about museums today reflects a top-down society where the rest of us are supposed to be mesmerized by the glamour at the top. We Occupy the big museums as both real ties to Wall Street fraud money and as symbols of a culture thats been stolen from the 99% by the elites. When we Occupy Museums, we’ll be announcing and demonstrating a new era of culture that is for everyone.”

That said, I’m still skeptical of Occupy Museums since private galleries, art fairs and auctions filled with millionaires are better targets than museums that have free days and cultural programs and are more accessible and beneficial to the public — i.e. “everyone” — than fairs and auctions. Go there!

Also, we’re glad to see that Occupy Wall Street protestors have joined the locked out art handlers to protest Sotheby’s. (Photo: ANIMALNewYork)