Surface-Level Engagement: The Problem with Token Questions
When the Rembrandt Museum in Amsterdam recently posted a social media prompt—“If you could hide yourself in one of Rembrandt’s paintings, in which would you do that and why?”—my reaction was swift and uncomfortable. This wasn’t a harmless engagement tool; it was a demonstration of institutional mindset. Here it is again: cultural spaces, particularly museums rooted in European traditions, reaching out with a question that, on the surface, seeks involvement, but in practice, reveals exclusion.
Institutions like museums invest in campaigns that ask visitors what would help them feel included. But when your campaign revolves around “hiding” in history’s most Eurocentric portraits, what’s actually being offered is erasure, not inclusion. The act of asking is not neutral; it’s structured by who is asking, what power they hold, and whose worldview is assumed as “default.”
The European-Centric Lens: How Power Filters Participation
Despite the rhetoric about diversity, these institutions—managed and directed, overwhelmingly, by white leadership—build their outreach and programming through a singular paradigm: the European lens. The expectation persists that anyone entering these spaces absorbs, and adapts to, a set of values and perspectives untouched by their own histories or traumas.
This is not missed by the people least represented in galleries or curators’ offices. Marginalized groups—Black people, people of color, queer voices, those who cross cultural, linguistic, or class-based borders—recognize what it costs to “join in.” The question “where would you hide in a painting?” reiterates cultural invisibility: the call to make yourself invisible inside someone else’s narrative, to disappear into the margins.
When founders, leaders, and directors of cultural institutions fail to acknowledge the limits of their mindset, they reinforce the hierarchy that creative solution based thinkers worldwide are working to dismantle. This is not a blind spot. It’s a refusal to shift the paradigm.
Cognitive Dissonance and the Performance of Inclusion
What follows next, for museum management and marketing teams, is the self-soothing ritual of cognitive dissonance: “We ask. We are open,” they say. “When it fits our agenda.” The economic reality is even starker: marginalized people are wanted in the building as symbols of strategy, not as equal participants or originators of culture. There’s always an underlying cost-benefit analysis—whose art, whose history, whose money. The institution acts only when diverse presence enhances the institution’s prestige or secures new funding.
For those of us who have mastered code switching—who speak multiple cultural languages and have survived by reading the expectations of the majority—this is an old game staged as inclusion. Marketers and directors, trained in white European norms, rarely test their own biases. The museum imagines itself as universally relevant. The reality: participation requires marginalized visitors to shrink, to perform comfort, or to “hide,” once again, within a Western canon that was not built for them.
The Superpower of Code Switching—and Its Exhaustion
If you have lived as a minority in spaces designed for the majority, your creative strength is adaptability. As artists, founders, and leaders from marginalized backgrounds, you hold a — often unrecognized — superpower: navigating systems on your terms while translating culture for those who never question their own dominance. Yet, no mainstream European institution requires its leaders to develop this capacity. They never interrogate what it means to reconstruct their viewpoint to match yours.
So here’s the structural issue with inclusion-as-branding: the practice consistently asks marginalized communities to reframe themselves as “valuable” only when they support the institution’s self-image. It’s an economic transaction masked as solidarity. Are you here to be visible, or to make the institution appear open? What does genuine, reciprocal participation look like, beyond token consultation or diversity campaigns?
A Practical Tool: The Invitation Audit
For any artist, director, or creative leader designing engagement strategies, I offer a mindset audit.
Before launching a “diversity initiative” or “open question,” ask:
Who is being asked to adapt?
- Does this campaign require marginalized people to enter your narrative, or does it open space for their narratives to shape your space?
- Are you inviting participation, or are you inviting assimilation?
- Who gets to set the terms of recognition and belonging?
Use these questions in planning meetings, campaign sessions, and board conversations—not for brand optics, but as criteria for institutional accountability. Make the answers visible inside your organization, not just as public messaging.
Food for Thought
What would shift in your institution if every engagement strategy was structured not by the impulse to “include,” but by the willingness to de-center your own narrative, funding priorities, and systems of recognition?
Looking for tools and resources that help transform your mindset and bring you to your development? Visit The Creative Vault.
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