“Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association,” Theodore Adorno famously accused, in 1953.1 Adorno believed that objects preserved in museums lose their vital relationship to the world; that, in being anchored for viewership, they die. Laura Raicovich’s new book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, seems to come from a love of art institutions and an ongoing commitment to keeping their contents in the land of the living. She argues that these spaces can keep from growing stale only if a diverse public feel welcome to visit and reinvent them. Raicovich celebrates activist groups such as Decolonize This Place (DTP), whose annual Columbus Day “counter-tours” prompted the removal of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the front steps of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Long defended by the institution as a neutral preservation or “freeze frame” of history, the statue,...

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