Culture as display: Epistemic and organizational contingencies of 'art/science' collaboration

This paper offers and reflects upon an organizational ethnography of a renowned
cultural institution. The cultural institution in question, a foreign academy in Mexico
City, brought together a select range of art and research fellows for a transdisciplinary
residency program. Inviting a hybrid form of ‘art/science’ collaboration,
the cultural institution soon faced a ‘permissive paradox’ (Heinich 2014); namely,
how to support a transdisciplinary program that prima facie called into question
the institution’s very existence. How would different constituencies of institution
members, ranging from senior trustees to resident fellows, mobilize ‘culture as display’
(Sharrock and Anderson 2011)? And how would they do so to either dramatize
or downplay said paradox, thereby configuring, and eventually deconstructing,
the contended program and intended institution? The paper offers a reflexive ethnography
in answer to these questions by probing the author’s experience, while
taking its cue from Wes Sharrock’s longstanding plea for an unprejudiced sociology.