It’s no secret that opportunity often hinges on who you know. The Bush
administration illustrated the point vividly from its selection of Supreme Court nominees to its appointment of a FEMA Director. While, of course, they were not the first administration to give preferential treatment to friends, the regular news reports of their corrupt dealing brought the process into the limelight.

With all the attention given the issue of cronyism, it became difficult to avoid
the fact that favoritism permeates other aspects of social life—in ways that often do not seem nearly so sinister, and from which we frequently benefit. While cronyism clearly has a dark side, connoting corruption, that frequently riddles political and social institutions, from a less cynical vantage, cronyism is fundamentally about friendship and supporting those you trust. Cronyism is one of the essential building blocks of community at a very grassroots level. Frequently conversations among friends generate ideas that transform into action. In the arts, in particular, it is not uncommon for friends to organize shows of friends’ work—a perfectly valid practice, which nevertheless treads a fine, incestuous line.

For Cronyism, curator Emily Sevier invited three artist friends to contribute work
to the show and invite three others to do the same. These three were then asked to
invite three more artist friends to contribute work to the exhibition, resulting in a loose network of insiders and a show produced solely on the basis of personal connections. In this way, Cronyism both parodied the decadence of closed, self-protective power blocks, and acknowledged the importance of mutually supportive networks of friends in sustaining a vibrant and self-empowered artistic community.