Art in crisis and in solidarity

The messaging of art’s social prowess, however, continued unabashed. Institutions have continued to make claims of their relevance as Turin’s Castello di Rivoli turned into a vaccination centre and New York’s Queens Museum became a food bank. The Whitworth gallery in Manchester adjusted its mission statement to directly respond to social inequities emergent in the pandemic. New York theatres opened their doors and became sanctuaries for protesters. Artists, too, have demonstrated their solidarity: the designer Craig Oldham launched a billboard campaign in support of underappreciated essential workers, while artist C. A. Halpin is mounting a drive for a national pay rise for healthcare workers.

 

What is new in these recent expressions of social value is that they are portrayed as rooted in solidarity rather than a policy imperative. Are we witnessing a solidarity turn that transforms food banks into art projects and museums into healthcare providers just like the performance turn transformed community walks into art events, or the social turn commodified community cohesion as a currency of social practice? 

 

 

In The Rules of Art (1996), Pierre Bourdieu offers an unflattering view of artistic production. He argues that art joins social struggles not out of altruism, but because such social movements’ needs for symbolic production drive new demand for artistic representation. Put crudely, Bourdieu implies that art as propaganda is profitable regardless of whether the artist believes in its cause, and whether the cause is successful in reaching its goals. 

 

In Bourdieu’s analysis, neither the artist nor the cultural institution is exempt from this hypocrisy that for the most part remains unarticulated. Should all the artists who made and sold artworks ‘supporting’ healthcare workers donate their proceeds to the cause, or is the claimed power of their artistic message enough? Does it matter if Castello di Rivoli charged the Italian health system rent? Is it disingenuous that Craig Oldham’s billboards also made claims of artists’, curators’, and designers’ social indispensability along his kind assertions of respect for waste collectors? Or that C. A. Halpin’s Kickstarter fundraiser details her fees and artwork production costs, but displays no interest in how the work may do anything to advance its stated aims? These dilemmas play out in far more jarring ways, too. In December 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement took the top spot on Art Review magazine’s Art Power 100 list, a place usually reserved for a blue-chip gallery dealer or a powerful institutional curator. It is unclear how the movement would make use of the benefits that such recognition would offer. Who is using whose power and for what?

 

The question of who benefits from the excess cultural capital generated when art engages in social interventions has long gone unresolved and to ascribe callous motives to all artists would be at best defamatory. The pandemic year could have been an opportunity to reconfigure the flow of value between social groups, but this remains difficult partly due to the considerable growth and professionalisation of the cultural sector and the arts and creative industries since the publication of Bourdieu’s work. Where once art’s solidarity with the world was a matter of moral obligation, the pandemic has turned art worker’s solidarity impulses inwards. This process has been long coming, given that the precarious working conditions of artists and cultural professionals have been a reality of the industry for many years. 

 

 

Individual ethics aside, this solidarity turn has profound implications for understanding culture as a public value because how culture performs solidarity can blur the boundaries between artists’ and arts professionals’ identities and those of the groups that are usually the beneficiaries of social practices. In a time of crisis, artists are incentivised to portray themselves as those deserving solidarity. #artisessential, but it’s more essential to artists than to their audiences.

 

The strikes surrounding the termination of some 300 retail and commercial jobs at Tate last summer illustrate this feedback loop. The workers’ plea to Tate management conflated two distinct narratives: that the workers were themselves likely artists, and that their number included historically disadvantaged groups. Tate owed the workers a double duty of care because artists are by definition underprivileged workers. In a sleight of hand, art’s offer of solidarity became a demand. Read in Bourdieu’s tone, art’s principled stand in solidarity with itself reflects the fact that artists can now control the demand for social art simply by insisting that they are themselves worthy subjects of art’s attention. In this solidarity turn, a closed and self-referential system, art can judge the worthiness of its subjects and mark the effectiveness of its own work. Such an outcome could only be self-defeating: solidarity between members of a single group is no guarantee of change. 

 

Art’s social mission is now core to its practice and education, and this has doubtlessly generated significant and quantifiable public good. However, in following this mission, art and culture have made unrealistic promises not only to their subjects but also to their workforces. How could they turn to a model of social practice that is driven by genuine solidarity, rather than a vicious circle of exploitation and amelioration that’s entirely internal to the practice? The challenges of disambiguating between the claims put forward by the plethora of actors involved are considerable, given that individuals are demonstrably as capable of moral grandstanding as their institutions. Resolving these tensions will be a key task for those charged with allocating what resources are available in the period of recovery, as they attempt to disambiguate the competing claims for support and evolving value narratives. 

 

 

Reconsidering the historical models of solidarity between identity or class groups whose successes are attributable to the exchange of social capital could offer a productive framework. Shannan Clark’s recent The Making of the American Creative Class (2020)  is a rich account of the emergence and transformations of the ‘white collar’ and ‘creative’ classes in the US since the 1920s. Clark examines the histories of an industry that, until today, includes newspaper reporters as much it does artists and suggests that their identities have often been in internal conflict. The political, personal, and professional motivations of creative workers have long been heterogeneous and historically unstable. To put it mildly: the creative industries have long struggled to reconcile their conflicting desires for intellectual autonomy and economic recognition.

 

What is hearting to a non-historian in Clark’s account is that it offers a precedent for just about any dilemma in which the creative industries find themselves today. Changing cultural consumption habits? It already happened. Fierce competition in the labour market? Yes. Economic collapse? Ditto. Political in-fighting? Continuously. Change in funding paradigms? Repeatedly. Against this backdrop, Clark brings out examples of solidarities between creative workers and society at large. In the 1930s, organisations like Consumer Union - a group of design and advertising workers - brought labour and consumer activism together through an ideology that was as aesthetic as it was political. A careful study of the interplay of these historical solidarities could support the examination of the claims that today’s art makes about its own needs, desires, and abilities.