The Uses of Artists Under Capitalism
When I describe the ‘relegation’ of artists to a less-than-consequential role in Western capitalist culture, this is not to say that artists are rendered entirely useless. Rather, it is to argue that one of the functions of capitalism is to channel the usefulness of artists into roles that pose little or no threat to the most pervasive forms of it.
This is also to be distinguished from the idea of useful art, which has inspired much thought and practice such as Tania Bruguera’s Asociacion Arte Útil, which is project-based and centered on the possibilities of art-works as useful entities in challenging social forms and the political status-quo.
Ultimately this is less a critique of capitalism’s exploitation of artists than it is one of arts education, which conveys such a limited set of possibilities to artists-in-training for what it is they might do in the world (while over-promising how doing these things might be sustainable ways of making a living). This is the ‘limited horizon’ Mark Fisher describes as a fundamental aspect of capitalist realism - the elimination of the imaginative capacities of its participants in regard to any alternative.
Co-optation of education is just one mechanism by which capitalism hobbles our imagination. Here I detail three major roles offered up to artists by arts education and the economic ecosystem which lays beyond the academy (with a short added note regarding a fourth role, wealth production, which does not involve artists quite so much as it relates to art objects themselves. You might wonder how one may exist without the other, and this would underline a key implication of this essay, which is that all of these roles for artists are likely replaceable by significantly advanced-enough technology).
1.) Decorators
It is true that artists are the makers of the paintings we hang over our couch, or the objects and images that adorn hotels, office buildings, and cafes. I have lots of art hanging up all over my home, and it’s lovely to look at. The distinction here is whether I think that covering my walls is one of the primary utilities of an artists’ life – I do not. The things on my walls are, to my mind, artifacts of a knowledge creation process, and while they may look nice, it is their relationship to a more longitudinal process of material and bodily engagement that makes them interesting to me.
In a wider professional context, many artists are corralled into the decorating business, with help from technology that promises an income by pipelining paintings into hotel lobbies and doctor’s offices. It is easy to mistake these often-attractive artifacts for a primary purpose, and thanks in part to acculturation within this paradigm, many artists then orient their whole practice toward the creation of such decorative objects.
Sometimes within the category of decoration, we approach something which looks like a larger purpose, such as programs that bring artists in to decorate hospital wings or daycare centers. The surrounding rhetoric of such programs often espouses the healing qualities and other physiological benefits of art. But we stop short of calling artists doctors, and if an artist were to seek payment in proportion to the reported healing benefits of hanging their work in the oncology ward, they will be reminded then and there that they are decorators only.
(I would add that Healer is in fact one of the prospective roles of artists outside of a capitalist political economy. The implications of the artist-as-healer are a threat to this system, however, because it is premised on an economy of care and non-quantitative metrics of efficacy, among other complications, and thus is resistant to commodification and co-optation for profit.)
2.) Entertainers
Museums have led the turn to artist-as-entertainer, as they’ve succumbed to the economic pressures to put on annual blockbuster ‘art superstar’ exhibitions. With their funding more dependent on ticket sales and less than ever on guaranteed cultural funding, they have largely abandoned a critical role in presenting challenging or un-established work (to say nothing of daring to stray from the seemingly in-born purpose of exhibiting objects, though this is by no means a mandate).
The transformation of art and cultural events at large into entertainment is a result of a crowded marketplace in the attention economy. This form of Fine Art as entertainment may be termed edutainment (if you can stomach it), and its angle is that it is entertaining while also being good for you. This pretense doesn’t help the artists caught in its ripcurrent however, from still straining to get the attention of its proponents and to propose their own worth in the attention economy.
The celebritisation of art has been felt through the gallery system as well, and of course this has become inseparable from artists’ ‘hustle’ on social media, presenting themselves as a reliable and exciting brand. Artists are compelled to consistently make stylish, saleable, and eye catching works, while also positioning themselves personally as cool, edgy, sexy, politically correct, connected, and/ or just quirkily out of step enough to possibly be a discovery.
All of this conflates culture with content, of course. Content is the hybrid entertainment/advertising material of the digital age. Because the skills needed for its creation share some overlap with the technical skills taught in arts academies (think Photoshop, video editing, digital imaging, etc), it has become a natural niche in industry for trained artists to inhabit. At the moment (but I suspect not for long), it’s even possible to make a modest living as a content producer, and it certainly is rewarded by the prospect of thousands of small doses of neurotransmitters when your posts are Liked. But this set of circumstances has made it often difficult to tease apart the roles of content creators from artists.
It also points to a more persistent symptom of culture under capitalism, which is that artists are taught that their livelihood is founded on their creativity, and therefore their skillset translates well to any field that likewise is reputedly ‘creative.’ This is another mechanism by which artists end up as entertainers – their education in ‘creativity’ is understood as being primarily useful for labor within the actual entertainment industry. And so our political economy finds artists useful, for now.
It could be argued that this form of entertainment is nothing more than decoration of the human soul, and should be lumped in with the first category of uses, but because of the huge number of artists employed for their creativity by the entertainment industry itself, I offer it here as a distinct category of preoccupation.
3.) Communicators (Conveyors)
Of course artists are communicators, you might think, and what could be wrong with that? Is it a co-optation of artistic practice that they would be hirable as communicators? After all, isn’t art all about expressing oneself or communicating one’s own interpretation of experience? A thousand rapturous introductions to textbooks on the Power of Art would suggest so…
This is why I have refined this category to be subtitled ‘conveyors’ – because the usefulness of artists under capitalism is not solely to communicate but specifically to convey the ideas of others.
Artists – through decoration, design, illustration, and storytelling – have proven very useful in conveying ideas, beliefs, and data. This is different from generating ideas, beliefs, and data. The use of artists for decorating work often evolves into the use of artists for conveying.
Art/science collaborations are frequently innocuous but nevertheless pertinent manifestations of this relegation of artists from potential knowledge producer to knowledge conveyer. All too often, the role of artists in such collaborations is to visualize (convey) the data or ideas generated by the scientific research. It is a rare collaboration wherein the artist is a source for the data. More often, artists are involved in order to decorate the reporting of scientific knowledge, and this elaborates into forms of conveyance, like data visualization and scientific illustration.
This puts the artist in a non-critical position – they simply receive the data from the knowledge-producers and effectively decorate it such that it is digestible or appealing to a wider audience.
Like the artists decorating the hospital wing, their work is put in a lower position within a hierarchy of value to that of the knowledge producing scientists, even while frothy rhetoric about the equal importance of art and science conceals the realities to be expected on the budget lines. The wider effects of this hierarchy are that culturally we then receive and value the categorizing, taxonomic, and quantitative picture of the world given to us by scientific analysis, and slowly lose the connective, synthesizing, in-commoning types of knowledge that artists might generate on the same subjects.
Storytelling skills (a type of connective knowledge) are routinely leveraged for communications/ conveyance. I have plenty of personal experience here, becoming involved with organizations who need their (often complex) work explained to a public (or stakeholders, funders, shareholders, etc) in understandable terms. This involves the use of artistic skills of synthesis and narrative to ingest the complex components of a ‘client’s’ existence and re-package them as a coherent and compelling narrative.
Advertising is yet another example of this sort of conveyance. We could ask a deeper question about the use of artists in many such circumstances: what are they advertising? It is the skill of the artists, rooted in their disciplinary training, that makes the conveyance of a sales pitch function - the composition, content, and aesthetics of our advertisements are highly reliant on artistic skills, yet the substance of those advertisements comes entirely from the cynical, complicit imaginations of marketers, salesmen, and corporate apologists. This is how artists are used within capitalism through the mechanism of conveyance.
*Wealth Production
I add this category only to make clear I’m aware that wealth production (for the already wealthy) is acknowledged as one of capitalism’s most effective uses of art, and the most clear-cut, by-the-book expression of capitalism itself. Hito Steyerl and others have done plenty of writing and demonstrating how art objects have become one of the most remarkable ways to fabricate wealth out of thin air, and store it for downright exponential accumulation. This essay is about artists though, and it is a miniscule set of artists globally who are in fact used for such purposes.
This miniscule set of artists is, of course, put to use by the wealthy for further production of wealth-producing objects. Further than that, the market mindset at the heart of the capital economy results in a competitive system in which lots of artists aspire to be in that wealth-producing subset, and so we are effectively used to create a vicious cannibalistic frenzy, jostling with one another for positions of favor (career), that serves as a very effective inoculation against cooperation, collaboration, community, and mutual care – all of which are potentially fatal to the host.
Conclusion - On Labor
The problematic here is that all of these roles for artists allow artists to subsist within our present political economy, and so it is tempting from a Marxist mindset to rise to their defense on the basis of the value of their labor. Would it be so bad for artists to work in the entertainment industry, either as exhibiting artists in popular museum shows or as skilled technicians in the film business, as long as we properly value their labor? There are numerous admirable initiatives to speak of advocating for a more equitable valuation of artists’ labor, from W.A.G.E. to the still nascent Arts Union. I appreciate and support the urgent need for this valuation of labor, and I recognize the philosophical motivations for this sort of agitation: within Marxist thought it is necessary to empower workers relative to the capitalist class in order to ensure subsistance for all in the present, and to perhaps bring about an overturning of capitalist hegemony through the raising of awareness amongst a vastly larger number of workers relative to the ruling class.
My concern is that the conflation of culture with content, paired with a neoliberal project of relentless technological production in spite of the constraints of our ecosystem, has put artists in a position where their labor actually isn’t valuable anymore. We can argue for it as much as we like, but according to the rules of the game, if we can keep putting up posts that get likes, staging exhibitions that sell tickets, and churning out content that soaks up consumer attention, there isn’t much of an argument for the value of artistic labor. All of these jobs are doable by advanced enough technologies, and the value-for-labor argument begins to look quaint and inapplicable to current circumstances. Because as long as we persist in saying that what artists do is make art, and conceding the point that in order to make art they can and must labor in the roles described above (and by extension that our art schools are right to continue to prepare us for these roles and little more), then we are inevitable participants in the political economy which has established this status quo.
What is needed, I’d contend, is first recognition of this relegation, followed by a redefinition of roles altogether. Stop claiming value for producing content. Stop claiming value for laboring within a competitive and regressive art market. Stop claiming value for gigwork, visualization, and decoration. Then we must ask what is necessary to human survival and harmonious existence on the planet? What do those who engage in artistic practice do that must be done? We can either dispose of the term artist or detach it from its occupational connotation, but we must redefine the usefulness and necessity of these ways of working that we call art.
I think there is an answer to this problematic within the realm of connective, synthesizing, in-commoning forms of material and ecological knowledge, which are a product of artistic practice (broadly defined). Whether we need to continue naming our activity ‘art’ or not is up for debate, but as long as we call it art while actually practicing decoration, entertainment, and conveyance, then we will remain comfortably within the political economy and social imaginary of the present.