ARTISTS REMAKE THE WORLD A Contemporary Art Manifesto
Vid Simoniti
Yale University Press New Haven and London
Copyright © 2023 Vid Simoniti All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. All reasonable efforts have been made to provide accurate sources for all images that appear in this book. Any discrepancies or omissions will be rectified in future editions. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: sales.press@yale.edu yalebooks.com Europe Office: sales@yaleup.co.uk yalebooks.co.uk Set in Adobe Garamond by Tetragon, London Printed in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942013 ISBN 978-0-300-26629-0 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chapter one
When and How Contemporary Art Became Political
O
f all the palaces that symbolise the prestige of old European empires – the Louvre in Paris, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg or Buckingham Palace in London – Schloss Belvedere in Vienna is probably the sweetest. Its marzipan-like swirls and sugar-white statuary coalesce in that distinctive symmetry that makes the best Baroque buildings look like both a princely residence and a culinary delicacy. However, in the summer of 2016, visitors to this palace, now a museum and an art gallery, were greeted by a rather sombre art installation on the pond outside: on the tranquil water surface, there were gathered 1,500 life jackets. Floating in circular formations, they appeared as strange aquatic blooms at the height of summer. Called F. Lotus (2016), the installation was created by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: a product of the studio that he had set up on the Greek island of Lesbos, where many refugees were stranded, while waiting for European states to decide whether they were going to be allowed to continue their passage to the continent (Plate 1). Even a casual visitor could not have missed the stringent message of Ai’s work. The year before, in the continuing refugee crisis, more than a million people arrived in Europe via the Aegean Sea, most of them fleeing the civil war in Syria. Austria, like many European states, shut its borders in the ensuing anti-migrant panic,
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contravening the principle of free movement in the European Union; by contrast, her neighbour Germany accepted 1 million refugees, in a gesture that bypassed the EU principle of claiming asylum in the first country of arrival. The life jackets, so closely associated with the death toll at sea, placed next to one of Austria’s most prestigious cultural monuments, could not fail to send a clear reprimand. And yet, one might worry that it is precisely the context of an art exhibition that makes the message itself less effective. After all, what could be more pleasant than strolling up to the Belvedere, viewing a famous artist’s work, perhaps exchanging a few worried words on the state of world politics, and then enjoying a nice ice cream in the sun? While some press received Ai’s installation positively, the artworld’s potential hypocrisy was called out by anonymous online forum participants, whose (as usual) disparaging comments nestled at the bottom of the news reports, complaining that art lovers were yet again shedding crocodile tears over a political crisis, without doing much to counter it.1 Such disputes are often at the core of the reception of contemporary art. Viewed one way, art seems to be playing its time-honoured role of holding up a mirror to society; from another angle, it seems to be preaching to the converted, or, worse, enables a grotesque ritual through which a privileged social class absolve themselves of their guilt. To reflect on the role that contemporary art might play in political life in the twenty-first century, we must inevitably arrive at perspectives beyond art itself: we must question who wields power in contemporary capitalist democracies, who is speaking to whom, whether art should try to change people’s minds or rather deepen their understanding of political issues. In this chapter, I will first consider art within its context of galleries and museums and ask how this world – the artworld – has come to conceive of itself not simply as a space for aesthetic enjoyment, but as a public forum for debating the kind of society we want to live in.
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W h at I s ( Co n t e m p o r ary) Art? The term ‘contemporary art’ is terribly ambiguous. In one sense, the term ‘contemporary’ means simply contemporaneous, and, like the word ‘modern’ (derived from the Latin modo, meaning ‘just now’), has an indexical meaning, pointing to the time of the utterance. Michelangelo’s sculptures were in this sense contemporary in the 1500s, Berthe Morisot’s paintings in the 1800s and Ai Weiwei’s installations in the early 2000s. Within academic art historical scholarship, however, such terms have also become associated with specific art historical periods. The early modern period is often equated with the art made between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; modern art tends to be dated 1860s–1960s; postmodern art 1960s–1990s; while contemporary art is either seen as co-extensive with postmodern art (1960s onwards) or denotes a later, post-Cold War period (from the 1990s onwards).2 It is surely unfortunate that all these designations are just variations on terms meaning ‘now’. But they have come to help art historians and museum custodians to separate works within collections, often tracing breaks in the materials used in artistic production. The third meaning of the term ‘contemporary art’, however, denotes not merely the period but the type of art produced. If someone asks ‘Do you like contemporary art?’ they do not mean just any watercolour of a sunset that happens to have been painted since the 1960s. Instead, the term is here associated with more experimental, exhibition-based practices, which include painting and sculpture, but importantly also stretch to installation, performance, social practice, textual art, digital art and a host of other genres, organised around concerns ranging from the purely aesthetic to the weightily political.3 This multiplicity of media and genres associated with the visual arts since the 1960s has contributed to the difficulty of defining the term ‘art’ itself. Today, art can be something as physical and massive as Ai Weiwei’s installation Straight (2008–12),
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which consists of 90 tonnes of steel (Plate 4); or something as intangible as Stephanie Dinkins’ artificial intelligence computer program, used to simulate her family’s oral history (Not the Only One, 2018, Plate 21). Contemporary art might be a figurative painting that recalls the techniques of the high Renaissance, like Lina Iris Viktor’s canvases adorned with 24-carat gold leaf (Fourth, 2018, Plate 12); or a grassroots social action, like Tania Bruguera’s participatory work Immigrant Movement International (2011–15, Plate 8). This extreme fluidity of medium seems to set art produced for galleries and museums apart from the other arts today. A novel, feature film, television series or hip hop album might also contain a great deal of experimentation, of course, but they remain confined to the comparably robust boundaries of medium and genre. A mainstream filmmaker might make a film about artificial intelligence, but she will not write an AI program and call that her film; a hip hop artist might be deeply socially engaged, but she will not organise a march and proclaim that to be her album. Contemporary artists that we will encounter in this book can, and do, take such liberties. Seemingly at home in all media and none, they adapt their tools freely to the issues they address, curiously capable of incorporating non-artistic disciplines and approaches as they see fit.4 The shape-shifting freedom that we find in exhibition-based art today has a fairly clear historical starting point: as one dating of the term ‘contemporary’ suggests, this is the great explosion of experimentation in the visual arts in the 1950s and 1960s, which included happenings, Pop Art, performance, installation, video art, land art, Conceptual Art and various hard-to-define mixtures of the above. In the ensuing decades, artists previously trained as painters, sculptors and printmakers abandoned their traditional skills in favour of conceptual approaches – the so called ‘deskilling’ process in art schools – and became the open-ended, maverick combiners of disciplines that we know today.5 As the medium-specific craft became less important, so alternative definitions of art began to
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emerge. For philosopher Arthur Danto, art was defined by the ‘artworld’: art is any object, the meaning of which can be decoded by those critics, curators and historians appropriately inculcated in the history and theory of art.6 Art historian Rosalind Krauss offered the concept of the ‘expanded field’ of art to describe much the same situation. Krauss legitimated the great proliferation of new forms by describing them as genealogically and structurally related to older forms like sculpture or architecture; she saw each new form (like ‘site-construction’) as a move made possible in the logical space opened by previous art forms.7 The philosophical account puzzled over by theorists like Danto and Krauss ultimately points to the ‘institutional’ definition of art: something is art if art historians, curators, artists and other members of art institutions accept it to be such.8 The institutional definition of art of course feels like a sophist’s trick: it tells us that art is what is found in galleries, museums and art history books, but not why we should put these things there. The definition does not answer the deeper desire to know what it is, in the first place, that makes art interesting, that unites this disparate field around something of value to human life. As our starting point, however, an institutional definition will have to suffice. My scope in this book will be art, which is made within the network of museums, galleries, biennial exhibitions, art schools and art press. Our temporal range will largely be restricted to the first decades of the twenty-first century, though in important ways just mentioned, the approaches of artists active in our own period reach back to the 1960s. I will sometimes use the term exhibitionbased art to refer to this production: even though contemporary art often breaks free of the exhibition hall, it still draws on funds and recognition from institutions like galleries and museums. In the final chapter, however, I will return to the question ‘what is art’, and attempt a hopefully more satisfying definition, which does not just grope at art’s scope, but at least raises our sights to its essence.
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T h e B i rt h o f P o l iticis e d E x h i b i t i o n - Ba s e d Art If you had been a part of the late 1960s New York art scene and knew where to look for hip new works, you might have wandered down to the opening night of the young art dealer Seth Siegelaub’s exhibition, held 5–31 January 1969 in a disused office space, a few blocks down from the Museum of Modern Art.9 The exhibition itself would be, provocatively, untitled and, more provocatively, contained nothing visually stimulating. There was a hidden transmitter broadcasting an imperceptible radio signal (by Robert Barry); some newspaper adverts, stuck to the wall (by Joseph Kosuth); and a discoloured stain, which had been created by the artist pouring some bleach onto the carpet (by Lawrence Weiner). The most physical piece was a heap of sawdust (by Douglas Huebler), which the gallery receptionist was instructed to photograph at half-hour intervals on the opening night. Without much to look at, you might instead notice some familiar faces: perhaps an artist known for drawing criss-crossed patterns on walls with his pencil (Sol LeWitt), or the sharp-penned critic who a year prior described this newest craze for ‘Conceptual Art’ as comparable in its ‘sparseness and austerity’ to ‘the best of painting and sculpture at the moment’ (Lucy Lippard).10 Perhaps you’d remember the receptionist photographing the sawdust (Adrian Piper); a few months later you might recognise her performing her own piece about internal states of consciousness, blindfolded, at Max’s Kansas City, the artists’ favourite haunt. If you had brought with you that morning’s copy of the New York Times, and opened its arts pages at a quiet moment, you might think that the new year’s wishes printed there had already been fulfilled: ‘may far-out artists drive their critics mad’ wrote one critic, while a patron wished for ‘even greater provocation and controversy in art’.11 This tight-knit artworld was awash with possibilities and ideas: these were the hot young things following in the footsteps of John Cage’s esoteric philosophies and Andy Warhol’s fame, with the memory of how
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Jackson Pollock made serious money by ‘inventing’ action painting in the previous decade still very much alive. The explosion of artistic experimentation, well underway by the late 1960s, corresponded to the credo of political freedom – Woodstock, hippies, sexual revolution, psychedelics – of that decade. But it was only at the very end of the decade that the experimental New York artworld became explicitly ‘politicised’, as is evident from testimonies by figures like Lippard and Piper.12 Events like the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King (April 1968), the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War (November 1969) and the Kent State shootings of students protesting the war (May 1970) provoked many young people into an open rebellion against the establishment, creating a generation who began to perceive their capitalist homeland not as the bulwark of freedom, but as an imperialist aggressor. By 1969–70, many New York artists had joined trade unions like the newly established Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),13 and joined regular protests against the war. Yet the work that these artists were making did not immediately reflect this change. So, in 1970, when Siegelaub’s protégés received the greatest accolade of the New York artworld, a full show at the Museum of Modern Art, the curator Kynaston McShine filled the catalogue pages with pictures of protests and of the war, asking ‘What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaningful?’14 But the exhibition itself contained almost no reference to current events by New York artists (foreign artists, who had politicised somewhat earlier, such as the Brazilian Cildo Meireles or German Hans Haacke, made more explicitly political works). Joseph Kosuth, Lucy Lippard and Carl Andre – all active AWC members – submitted, respectively, a meditation on linguistic reference, a riddling text about absence, and concrete poetry. Hilton Kramer, a conservative art critic, mocked: ‘The “relevant and meaningful” thing to do in the face of this grave political crisis is, apparently, [… to] go to town with the Xerox machine, collect a lot of pointless photographic junk, listen to a poem on the telephone, or simply go to sleep.’15
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I narrate these events in some detail because, while the beginnings of politicised, post-conceptual art in 1960s–1970s New York City have been much written about, the sheer paradox of that birth is often underappreciated. On the one hand, we have an artworld in many respects brilliant, but revelling in pleasures utterly abstruse and self-absorbed. As American art critic Susan Sontag wrote in 1965: ‘The most interesting and creative art of our time is not open to the generally educated; it demands special effort; it speaks a specialized language.’16 On the other hand, there are the mass political movements – anti-war, civil rights and feminist – that led a generation to reject the chief tenets of their society. Both the artistic and political identities were strongly felt by artworld participants of the time, but the obvious tension between them could not be easily negotiated, and so, for many, the two simply became equated. Visual artists, of course, had been socially engaged many times before – we may think of William Hogarth’s moralistic prints condemning marriage for money or the drinking of gin (1730s–1740s); of Eugène Delacroix’s idealisation of the July Revolution in Liberty Leading the People (1830); of Käthe Kollwitz’s etchings of labourers’ plight (1890s–1930s); of Pablo Picasso’s condemnation of war atrocities in Guernica (1937) – but these are all figurative works, instantly comprehensible in their denunciation of evils or glorification of the good. In the New York of the late 1960s, we have a confluence of two entirely different principles: art at its most intellectually difficult becomes the expression of a mass, anti-establishment political sensibility. No wonder aesthetic conservatives like Kramer had enjoyed themselves so much at this new art’s expense. The consequences of this paradoxical equation, of this squaring of a circle, have been long-lasting and, crucially, define the art of our own time. How art is now written about by both historians and critics is perhaps the clearest indication of this influence. Take the work of Sol LeWitt, who in the 1960s became famous for his conceptual wall drawings, whereby he specified a simple design (such as ‘vertical lines not touching’), and then had it executed onto the walls
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of patrons’ houses or in galleries. In his long career, LeWitt created increasingly elaborate patterns, compared his process to the formal complexity of Bach’s music,17 and made no connection between his art and his politics. Even though this work lacks any explicitly political subject matter, however, one art historian, writing in the early 2000s, finds LeWitt’s work to contain a subversion of capitalism because the artist ‘reappropriates a mode of operation from the world of industrial capital and distorts it, defamiliarizes it, and puts it to a different use’.18 For another commentator, LeWitt’s wall drawings represented an anti-establishment spirit because the wall ‘is open to anyone with a can of spray paint, far more democratic than a canvas’;19 for a third, LeWitt champions ‘equality, accessibility, open exchange and public space’;20 for a fourth, the ‘radical contingency and oppositionality of LeWitt’s practice […] points to an alternative model of democracy’.21 LeWitt’s art of creating gentle, imaginative abstract patterns suddenly becomes, in some strange way, a call for a revolution. In the decades following the conflation of experimental art and political engagement, the main task for art historians and critics pouring out of graduate schools would be to keep squaring the circle: to preserve the formalist sophistication of art while contortedly alluding to a radical, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment political stance. As the American critic Hal Foster once suggested, the writing of his generation preserved the ‘difficulty and distinction’ of high modernist art while the ‘radical rhetoric compensated a little for lost activism’.22 Today we find such wishful thinking perpetuated in what we might call ‘wall label politics’: when an artist’s practice makes no political reading available to the observer, but where a curatorial text or an artist’s statement, attached to the work, alludes to politics.23 Into the 1970s and beyond, however, artistic practice did change, and increasingly came to incorporate overt political messaging. This new work utilised the expanded toolkit developed in the 1960s – conceptual art, performance, participatory art, installation, institutional critique, land art and so forth – but explicitly thematised power structures, gender and racial inequality, consumerism, Cold War conflicts,
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corporate greed and other social topics. Artists like Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Rasheed Araeen, Hans Haacke, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Félix González-Torres, Harun Farocki and Lorna Simpson, to name a few, formed the new canon of this brand of critical postmodernism, and, as can be seen from this list, women artists and artists of colour often led the way. By the time we arrive in the new millennium, this next phase of work, formally experimental and politically explicit, was beginning to be recognised as one legitimate language of critical art, and it set the scene for the twenty-first-century departures that will preoccupy us in the following chapters. Importantly, practices from the late 1960s to the 1990s pioneered the interdisciplinary modes of contemporary art, whereby artists would no longer be constrained by any one medium, but freely borrowed from other fields of discourse: be it Joseph Beuys mixing art with philosophy and sociology, Jasia Reichardt curating an entire exhibition on art and the emerging field of cybernetics, John Latham and Barbara Steveni sending artists on placements within industry, or Suzanne Lacy incorporating social action into her performances.24 Despite art’s openness to political message and life outside the gallery, however, the contradictory spirit that attended the birth of contemporary art was never fully banished, and must be kept in mind as we proceed. Even as we stand by the pond showing Ai Weiwei’s work in 2016, we can hear it hovering above the water surface, murmuring its objections. Who is this art for? What can it achieve? What links artistic experimentation and political engagement?
Th e A rt wo r l d a s a Pu b lic Fo ru m Contemporary exhibition-based art, as we noted above, is defined by the artworld: the people who decide what is in and what is out. Up until the 1960s, visual art consisted largely of irreplaceable, one-off creations like paintings and sculptures, and the artworld
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that surrounded them was thus in large part made up of collectors, patrons, auction houses and commercial galleries. Critical analyses of the artworld therefore often centred on art’s domicile in this world of private luxury. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, writing in the 1970s, memorably analysed contemporary artworks as fetishised commodities for the wealthy, whose sole purpose is that the mega-rich can demonstrate their status to each other by spending money on, essentially, worthless objects. In this damning analysis, the ugliness and banality of much contemporary art is in fact an advantage: the more uninteresting the object in itself, the more delicious is the glory that surrounds the purchaser at the time of spending a vast sum. All that really matters is the provenance, the name (the brand) of the artist in question.25 Baudrillard’s analysis, unkind as it is, strikes me as still largely correct insofar as we seek to explain the aesthetic and intellectual nullity of contemporary art associated with vast wealth. Thus, a dead calf in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst has sold for about £10 million, while his ashtrays overflowing with real cigarette butts (in an edition of 1,500) sell for a few thousand apiece. There clearly is nothing especially valuable about an ashtray, other than the fetishised value associated with possessing ‘a Hirst’. Indeed, the only part where Baudrillard is mistaken is that these objects might not even be that expensive for their buyers: to a billionaire who can easily afford to spend $80 million a year, a $10 million artwork is proportionally about as valuable as a $250 framed print from a department store is to a middle-class person with an annual luxury budget of $2,000. So, these things are part fetish objects, part oligarch’s knick-knacks. Slowly but steadily since the 1960s, however, an alternative artworld has developed, in which art’s status is no longer solely that of a commodity but rather that of an inquiry. Populated by curators, artists, critics and academics, rather than collectors and dealers, this relatively new artworld is supported within the ecosystem of public museums, large-scale biennial exhibitions and academia; and while its separation from the commercial artworld has not been a clean
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cut, the significance of its rise is considerable. Crucially, the 1990s and 2000s saw an accelerated spread of large-scale exhibitions across the globe; these have often been referred to as ‘biennials’ because they are mostly scheduled to happen every two years. There are now more than 200 such biennials across the world, including in Gwangju, Istanbul, Jakarta, Liverpool, Havana, São Paulo, Chennai and many other cities.26 While the original and still most famous biennial is the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, where painting and sculpture have been traditionally exhibited in national pavilions, the new generation of large-scale exhibitions has been more closely modelled on documenta, held in the German city of Kassel every five years, which since Harald Szeemann’s influential edition of 1972 has existed as a forum for discussing social issues of the day.27 Into the 1990s, within a post-Cold War global landscape, similar exhibitions were being created all over the world, intending to provide stimulating experiences for both the local population and international visitors. The biennial curators began to increasingly sponsor artworks that were no longer one-off luxury items to be bought and sold, but rather artistic projects: impermanent installations, durational and participatory works. Some of these were purely visual spectacles, but due to the public-facing nature of these exhibitions, biennials have often fostered works that inquired into social issues. This can be clearly evidenced by some of the recent biennial themes: the 2012 Berlin Biennale, entitled Forget Fear, explored themes of social participation, especially as a response to the Occupy movement; the Jogja Biennale in Yogyakarta, 2015, entitled Hacking Conflict, featured artistic practices that explored ‘speculations and conflicts surrounding the desire for democracy, autonomy and power’; while the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York promised ‘a profound consideration of race, gender, and equity; and explorations of the vulnerability of the body’.28 In recent decades, public galleries and museums have also increasingly conformed to the expectation that art should inquire into social and political issues. In the marketing copy of British public
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galleries, for instance, we can readily find descriptions like: ‘animations and portraits that explore the increasingly profound influence [technological giants] have on our lives in the age of “Big Data”’;29 ‘the contesting of traditionally predominant narratives by previously marginalised voices’;30 or references to objects whose ‘scars can hint at the violence of the object’s separation from its homeland – a separation that parallels experiences of migration and diaspora’.31 There are no comprehensive empirical studies of the thematic trends in contemporary art institutions, but some such formula for describing art seems to have become de rigueur by at least the 2000s: a verb that denotes an inquiry (such as ‘explores’, ‘investigates’, ‘conveys’ …) coupled with a recognisably sociopolitical theme (‘identity’, ‘capitalism’, ‘privilege’ …). All this suggests a significant art historical development. From the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century there emerges a new artworld, which we might describe as the artworld of the public forum: a place where diverse audiences should come together to look at art and, through that experience, reflect on, or even debate, issues facing them as a society. That is not to say, of course, that the old, commercial artworld despaired over by Baudrillard has disappeared. Commercial art fairs, auction houses, private collectors all continue to participate in their bonfire of vanities, and that strange activity continues to intersect with the artworld of the public forum.32 This odd overlap is especially keenly felt in the United States, where wealthy collectors and corporate representatives are more likely to exercise influence (and sit on the boards of ) public-facing museums.33 Yet, while the two artworlds coincide, they cannot be said to be one and the same. In earlier eras, most artworks simply could not be separated from their status as luxuries: that was the unfortunate ontological predicament of painting and sculpture. Politically committed painters from Gustave Courbet to Pablo Picasso had to contend with the fact that ultimately their creations were one-off marvels accessible to the wealthy few. Today, serious, politically engaged artists have more options. Some, like Ai Weiwei, might indeed support themselves
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through the creation of luxury commodities – Ai’s studio produces vases, prints and sculptures, ranging from a few thousand to a few million dollars in price – but these artists’ most widely discussed pieces tend to be impermanent, participatory works, or public installations (like the one at Belvedere). Indeed, we might say that an artist like Ai Weiwei supports himself through saleable merchandise, and then uses it to make art for public discourse. More often, however, political artists today do not sell at all, but exist as ‘conceptual entrepreneurs’ – to use artist Martine Syms’s phrase – whereby they make their livelihood from academic posts, public commissions, research grants and other revenue streams created around the ideas they wish to explore.34 An art viewer interested in being intellectually challenged can today for the most part ignore the items for sale at the Frieze art fair or in Sotheby’s auction house, and focus on what is shown in public exhibitions, just as anybody interested in the intellectual content of novels, films or music can largely ignore the market for signed first editions, film merchandise or diamond-encrusted collectors’ vinyl plates. With the rise of the artworld as a public forum, visual art has therefore, at least in part, dispelled the curse of the fetishised object, which for so long was the unusual predicament it had to put up with among the arts. The challenges for the public forum faced by contemporary art are therefore elsewhere, and more similar to other spaces where people come together to exchange ideas. Like newspapers, television, the internet and academia, the public forum of art is also shot through with various economic interests, ideological agendas and structural inequities, which determine what and who is heard. These agendas might indeed be commercial (private galleries pushing their artists, or corporations sitting on museum boards), but they just as easily grow out of informal networks (curators showing artists they went to school with). Barriers to access might mirror broader social disadvantage (of ethnicity, race, gender, geographical margins and socioeconomic background), though patterns of opportunity can be rearranged to serve public agendas (arts-funding
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bodies can prioritise values of inclusivity and diversity). While it is sometimes presupposed that the public forum of exhibitions and museums is primarily accessed by economic elites, this is also not entirely correct. Recent analyses of social class in the United Kingdom, for instance, indeed find strong correspondence between economic prosperity and engagement with ‘highbrow’ culture; but on the other hand, the social classes that are counted as belonging to this relatively economically well-off segment make up more than 50 per cent of the population.35 The most engaged audiences of art exhibitions tend to consist of economically well-situated, educated, urban or commuter parts of society, but as many as 20 per cent of the UK population had visited an exhibition of some kind in the past year. Visual art audiences also tend to be younger than audiences for the other arts, and tend to mirror the ethnic composition of the country better.36 So, while the new artworld is by no means fully representative of society, its audience also does not simply correspond to the old preconception of a tiny bourgeois elite. If the artworld is a public forum, it is not a perfectly balanced idealisation of the Greek agora, but rather reflects modern democracies’ socially, economically and culturally fragmented nature. The rise of the artworld as a public forum is also not limited to the wealthy nations of the Global North, as the spread of the biennial system demonstrates. The global biennial system since the 1990s has led to greater platforms for artists from South America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. In a highly Anglophone-centric place like the United Kingdom or United States, it seems easier today to come across a voice from, say, Indonesia, Poland or Argentina in a public gallery than in the commercial cinema or on Netflix.37 Nevertheless, the spirit of free expression presupposed by the public forum does not carry everywhere equally. Artists exhibiting in capitalist democracies are not hindered by the obstructions faced within artworlds in autocracies like Russia or China. Thus, the global-facing Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, founded by the oligarch Dasha Zhukova, might present a thought-provoking show about
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climate change (The Coming World, 2019), but no artist in Russia can be critical of Putin’s authoritarian regime without suffering severe consequences. While I will present an international rostrum of artists in the pages below, my focus will be on artworlds within capitalist democracies; the forms of expression under the conditions of authoritarianism are too different to examine fully here. With these qualifications in place, if we look at the contemporary global artworld today, we more or less find a world in which the dreams of those earlier avant-gardes, of the politicised artists of the 1960s, appear to have been fulfilled. Indeed, never before have exhibition-based artists had access to such a broad range of exhibition spaces, all of which are asking them to be critical of the society they live in. Even an art gallery as disposed towards unadulterated pleasure as the Belvedere palace now presents social critique on its doorstep. True, this world might still be primarily accessed by the economic middle class, but it is doing its best to expand, to include a variety of voices, and to respond to global events with urgency. If art has at long last shaken off the golden yoke of the auction house and transformed itself into a space for democratic debate, however, then this transformation begets its own questions. While it is easy to demonstrate the relevance of politics to art, it is harder to show the relevance of art to politics. After all, we already have a variety of ways to debate the issues that face us: journalism, activism, university campuses, party politics, social media. The question ‘What does art offer politics?’ must today be asked, therefore, not simply by analysing the artist’s intention, their reception within the artworld or their relationship to art institutions or art historical precedents. The question implies the need to conduct a test of comparison. We should compare art to other public fora, to other modes of contributing to political life that are available within capitalist democracy. Can art offer anything that other types of discourse or action cannot? What does the installation of refugee jackets outside the Belvedere do for politics that other forms of political activity do not already accomplish?