An excerpt from Chapter 3 of my doctoral dissertation:
THE OPPRESSION OF ARTISTS
It's also impossible to look at creativity in any systemic way without acknowledging the relationship of art and artists to the greater society. In the U.S., this is not a comfortable relationship, as many of our social values and beliefs work to the detriment of artistic development. To a great extent, any society's status quo benefits by keeping artists functioning at lower levels. Art has the power to be subversive because it is about seeing things in new ways and can be very antithetical to the status quo. The job of an artist in society is often to invite people to step outside of the everyday, to pay attention and notice, to remember joy and love and each other's humanity, to acknowledge a difficult part of reality, to think, to remember what life is all about, to make a connection between themselves and the world. Artists often keep an independent view of society and how we’d like it to be (though we may have very different views). Artists think about pretty much anything in any way we want. This can be subversive. If a society is not interested in change, it does not get much benefit from creativity. No society can be against art altogether. For example, certain art such as “classical” music, opera, and the famous paintings of Old Masters, which don't question current social structures or moral values, often function to reinforce class, race, and gender differences. On the other hand, the work of contemporary artists like Holly Hughes and Robert Mapplethorpe, which questions sexual values, is very threatening to our current society and faces direct censorship.
Besides direct censorship, there are more subtle but systematic ways in which artists are kept functioning at lower levels. One of the most common mechanisms is the ideology of taste. This is the idea that some people have better "taste" than others and are able to recognize "good art" from "bad art." In the contemporary art world in the U.S., avant garde art is the most highly valued. It is also unintelligible to most people. To a certain extent, the more obscure and self-referential art is, the more valuable it is to museums and collectors. People who understand it can feel smarter than other people, encouraging art snobbery and essentially reinforcing class distinctions.
Avant garde and other art is also made even more unintelligible by the use of confusing language by critics, dealers, and art historians. This language is sometimes called "artspeak" by its critics. It is a highly intellectual form of discourse that focuses on aesthetics and aesthetic context rather than on content and political context. Only those who are highly educated in that form are capable of understanding it. Artists who do not participate in this way of viewing and talking about art are not taken as seriously, and viewers who cannot participate are seen as uncultured, having no "taste." Unfortunately, this ideology of "taste" isn't confined to the art world. The idea that art is not for everyone has come to permeate the entire U.S. culture.
The idea that there is some objective sense of "quality," unaffected by race, class, gender and other social factors, that only certain people can understand serves to separate art from the majority of people in U.S. society. Art (or what is seen as art) is made irrelevant. The intellectualization and obfuscation of art ensures that it does not stir up any unrest, because the people who already have power are the only ones who have the resources to gain intellectual and often physical access to it.
A second factor that keeps artists from functioning fully is the separation of art into separate categories that are ranked in a hierarchy. The largest division is between "fine art" and "craft." Fine art is valued more than craft, and certain fine art mediums are valued more than others. For example, oil painting is higher in rank than watercolor. Watercolor is higher than collage. It's really all about who gets to be an artist. Those who work in a "higher" medium tend to see those working in "lower" mediums as less than artists. Calling some artists "craftspeople" defines them out of the category altogether.
Related to the first two factors is a third: criticism. Criticism has become an honored tradition in the art world to the point where an artist's reputation is partially based on her ability to tear down and criticize other artists' work. It's not constructive criticism, it's all about who's better than whom. There is a cult of innovation, and what is innovative must fill a space where something else is lacking. Needless to say, this does not create a cooperative atmosphere in the art world. This handicaps artists in the long run, though participating in the game of criticism can certainly help an individual career.
Criticism is also encouraged by competition for scarce funding, which certainly affects artists' level of functioning. In the U.S. artists compete for a tiny amount of funding which, even taking into account all levels of government funding as well as private money, is less than half the per capita arts funding of most other post-industrialized nations (Heilbrun & Gray, 1993, p. 232). Money and art have a strange relationship altogether. On the one hand, if an artist isn't selling, it must be because her art isn't good enough, or she isn't working hard enough. On the other hand, if an artist is selling, it must be because she has "sold out" to the establishment, so her art is really no good. It's a Catch-22. The idea that money can be either corrupting or validating— that one way or another money has something to do with the value of an artist's work— is misleading.
Money seems to have more to do with marketing, investing, and mystique than with the artwork itself. Duchamp could call a urinal "art" and make it worth thousands. Money in art doesn't have much to do with labor, but is supposed to have to do with "talent." But apparently there's no sliding scale of talent—an artist has either "got it" or not, at least when it comes to fine art. Avant garde artwork in particular generally either costs a tremendous amount or is nearly worthless, with not much in between. Most artists have no hope of making a living from their artwork (Alper et al., 1996; Wassall , Alper & Davison, 1983). Scrambling for money keeps artists competing with each other and distracted from looking at the system itself.
But then, art isn't really work, or so goes the next myth that keeps artists functioning at a lower level. Art is more like play. How can artists expect to get paid to do something that is so fun that non-artists do it for recreation? ("Why, I could do that!" is a common response to modern artworks.) In this way art is like sports. It's something fun that a few people do professionally but most people participate in or watch for recreation. Professional athletes don't work, they play a game, right? The harsh physical realities of athletics bring it closer to our cultural definition of work (physical training is even sometimes called "working out"), but artists don't even have to break a sweat.
There is also a similar relationship to money in sports. A few top professionals get a huge amount of money, while many professionals just scrape by, others have to teach to support themselves, and lots of kids are left with big hopes and not much of a chance. In sports, however, players aren't just paid by their popularity. There are clearer standards of quality. Getting points and winning and losing games are not so ambiguous. And in sports it's very clear who's a professional and who's not. In art, "professional" doesn't have anything to do with whether or not one gets paid.
The most paralyzing ideology affecting the functioning of artists and everyone else in society is the myth that artists are special and different. It keeps artists isolated from others in society and in competition with each other to see who's the bigger genius, and it keeps those who don't identify as artists from thinking creatively and engaging in and learning about art. ("Oh, I'm just not creative.") It ensures that artists will be misunderstood because non-artists are discouraged from gaining any serious understanding of art. Arts programs in schools are often the first thing to be cut in a budget crunch (after all, talent will "out" no matter what, right?). Then the misunderstanding of artists is folded back into the myth of genius to the point where one can't even be a genius without being misunderstood. The misunderstanding and isolation, instead of being recognized as problems, are seen as a necessity. The oppression becomes internalized and perpetuated (and even staunchly defended) by the artists themselves.
In his book On the Margins of Art Worlds (1995), Larry Gross points out how children are taught about art in ways that make it seem like it does not belong to them:
Children are quick to absorb the contradictory messages they encounter about the arts: They are valued and scorned at the same time, treated with respect yet suspicion, fundamentally alien to the real business of life. Encounters with art take on a pass-fail overtone in which one’s innate potential is being assessed. Not surprisingly, most give up, relinquishing any claim to membership in the communicative community of the arts. (Gross, 1995, p. 4)
In contrast [to the atmosphere in which children learn to speak], in our society children typically encounter the arts in contexts where most adults (1) are themselves incompetents, (2) assume that only a genetically chosen few will acquire competence and at least tacitly convey the message that the child is not necessarily expected to get anywhere, and (3) are incapable of responding to the child’s beginning efforts in any discriminating fashion (as they would in the case of speech), thus dampening any sense that these modes are vehicles of shared meaning. Imagine the consequences if we assumed that only those possessing special talent would learn to speak. (Gross, 1995, p. 6)
The isolation of artists from the rest of society makes it much more likely that their work will be irrelevant to most people and will not have a great effect on society. This affects everyone. So does the myth that thinking deeply and creatively is only for those "special" people over there. If we don’t realize we can think creatively about our lives, environments, and societies, we can’t change our lives and our communities. The myth of the genius also reinforces the notion that some people are better than others—not just better at something, but actually worth more. Some lives are more precious than others. And the myth reinforces the notion that paid work should be hard and unrewarding rather than nourishing and enjoyable, which affects all our lives.
When artists buy into the “great creator” myth, we can cut ourselves off from our richest resources, both within ourselves and around us. We can undermine our own development through the belief that creativity is something inherent and not learned (Freeman, 1996). We can feel like our ways of creating are somehow flawed, that doing the juggling acts we need to do in order to create means something is wrong with us. Or we can feel like we’re the exception, somehow apart from and better than the rest of our gender or our species. Women artists are fine just as we are, and we are as much women as any other women are. Creativity just doesn’t look like we’re told that it does. It may be romantic and magical sometimes , but certainly not all the time. It's important that we share our real experiences as artists, and talk about our struggles, to get some sense of the reality of creative life—its joy and empowerment, its struggle and disempowerment.
Sharing experiences means creating community, which is very difficult to do within the competition of the art world. Those already marginalized, such as women and artists of color, seem to do a better job of creating community than those who fit more readily into the mainstream (Freeman, 1996), perhaps because of cultural differences or perhaps in response to more profound feelings of disconnection. Paradoxically, community and connection can make it easier to separate out one's true desires and motivations from those constructed by the art world and its commodification of art. One might need to hustle to be successful as an artist, but one doesn't need to become a hustler. Community may also make it easier to find an appropriate balance between one's art life and the rest of one's life, a place between complete self-centeredness and submerging oneself in the needs of others. Most artists do not work to change the system and make it more conducive to creativity. They struggle simply to find themselves and their genuine connections to art and to the world, and to move towards creative self-determination (Freeman, 1996).
Amy Bethel, Amy.Bethel.art@gmail.com, RearrangeTheFire.blogspot.com
