Since late lockdown, I’ve been working on a kind of self-help tract for my own self, to reconcile some of the contradictions of being a caring artist in the shadow of capitalism.
For a while I thought it might be a book, or a talk, or… something, who knows. But it’s become clear I ought just to be thinking aloud, even if what emerges is disjointed and intermittent – otherwise it’ll lead nowhere.
So here’s the first notebook on the subject, and hopefully there might be some more in the future.
From the reverse of the Fons Vitae (attrib. Colijn De Coter) Museu da Misericórdia, Porto. Photo: TXA.
I like stories that get better every time you think about them.
I like music that was first played to me twenty years ago but I didn’t really, truly hear until last Thursday.
I like accidental works of art, and I like works of art so thoughtful you can barely tell there was any thought applied.
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand there are no particular borders between different kinds of art. The method is always essentially the same: making something out of abstraction; making something that speaks and moves, without technically being a living entity.
So I don’t really take in the Hollywood blockbuster with different eyes and ears to the ones I use when I’m listening to forty-nine minutes of church organ improvisations. I can love both of them just as much, or be equally bored for that matter.
Instead of distinctions between ‘varieties’ of art, what I’ve come to recognise instead is that all of it is produced within the restrictions of one system (at least in the world we live in now.) This system is, of course, capitalism – and it’s most often a hostile environment to everything art can empower in people.
What I want to say here isn’t about overthrowing abusive economic hierarchies – or, it’s not about that directly. It’s about survival tactics in an economic culture that actively denigrates true creativity.
There is a long list of social essentials that capitalism does not value on its own terms, and empowering creativity is merely one of them. Among many other neglects, capitalism does not invest properly in children’s education or the care of the elderly, the management of human waste, alternatives to armed conflict, or the long-term resilience of our species and the ecosystem in which we all exist. There will one day be a punchline to all of this, but as it stands no-one quite knows what kind of joke we’re living in.
And then, capitalism’s abuse of creativity isn’t simply a matter of neglect. The truly insidious facet of free market culture is to divide the entirety of humanity into winners and losers, and to make the fears for your own security a constant background noise to everyday life.
The arts aren’t somehow immune to this fearfulness and subservience. In fact they are very often a litmus test for how fearful our communities are, not only in the substance of the art, but also the manner in which it’s produced.
The paranoia and fear is not a bug, but a feature. Underprivileged, disempowered humans are absolutely crucial to free-market capitalism’s worldview. It cannot function without them. So its most consistent, all-pervading and oft-repeated lie is that we are all somehow equal under the eye of this competition. We are not, and have never been – in fact the system we’re serving is little more than a lottery, weighted towards those who can already afford to buy more tickets.
Part of surviving as a caring artist in a capitalist world is first of all to decide whether you want to keep playing that lottery on any level at all.
Accepting it in full requires an acceptance that your creative life is now a game, and that unless you’re already wealthy, brute luck will most likely define your fate.
Should you choose to opt out, in your whole spirit, or simply in part – then that of course leads to more questions, of compromise, of honesty, of self-definition, and especially questions of mental health. Because the main disconnection any caring artist has to deal with is being told that their work is being judged within an entirely artistic framework, when there will almost always be capitalist demands upon that work.
What I’ve come to believe is there might be a kind of superpower, a calming effect under pressure, in recognising those moments you’re under the looming shadow of capitalism. It’s equally important to recognise and celebrate those moments where you’re bathed in a much more positive and beneficial light.
I’m not sure the capitalist impulses always arise when you’d expect, from the most expected sources. I also don’t believe that the commercial and artistic are oppositional by default, or even necessarily part of a spectrum. I think it’s about hearing the social and economic fear in others – fear that sometimes arrives as a form of violence – and trying to respond with a creative hope.
[to be continued]