value washing the arts:

on the quantification and

instrumentalisation of art

ceci nest pas lart de volution sociale


Nat Muller
We have heard it all before: art for social
change, intercultural dialogue, conflict
resolution through art, resistance art,
revolutionary art, participatory art, the social
turn, the political turn, the educational turn.
Attitudes towards arts and culture have
changed along with the drastic global political
and economical changes of the past decade.
We have witnessed amongst others the end
and aftermath of the Cold War, 9/11 and a
global economic crisis caused by what some
may term hyper-capitalist greed. In an age
of quantification and maximisation of profits
everything needs to be accountable to
computation. Art too.
This brings me to the thorny question
of the value of art. Quantifying art financially,
though at times arbitrary, is the easy part.
In her excellent book on the contemporary
art market Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art
Market in the 21st Century Georgina Adam
writes that, [b]etween 2004 and 2012 [the
contemporary art] market grew by five hundred
and sixty-four per cent in valuefar eclipsing
the previous traditional heavyweight category
of Impressionist and Modern art.1 Later on
in the book she makes a connection between
luxury consumer goods and contemporary art.
Indeed, for the one percent contemporary art
has become a lifestyle choice: flaunting a
Louis Vuitton bag, wearing Prada and owning
a work of the snazziest artiste du jour go hand-
in-hand. The newly established, and much
criticised Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris
is a case in point.
However, in times in which the
marketability of art is being played out
extremely aggressively and in which art fairs
have more funds at their disposal to commission
artists and organise conferences, symposia and
not-for-profit shows than museums and art
institutions, the tables have been turned. Public
funding, that ever dwindling resource, which
facilitates non-commercial and difficult art, has
over the past fifteen years, beset by budget cuts
and increased populism, struggled to articulate
its raison dtre. The effect is that nowadays more
often than not art has to do something if it
Opposite
Apologies to Rene Magritte
23 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 4 _ 1 2 015
wants to be eligible for public funding.
Doing something is never really defined
but can be broadly interpreted as doing good
for society and thus can be quantitatively
measured. In other words, art is made useful
and functional and its prerogative of autonomy
and of doing absolutely nothing in terms of
immediately useful material outcomes is
effectively annulled.
Examples are legion, and perhaps
one of the most evangelising and misguided
ones is pop philosophers Alain de Bottons
idea of art as therapyart will help you cure
everything from love sickness to dissatisfaction
in your professional life. On his website he
claims, if art is to enjoy its privileges, it has
to be able to demonstrate its relevance in
understandable ways to the widest possible
audience.2 Part of this undoubtedly implies,
if art wants to continue to receive public
money it better prove its usefulness. Claims
like de Bottons completely miss the point about
art and perpetuate a populist neo-liberal idea
about public spending, namely that hard earned
tax money should only be spent on something
with wide appeal and consensus. Moreover, it
forces art in a very narrow straitjacket that is
soothing, sanitized, pleasing, sugarcoated and
most of all functional. Out go the practices that
disturb, complicate, rub, resist, are difficult
and produce affect and meaning on a variety
of levels, whether conceptually or aesthetically.
De Bottons idea of art is, apart from being
reductive and conservative, decidedly boring.
However, this has not stopped Amsterdams
prestigious Rijksmuseum from appointing
de Botton as its guest curator to convert the
institution into a self-help manual. Reviews
in the Dutch and British press were scathing.3
They mostly found that de Botton pedantically
reduced art audiences to an unthinking mass of
infantile souls, incapable of reflecting, feeling
or experienceing artwork without prescriptive
guidance. Art critic Wieteke van Zeil of the
largest Dutch daily de Volkskrant put it very
well when she wrote;
So let it be said, the exhibition Art is
Therapy is an insult three times over: for
museums, for the works of art and above all
for the visitor who is addressed as a childish
victim and is not encouraged to look or
to think. And thats exactly the opposite
of what every good work of art evokes, if
you make the effort. Whether amateur or
connoisseur.4
We should keep in mind here that de Bottons
curatorship was probably meant more as
a publicity stunt than anything else. Get a
celebrity in your museum and it is bound to
attract lots of media attention and generate
(new) audiences. It is an excellent example
of how ideas about the consumption of art,
marketing and public spendingdangerously
go hand in hand. On the funding end of the
spectrum we find initiatives such as The Art
of Impact, a seven million euro fund initiated
by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture
and Science in late 2014 in collaboration with
the Netherlands largest cultural funds. A slick
video on the projects website announces the
funds objectives and a video message of
Jet Bussemakers, the Netherlands current
Minister of Education, Culture and Science,
reinforces the fact that this is basically a policy
instrument. The issue with this fund starts
with its very name, The Art of Impact.
It desperately wants to do something that
has (measurable) effect and states that it
wants to stimulate projects with a clear social
impact. The examples given on the website
are textbook, from a collaboration between
artists and scientists to research into ways
fungi can function as insulation material, to
playwrights developing plays for communities
in disenfranchised neighbourhoods. Despite
the inclusion of projects by excellent and
visionary organisations such as the Studio
for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM)
and the art and new technology platform
Mediamatic, it becomes clear that the actual
intent of the fund is to spur on organisations,
companies and policy makers to use artists more
to attain their goals.5 Indeed, the main questions
asked here are, How can art make a difference
in [creating] a liveable neighbourhood or
city, energy and climate, care and welfare,
technology, science and economy?6 It is no
coincidence that artists are required to step in
where neo-liberal governments are pulling out:
education, care, social services etcetera. In an
economic context where cultural resources are
scant, even prestigious and unique international
cultural foundations such as the Prince Claus
Fund have shifted their focus more towards
topics such as conflict and poverty, the
traditional areas of humanitarian development
agencies.

Though value-washing the arts took flight
particularly after the 2008 global economic crisis
and ensuing massive cuts in arts and culture
budgets, especially in countries with typically
generous cultural budgets, such as the UK and
The Netherlands, the writing had been on the
wall for a while. In The Netherlands the idea of
cultural entrepreneurship was trumped and
written into policy by former Deputy Minister
of Culture Rick Van der Ploeg in 1999,7 who
concretised the by now irrevocable relationship
between public funding, artistic ambitions,
marketability, accessibility, audience preference
and ultimately the self-sufficiency of cultural
producers. Cultural entrepreneurship is to
this day a key criterion for funding bodies to
assess an applicant. In the UK, writers such as
Alana Jelinek and Claire Bishop trace a shift of
attitudes back to the rise of Tony Blairs
New Labour government in the late 1990s.
For the first time, funding became linked not
to an artworlds [sic] elite self-defined notion
of excellence, but instead to increasing the
range and the type of audience for the arts
(known as access) and, to a lesser extent
to those activities that provide social goods,
such as community cohesion.8
It is an unpopular position to challenge
the direct social and political impact of art
projects. My quarrel is as much with the total
commodification of art in an art market that has
totally spun out of control as it is with artistic
practices which are blatantly instrumentalist
and hence end up in their own way
commodifying the arts. Albeit not in terms of
sales, but rather of its measurable contribution,
i.e. profit, to society. A wholesome participatory
society, whether its the neo-liberal variety that
is organised top-down or the self-organised
horizontal Occupy variety, both call for a
wholesome and participatory art. Aesthetics
that dirty wordhas all but disappeared from
most critical artspeak. I am exaggerating for the
sake of argument, but there is a disturbing and
cloying dogmatic reek to all of this.
Cultural producers, already
working precariously and on shoestring
budgets, should be weary of perpetuating
a feel-good semblance of participation or
criticality, so that value mileage can be accrued.
Symbolic capital, so it seems, is bleeding to
death in the twenty-first century. There is a real
danger that artistic production may fall in two
absolute categories: the luxury consumer good
or the PR extension for faltering governance.
Neither option is attractive.
25 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 4 _ 1 2 015
A curious effect of all this is that certain
politicised forms of radicality and resistance spectacle? We have to ask ourselves if
in art are embraced by institutions and funders
alike. In her excellent history of, and critique on,
participatory art, Claire Bishop argues; models
of democracy in art do not have a relationship
to models of democracy in society.9 Yet time
and again these two models are collapsed
and confused. The 7th Berlin Biennial titled
Forget Fear curated by Polish artist Artur
mijewski in 2012 is a case in point. Known
for his provocative and confrontational videos,
mijewski does not shy away from disturbing
the socialand otherorders.
There is nothing sugarcoated about
his artistic work; it is raw and in-your-face.
Nevertheless, what works for mijewskis
artistic oeuvre became problematic as a
curatorial framework for the Biennial. I share
mijewskis frustration with the current political
climate that is detrimentalnot only to the
artsbut to society at large and that change
is urgent through different forms of alliances.
He propagates a fervent anti-institutionalism
and rightly observes in his foreword to the
Biennials catalogue that artistic radicalism is
transformed into velvet critique and that in not. Therefore the binary that is often set up
the art world and beyond art has become
a dcor for a neo-liberal system, [which]
includes not only art objects, but the intellectual
discourse that frames them. 10 Nevertheless, I
do wonder at his idea of what he calls artistic
pragmatism, which he explains as:
What interested us were concrete activities
leading to visible effects. We were interested
in finding answers, not asking questions.
We were interested in situations in which
solutions are implemented responsibly. We
were interested neither in preserving artistic
immunity nor distancing ourselves from
society All that art has now is spectacle,
where social and political problems are
played out with no substantial impact on
reality. And no substantial impact even on
the players in the field of art: other artists
and curators.11
Biennials, and the institutional structures
that shape and support them, are unwieldy
animals, no matter how many transformations
they go through. As such, as a biennial curator,
its difficult to have your cake and eat it too.
And though mijewski is fiercely anti-neo-
liberal in his arguments and discourse, we
might wonder whether he too has failed in
his endeavour. What is the artistic or political
meaning of bringing part of the Occupy
movement to the spaces of the Kunst-Werke
Institute for Contemporary Art other than
mijewskis act would have been more powerful
had he simply joined Occupy rather than
putting them on display in a white cube gallery.
In the end both the artistic and the political
gesture are weakened here. After all, is art the
best vehicle to further the social change he
desires? Isnt arts role elsewhere? Returning to
Bishop: This new proximity between spectacle
and participation underlines the necessity of
sustaining a tension between artistic and social
critiques.12 In the 7th Berlin Biennial this tension
came undone.
During the 2011 uprisings in the
Arab world many artists participated in the
demonstrations. Many made a point that they
were there as political subjects and that their
artistic practices would have to wait. It was
a potent statement. Conversely, artists are
censored, arrested, tortured and killed for their
work the world over, from Ai Weiwei, Iranian
filmmaker Jafar Panahi, to Syrian cartoonist
Ali Ferzat, Pussy Riot and the atrocious killings
at Charlie Hebdo. Art is never innocent, whether
we choose to identify with its assumptions or
between autonomous art or art for arts sake
and engaged or politicised art is a too facile
one and undoes the complexity of what art is
and what art does. Not being exactly able to
pinpoint what art does is, I would argue, an
inherent part of its beauty and attraction. It is
why we can re-visit a certain piece again and
again and not become bored by it.
However, in a neo-liberal context
and in the participatory society geared towards
demonstrable results, there is little patience
for this. At a workshop on art, value and
globalisation that I ran at the arts organisation
TENT in Rotterdam in the autumn of 2014,
students commented on a piece by artist
Jonas Lund, who was part of the group
show The Value of Nothing. Lunds piece
Projected Outcomes (2014) consisted of a huge
blackboard depicting a real-time, cost-benefit
overview of the exhibition. The data ranged
from grants received, ticket sales, artist and
curatorial fees, production costs, mentions
in the press, to cleaning and PR costs. It also
listed the volunteers paid to come and adjust
the numbers on the black board every day, as
well as the price of the blackboard itself (54).
VALUE W ASHIN G THE ARTS : ON THE Q UANTI F ICATION AND INSTRUMENTALISATION O F ART
Jonas Lund
Projected Outcomes, 2014
Photo courtesy the artist and TENT, Rotterdam
Photo Janssen/Adriaans
Projected Outcomes is a wonderful tongue-in-
cheek example of turning the quantification of
value in the art world against itself. The hard
data becomes the artwork, the spectacle, and
presents itself to be assessed quantitatively,
conceptually and aesthetically. Lunds simple
but genius move of flipping a work against
itself is extremely effective as a critical
statement. It also shows us that little meaning
can be derived from this hard data only; you
still need to experience the work in order to
reviewor assessthe show. However, this
irony was lost on my students. They cried
foul that artists criticising the capitalist system
should then actually expect to be paid for their
labour. Their reasoning was: if you expect
remuneration for your work, you cannot oppose
the system; you have to acquiesce and be
part of it. There is no other system. They read
Lunds work as hard quantitative data only,
not as a poetic intervention. While it might
be unfair to argue that this group of students
is representative for a general public, it is
informative as much as it is slightly worrying.
If we obsess so much over the measurable and
literal impact of art in society, we forsake the
power of the imaginary and the potential for
art to make worlds, no matter how hopeful
or dark they turn out to be.
Notes
1
Georgina Adam, Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market
in the 21st Century, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2014: 10
2
Cfr. http://alaindebotton.com/art/; last accessed January
23, 2015
3
See for example Adrian Searle, Art Is Therapy review
de Botton as doorstepping self-help evangelist;
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/25/
art-is-therapy-alain-de-botton-rijksmuseum-amsterdam-
review; last accessed 23 January 2015
4
Wieteke van Zeil, Alain de Botton in het Rijksmuseum:
Alain de Botton in Amsterdams Rijksmuseum: An insult
three times over...; http://www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-musea-
en-galerieen/alain-de-botton-in-het-rijksmuseum-een-
drievoudige-belediging~a3646456/; last accessed 23 January
2015
5
Emphasis and translation from the Dutch Organisaties,
bedrijven en beleidsmakers zouden meer gebruik kunnen
maken van kunstenaars om dat te bereiken wat ze
nastreven, mine. Cfr. http://www.theartofimpact.nl/over.html;
last accessed 23 January 2015
6
Translation from Dutch Hoe kan kunst verschil maken voor
een leefbare wijk en stad; energie en klimaat; zorg, welzijn,
technologie, wetenschap en economie?, mine. Cfr. http://
www.theartofimpact.nl/over.html; last accessed 23 January
2015
7
Cfr. Rick van der Ploeg, Nota Cultureel Ondernemerschap,
presented to the Dutch parliament on 25 October 1999;
http://parlis.nl/pdf/kamerstukken/KST41287.pdf; last accessed
23 January 2015
8
Alana Jelinek, This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not-Art,
London: I.B.Tauris: 24
9
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the
Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso Books, 2012: 279
10
Artur mijewski, Forget Fear: Foreword; http://www.
berlinbiennale.de/blog/en/comments/forget-fear-a-foreword-
by-artur-zmijewski-19528; last accessed 23 January 2015
11
ibid: 10
12
ibid: 9, 277