domsideasgarden

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Fighting for social change through art

Ivan Kafka (1981) covered a street in Prague with 1,000 upright wooden sticks – the only way people could get to work was by trampling them (Credit: Ivan Kafka/Artlist.cz)

Through the history, art has been used as an implement by rulers to establish and profound their beliefs, which allowed them to keep their high position in society. Famous example of this might be considered religious propaganda that was supposed to enhance believes of people and was especially strong in the times of renaissance because it could portrait and celebrate events in the form of pictures from biblical stories.  Even though art used to be a leisure of the elites in society, the democratic shift of art enabled new opportunities and people stated being creative with it. New innovative ways are explored to engage communities, such artworks can take in place of a store, garden, website, story exchange or street performance. Socially engaged art has the potential to build collaborative communities whilst provoking them to think critically.

Artists started forming various movements to speak up on the current issues that have been happening within communities by leading meaningful protests or causing controversies that expose structures of society and provoke people to think differently. An example of this could be when in 1981, Czech artist, Ivan Kafka installed 1,000 wooden sticks that stood upright on the floor on a street in Prague, the locals were faced with the decision to walk over it or to preserve it and miss being at work. This was very controversial at that time because of the communistic regime it was illegal to act in the freedom of expression (Weiwei, 2018).

Artists might go after provocative themes which are likely to spark a debate between audience leading to higher engagement and social reach. Reports by Arts Council England and the All-party Parliamentary group has shown visible evidence of the positive impact of art and cultures on wellbeing, education and social presence. Study by Arts and Mind revealed that by implementing art workshops within community can decrease anxiety by 71% and depression by 76%, while the participants also felt their wellbeing getting better and 69% of participants stated that they felt more socially included (Slawson, 2017). The participants had the opportunity to work with a variety of materials which enabled them to make a piece that not only visually represented what they wanted to say but also allowed them to show their originality with the material it was made out of. This alone would have had a positive effect on the participants because it straight away sends the message that they are free to do what they want and this project is there, this allows people’s to get motivated for their project and the more they connect with it, they more it will help them release their emotions and improve their wellbeing. This shows that implementing social change through art can have positive benefit for more vulnerable communities who might face discrimination or other injustice within the system by allowing different communities to come together through something they all understand and love. This also can help with eliminating the “cookie-cutter” culture that tries to force everyone to fit in a box, and instead it gives an opportunity to people to freely express themselves and proudly embrace their personality Badenoch, 2021).

Supporting community art has shown to have positive effect on communities as it gives them shared purpose and meaning of their neighbourhood. This is a great opportunity for art organisations to engage groups of people in shared goals, bring awareness to variety of issues and carry out community building creative programs. Such a program would promote interaction in public space, increase public participation through annual celebrations, engage youth in the community and broadens civic participation (Borrup, 2009). This way, art organisations could bring up the interest in art and achieve higher civic teamwork by collaborating with various artists that have important or radical messages to say.

A good example of an artist who raises concerns about modern issues through contemporary art is Banksy. He is globally known for his controversial artwork that usually randomly appears overnight. His radical art is reflecting societal and political corruption and environmental neglect. He is using his art voice to raise debates and change the way we think about our system by criticising it and its society while also reminding people of the negative impacts that commercialism brought to universal culture. Through his art he is expressing his unhappiness with current norms and hopes to raise more awareness about them. He is keeping is anonymity secret and that might be adding onto his mystical persona.

By shifting people’s mindsets and changing narrative, the societal norms are becoming more inclusive, diverse and equitable, and are able to embrace the constant change by using their creativity and curiosity to turn it into new opportunities, while also being more fearless about the future and relying on intuition (Badenoch, 2021).

Art has been used through the history as a form of sharing and self-expression but also as a driver to bring awareness to social and individual issues that people in societies might face. Artists started forming creative movements as a way to express their disagreement with the system and possibly cause controversy surrounding certain political or environmental issues to spark debates and embrace critical thinking within their audiences. The research that has been done within this topic shows positive influence of art on societies and shows that it provides us with the option to connect local communities and increase civic participation within them.

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The influence of social media on artists

Music, Brecht Vandenbroucke, 2016 (https://www.instagram.com/p/BDh4SKdg6HC/?utm_source=ig_embed)

Social media’s popularity was rapid because it offers the freedom of expression and self-actualisation, which is considered to be one of the basic humans’ needs in Maslow’s pyramid of needs (Kang, Chen and Kang, 2019). Online social platforms can fulfil this needs very easily due to its easy and quick interactions between users. This gives designers a chance to become more independent while giving them a higher chance of getting noticed and express themselves as they would want because the conditions to be accepted in a gallery might be held high standards and it can be difficult.

Due to the digital development, new participatory cultures started to form, which helped with overcoming entry barriers in the art industry and gives everyone a fairly chance on succession. Members of participatory cultures believe that their contributions matter, they feel shared social connection because of mutual support and feedbacks and advanced artists can offer support through memberships to newer designers (Kang, Chen and Kang, 2019). This provides everyone with the opportunity to be creative and learn new skills if that’s what they are seeking.

Before the popularisation of art on social media, art was mostly considered to be a leisure for the rich and it was only accessible in galleries and museums. Social media was able to demolish this barrier and made art easily accessible to almost everyone, while giving more freedom to artists to explore their creativity and promote their work there (Pramod, 2020).

Social media has a lot of benefits to offer to an artist such as more engagement from their audiences, which artists can enhance by involving their spectators through debates on their posts and asking for opinions from their viewers. As social networks are able to support various types of media (e.g. Images, videos, GIFs), it can be good tool to use for exploring new inspiration and ideas for their projects without losing time being buried in books because the online resources are easier to reach (Elmansy, 2016). Another benefit is the direct interaction between artists and its audience through social media allows them to comment and give likes on their artwork, providing them with direct feedback, which is considered to be one of the essential learning resources. One of the best benefits of social networks for artists is definitely its promoting tool as each artist can promote their individual work on their online platform and they don’t have to rely on galleries to take interest in them.

Even though social media platforms can offer variety of benefits for its users, there is also a lot of negative factors that have influence on the digital experience. By being too focused on the feedbacks from audience, one can get too consumed in reviewing other artists’ artwork which delays them on starting their project, thus forming an endless loop of procrastination by looking for new creative ideas but then not doing anything of their own based on those ideas (Elmansy, 2016).  The copyrights and privacy of work is also considered to be a disadvantage on digital platforms as screenshots of artworks can be shared online without crediting the original artist. Some online platforms have policies in place to help with unauthorised reproduction but very often it is hard to keep track of unauthorised shares which causes a big problem with online credibility. And even though the entry barriers for the art industry is lower now, the competition on these platforms is huge and artists need to keep up with current social trends, so they stay relevant (Pramod, 2020).

The social platforms give opportunities to everyone to be creative and share their creations online, which is great because more people are starting to express their creativity and share their artwork. Social media tends to be non-restricted about the quality and the ownership of artworks, depending quite heavily on its algorithms that are influenced by interactions, so it can be very difficult for artists to get seen and break through without having any base audience.

It is good that artists have a chance to be more independent and don’t have to rely heavily on galleries or museums to break through to the art industry. Social media is giving them a chance to express themselves as they want but it comes with some disadvantages that make the processes difficult to execute. Maybe this is a call for an online reunification of artists and galleries where they can help each other cooperate in the online world and get rid of the barriers that artists face.

With the increased popularity of digital market, a lot of galleries had to update their digital brand and started offering virtual viewing of their exhibitions. Especially now, with covid-19 pandemic it was shown how important it is to keep your online mark as many businesses would crash without moving to the online market during the pandemic. Virtual exhibitions gained its popularity and gives access to anyone to view it while they don’t have to go far from home. The galleries who decided to move simultaneously online made a good strategic decision as through the last 3 years the purchases of art online increased from 35% to 55% and it is believed it might become permanent in the future.

If galleries started to give more online to support to artists it could lead to better privacy protection of their work, help their credibility and open door to more networking opportunities. That would mean that artists would still be able to be independent but would be working in a partnerships with online galleries that might offer to post their work online, which could potentially bring more audience to the artist and to the gallery from the artists side providing them with mutual benefits.

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Evaluating discrimination factors within the art industry

Rosie, Tim Okamura, 2020 (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/tim-okamura-limited-edition-archival-giclee-print-of-rosie-no-1)

With the feminism movement on the rise and new progressive strategies that are trying to tackle diversity and inequality for ethnically diverse people, more awareness is being brought to the issues with more research being done to expose the outstanding discrimination against minorities and the wage gap that is still a barrier in the creative art industry, that is why this paper wants to evaluate the current situation of discrimination.

The gender inequality in the art industry is still a big problem, especially the pay gap between genders. In the UK, it is estimated that 64% of undergraduates and 65% postgraduates in creative arts and design are women, while the representation of top London commercial galleries is dominated by men with 68% (National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2019). While women are represented within the art industry with multiple positions (they take over 65% of the positions in the art industry), it is more difficult for women who are trying to find a position for their fine art.

Even though at universities the gender is numerously balanced, when it comes to women artists but when it comes to breaking into the professional field, women are more likely to face scepticism from superiors. That is simple because of the prejudice that women will have children and raise a family even though now it is just as common for men to stay at home and raise children, differing from that typical scenario that stems solely from the gender divide.

Even when women manage to make into the primary market (galleries), it can be difficult for them to make it into the highly competitive secondary market (auctions), where the proportion of living female artists decreased by 15% in the bound from the primary to secondary market (Halperin, 2017). The dominance of male artists at auctions was evident as only 8% of women were able to sell their work for over $1milion.

Between 2000 – 2007 there was just 143 female artists (2.6%) who were responsible for 91% of all sales made by women at auctions, and while the female artists who make it to the secondary market tend to sell at auctions for higher price, the overall profits are distributed more fairly for male artists while giving them easier entry to the business. The number did not get much higher as newer study done by In Other Words & artnet News between 2008 – 2018 found out that only 2% of global art action was spend on work done by women when analysing the global marker (The Guardian, 2019).

The market gap widening between male and female artists could be attributed to multiple factors but the biggest could be the privatisation of the events as stakeholders, sponsors, brokers and others arranging it, it can be influenced by their own cognitive bias when arranging the event. They might consider it as just tailoring it to their preference, which could be due to their lack of knowledge. Discriminating towards certain artists solely dependent on their gender or other, more direct forms of discrimination, such as not allowing people of colour the same opportunity as they would a white male because they feel like the art does not fits the settling to their exact preference even when that is not the case.

The inequalities of ethics in the creative sectors has been noticed by the Arts Council England who launched the Creative case for Diversity in 2011 to accentuate the importance of diversity in the arts and its significant influence on artistic practices as well as enhances new audiences and leaderships.

There is still certain degree of prejudice towards black and Asian (BAME) communities because of segregation of culture and established hierarchy of cultural production. This has happened due to the majority of art being taught mainly focusing on the British concepts that has been taught in schools for centuries, such as techniques but also the bases of other forms of art such as William Shakespeare being the core for drama schools to teach students. While there is no argument that there is much to be learnt from influential characters such as him.

There is also an argument that it does not help BAME communities or even women feel like they belong as part of the art world but also reinforces the bias that makes the industry dominated by white males. To tackle this issue the Arts Council England tried to use their Creative case for Diversity 2011 to bridge the gap in diversity and equality, but it failed with little to no impact bringing in and working with BAME communities and those that feel the most skewed and pushed out by the mainstream culture that engulfs the art industry.

The art industry definitely underwent big changes in how it tries to handle diversity and equality within its practice where the modern state of progressive issues such as LGBTQ+, feminism and lesser known cultural issues, which had an influence on the development of the industry in recent years.

While the inequality between men and women within university courses surrounding creative art became more neutralised, as 64% of undergraduate students are female, when it comes to finding a way into the professional industry, women and ethnically diverse artists tend to face more barriers and it can be difficult to make their way into the industry.

To quote Renee Adams, who is a professor at University of Oxford:

“Price gaps between male and female art is higher in countries where there is more gender inequality—which suggests it’s not the quality of the art that matters, it’s discrimination.”

(Adams, 2019)