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[hvforks]

Gagging the Arts

Self-delusion, hypocrisy and dishonesty: they might not be the first three words that come to mind when thinking of working in the arts sector, but a recent report from the Arts Professional Pulse survey exposes the soul of a sector that believes it is owed artistic freedom but doesn’t tolerate freedom of speech within its own ranks.

The cultural sector is often thought of being open and tolerant, welcoming of debate and diverse opinion, and prepared to challenge the status quo, but nothing could be further from the truth. As part of this survey, an anonymous forum was offered as research - this was eagerly embraced by those who have experienced censorship. This included those who are subject to contractual gagging clauses that have taken away their right to speak out; I too being subject to one of these agreements from a previous employer within the sector, know too well the insidious tactics used to silence employees. One in six art workers revealed in the survey that they had been offered a financial settlement in return for keeping silent about circumstances within an organisation. The anguish, fear, regret and anger expressed by the people who left personal comments form a disturbing testimony. It shines a light upon coercion, bullying, intimidation and intolerance within a community that thinks itself as liberal, open minded and equitable. 

A huge amount of arts workers fear to speak their minds. Of course, it’s not only the cultural sector where people feel unable to express a controversial view. However, the pressure on arts workers to keep their views to themselves reveals self-delusion and hypocrisy at the heart of a sector that believes its own artistic freedom but not the freedom of speech of its employees. Publicly stating opinions outside of the sector’s norms is widely thought of being a career-breaker; employees often feel pressured to self-censor in fear of being ‘cancelled’ or bullied for not conforming to the orthodoxy. It’s unsurprising to see evidence of intolerance shown towards those with alternative political views - liberal ideology being the main viewpoint within the arts and anything other than that being belittled and snubbed. Other topics like faith, discussion of gender identity and honest conversations about the meaning and value of diversity have been all but extinguished. Hierarchical power structures within arts organisations appear to be the problem. In tight communities where reputation is arguably more valuable than expertise, stepping beyond expected norms of speech or behaviour is dangerous. So, are you surprised that sexual harassment, bullying and exploitation are seldom aired in places where action could be taken to stop it?

Fear of consequence is the primary deterrent to free speech. As a result, the rich, the powerful and the naive are being heard while the rest of us are muted for fear of a hostile reception. We might expect the sector to be wary of sharing opinions among those who have power over them, such as funders and others they rely on for financial input. But it is disturbing to find that colleagues are often the most likely to leave arts workers fearful of speaking openly. The clearest evidence of organisations being gatekeepers of communication is when they pay for silence using contractual devices, including non-disclosure agreements. When evidence emerges of potentially unlawful activity being covered up by using pay-offs and gagging clauses, then we desperately need to examine widespread practices which have been advocated by some funders and organisations. 

This report is a wake-up-call for everyone within the cultural sector to take a long hard look in the mirror. Failing to respect the views expressed by others is the hallmark of people living within an echo chamber. Too often the arts industry colonises the knowledge of artists in order to build a set of exploitative structures that serve themselves rather than the arts and culture. We need to address these issues of powerlessness. We need to speak out against the dysfunctional systems, organisations and policies that exploit, steal from and undervalue the precious work that artists and arts workers do. It is clear that the status quo in the arts protects unfettered power imbalance, systemic racism, sexism, ableism and classism. We need to create a space for unexpected voices that are often unheard, ignored or dismissed to question publicly that status quo, without repercussions.

Image: The Sound of Silence, 1970 by Peter Collins courtesy of Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection.

This article was originally written in February 2020.

[hvforks]

The Artist Collective and the Utopian Vision

When I was an undergraduate on my final year of my Fine Art degree, I became a member of a small artist collective. We were made up of three undergrads (including myself) and three graduates from the year above me. During the last half of my final year we managed to secure a free, year-long lease of an old warehouse; which we did-up ourselves and turned into artist studios. We leased the studios out to local artists for a small fee, which went back into the upkeep of the building and the cost of Wi-Fi. Anything leftover in that pot we used for local “Art Parties”. We’d become chummy with a local bar owner - the bar happened to be a hotspot for music and comedy gigs and had a small basement room with a stage, projector and PA system. He let us have a usually quiet Thursday night, once a month for free in his bars basement, and in return we brought in huge crowds which drank the bar dry. We would showcase our own work, and sometimes other local artists (graduates and undergrads) on the basement walls and projector, and would invite local bands and comedians too. We’d make these hugely popular nights where the bar would be heaving and groups of people would stand outside smoking and huddling together because there wasn’t enough space in the bar. We wouldn’t charge; we’d pay the bands and comedians in free booze and the artwork sometimes got bought on the night; the money always went directly to the artist. After the year was out and I graduated, we were asked to curate a local music and arts festival which spanned over four or five different venues in the city. After the first year, we managed to get funding from the university for its undergrad students to showcase their work and get paid doing so, and the year after that Arts Council funding. The artists always got paid and we never took a penny. After a couple years the collective disbanded - one of us moved to London, another got married and had a baby, and two others started to work more seriously with other organisations. We’d lost the lease to the warehouse, but because of our efforts new artist collectives started to pick up where we left off; they secured buildings and support from the local council, and like the others in the collective, I moved on to a new city and a new job as an Arts Producer.

Looking back on these times, I have extremely warm memories, but I also used to think how great the art collective looked on my CV; how it had helped me secure a job that I really wanted and how it had given me a degree of status in the city - people knew me and they wanted to get to know me because of the things I’d done and the connections I had. I’m going to be honest and say that I used to enjoy the recognition; which gives me some shame to think of now, but I understand that I liked the little power I had because I grew up with none whatsoever. But then, when I got a little older, and much more politically engaged and aware of my social class, I realised that the art collective itself was a utopian ideology. 

The artist collective is a group of different people working together under their own management towards shared aims. The aims tend to be around the ideas of reciprocity, whether that's sharing equipment, space, materials, or ideologies, aesthetic or political views; and sometimes even living and working together. There was no hierarchy of ownership; we were all equal and all valid. I would never have been able to do the things that we did collectively on my own. A working-class graduate from a regional university; I had absolutely no power as an individual artist; but power in numbers and an egalitarian ethos meant that we had leverage - we had a voice and it was loud and unwavering. But the best thing about it was that it existed outside of the capitalist paradigm. We didn’t do what we did for money or profits; we did it for us and for others like us; which in turn helped the local community. We saw that there was nothing for art graduates in our city. There was one government funded gallery with a stuffy, old collection and no public outreach programme, and there were no independent contemporary galleries. We created a scene because we needed one, and we knew that other people needed it too. Graduates started to stay after studying; we made pop-up exhibitions and we travelled to neighbouring cities to collaborate, we invited art organisations to work with us, we spoke to our local university and we bothered the local council to gives us empty shop fronts and spaces, and above all, to see that we were doing it, whether they supported us or not. 

The art collective is a fantastic example of utopian thinking and the creation of tangible, utopian results. When I bring up utopian thinking to my peers, I tend to get responses like “it’s just not possible” or “humans are too greedy for that”; but an artist collective is a great example of contemporary utopianism. All we need is something that is accessible to everyone and accomplishable with resources available to average people. The collective addresses human needs from a perspective of fulfillment as well as sustainability to combine emotional needs with external/survival needs for the good of the people. What the artist collective did for me was that it helped me imagine a future where society’s focus moved from consumption to quality of life. 

We must never doubt that small groups of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; something as small as six artists managed to create a contemporary art scene in a culturally deserted city within a year. Imagine expanding into the bigger picture of what can be possible if we worked collectively but on a global scale. If we take what my small collective did and look at it through a wider, global lens we can see that in order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. Those boozy, late night Art Parties really did change the city, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure that they know it. 

Image: An image from the collective’s self-run artist studios, taken around 2010-11.

[hvforks]

The Hobby: Creative Capital and the Death of Pleasure

Recently at work, I asked my colleagues what their hobbies were. The dictionary defines a hobby as “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”. I wasn’t surprised at some of the responses: a lot of my peers told me they didn’t have a hobby because they didn’t have time, but when pushed a little more, admitted to reading, gardening or playing a sport. A few colleagues interjected; any form of exercise, to them, was not a hobby but a necessity - interesting I thought (and a lot to unpack there for perhaps another time). However, one of my colleagues who I know to be very creatively active outside of their job, told me they didn’t have a hobby. "What about your podcasting?” I asked. The response was not what I would have expected; my colleague got so mad at me, their podcasting was not a hobby, it was a pursuit - it was a product of creative capitalism. 

The opportunities for creativity for most people’s lives is increasingly scarce. Exhausted after a day of work; there is less time and less money to pursue creative expression. Anyone who does find the time to create outside of their day jobs must then decide on its creative capital - its value rather than its pleasure. The funny thing is, is that once we have found a creative activity outside of work that gives us pleasure, we are quickly followed by a feeling of self-loathing or guilt. Our society’s puritanical roots assure us that any form of creative self-indulgence is morally wrong, so to make it more acceptable we remove the pleasure and focus on the value. As more and more jobs and processes become systematised, concentrated and commodified, the everyday micro acts of creativity must also fall under those rules. And so the creative act of fulfillment no longer becomes about pleasure, it becomes about capital. 

“Everyone is creative” is the slogan of a broad cultural shift in our society: “the artist” is being held up not as a poverty-stricken social malcontent, but as a triumphant pioneer of the new economy. Today, when the idea of a good, steady, life-long job seems impossible, corporate propaganda encourages us all to see ourselves as artistic souls. Instead of relying on big bureaucratic organisations like paternalistic corporations or the meddlesome nanny-state, we should all, like artists, rely on our personal portfolio of skills, passions and past accomplishments to secure short-term, no-string-attached “gigs”.

The reality of course is that no-one feels any special passion for working three part-time jobs, and few achieve aesthetic satisfaction from working in a call centre. But the idea of the artist and the promise of creativity are today being held up as “carrots” for workers in the age of creative capitalism. In our economic situation, many of us do free creative work all the time. We record music on our computers, we Photoshop images, we make short films, we write blogs or fan fiction - we teach ourselves. And we create what the internet calls ‘content’ and we do so because we enjoy it. So why can we not admit to ourselves that this form of work is pleasure, and not some form of individualised commodity? 

We try and survive in this digital world, amidst increasingly casual and unsecure employment with few guarantees about our futures, because of this creativity becomes a highly individualised means of solace. The number of people we consider artists and the range of things we consider creative practice are expanding everyday, and while there is a lot of potential for people to create new forms of community and empowerment, it all takes place within and as part of the expansion of global and local poverty, exploitation, and social dislocation.

Despite all this, establishment pundits have declared ours an age of creative capitalism. Capitalism, they argue, is the best system for providing creative opportunities for everyone. Indeed, many argue that capitalism thrives on what is called “creative destruction” - the way competition forces companies and individuals to constantly reinvent themselves or go under, the way the incessant drive towards profit forces innovation and dynamism. What capitalism does, in effect, is fundamentally shift what we could call the “economy of creativity”: it drastically alters what sorts of creativity we think are valuable and it focuses humanity’s creative energies towards earning ever greater profit for the few. This system has quickly destroyed the planet and most people’s lives because it has no vision for the future. It is driven by irrational and pathological competition for profit, not by any compassionate and collective social vision. Imagine what the world would be like if we focused our creativity towards other ends?

I’m not going to lie, you can be very creative under capitalism, and many people are. But real creativity, the sort of creativity that is about pleasure and community fulfillment is almost impossible under capitalism. It is a privilege reserved for a very select few, usually based on their ability to make someone else money. Capitalism doesn’t make good use of human talents; it relies on exploitation and a fundamentally unjust division of labour. This system imprisons creativity in the prism of brutal economic “necessity”. 

We need to focus on making it clear that real, deep creativity can never be achieved as an individual possession but is always a collective process, bound up with values of equality, social justice and community. The promise of pleasure can only be fulfilled in a very different society than ours. Creativity must embrace its potential and promise as a key part of cultivating critical, revolutionary communities that resist capitalism, colonialism, gender oppression and racism and create fierce and sustainable alternatives within and against the status quo. Creativity and pleasure are, in part, the way we refuse our current “reality” and, in a very small and often abstract way, propose or model something different. 

Image: Oscar Mellow, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 1972. Courtesy of Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre.

[hvforks]

“Thinking back to when you were aged about 14, which best describes the sort of work the main/highest-income earner in your household did in their main job?”

Arts Council England have introduced a new questionnaire for it’s National Portfolio Organisations in order to collect data on the socio-economic background of their workers which they hope will tackle the working-class gaps in their workforce. But this question in itself is problematic; for one, the question only covers contracted employees, it doesn’t include freelancers who make up a huge majority of creative labour or unpaid employees like internships, and it doesn’t question artists that organisations might work with either; but for me the biggest omission here is audiences. ACE’s slogan ‘Great Art for Everyone’ doesn’t really work when there is no compelling information on how the art it funds reaches the working-classes. 

Debate around class in the arts still draws on middle and upper-class stereotypes of working-class life. Just like the conversation around ethnic diversity, we are often talked about rather than talked to. People who are broadly working-class, those in households with the median income or less, are by definition not a minority. It’s only in the elite-dominated world of the arts that they are seen that way. Working-class people aren’t some tiny minority of our society to be managed and transformed; we make up around two thirds of England’s population - we are most of this country. 

In the first Blair administration, organisations were encouraged to think about the “social outcomes of their work”. Art organisations were complicit in the soft privatisation of education, health and community resources that charities, voluntary organisations and other non-state, non-private bodies led. Where social services had existed as part of a minimum social welfare contract, youth services, along with social services and mental health charities began to compete for funding on the grounds of delivering agendas in areas such as citizenship, community cohesion and crime prevention. Art organisations were part of this shift. The arts world turned working-class people into a problem to be solved rather than audience members, employees or artists to be developed. 

It isn’t just the working-class workforce that’s getting fucked here, it’s also the working-class artist and the working-class audience. In public museums and galleries there is a rising economic inequality which is bringing about deep-seated, systematic and sustained classism which extends beyond public funding cuts associated with austerity politics to a wider re-positioning of the arts away from the public sphere and towards elite private privilege. 

It’s no lie that there has been a concerted attempt to democratise exhibitions displays and public collections over the past two decades in order to make museums and galleries less ‘highbrow’, and to promote diversity, take on social responsibility and encourage a wider range of audiences to engage with art. However, even though democratising has been in effect, less attention has been paid to the way that the rise of the super-rich and the accumulation of wealth and capital has become a problem for artistic expression and curation. The contemporary art market is driven by the investment potential of art works for the super-rich, which then becomes dependent on super-rich cultures which may affect the capacity of art to act as a critical public good. With austerity cuts making public art institutions increasingly reliant on wealthy private collectors and big galleries (like Gagosian and the White Cube) for funds and loans of works to put on shows by major artists, it means that museums and galleries compromise their civic values as private donors push works by artists that they own or represent in order to increase their value. Private collectors or commercial galleries loan the art or support exhibitions in order to up the value of their own investments. We can see diversity being strangled before our very eyes, and perhaps we’re all too bougie to notice. The top galleries control the top artists and the top artists are in the top public museums. The art world, like the rest of the world, is controlled by the same people who control everything. 

With art now being so disgustingly intertwined with the dynamics of financial accumulation we can see that art prices literally reflect economic inequality. In Christopher Upton-Hansen’s essay titled ‘The Financialization of Art’ (2018) he tells us that art prices rise when income inequality goes up; that a one percent increase in the share total income earned by the top 1% triggers an increase in art prices by 14%. These dynamics in the art market have naturally had an impact on the kind of art that is highly sought after - the rich want their art in museums so to increase their value, and museums have to consider their wealthy patrons and donors because their backs are against the wall financially, so the blue chip artists get the gigs and the rest of us artists in minority groups or of working-class backgrounds, well, we don’t stand a chance; we’re just too much of a financial risk.

Many museums are under the thumb of austerity policies set out by government funding bodies. Cuts to the arts have caused museums resources to suffer, and they have come at a time when many institutions were attempting the costly business of reorganisation in order to better incorporate women artists, POC or LGBTQ+ artists into their collection. These public spending cuts have also had an effect on access by making it harder for schools or groups dependent on public subsidies to fund visits. Travel has also become more costly due to both fare increases, and in more rural areas, cuts to bus services (the village I grew-up in doesn’t even have a bus route to our closest city, if you can’t drive, you can’t get there). These public spending cuts have made it increasingly difficult for working-class people to visit public collections around England.

The population that is able to visit and work for museums is not representative of the wider population; they are primarily older, white, London-based and middle-class: a metropolitan elite. You have two-thirds of society excluded, or at least hindered to full access of the arts; you segregate two-thirds of society from being able to participate in culture, its production, reception, its making. It has become a very monotheistic and exclusive world. So how are museums tackling this working-class repression? They aren’t. It’s a worrying concern for museums since addressing economic inequality directly will be problematic because it can affect funding and patronage. This financial model tells museums to shut your mouth or bite the hand that feeds you. Museums recognise the seriousness of inequality, but act by creating outreach programmes, or by making their entrance and educational provisions mostly free; in a way completely missing the point. 

This renewal of cultural elitism that inevitably accompanies growing economic inequality, and this growing tension between public provision and private art that is being increasingly driven by elites and wealth accumulation has to stop. The arts are smothered in systematic classism and I for one am bored of it. The upper-classes continue to make the art world increasingly out of reach, which in turn makes it incredibly out of touch. Privileged people are curating a privileged art scene because they want it to be about middle and upper-class assimilation. This means working-class people are excluded. The language they use creates a barrier, the buildings make you feel unwelcome, the prices are alienating - they create a purposefully threatening environment. The upper-classes create castles and fortresses because, ultimately, they don’t want people like us to break in. We’re too disruptive, we talk too loudly, we touch things we’re not supposed to, we don’t play by the rules, and this frightens them and so we are excluded. The art world appears at face value to be ‘for everyone’, but to put it bluntly, it isn’t; it’s for the few, and unless its attitude changes towards working-class people it will continue to be a monolith of classism, ignorance and prejudice. 

I say, if we frighten you, good - you should be frightened. Let’s create working-class nepotism, let’s share platform’s and skills; let’s look out for one another. We need to stop romanticising the arts because it is controlled by the same people who control everything else. We need class solidarity. We need to burn these institutions down, metaphorically and physically, and start again on a true field of equality. 

Image: Laura Mason, 2020, courtesy of Working Class Creatives Network and the artist.

[hvforks]

Demystification: Occultism, Contemporary Art & the Market

Art: no other relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature. To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible and invisible.  

Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt rules about art. These rules can be beauty, truth, genius, civilsation, form, status and taste. Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. The world is more than fact, it includes consciousness. Out of true with the present, these rules obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognised for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.

For example, when we ‘see’ a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we ‘saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.  

Discovering works of art which have undergone a degree of mystification is what I love about art and art history. Uncovering these ‘truths’ is what gives a voice to the underprivileged or the hidden, and also shines a light on an unwanted underbelly of history, which in turn informs our present conditions. 

Through my time studying and working in the arts, I knew there were artists who were explicitly interested in occult themes; artists like William Blake (1757-1827) who’s iconoclastic positions on equality of the sexes and classes, the existence of magic and mysticism, and the right to unfettered sexual expression not only separated him from his peers but also marked him as controversial for his time; artists like Salvador Dali (1904-1989) who produced a tarot deck called the Universal Tarot in 1984, as well as writing a book titled ‘50 secrets of Magic Craftsmanship’ published in 1948, which is an unexplicit top tips of how Dali created his surrealist style of paintings using magical techniques; and another artist like Madge Gill (1882-1961) who believed she was possessed by a spirit called ‘Myrninerest’ and who was openly a member of the Theosophical Society. But the more I started to engross myself in my own esoteric practices, the more I started to notice occult and spiritual themes in art at my place of work; archiving 20th and 21st century art acquisitions. I saw it in Cecil Collins (1908-1989), Eileen Agar (1889-1991), as well as artist Greyson Perry (born 1960) and many more. However, unlike Blake, Dali and Gill, these artists weren’t explicitly documented as mingling with the occult. So what was going on here?

My first thought was to research these artists, to try to confirm their affiliations with occultism - but it became clear to me that it wasn’t about affirmation; it was already visible that occult symbolism kept recurring in art history regardless of whether the artist was ‘into’ the occult or not. To me, what was important was seeing that these themes had been repeated throughout art history for centuries - and there’s lots of great writing about that, for example: Carl Jung’s ‘Man and his Symbols’ published in 1964, or Carl Abrahamsson’s ‘Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward’, published in 2018. It became apparent that there were two sides to this: one side being that occult references in art history have been ignored and hidden; they have undergone a degree of mystification. A recent example of this is William Blake’s retrospective at Tate Britain (2019-2020). William Blake had an intense dislike and mistrust of the prevailing orthodoxes of his time: organised religion, divisions by class and gender, and the stultification of social conventions. He and his wife Catherine joined the New Church of Emanuel Swedenborg in 1789 where they practiced a more gentler, mystical form of Christianity in which truth came from personal revelation, not priestly academics and arguments. Blake had a desire for free love and the right for adults to engage in sex unfettered by ideas of sin or social ostracism, and subscribed to the kabbalistic belief that sex was a sacred communion with the Divine. To my disappointment, the exhibition did not explore Blake’s imagery and symbolism, but instead considered the reception of his art with his peers and the monetary value of how much he was paid for certain works; a somewhat capitalist perspective. At no point did the exhibition consider Blake’s radical thoughts, practices or politics; and so this truth remains somewhat hidden in the present; it has undergone a degree of mystification. 

During the last decade (2010-2019), I began to see a huge resurgence of occult popularity, especially in contemporary art and thus the art market. Which brings me to the second side: that occult themes are now gaining popularity in contemporary art practices, that occult or spiritually inspired works are being sold on the art market through commercial galleries and huge art fairs like Frieze - they have become marketable, valuable, and curatable… and most importantly, this means that they are now being viewed through the lenses of the learnt rules: beauty, truth, genius, civilisation, form, status and most importantly ‘good taste’.

Let’s briefly explore this idea of ‘good taste’. As sentimental as I personally am about art for art’s sake, from a strictly sociological perspective, I have to admit that taste is pretty intimately related to power. When you go to a museum you look at various objects on pedestals under special lighting which makes them look magical, which is not too different to when you go to a shopping centre and you walk past all the shop-front displays; but what sets museums apart from any shopping experience is that you can’t buy any of the art on display, and that’s important. In the retail context of commodity fetishism, you correlate your aesthetic taste with material desire, whereas in the museum, because you can’t buy anything, you feel like your aesthetic pleasure is pure, that you’re simply enjoying out of context objects - but of course, that’s an illusion. The museum is the context, and the context is telling you that the things you’re looking at are art. So, whoever decides what’s in the museum decides what ‘good taste’ is, what’s beautiful and what’s valuable, and that goes the same with the art market.

It’s no secret that occultism has been viewed as ‘bad taste’. The resurgence of occultism in contemporary art and culture is not without precedent: the occult has faded in and out of the cultural arena for centuries, from the Witch Trials of 1580-1630 during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion, as well as the 19th century - the setting of the first widespread occult revival since the Christianisation of Europe; the early-modern witch hunts and the so-called age of reason, to the development of Wicca after World War II, the esoteric counterculture of the 1960’s, to the rise of the ‘Satanic Panic’ that troubled the US throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s. It’s no lie that occultism has had a roller coaster of a time throughout history, but we can recognise this desire in our current moment - steeped in advanced capitalism, swift gentrification and right-wing political gains - the occult and spirituality now holds the promise of connection and empowerment to those who feel powerless. So, of course during this time of uncertainty, a new wave of artists have once again been inspired by occult and spiritual ideologies and themes. Currently in the art market, occultism is on trend and as the art market sees it; political and social turmoil surrounds us, so it’s no surprise new age spiritualism is booming. For example: Damien Hirst’s (born 1965) ‘Mandalas' exhibition from 2019 at the White Cube had people queuing around the block on the opening day, the esoteric was on the ascendent at Frieze Art Fair 2019 with many works exploring the spiritual and supernatural, including high profile commercial galleries like Maureen Paley, Gagosian and the White Cube. A take by Marc Glimcher, the president and chief executive of Pace gallery says: “For many, organised religion’s rejection of universality has left a gap.” for context; he made this statement after opening his new gallery in New York with a blessing from a shaman (2019). It was, Glimsher says, “a moment for the family that is Pace to reflect and appreciate one another and the journey. [...] a growth in the search for an expansion of consciousness today; artists are often the first to recognise and articulate this”.

But many of these ideas have their roots in the counterculture of an earlier time. What Damien Hirst is doing at the White Cube exhibition isn’t particularly new; he’s just doing it in a more acceptable time. But with this, such ideas have entered the mainstream and have become a saleable commodity. The new Pace gallery in New York has crystals embedded in its walls and the London gallery Sadie Coles HQ was selling ‘healing’ gems and minerals in its pop-up shop with the US artist Andrea Zittel (born 1965) (exhibition 2019). Occultism and spiritualism has arguably been co-opted by capitalism and spiritualist art is a booming business. But with any subculture that is embraced by the mainstream and commodified, has the concept of the occult or spiritual lost its purpose?

Let’s take a step back to Marc Glimcher’s statement; what caught my eye here was “artists are often the first to recognise and articulate this”, and well, he’s right. So, let’s examine who the spiritual artist is: if we strip back major western figures, also known as blue-chip artists who created occult inspired or spiritual art in the 20th and 21st century; for example: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Salvador Dali and Bill Viola (born 1951), then we’re left with predominantly outsider-artists, artists who are considered to be from a minority group, or middle-class artists who weren’t credited for their work during their lifetime. You see, a lot of mainstream visual art inspiration, especially in the fine arts, works in what we might call a trickle-up model of aesthetics, especially with religious and spiritual imagery in 20th and 21st century art. This kind of imagery and philosophy is created by the most marginalised groups and communities, then they trickle up to the middle classes, and then finally to big named artists and commercial galleries. A great example of this is Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and his African Period which is also known as Primitivism. Primitivism ultimately led to the invention of Cubism and produced one of Picasso’s most famous paintings, the ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907). During Picasso’s Primitive Period, he painted in a style which was strongly influenced by African sculpture, particularly ceremonial African masks. In the early 20th century, African artworks with spiritual significance were being brought back to Paris museums in consequence of the expansion of the French empire into Sub-Saharan Africa, which brings up a lot of questions about colinialisation, the theft of important spiritual works, and the cultural appropriation of Picasso’s work. We could say that this is happening now, with the popularisation of occultism in contemporary art. That small communities of marginalised groups have been creating and forming a specific aesthetic and philosophy for decades, sometimes centuries, which have then been accessed and popularised by the middle classes with things like yoga becoming more mainstream, mindful meditation apps, healing crystals and Harry Potter, which has then trickled up to the very top and is now being commodified at the art market. The occult has once again gone from ‘bad taste’ to being viewed through the lens of ‘good taste’. 

It’s no secret that the art market has taken a turn in the past two decades, works by women and people of colour are more popular than ever; maybe this is the elite taking advantage of people’s cultural shift towards inclusion and diversity in a way to capitalise on it, or maybe the elite are like, totally ‘woke’ now? To understand the market better, let’s take a look at an institution like MoMA; one of the world’s most important artistic institutions, it came into being in 1929 after a small group of rich New York benefactors made an initial gift of eight prints and drawings. That initial donation grew into the new MoMA which reopened in 2019 after a $450 million renovation which shows more of the museum’s permanent collection of 200,000 artworks. Before the renovation the museum could only present 1,500 artworks on average, now it can show nearly 2,500 works permanently. To put that in perspective, if MoMA stopped collecting new works today, but continued turning over the entirety of its permanent collections gallery every 18 months, it would still need more than 80 years to put everything it owns on view to the public just one time. MoMA decided to take new liberties with the chronological presentation of its collection, and introduced a more theme-based approach which will promote a healthy diversification of genres - putting a Pablo Picasso next to a Faith Ringgold (born 1930) for example. But why is that important? MoMA’s acquisitions and choice of display radically affects the market, and their choice of contemporary art always stimulates the market. It is no surprise then, that MoMA opened one of it’s new gallery spaces with printmaking artist and mystic Betye Saar’s work in October 2019 with the exhibition ‘The Legends of Black Girl’s Window’; this exhibition had an immediate impact on the artist’s prices. Celebrating the acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this was MoMA’s first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as a printmaker and those acquisitions had an inflationary effect on the prices and popularity. Spotlights by major museums almost always have a virtuous impact on demand, and growth in demand means higher prices. And so in October 2019, thanks to institutions like MoMA, we saw a huge resurgence in art exploring occult themes hit the market; right in time for Halloween. 

Even though MoMA’s new expansion did more to reinforce the established canon than to atomize it, the museum’s expansion did more to reinforce the art market status quo than to disrupt it. In a museum system still largely subject to the preferences of its super-rich private patrons, it’s important to recognise that the new MoMA was largely made possible by checks bearing the same old signatures (David Geffen, David Rockefeller, Debra & Leon Black, Ken Griffin and Steven A. Cohen being the largest MoMA donors since 2015). However, with the inclusion of spiritually influenced works like Betye Saar at MoMA as well as the other countless exhibitions of occult or spiritual themed work over the past ten years: like ‘A History of Magic’ at the British Library (2017-2018); ‘Spellbound’ at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2018-2019); ‘The Medium’s Medium’ (2019) and ‘Art + Revolution in Haiti’ (2018) at The Gallery of Everything, London; as well as Damien Hirst's ‘Mandalas’ at the Whita Cube, London (2019); Lenore Tawney at Frieze as part of Alison Jacques Gallery (2019); Melanie Matranga’s wall hangings at Frieze as part of High Art (2019) and Shana Moulton at the Zabludowicz Collection (2019) to name some of the more recent exhibitions; I believe I can safely say that the occult is now going through a state of demystification (from the upper class patrons of MoMA, through to the working classes). The mystification of occult themes appears to be lifting and with this, a whole new occult perspective on not only current artistic practices, but also historic works of art are being discovered today; a good example of this is the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s (MAMCS) exhibition ‘The Europe of Spirit or the Fascination of the Occult, 1750-1950’ (2011-2012) which explored a vast range of works from over 200 years which showed how the visual and literary arts were informed and inspired by appropriated occultism.  

With this demystification of history, we begin to see occult symbolism in the present: we gaze into pools of data, in a terminal trance running on light, power, numbers. We raise histories long dead on Wikipedia, we cast chat communiques to fellow citizens via vibrations. We summon demons, turn our base metal devices to the task of making gold, astral project into virtual worlds, program the very landscape we live in; and this resonates most strongly with working class and unrepresented artists across the UK (the trickle up model of aesthetics; the unrepresented artists are usually the first to notice). Artists like Chloe Langlois (born 1980), Arianne Churchman (born 1988), Joseph Winsborrow (born 1994), Craig David Parr (born 1990), and artist collectives like Chaos Magic, Dohm Ceramics and KÜHLE WAMPE are all exploring occult themes using digital ritualism. This could suggest that the current mining of the esoteric underground and the upsurge of mainstream interest in the occult mysteries serves a more practical function for young, unrepresented and working-class artists. It’s not about the return of Gods and the re-enactment of a technologically dischanted reality. Instead, it’s about the rediscovery of tools and strategies that are, paradoxically again, pragmatic and instrumental. These artists recognise that magic may help us map, manipulate, and navigate the weird political, social and technological landscape that yawns before us. 

Since the eighteenth century, the West has seen a profound transformation in the relationship between art and religion. The Reformation, the rise of capitalism, the ideals of the Enlightenment, the worship of Reason and the growth of the town all led to what Max Weber (1864-1920) called “the disenchantment of the world”. At the same time, the sense of the withdrawal of the divine that found expression in the Romantics, followed later by Nietzche’s announcement of the death of God, the advance of science, the emergence of psychoanalysis and the growing influence of Marxism, led to a reconsideration of Man’s place in creation and thus of his relationship to religion. It was in this landscape of belief violently unsettled that Modern Art came to birth. In the course of this long process the secularisation of society delivered artists from their subordination to occultism and spirituality; the crisis of religion did not at all mean the disappearance of metaphysical questioning. There remains a survival of such questioning today which continues to fuel the invention of contemporary artistic forms, and as such represents an essential key to the understanding of art history and contemporary art. 

Images: 1.  Shana Moulton, The Pink Tower and The Waterfall of Grief, 2019, exhibition view Zabludowicz Collection, London. Courtesy the artist and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo: Tim Bowditch

2. Madge Gill, Untitled, Undated, Courtesy Newham Archives and Local Studies Library

3. Damien Hirst, Mandalas, 2019, exhibition view The White Cube, London. Courtesy the artist and The White Cube.

4.  Left, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 with Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die, 1967. Exhibition view Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019.

5. KÜHLE WAMPE, Under Different Stars, 2019. Vivid Projects: Black Hole Club. Photo: Marcin Sz