Is the job of artists to reflect the times we live in so as to make our fellow citizens aware of the historical mistakes we as a society may be repeating? Should artists be confronting us with our greed, stupidity, and all the other deadlies we constantly commit? Or should we be celebrating the slow progress of conscious human awareness? How can an artist distinguish between their own perception of reality and what is actually going on out there? How do we know if our sins are more numerous and deterministic than our saving graces?

The post-moderns, post-post moderns and other recent schools answer these questions by assuming that we can’t perceive what is real because reality is made up of momentary impressions that we superimpose on the world around us. Some might even suggest that there is no independent reality, there are only disparate individual perceptions created by cultural norms, personal histories, situations and emotions. By this logic, artists cannot depict reality as it is an illusion and they must avoid attempting to impose their personal understanding on their audience as this is dishonest and even unfair.

This leads us to the second part of the question posed by Barnes: is art a concentration of reality? If one accepts the logic outlined above, then reality cannot be depicted, let alone concentrated. But perhaps artists, through their craft, discipline and experience, are able to distill experience into a hyper-real depiction of the world around them. This is the case in many non-Western cultures and was the case in earlier European cultures before the pursuit of realism became the measure of excellence. In First Nations cultures on the west coast of British Columbia, artists capture the history, stories and spirit of their culture rather than individual emotional states or experiences.

The power of a work such as this can’t be denied and its concentrated energy negates the idea that art can’t depict reality. But this is a reality on a different scale that the one debated by the post-moderns. This is the type of reality that Westerners lost sight of as scientific reductionism took all our attention.

Early Europeans also used powerful images to concentrate and communicate the essence of their culture, and this has been explored in an earlier blog . One such powerful image is the sculpture below:

These works provided a schematized, abstract rendition of human traits, in this case, fertility (mother-goddess). They were depicted in stages of pregnancy, giving birth or showing maternal affection, parts of life independent of individual artistic bias.

Is art a superior substitute for reality?   Can we attain the same level of understanding from an excellent novel by Julian Barnes as we can by exposing ourselves to life in all its variation, wonder & squalor? Does a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting represent a more refined and accurate conception of reality than the lived experience of a non-artist?

This topic can be diverted by the issue of digital vs. non-digital reality and the current worry that for many, if not most of us, “real” reality has become a dull reflection of what we can find in our devices. Is a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting intrinsically more valuable than an hour or two on Facebook, Snapchat or TikTok? If we accept that there is no “real” reality anyway, it’s quality doesn’t make any difference.  But if we don’t accept this, we might suggest that an undifferentiated virtual world with no limitations or standards is a formless, dumbed-down alternative to a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting. These collate societal  experiences into artworks that don’t substitute for reality but distill it into something greater than all of our busy minds. So in that way, yes, good art is a superior substitute for mindlessly getting through the day.

But the last part of Barnes’ question is the big one: is art just a beguiling irrelevance? Is it defensible to be working diligently to create artworks in the context of world hunger, war, climate change, mass migrations, mass species extinction etc.?

Shouldn’t we all down pens, paintbrushes, ballet shoes and violins to distribute needed supplies to exhausted refugees? Remove invasive species from nearby wildlife habitat? Sit in front of our legislature with a placard demanding a sustainable future?

We artists defend our practices by arguing that in a world of greed & violence, the arts preserve the best part of humanity and provide an alternative paradigm to getting & spending. This doesn’t really answer the big question, but it will have to do for now.

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A. S. Byatt’s last book of short stories, Medusa’s Ankles, was a joy to read after having waded through a slew of glib novels by young writers seeking to take liberties with the form without having mastered it to begin with. The introduction to Byatt’s book is written by David Mitchell who describes the author as an art historian whose scholarly knowledge of art informs her prose. He says her characters act as conduits for ideas about making art, looking at art and art’s centrality to the mind and the world. For instance she incorporates ideas from John Ruskin “…from whom art lecturers claim professional descent“.

Few writers, Mitchell says, embed theory in their fiction with Byatt’s boldness and success, with theories of art illustrated by the stories that house them. He uses the word “Ekphrasis” which describes a work of visual art used as a literary device. I’m delighted by the revelation that there is a word for an area I’ve been trying to talk about in the halting prose of a non-writer. But Byatt’s prose “bestows dignity upon art in all its manifestations.”

In the short story, Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary, she has the character Valasquez say, “the world is full of light and life and the true crime is not to be interested in it“.  That’s an interesting idea – artists are simply those people interested enough in light and life to devote their lives to translating it into a visual, literary or some other communicable form.

One of the collection’s outstanding stories  is “A Lamia in the Cevennes” in which an artist with a creative block falls in love, not with a mythological seductress, but with art itself. 

As in all her stories, this one is in constant dialogue with the readers, asking, What is art? Why do we need it? What does it do for us? The protagonist, Bernard, asks, “Why bother? Why does this matter so much? What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again? I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.” “Art is a mercurial lover” says Mitchell in the Introduction. “The artists can no more ignore their art than a character can change the story they appear in, or a Greek hero outwit the fates.”

There are many other authors who wrestle with the point of making art. In his novel, Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes asks,”Is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” In the case of a novel, it is easier to understand how the writer, an expert at communicating in language, can help readers to make sense of the world, to understand it and our place in it. But what about the writers’ or artists’ larger responsibilities to society as a whole? Whether a writer, or any artist must directly address and take a strong position on political developments in his/her country is explored at some length and with great delicacy by Colm Toibin in his novel about the life of Thomas Mann, The Magician. In the novel, Mann (and Toibin) concludes that artists are damned if they do or don’t take a political stand and by extension, suggests that an artist’s first and primary responsibility is to his/her work. He also concludes that barbarism is never far beneath the surface and that art is always the first of its victims. So artists keep alive a sense of grace and beauty that balances violence and brutality.

These great artists insist that creating artworks is a balance to violence, help us see and make sense of the world and I am grateful that they have defended making art for art’s sake. Thanks Antonia, Julian, Colm, Thomas and all the rest.

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Art as Counterbalance

When the arts are under attack, artists generally defend their disciplines as providing a counterbalance to contemporary Western culture’s obsession with getting and spending, And while the attacks are increasing, artists have a decreasing ability to argue convincingly that the arts are relevant. What could, in previous decades, have been described as a general lack of interest in the arts, appears to be blossoming into antipathy towards the arts in general & painting in particular. One of the reasons for this is the sheer impossibility for art to capture the scale of the disaster the planet faces as the anthropocene age progresses through mass species extinction,

climate change,

rising sea levels,

and so on, all of which creates a widening gap between rich & poor.

In Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, Oxfam calculated that the richest 1% of people in the world owned nearly half (48%) of the world’s wealth. The vast majority of the remaining 52% of the world’s wealth was owned by the next 19% of the world’s richest people (which would probably include everybody reading this post) leaving just 5.5% of the world’s wealth for the poorest 80% of people in the world.

Artists are faced with the dilemma that the works we create are entirely unlikely to make a difference to the onslaught of late-capitalist destruction.This dilemma is nicely described by the writer, Rick Bass:
“What story, what painting, does one offer to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC? What story or painting does one offer up or create to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions?”

Painting is especially helpless in this regard as it cannot compete with installations designed to shock viewers into recognition of the crisis we are part of, or photography that can record the disasters in relentless detail.

Artists are faced with the dilemma that the works we create are entirely unlikely to make a difference to the onslaught of late-capitalist destruction.This dilemma is nicely described by the writer, Rick Bass:
“What story, what painting, does one offer to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC? What story or painting does one offer up or create to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions?”

But then he goes on to say, “Paint me a picture or tell me a story as beautiful as other things in the world today are terrible. If such stories and paintings are out there, I’m not seeing them.”

He is referring to the fact that, instead of acting as a counterbalance to the misery humans are creating, intellectual discussions on the role of art promote the idea that creating beautiful paintings, and indeed beauty itself, is part of the problem instead of part of the solution.  Bass suggests that,

“Rampant beauty will return”, but in the meantime, “activism is becoming the shell, the husk or where art once was….The activist is for a real and physical thing, as the artist was once for the metaphorical; the activist, or brittle husk-of-artist, is for life, for sensations, for senses deeply touched…The activist is the artist’s ashes”.

Is this true or are artist/activists arising, Phoenix-like from these ashes imbued with creativity and meaning?

Art & Gentrification

An ambivalent view of arts and activism is bolstered not only because artists themselves are rejecting the creation of art but because urban activists have focused on artists and galleries as the enemy – the thin edge of gentrification’s wedge.  Artist-driven urban renewal typically leads to artists being priced out of the neighborhoods they have helped to revive. This is sometimes referred to as “the SoHo effect.” Artists are complicit in the gentrification process, which has an impact not only on the artists themselves, but on other residents of neighborhoods that are being gentrified. This process is called “artwashing”—a term for adding a cultural sheen to a developing neighborhood that then sends rental prices up, forcing out the original inhabitants.

Artists find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being inadvertently complicit in driving gentrification, even as they are being victimized by the trend.

The term appears to have first been used in mainstream media in 2014 by Feargus O’Sullivan of The Atlantic, in an article about a tower in once-destitute East London that had been redeveloped for high-paying tenants. They were being enticed, in part, by suggestions that they wouldn’t be gentrifiers but, rather, original members of a new artistic community. “The artist community’s short-term occupancy is being used for a classic profit-driven regeneration manoeuver,” O’Sullivan wrote. He labelled the process “artwashing.” Years later, the conflict is escalating, and someone shot a potato gun at the attendees of an art show, and someone spray-painted “Fuck white art” on the walls of several galleries.

As explained by Jillian Billard in the online journal Artspace, artwashing takes place “when artists and galleries move into what is branded as a “newly established art community,” they generally don’t think of themselves as gentrifiers so much as they think of themselves as pioneers of a “new community,” (as opposed to new members of the pre-existing, already culturally-rich community).

Activists in cities with the highest levels of gentrification and displacement of longstanding residents, such as LA and New York, disrupt exhibitions and readings in new galleries. As Billard says, “It’s not that they don’t like art; rather their efforts proactively address the historically damaging effects that art spaces can have on a community’s deep-rooted residents. When developers see a neighborhood flourishing with art galleries and bougie cafes, they see a potential for exorbitant profit. Art galleries are part of a broader effort by planners and politicians and developers who want to artwash gentrification.”

In the past year, across North America, artist/activists are voicing their discontent with developer-driven artwashing and displacement. The Chinatown Art Brigade, an anti-gentrification group of artists and activists in New York, protested an exhibition by a Berlin-based artist. Their banner read “RACISM DISGUISED AS ART” as the installation included a room replete with objects indicating a sparsely merchandised Chinatown business that visitors walked through in order to view an artwork screening in the back of the gallery.

In Vancouver BC, a member of the Chinatown Action Group likened the artwashing taking place in New York’s Chinatown to developers and new businesses in Vancouver. These employ stereotypically Chinese imagery or aesthetics to gain authenticity, pay a misguided homage, or clumsily conceal an exclusionary agenda.

Though the movement is often called Anti-Art, some powerful art is being created by these activists, such as the art washing hands image shown earlier, the above image and the following by an unidentified artist on the Defend Boyle Heights Facebook page:

Another compelling image emerged from Vancouver, B.C activists protesting developer Westbank’s arrogant use of art-washing discussed in the blog Anti Art. This is a strong piece of activist art using the format of Westbank’s advertising blitz and capturing its hypocrisy and contempt for neighbourhoods. Westbank is the largest real-estate developer in Vancouver and it launched a disingenuous ad campaign called “The Fight for Beauty” for its new condo development that would displace many residents of the city. On its website, the activists posted the following:

“Everything Westbank does serves to displace culture created by the people. The real estate development company is not a cultural pioneer or patron, but a corporate entity that takes advantage of culture as a facade to push forward their profit-making agenda at all cost. They distribute their manufactured “culture” as soulless condos globally to offshore investors, while they wipe out Vancouver’s neighbourhoods and affordability. Westbank is not a culture company; it is a vulture company.“

The activists oppose artists and galleries that act as vehicles for gentrification & displacement but ironically, the images arising from that struggle are some of the most evocative being produced today. Perhaps that is because these images are coming from strong feeling and beliefs as opposed to what tends to be the coldly intellectual art promoted by the arts establishment.

Role of Arts Establishment

In addition to galleries, the arts establishment contributes to gentrification & displacement in cities under pressure from development interests. A  good example of this in Vancouver is Artscape,  an arts and culture non-profit with a multi-million dollar budget used to “revitalize” neighborhoods and promote mixed use developments.

Artscape’s method is to purchase or lease underused properties, more often than not  in low-income neighbourhoods. The spaces are then rented out to professional artists and registered not-for-profits at below-market rates. In the case of BC Artscape, the project was also helped with $900,000 – from the City of Vancouver, the credit union, VanCity and the J.W. McConnell Foundation: a match made in real estate heaven. Over the past decade  Artscape has become a very attractive partner for developers because developers can build bigger condos if they provide “community benefits” such as arts studios.

The New Avant-Guard

The arts establishment and some artists continue to be guided by the pursuit of such non-issues as whether an artist should ” move away from …the imagistic and textual and toward a probing of the real and historical” as discussed in a recent work of art criticism. But the artworks that are promoted by what the arts establishment would term, “progressive debate” have done little to counterbalance “Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC”. And as we have seen, the arts have been complicit in localized class wars, also called gentrification.

Palestinians search for casualties at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023. REUTERS / Anas al-Shareef

However, the work of the artist/activists explored in this blog are pointing the way forward and that direction is one of meaningful (as opposed to theoretical) day-to-day involvement in the ongoing struggle to protect common social and economic values from the ravages of greed and opportunism.

An article in the online journal colouringinculture.org  suggests that, “The radical avant-garde today can therefore be seen to exist in the cracks of neoliberalism as re-politicised acts of resistance against the totality of capitalism, grounded in collectivism and …nonaesthetic reason…in keeping with the radical avant-garde, disobedience and dissent, non-compliance and non-conformity, are what make us human and make us creative.” It is an interesting that anti-art activists are art’s newest avant-garde.

While the arts can do little to halt the ravages of the anthropocene age and the totality of capitalism on the environment, they are able to have a meaningful impact on local issues of gentrification and displacement. But as previous blogs have argued, they continue to enrich our lives in dark times. To quote Joseph Conrad (ignore his use of the gender-specific pronouns this was written in early 1900’s):
“the artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mysteries surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of enumerable hearts, to the solidarity… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

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