Not the Gift I Had Hoped For

As an artist, I had high expectations for this book, and that it would, if not keep me sane, at least help me understand and work within the commercial context of our lives. Hyde goes some way toward helping with the understanding part by looking at late capitalism from a unique perspective. And he describes the relation of artistic activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society in (for the most part) an interesting way. But he makes no attempt to help artists work within this system, because, as he puts it, “this is not a “how to” book. So I was disappointed because it is very easy to come up with a critique of capitalism, no matter how unique, but it is another thing to suggest alternatives, either at the individual or the governance level. I was also disappointed that the book did not translate all that well across disciplines.

Works for Writing Maybe Not Other Arts

Hyde claims many of his assumptions hold for writers, painters, singers, composers, actors, and film-makers, but he is writing from a writers perspective. For instance he talks about the suspension of disbelief, “by which we become receptive to work of the imagination”. But in painting, there is no real requirement to suspend disbelief as belief is more of a verbal/intellectual process that does not hamper or enhance a viewer’s perception of visual art. The writerly focus ovetakes the middle section of the book, which is an exhaustive analysis of the work of two poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, that was of limited interest to this reader, a painter.

The book was started in 1979 and first published in 1983, a time when it was still considered appropriate to use the masculine pronouns, “man”, “his” and “he” instead of non-gendered plural forms like “humans”, “people” or “they”, and Lewis uses masculine forms throughout. He does, however, include Chapter 6, A Female Property that has to do with women being given in the marriage ceremony as a gift. He points out how clearly this underscores that women are still considered as property to be used in bartering. His very practical suggestion is that, in addition to a father giving away his daughter to the groom, the groom’s mother should give away her son to the bride.

These may be niggling criticisms because the real point of Hyde’s book is to understand the market economy – how it evolved, its most salient characteristics and what it means to be an artist in such an economy. He develops his argument in the first part of the book where he differentiates between a gift economy where items are given without expectation of rent and a market economy where anything given to another is expected to come back with interest. In the last part of the book he explores how art fits into this.

He has some keen insights and, like most good writers, can put into words ideas that the rest of us have trouble expressing. For instance, he describes how a gift economy differs from a market economy: in a market economy, all gifts are destroyed. “If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).(p196)

Artists with Dark Sides

Flannery O’Connor

Though in some ways The Gift does not translate well among artistic disciplines, Hyde includes great quotations that are universal, such as this one from Flannery O’Connor:“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” (p.195)

While this is an eloquent, uplifting statement, it illustrates that an artist can be gifted with imagination and skill but step outside the zone of self-forgetting and become as blind and bigoted as the most brutally ignorant. Recently found correspondence indicates that O’Connor had a “habit of racial bigotry…She was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.”

Ezra Pound

This is the shadow side of many successful artists that is not adequately addressed in Hyde’s book. For instance in the chapter dedicated to analyzing the life and work of Ezra Pound, he does not address the question of how Pound can be a self-forgetting artist capable of making poetry that “meets the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made” and a rabid anti-semite. Instead he goes into a somewhat annoying digression about Hermes and the shadow side that doesn’t ring true.

Pablo Picasso

It is not only writers like O’Connor or Pound with a shadow side, such artists abound in every discipline and their presence is not clearly explained in The Gift. For instance, Pablo Picasso has been called the most influential artist of the 20th century but today, Picasso is more often talked about as a misogynist, sociopath and narcissist. Yes, it is difficult to be a sensitive, creative person in a culture of getting and spending, but Hyde does not explore how an artist can be gifted in one area but spiritually disabled in others. He believes artistic creativity “has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes”, but this is clearly not the case for some artists who have stunted relationships with fellow human beings.

So we have to go along with Hyde’s compartmentalizing of the creative imagination so that the person making art is in a different zone than the person out in a culture distorted by the marketplace.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Esemplastic Power

He relates artistic creativity to the concept of the gift in that “the imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has the gift.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as it’s hallmark it’s ability “to shape into one,” an ability he named “the esemplastic power.” An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what Lewis calls a “”gifted state,” one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life….the artist who succeeds in this endeavour has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: it’s spirit is embodied in the work.”(p.195)

Hyde goes on to describe how “…the spirit of the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives…any such art is itself a gift, cordial to the soul.”(p.196)

And “we participate in the esemplastic power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.” “The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world.”

Joseph Conrad

Hyde quotes Joseph Conrad, “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.”

Thanks Anyway

As I have said in earlier blogs, the greatest gift writers can give to other artists is to put into words truths about art that practitioners of other disciplines do not have the skills to do (this sentence is a case in point). So I forgive the gender-specific pronouns, the long diversion into analyzing poetry and the lack of a “how-to” because The Gift is one person’s offering to nature, the group, the human race, history, tradition and the spiritual world. Thanks so much, Lewis.

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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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