A Gaping Hole in the Art World’s Diversity Efforts
For centuries, white male artists dominated exhibitions, collections, awards, and consequently, the art canon. As a result, art history was a myopic chronicle of their concerns: legends of their histories, displays of wealth and power, delectable arrays of desirable bodies, and monumental battles. Art history reflects the human narratives we value, the ones that will ultimately live on to represent us. The art world’s recent efforts to remedy deficits in representation have given some previously unheard voices important opportunities to participate in the discourse. The end goal of these reparations is for diverse audiences to see their own identities and experiences reflected in art galleries, museums, and textbooks.
This corrective action often begins when artists disclose their demographics on applications for schools, grants, residencies, and exhibitions for the purpose of ensuring equity in the selection practice. The applicants are asked about their race, disabilities, veteran status, gender identification and sexual orientation. These inquiries, coupled with conscious, informed commitments to inclusivity, allow us to make progress toward the support, promotion, curation and display of art that reflects a wider expanse of society. Yet, a persistent, insidious prejudice remains, one that is blatantly obvious, but far too slippery to relegate to a checked box.
While a committee might be impressed by a top art school on your application, nowhere on these forms do they inquire if you had the talent to be accepted to that top school, but could not afford to go. They don’t ask if you won those academic/art prizes carrying the same rigorous course loads as everyone else… while also working 30 hours a week to put yourself through college. As a demographic, the economically challenged suffer from debilitating systemic oppression that the wealthy (and even the middle-class) often find difficult to fathom. No group has less collective power. Because art exists primarily in the context of an insulated clique where privilege is a forgone conclusion, many are oblivious to this exclusion, or they assume that it has already been corrected through other initiatives. Yet, to suppose that current efforts towards inclusion have already addressed this prejudice against poverty is, itself, inherently biased: skin color, sexual orientation and veteran status span the wealth spectrum.
The art world is an amplified expression of the United States’ sham meritocracy. It’s a system built on hoarded capital and exploited labor. The less fortunate are subject to moral judgements by those who cannot begin to grasp the complexities of surviving a predatory system designed to prevent upward mobility. Over time, artists with low socio-economic status may even absorb those judgements and accept the failure as their own. Yet calling out a rigged system in the art world is the kiss of death. Obviously, your work simply wasn’t good enough, and your complaints are sour grapes… not the “winning” look artists must maintain. In a culture that perpetually implies that cream always rises to the top, anyone who appears prosperous must be cream. If your publicist or your father’s friend gets you a fashion magazine feature of carefully styled “emerging” you in your cavernous studio, you seem successful, regardless of what you have actually produced.
In addition, the unregulated art microcosm is uniquely complex regarding finances, even beyond the market opacity, money laundering, and jockeying for status. It’s considered vulgar to discuss money in circles where members have no desire to wrestle with the cognitive dissonance surrounding their privilege. The art tribe is also distinctively convoluted in the form of trust-fund artists who cosplay poverty, while the truly destitute creatives (and often, gallerists) contort themselves to maintain the required appearance of success, in order to gain more of it.
The art world feigns to simply celebrate the most talented, when achievement requires capital at every career stage. Unlike the small art circles of the 1950’s, today’s complex system of networking, validation, and maintaining constant visibility has severely reduced the possibility that lower-to-middle class artists can succeed based on pure talent & perseverance. Creative production requires time, space, and materials (which all cost money). Working to survive and pay off student loans not only prohibits artistic production, but also attendance at openings, lectures, and other critical networking events.
Studies indicate that wealth is a major factor in determining whether someone becomes an artist. The most lauded creatives have traditionally bought their way into a pipeline, paying exorbitant tuition to attend a prestigious college. Three-quarters of the “Top 500” artists went to the top 20 art schools. (This fact is never shared with poor students taking out loans to attend less desirable institutions, dreaming that talent and hard work will insure their success.)
Financial privilege for an artist can be manifested as: family and friend connections, easy access to the collector class, top art schools to establish primary validation (and to forge relationships with dealers, collectors, curators, and other artists), the ability to live in urban centers amidst the art elite, financial support allowing time and energy for creative work instead of a “day job”, the ability to travel to art fairs, biennales, and museum openings for networking in art circles, the ability to make initial, career-establishing investments for spacious studios, equipment and materials, the ability to hire assistants to increase production, the ability to create their own opportunities, the ability to print their own validating books and catalogs, the ability to produce projects limited only by their imagination, and the ability to pay publicists thousands of dollars a month to secure interviews and features to maintain visibility.
In addition, art career advantages often grow in exponential leaps. If an artist is selected for an important exhibition, they often pick up gallery representation, then the efforts of several people are focused on actively promoting them, placing their work in collections, and providing income through sales. Awards and fellowships are frequently granted to those who don’t need them, when that kind of money could truly transform a poor artist’s life. When jurors for those prizes are facing a stack of 3,000 applications, focusing on art school pedigree, established gallery representation, or well-known collections can sometimes be an expedient way to cull the pile. Yet, for the artist applicant who lacks those “pipeline” credentials, winning that grant would further validate their work, leading to considerably more opportunities. For artists, success begets success; one unlocked door can lead to another, and another… unless they were born keyless.
The psychological stress of living without a safety net can easily eclipse the creative life. Sustaining a career over decades simply becomes an endurance game. Even after decades of commitment, careers can be derailed by unexpected emergencies. By middle age, financially struggling artists have likely experienced a dozen critical junctures where life events pulled them under and threatened to eliminate them from the game. At each point, they pushed through and created ways to go on, when many others might have quit. Effectively managing small blocks of time, juggling disparate tasks, relentlessly working against endless obstacles, remediating problems, doing what needs to be done, grit and tenacity… these are qualities that ambitious underprivileged people have in spades. Consider two gifted athletes who have tied at the end of an obstacle course. One of them also juggled plates while running the race. Which one has more “talent”?
The most insidious consequence of this unmitigated art world bias is that it shuts out the voices of those at the bottom of the economic ladder at a time when we desperately need to hear them. The chasm between the top 1% and the rest of us has never been this vast, and it widens each year. This rift affects our planet and its inhabitants in profound ways. Our culture is at a critical point where we need powerful catalysts to disrupt growing international tendencies towards oligarchism. At this very moment, U.S. democracy is in dire straits due to private and corporate wealth used to purchase politicians and judges. Economic injustices are most obvious and visceral to those who struggle with the extreme discomforts and quagmires that Late-Stage Capitalism creates. Their voices need to be represented in current cultural discourse.
Poet Adrienne Rich, in her 1997 Op Ed (on why she refused the National Medal for the Arts) stated,
“Like government, art needs the participation of the many in order not to become the property of a powerful and narrowly self-interested minority. Art is our human birthright, our most powerful means of access to our own and another’s experience and imaginative life. In continually rediscovering and recovering the humanity of human beings, art is crucial to the democratic vision.”
If we are to address this disparity, we need to have frank discussions about the exclusionary role money plays in the art world. Which artists will wield the potency of art to tell their stories and call out systems of economic oppression? Federally funded institutions and non-profits are meant to be inclusive instruments of public good and education, but how often are they unwittingly programming exhibitions from a pre-selected pool of artists whose validation was originally established through financial means? Who ensures that artist panels and award lists are not populated solely with the insulated offspring of doctors, architects, and CEOs, whatever their gender or color of their skin?
If art world members are serious about representing diversity, they must formulate new boxes to check. Financial identity is more complex to ascertain, but it is critical to filling this obvious hole in creative representation. At what age did the artist get their first job? What were the occupations of their parents? Were they admitted to any prestigious grad programs? Have they been offered other talent-based opportunities that they could not afford to participate in? Was their education self-funded? Did they win all the awards at their state school? Do they have extenuating life circumstances that command resources? Are they still working outside jobs to fund their practice? Who has managed to rise to an impressive career level without financial advantages?
Curators and gallerists need to commit to looking outside the established hierarchy to ferret out some of the extraordinary work being made at the fringes. Comb through CVs to identify privilege, and lack thereof. Find some non-rich applicants whose work deserves to move to the top of the grant pile. Visit graduate schools beyond the top ten to discover emerging students. Imagine a prize that grants poor but madly talented artists a few years in a giant studio (with health insurance, assistants, and a large stipend for materials and basic living supplies) to see what they are capable of. (I’d tune in to watch that reality show.)
Next time you have seen an impressive exhibition, take a moment to look at the work through the lens of financial privilege: did it require expensive materials, fabrication, extensive framing, a massive studio, or a dozen assistants to achieve? If you are an educator, don’t implicitly convey to your students that they all have a chance at being the next Jeff Koons: let the ones with starry eyes and empty pockets know how the current system works, including the additional obstacles they will face. The artists of the next generation have the power to create a new reality, but they must be armed with the truth in order to do so. Raise the consciousness of those around you, while encouraging them to change this system to a more equitable one. Most importantly, stop perpetuating the myth of artistic meritocracy.
We must also come to terms with the possibility that this may be an issue the art world doesn’t want to correct. No doubt some powers that be would prefer a closed system, essentially an elite country club where the rich make themselves and their friends richer. Top MFA degrees provide a guarantee that dealers, collectors, and even fellow students and professors will all gain more mutual wealth proximity.
Like other biases, a central attribute of classism is denial of its privileges. Facing facts about historical, systemic oppression of the poor by the rich requires surrendering deeply ingrained moral judgements regarding class supremacy. Like corrective action against any kind of prejudice, hard work is required. Stale assumptions need to be replaced by education, curiosity, and awareness in the quest to be anti-classist. Telling those of low socio-economic status that they are simply too poor to play the game might work with polo, but art is made by, and belongs to, all of us. Yet historically, those with power do not surrender it willingly. Change could require a more aggressive approach on the part of artists to call out and actively subvert the system, or even create a new one.
Most importantly, consider how the vocabulary of art and our dialogue surrounding it has expanded over the last few decades, as we have increased the range of voices through advocacy. Providing access to this large, undiscovered population will reward all of us with timely work we could never have imagined, along with what I promise will be a shocking expansion of our creative conversations. It’s time to let art’s higher power reflect the varied experiences of our vast humanity, not merely those humans who went to Yale.
Kate Kretz’s new book, Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice has recently been published by Intellect Books. It is distributed by The University of Chicago Press, and is available where fine books are sold.
