2.5 One role for art, therefore, is as a luxury good, whose superior craftsmanship or intellectual prestige indicates superior social status.
2.6 Another role for art is to serve as financial instrument or tradable repository of value.
2.7 Another role for art is as a sign of “giving back” to the community, to whitewash ill-gotten gains.
2.8 Another role for art is as a symbolic escape valve for radical impulses, to serve as a place to isolate and contain social energy that runs counter to the dominant ideology.
2.9 A final role for art is the self-replication of ruling-class ideology about art itself—the dominant values given to art serve not only to enact ruling-class values directly but also to subjugate, within the sphere of the arts, other possible values of art.
3.0 Though ruling-class ideology is ultimately dominant within the sphere of the arts, the predominant character of this sphere is middle class.
3.1 “Middle class” in this context does not indicate income level. It indicates a mode of relating to labor and the means of production. “Middle class” here indicates having an individual, self-directed relationship to production rather than administering and maximizing the profit produced by the labor of others (capitalist class) or selling one’s labor power (working class).
3.2 The position of the professional artist is characteristically middle class in relation to labor: the dream of being an artist is the dream of making a living off the products of one’s own mental or physical labor while being fully able to control and identify with that labor.
3.3 A distinctive characteristic of the visual arts sphere, therefore, is that it is a sphere in which ruling-class ideology dominates, and yet it is allowed to have an unusually middle-class character (in fact, it is by definition middle class—the “art world” is defined as the sphere that trades in individual products of creativity rather than mass-produced creativity).
3.4 In part, the middle-class character of the visual arts relates to 2.5–2.8 above. From a ruling-class perspective, it is beneficial to promote the example of middle-class creative labor for a variety of reasons.
3.5 Nevertheless, the middle-class perspective on the value and role of art is not identical to the ruling-class one; artists have their own way of relating to their labor and consequently their own value for “art.”
3.6 The middle-class value of art is double-sided: on the one hand, “art” is identified as a profession, as a desirable means of support.
3.7 On the other hand, “art” is identified as self-expression, as a manifestation of creative individuality (whether that is expressed through a specific style of craftsmanship or as an original intellectual program; art-theory debates about the importance of the hand of the artist or “studio” versus “post-studio” production displace this more fundamental and structural sense in which the sphere of the visual arts preserves individuality).
3.8 Two permanent contradictions therefore dominate the sphere of the visual arts. The first contradiction is between the fact that the visual arts are dominated by ruling-class values but defined by their middle-class character.
3.9 The second contradiction is internal to the middle-class definition of “art” itself, which is split between notions of art as profession and as vocation and therefore comes into contradiction with itself at every moment where what an artist wants to express runs into opposition with the demands of making a living (in a situation where a minority dominates most of society’s resources, this is often).
4.0 The sphere of the visual arts has weak relations with the working class.
4.1 The working class here is defined as consisting of those laborers who are compelled to sell their labor power as a commodity to make a living and therefore have no individual stake in their labor.
4.2 There are many links to the working class in the visual arts: gallery workers, anonymous fabricators of artistic components, nonprofessional museum workers, and so on. Most artists are themselves employed outside the “art world”—the dream of having fully realized middle-class status remains aspirational for most people who identify as “artists.”
4.3 Still, the form of labor at the heart of the sphere of the visual arts, the production of artworks, remains middle class—far more so than most other so-called creative industries.
4.4 One consequence of this predominantly middle-class character is the visual arts’ approach to dealing with the social and economic contradictions that it faces. An individualized relation to labor means that middle-class agents tend to conceive of their ability to achieve their political objectives in individualistic terms, with their social power deriving from intellectual capacity, personality, or rhetoric (it is this reality that is behind the displacement of the discussion about art’s contradictions onto considerations of the “market”—a construct in which free individuals enter into economic relations with one another—rather than considerations of “class,” a concept that implies fundamental, opposing interests that go beyond the individual).
4.5 On the other hand, because being a member of the working class involves being treated as an abstract, interchangeable source of labor, the working class’s ability to achieve its objectives depends much more on its ability to organize collectively. This is a form of resistance that is difficult to achieve within the sphere of the arts (all talk of an “artists’ strike” remains satirical outside a situation like that of the 1930s government art support in the United States, where artists are employed as a bloc).
4.6 Because the ruling structure of society is capitalist—that is, the exploitation of wage labor to maximize profit—the working-class position is actually closer to the core of society’s functioning than that of the middle class; middle-class workers, by the very nature of their semi-independence, have only the ability to shut down their own production, whereas an organized working class can directly affect the ruling class’s interests.
4.7 The specific nature of the working class suggests its own relation to the concept of “art,” distinct from either capitalist or middle-class notions.
4.8 On the one hand, one working-class value of art is determined by the reality of “creative industries,” in which creative laborers are employed who have a working-class relation to the products of their expression; that is, they produce creative products not as an expression of their individuality but simply as a task. Viewed from this angle, “art” is demystified—it is not a uniquely exalted form of expression but simply one more human process that is the subject of labor.
4.9 On the other hand, inasmuch as working-class labor is controlled from above, the ideal of “art” might also represent a form of labor that is opposed to the demands of work, as freely determined expression, whether private or political. Viewed from this angle, art is deprofessionalized and in this sense is actually more “free” than the middle-class ideal of personal-expression-as-career.
5.0 The idea of “art” has a basic and general human sense on which no specific profession or class has a monopoly.
5.1 “Art,” conceived of as creative expression in general, can be seen as representing a function as basic as exercise or dialogue and a need only slightly less fundamental than eating or sex (“slightly less fundamental” because the question of creative expression comes after simple survival—you must first secure food before you can think of cuisine).
5.2 Conceived of in this way, every human activity has an artistic component, an aspect under which
