Artists in Capitalism (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you have ever roamed the fields and lanes of the countryside and perhaps marvelled at the sight of the sun catching the trees, or the side of the hills, and finally set up your easel and started to paint, you will know something of the pleasure and joy of the amateur artist. This is work done for the satisfaction it brings, not for money. The growth and popularity of painting as a leisure-time activity has been accompanied and stimulated by a continuous flood of books and materials. There is a wide range of books and magazines dealing with numerous aspects of art, artists, art history, and techniques. All kinds of new and often gimmicky materials come on to the market; the motive for their production is profit, not for the purpose of helping artists produce works of art.

What is art under capitalism? Whatever people think it is, or ought to be, the overwhelming fact is that capitalism reduces it like everything else to the status of a commodity — something to be bought and sold. Consider the recent boom in sales of works of art. Capitalists visit plush galleries and auction rooms to invest in them in order to increase their wealth, or if they feel it is a safeguard against depreciation of their money. Or they may, as some do, buy them as a show of status (or even sometimes because they like them). But whatever the reason, it is only the capitalist class who can afford original works of art.

Capitalism on one hand saturates us with art in a multiplicity of ways. It comes in the form of cheap prints of old and modern masters to be bought in any number of different kinds of shops. It comes in masses of mass-produced ornamental commodities, and from the television screen like the very popular Sir Kenneth Clark series, programmes of individual artists, different schools of art, and a host of others. Yet on the other hand capitalism denies the vast majority any participation in creative activity.

Slaves of the Market

How does capitalism accomplish this denial of art?

Why is it that productive activity under capitalism is devoid of pleasure and art? It is because the worker is divorced from the means of production and his product. Hence there is no relation between the productive process and the needs of the producers as human beings. The workers are not engaged in producing useful things for the purpose of satisfying human needs. Profit is the goal of production; all effort must be harnessed to this end. This is the negation of human fulfilment and of art, an impossibility for their development.

The means of production and the product are alienated from the worker. They exist for him outside of his control, and they are only brought together with the needs of expanding capital, and so long as the worker continues to produce not only the value of his own wages but a surplus value over and above his wages. For the capitalist, his interest in the means of production and the product exists only for him as owner of private property, to use as capital and the increase of capital, not as a user of them for the purpose of creating useful things. Art can only result when it is a necessary function in the lives of people in society, when it plays a part in the production of the things society requires. That is, when man has control of his own production related to his needs. Capitalism requires the reverse.

What about the professional artists, those men and women who produce the work exhibited to be sold from the various galleries? What is their position in capitalism? The artist of today is subject to changing fashion, he must constantly be ahead of trends. He must produce for exhibitions (the market), try to anticipate the attitudes of the critics, and like a film star must constantly stay in the lime-light. He must be something of a celebrity, to be interviewed and photographed, otherwise he may be hurled back from success to join thousands of others who hope that one day they may achieve success.

Some artists have been moved to express some of the tragedies of capitalism, whether it be the loneliness and wretchedness of old age, the horrors of war, the mentally sick, or whatever else, and have left a record of this social system. An artist of this kind cannot help but express his experience and what he sees round him. If what he expresses is disturbing or ugly, then it is because his social conditions are disturbing and ugly; those are the conditions of capitalism. Then there are those artists who work in one of the branches of advertising or commercial art. They design the material which constantly bombards us from the television screen, the magazines, hoardings, and of course the stream of brochures and coupons that are stuffed through the letter box.

The world of advertising is the area of the art movement known as “pop art,” so called because it draws for its subject-matter on the techniques of commercial art, advertizing, comic strips, photographs of film stars, soup-tins and packaging showing brand names. Covering all the paraphernalia of what has come to be known as “pop culture” (all of which has become increasingly part of the environment of capitalism). Pop art is a very obvious example of ideas and their expression being the outcome of material conditions, in particular of the capitalist mode of production.

One of the ideas nurtured by capitalism which has spilled over as part of the ideology of pop art is that of the throw-away society, where commodities are made to be quickly cast aside and replaced with new ones. How clearly the profit motive shines through! This idea was echoed by Andy Warhol the pop artist in his famous remark “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” It could be that there is a lesson to be learnt from pop art insofar as its treatment of the superficial and the banal highlights the degree of triviality which the condition of human life under capitalism has attained.

Part of Life

It has long been seen by some that art is divorced from everyday life, and attempts have been made to try and bring art to the common people (the working class). All these attempts are doomed to failure, as they only deal in effects, not with the cause. For art to play a part in the life of man, in his productive activity, a complete reconstruction of society is needed. Anything short of that inevitably must fail. Art cannot stand above the affairs of society; it must for its healthy development be part and parcel of the everyday activity of society.

Is there no hope then for art, for men and women to take part in creative activity as part of the work necessary to society, and the full development of its people (a completeness of development because, in the act of producing, the whole human being is produced, by bringing into play the intellectual and creative faculties?) So long as the cure is sought by trying to reform capitalism, sadly the answer must be no. When the means of life are owned in common the basis for truly human life will have been established. The practice of art will become part of life to take its place in enriching human experience and achievement.

P. Young