How to be a populist in the art world

Who is contemporary art for, and who makes it? The reflexive answer, espoused by museums, is that “all” are welcome, and that art should, therefore, encompass “everyone”. Let’s Create, Arts Council England’s recently abandoned strategy, went even further and insisted that every Tom, Dick, and Harry were also artists. With the collapse of arts institutions imminent, the now unsustainable regime of all and sundry is an uncomfortable legacy of art’s neoliberal expansionism. 

“Everyone” makes for a lot of people. Confusing the subject and object of art, one could call both its audiences and makers a demos. Successive populations have become incorporated into contemporary art systems. At the turn of the century, for example, it was as aspiring art students, and soon after as the deserving beneficiaries of art’s social amelioration projects. A decade or so later, a different group became the sought-after audience segment marked out by acronyms such as “PoC”. All the while, the idea that some people remained underserved by art drove theory and policy. In a profound sense, elite art has never been more accessible or democratic than today.

Yet in numerous exhibitions, essays, and events, the establishment art world in Britain reacts to the past decade’s ostensible “rise of populism” — an aesthetic turn to the interests of ordinary people — with palpable panic. One recent conference, Art and Populism, brought together the industry’s luminaries, including the internationally respected cultural critic T.J. Demos and the self-described “public intellectual” artist Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith Group, in a discussion that provided a depressing insight into the old guard’s paralysis in the face of the new popular. 

As speaker after speaker crowbarred virtue-signalling references to Gaza into their presentations, most forgot to define the “people”

The symposium, hosted by academics at Oxford and the Courtauld, brimmed with fearful and hateful accounts of techno-populism and the inherent fascism of AI, mixing them with nostalgic recollections of communist art production. As speaker after speaker crowbarred virtue-signalling references to Gaza into their presentations, most forgot to define the “people” who were at once the pitiful victims of Trumpian-style demagogy and, as unreformed bigots, the greatest threat to art and democracy. 

A reflection on the Canadian Iranian artist Bahar Noorizadeh’s 2023 game-film Teslaism by Manchester School of Art’s professor Sarah James typified the confusion. The work’s protagonist is Elon Musk, who travels to his Gigafactory in Berlin in a self-driving car, which is also his lover. So far, so fantastical, but also so plausible. Exploding the psyche of the world’s wealthiest man is a fine subject for art. Yet the clear aim of James’s account was to designate Musk a fascist like art activists used to do with Trump — only this time, using the same AI aesthetic Noorizadeh’s work critiques.

The reliance on such projection betrays the art world’s need to invent an enemy “other”, a class of people whom it can legitimately exclude. To strengthen its own ranks, contemporary art also invents another group of powerless people whom it can turn into friendly subjects. It then pits the two groups against each other, itself maintaining a safe distance. Its cost is critical relevance. When the critic Dean Kissick proposed that contemporary art had lost the grip on contemporary culture — which now largely develops online, where the Schmittian distinction plays out in far more complex ways — he became the target of the conference’s very own in-person pile-on. The idea that contemporary art theorists might truly contend with the people — a populace of online anons, say — and their art is incompatible with even the most radical visions of democratic inclusion.

Was this brutal split always inevitable? Writing about America’s cultural bicentennial celebrations of 1976 in Artforum, the art historian Katy Siegel suggested that pluralist and populist conceptions of culture were not incompatible at the onset of neoliberalism. The diversity of America at 200, only then becoming truly acknowledged, was not the obstacle to but a source of the country’s brand of patriotism. 

This recognition gave rise to countless exhibitions of previously neglected art practices and widespread art history revisionism. The then-young contemporary condition in art championed American pluralist creativity with a zeal that its British counterpart would repeat only decades later. But any benevolent openness of this stratagem was short-lived. The merger between high and populist cultures provided the art establishment with opportunities to track the shifts in power by incorporating minority art practices such as community quilting into the programmes of a new generation of museums.

If pluralism is the culture of neoliberal capital, then its market-optimised end is what Siegel terms “representative diversity”, a hollow mode of inclusion unconcerned with the specificity of any particular population. What’s sobering in this American history is that critics, such as Rosalind Kraus and Hal Foster, warned about the effects of opening cultural capital to the free market already in the early 1980s. They did so in class-protectionist terms that mirror theorists protesting the inclusion of global populisms in contemporary art today. 

Yet the parallels aren’t always straightforward. The US boasts a “we the people”, while Britain historically lacks such a jingoistic formation. This might change as notions of Britishness give way to “the Yookay” as the country’s cultural organising principle. That the contemporary here today relies on importing certain chosen populisms wholesale from other cultures is historically contingent. For example, the community arts movement, which was active in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s, was all but obliterated by the growth of the credentialled artistic elites. When Arts Council England said decades later that everyone is again an artist, they were no longer referring to grassroots well-dressing in Staffordshire because that practice lost its political relevance to the people decades earlier.

Whose job is it, in the terminal stages of this evolution, to cultivate the distinct aesthetic of a people? As the contemporary art establishment lost interest in the demos, opportunities opened for charismatic populist leaders. The idea that Donald Trump is the century’s greatest artist is already a cliché. But it is also a paradox. For the art critic Julian Stallabrass, who curated a 2023 photographic biennale The Spectre of the People, populist movements by definition emerge even without figureheads. The question is one of representation. It is hard enough to show the people of a democracy — Stallabrass brings up Delacroix’s Liberty — but how does one portray the white English working classes without using a photograph of Nigel Farage?

The production of such icons is the populists’ weak point today. Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes, intended to give MAGA patriots images to identify with, remains unrealised. Plenty of right-wing aesthetic artefacts, such as Uwe Boll’s recent film Citizen Vigilante or the campaign memes of Restore Britain, avoid portraying the very people they claim as subjects. 

Say what you wish about the dying left’s nostalgia for communist art, then, but Soviet social realism did at least know how to put the masses at its centre. In their absence, contemporary art theorists will continue to read Musk as if he were a man of the people — a mistake that no people make themselves. Liberal artists, meanwhile, will continue to emulate the shallow faux-populism promoted by the likes of Banksy in the hope that people other than themselves will finally pay their demagogy heed.