Wealth inequality = cultural inequality

“An Institutional Politics of Place: Rethinking the Critical Function of Art in Times of Growing Inequality,” by Christopher Upton-Hansen, Kristina Kolbe, and Mike Savage, explores how art affects — and is affected by — economic inequality. In a nutshell, wealth inequality comes with disproportionate buying power among the super rich. They shape the art world, and the art world affects how culture looks. And that affects what we believe.

“Over recent decades, there has been increasing uncertainty about the prospects for ‘artistic critique’ in general, and for the critical potential of arts institutions in particular, to be socially and politically successful within the parameters of neo-liberal financialised capitalism (e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello, 2006; Rancière, 2007 [2003]). Numerous commentators have offered pessimistic prognoses that the critical power of the art world – however limited or constrained this might have been in the past – has waned amidst the forces of commercialisation, financialisation, and the retrenchment of public funding.

“This reflects the way that the echelons of the contemporary art sector in particular are substantially inflected by the investment potential of art works for the super-rich, and hence becomes symptomatic of financial motives that affect both what art is produced and art’s legitimacy in acting as a critical public good (Fasche, 2013; Koh and Wissink, 2018; Robertson and Chong, 2008; Srakar and Čopič, 2012).”