Quick Thoughts on the Commodification of Art: Means of Social Empowerment or Tool for Profit

As you may have noticed above, the Big Eyes blog has recently had a make-over with a new beautiful banner made by the talented and inspiring Kay Arthur Brito. Kay, a longtime friend from my high school days, is a Mozambican visual artist who uses her colourful, bright aesthetic and range of techniques to explore themes of identity and social justice (amongst many others...). Kay was kind enough to take time off her busy schedule as a Fine Arts student and member of Txunarte - a collective of artists and thinkers challenging the role and availability of art in Mozambique - to design and create the Big Eyes new logo. This generosity on Kay's behalf, alongside the challenging and critical work she is doing with the Txunarte collective (whose work I highly recommend you check out and follow here), got me thinking a lot more about the power and role of art in both challenging and reinforcing the structures of power around us. While the topic of art vs. business interests has been thoroughly explored and the short scope of this essay might not allow for a complete exploration, it's meaningful to consider the increasing constraints between art as a tool for capitalist profit accumulation or a way of challenging and transcending those oppressive power structures.

ABOVE: Logo for the Mozambican Txunarte art collective, find out more about the work they do or follow them on their Facebook page.

The commodification of the art world is far from a new conversation in public and academic discourse. Even at his time Marx wrote about the role of art within a capitalist system; for Marx, all artists were cultural labourers within a capitalist system that treated works of art like any other consumer object that is to be desired and fetishised. His propositions hold strong value and truth when we explore the world of the art and the art market in the last few decades. Perhaps the most influential artist to have encapsulated in his work's philosophy the commodity-aspect of artworks was the iconic Andy Warhol. He famously stated, 'Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.'. Reflective of an era deeply entrenched in the values of 'consumerism', Warhol's art and his approach to its production and dissemination was about selling art as another platform for consumer culture to be represented and applied. Whilst he may have been the first/most famous, Warhol is far from the only famous artist whose strategically utilised the tenants of a capitalist-profit culture to his advantage; another key figure of the conversation of art's commodification is British artist Damien Hirst. Whether you are a fan of Damien's art or not, it is undeniable that the man has had an immeasurable impact on the art world with his 2008 Sothebys sale that earned £111 million broke the world record for one-artist auction. Similarly to Warhol, the value for Hirst is not just in the actual work of art itself, but in its ability to sell and raise its value within a consumer art market. Heavily critiqued for its lack of message and depth, Hirst demonstrates the ways in which markets dominate the focus and locus of the international art world.

The visual arts world is not the only sector of the arts prey to the grips of Capitalist consumer culture; the music industry is also a key example of the way in which the meaning and intent of art gets shifted to prioritise financial markets over value of content. Sub-cultures that were originally underground and created as a means to challenge inequalities and structural silence get manipulated and re-packaged for mass global consumption time and time again, almost like a process of musical gentrification. The history of Hip-Hop has been a key part of this. Originally a subcultural art movement started by underprivileged Black youths in the South Bronx during the early 1970s as a way of asserting their existence and access to knowledge, Hip-Hop has come to take on very different meanings and audiences in the past three decades of its existence. The power of Hip-Hop as a means to challenge the oppressive power structures and widespread inequality slowly eroded as it gave way to more commercially successful 'Crunk/Gangster Rap' culture of the early 2000s. The focus here was no longer on art as a story-telling tool of empowerment for the under priviliged, rather, Hip Hop became about flaunting success, parties, and beautiful half-naked women. As a 2014 Westworld article points out, the popular Hip-Hop music is increasingly controlled by one powerful label, the Universal Music Group, having a hand in 20 of the 25 top charting Hip-Hop singles of 2013. Noah Hubbell, the author, argues this is a fundamental danger to the art of Hip-Hop; he argues that "The danger is that white men have no stake in hip-hop evolving culturally, only in it evolving economically.". The exploitation and increasingly dominant control of the Hip-Hop industry, and creative fields in general, represents a fundamental risk because it means that we are no longer valuing the art presented to us for its message or its ability to help us think critically, we are valuing art for the price tag that it holds.

This is not to say that there are or have not been numerous artists who have attempted to go beyond the boundaries of their art's favoured business model in order to transmit their social or political message. In the realm of Hip-Hop one can easily talk about the influence Kendrick Lamar is having in making Hip-Hop political again. Beyond having his skills recognised by the music industry with 7 Grammy awards including Best Rap Album for his widely-acclaimed 2015 To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar has been an influential figure in the re-emergence of politics and social justice in the public Hip-Hop sphere. When it comes to the side of visual arts, one can easily discuss the role of public artists like Banksy is shambling the business-favourable conditions of the traditional art world. Beyond having begun his work as a street artist Bristol, it is undeniable that Banksy has become a international institution in the field of street art and graffiti. Always having pursued a political message in his work, Banksy took a direct stab at the business art world during his one-month long 2013 "show" in New York City. One of the 'pieces' had an old man sell authentic Banksy paintings, valued in the traditional art market at £140,000 for around 40£. In their distinct ways and fields, both Lamar and Banksy have challenged the traditional structures that restrict creativity and freedom, bringing art back to being a tool for empowerment and critical thinking. But is it enough?

VIDEO: Kendrick Lamar on the true story behind the track "How Much a Dollar Cost?" from his album To Pimp a Butterfly. The song was publicly acclaimed by President Obama to be his favourite of 2015.

Both Lamar and Banksy have notoriety and success in their creative fields, so getting their message and art across the boundaries of a world that favours finance over art is no longer a difficult task for both of them. But what is the situation for those young artists and creatives who are trying to survive and succeed in this competitive environment? It seems that for many trying to make it in their respective fields there is an irreconcilable duality between making art (or what they love) and making money, as if the value of the artistic process became intrinsically devalued the second it was made to have a price tag or constructed for a commercial purpose. Yet they must delicately navigate between the boundaries of art and business, private and public, empowerment and submission in order to build their careers and futures in the art world. Art, both its creation and process, is increasingly hindered by the pressures of an ultra-competitive capitalist environment in which works of art, and sometimes the artist themselves, are valued as commodities to be sold. Despite these hindrances, young emerging artists are using the increasingly open plethora of communication mediums to get their message across freely and unconstrained. The aforementioned Txunarte collective that Kay is a member of is searching to use platforms like Facebook live and Youtube to create open conversations on the potential power of art for social justice that can be transmitted, shared, and then created across collectives and countries. While it is undeniable that business is increasingly taking over the world of the arts in every spectrum, there is also an increasingly open platform through which artists and creatives can produce and share free from the constraints of business and surplus capital. It is in these new opportunities that we can try collectively, similarly to the ways Lamar and Banksy are doing in their respective fields, to bring politics and equality back to the art platform and make the creative process one that is free and accessible to all.

Thank you again to Kay Arthur Brito for her blog banner - it is loved and appreciated!

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