Looking Back in Anger: Ten Years On

Morgan Quaintance identi ies an ever-widening gap in the UK art world between social, cultural and political realities, and the hermetic aesthetic concerns and discourses taking place within museums, funding bodies and the curatocracy. ‘Have you seen these?’ My colleague was holding up a black T-shirt with the words ‘IKON: Not So Conservative’ written across it. ‘He wants us to wear them when we’re working there.’ ‘He’ was Jonathan Watkins, director of Birmingham’s Ikon gallery; ‘there’ was the 2010 Conservative Party conference at the Birmingham International Convention Centre. Two years a er the global inancial crisis of 2008, public institutions were staring down the barrel of signi icant funding cuts. Ikon, a regional space with ‘pro ligate’ or ‘ambitious’ spending (depending on how you interpreted their budgets) was at considerable risk, and so, in an attempt to so en hearts and ward off the impending iscal blow, Watkins opened his arms to the Party. In real terms that meant meetings with the then minister for culture, communications and creative industries, Ed Vaizey. It also meant an agreement to both install a temporary art exhibition at the Tory conference and set up a small gallery stand at which I and other junior staff members took turns selling knick-knackery and soliciting leather-faced right-wingers to sit for large, high-de inition photo portraits. Over two days of cashier and invigilator shi s, I felt like the unwilling participant in some nightmarish immersive performance. Young Conservatives giddily approached George Osborne for autographs, a grinning Iain Duncan Smith arrived with a woman on each arm, think tank members talked weapons next to David Medalla’s A Stich in Time, 1968, and everywhere party af iliates ate biscuits, biscuits that crumbled out of their mouths and onto the carpet as they snorted and guffawed at the inane statement emblazoned across my chest.

Ten years later, this brief episode from the doldrums of my early career is more than a simple anecdote about the dire situations and stresses senior management o en makes employees face. It stands as a near-perfect example of the two operative modes or imperatives that would orient individual and institutional behaviours throughout the decade: one, pandering to the real or imagined whims of those in power (politicians, yes, but also high-net-worth individuals, collectors, public and private funders etc); and two, participating in the strategy to use art as a distraction from detrimental neoliberal policies, including but not limited to austerity, gentri ication, arms dealing, capital light, tax evasion, environmental disaster and the day-to-day sociocultural and economic consequences of such states of affairs.

One of the more banal and endlessly repeated discursive maxims of the art world is that historical periodisation is an impossible task unless done from the requisite distance, but anyone paying the least bit of attention to the 2010s could have taken their measure midway through. Now, at the decade’s end, its distinguishing features are incontrovertible. The decade is de ined by a blatant attitudinal sea-change signalled by a switch in sensibility that took the UK art world from a pseudo aesthetic to an ethical regime. That is, value at the start of the decade was ostensibly measured according to the ‘qualitative distinction’ of contemporary art’s production, dissemination and interpretation (though of course that in itself was questionable), while value at the end of it is largely measured according to its perceived political, moral and ethical rectitude. A third element in all this has been the phenomenon of the long noughties: senior managers, members of the curatocracy and arts professionals who are now in decision-making positions at major funding bodies, galleries, universities, magazines and so on are to

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student protests against fee increases, 2010, London

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021