3.8 Two permanent contradictions therefore dominate the sphere of the visual arts. The first contradiction is between the fact that the visual arts are dominated by ruling-class values but defined by their middle-class character.
3.9 The second contradiction is internal to the middle-class definition of “art” itself, which is split between notions of art as profession and as vocation and therefore comes into contradiction with itself at every moment where what an artist wants to express runs into opposition with the demands of making a living (in a situation where a minority dominates most of society’s resources, this is often).
4.0 The sphere of the visual arts has weak relations with the working class.
4.1 The working class here is defined as consisting of those laborers who are compelled to sell their labor power as a commodity to make a living and therefore have no individual stake in their labor.
4.2 There are many links to the working class in the visual arts: gallery workers, anonymous fabricators of artistic components, nonprofessional museum workers, and so on. Most artists are themselves employed outside the “art world”—the dream of having fully realized middle-class status remains aspirational for most people who identify as “artists.”
4.3 Still, the form of labor at the heart of the sphere of the visual arts, the production of artworks, remains middle class—far more so than most other so-called creative industries.
4.4 One consequence of this predominantly middle-class character is the visual arts’ approach to dealing with the social and economic contradictions that it faces. An individualized relation to labor means that middle-class agents tend to conceive of their ability to achieve their political objectives in individualistic terms, with their social power deriving from intellectual capacity, personality, or rhetoric (it is this reality that is behind the displacement of the discussion about art’s contradictions onto considerations of the “market”—a construct in which free individuals enter into economic relations with one another—rather than considerations of “class,” a concept that implies fundamental, opposing interests that go beyond the individual).
4.5 On the other hand, because being a member of the working class involves being treated as an abstract, interchangeable source of labor, the working class’s ability to achieve its objectives depends much more on its ability to organize collectively. This is a form of resistance that is difficult to achieve within the sphere of the arts (all talk of an “artists’ strike” remains satirical outside a situation like that of the 1930s government art support in the United States, where artists are employed as a bloc).
4.6 Because the ruling structure of society is capitalist—that is, the exploitation of wage labor to maximize profit—the working-class position is actually closer to the core of society’s functioning than that of the middle class; middle-class workers, by the very nature of their semi-independence, have only the ability to shut down their own production, whereas an organized working class can directly affect the ruling class’s interests.
4.7 The specific nature of the working class suggests its own relation to the concept of “art,” distinct from either capitalist or middle-class notions.
4.8 On the one hand, one working-class value of art is determined by the reality of “creative industries,” in which creative laborers are employed who have a working-class relation to the products of their expression; that is, they produce creative products not as an expression of their individuality but simply as a task. Viewed from this angle, “art” is demystified—it is not a uniquely exalted form of expression but simply one more human process that is the subject of labor.
4.9 On the other hand, inasmuch as working-class labor is controlled from above, the ideal of “art” might also represent a form of labor that is opposed to the demands of work, as freely determined expression, whether private or political. Viewed from this angle, art is deprofessionalized and in this sense is actually more “free” than the middle-class ideal of personal-expression-as-career.
5.0 The idea of “art” has a basic and general human sense on which no specific profession or class has a monopoly.
5.1 “Art,” conceived of as creative expression in general, can be seen as representing a function as basic as exercise or dialogue and a need only slightly less fundamental than eating or sex (“slightly less fundamental” because the question of creative expression comes after simple survival—you must first secure food before you can think of cuisine).
5.2 Conceived of in this way, every human activity has an artistic component, an aspect under which it can be viewed as “creative.”
5.3 However, in any given historical situation, some forms of creative labor are valued over others; some types of labor are considered more exalted, others less so.
5.4 Which of the various forms of labor are considered truly “artistic” on their own is governed by the present ruling class [2.2], which presides over the dominant relations of production and by this means has influence over both the character of non-artistic “labor” and the value of “art,” as well as the intersections between them.
5.5 However, the general artistic impulse does not simply vanish in the face of its specific historical determinations; insofar as a basic sense of art as creative expression exists, humans also have a certain day-to-day creative investment in their labor, since all labor is the creative transformation of matter or life.
5.6 On the other hand, insofar as the general impulse toward creativity is cramped and thwarted by the demands of a specific historical setup, there exists the impulse to escape these and express freely outside of them.
5.7 Because “art,” in the sense of general creative expression, is a basic impulse, no class has a monopoly on it; however, the organic worldviews of different classes can be closer or farther from expressing the possibilities of its general realization.
5.8 Both ruling- and middle-class worldviews preclude the idea of “art” as general human expression: the ruling class because it defines the value of art according to the interests of a narrow minority; the middle class because its interest involves defining creativity as professional self-expression, which therefore restricts it to creative experts.
5.9 The working-class perspective, then, can be seen to reflect the most organic contemporary conception of generalized creative expression (even if circumstances don’t always allow this conception to be developed or expressed)—“art,” in this light, is at once a subject of labor just like any other [4.8] and opposed to the alienation of the present-day labor process [4.9]. It is therefore implicitly free of any professional determination and common to all (though this aspect, in the present ideological setup, is often channeled into middle-class creative aspirations—which can itself be seen as one of uses of the “art world” for the ruling class [2.8 and, following from this, 2.9]).
6.0 Because art is part of society [1.1] and because no single profession has a monopoly on creative expression [5.0], the values given to art within the sphere of the contemporary visual arts will also be determined in relation to how “creativity” is manifested in other spheres of contemporary society.
6.1 “Art” in common parlance has a double meaning: It designates creative activity in general and represents work that circulates within the specific tradition and set of institutions of the visual arts; thus, something can be “art” (that is, creative) but not be “Art” (that is, not fit within the visual arts sphere), or something can be “Art” (that is, can be easily classifiable within the sphere of the visual arts) but not be “art” (that is, not be particularly creative).
6.2 Contemporary visual art therefore has a paradoxical character: It is a specific creative discipline that arrogates to itself the status of representing “creativity” in general (when someone says that he is professionally an “artist,” he is often both trying to indicate that he works within a certain set of traditions and institutions and implying that his labor has a certain especially creative character).
6.3