I think we can all agree that it’s a precarious moment for the arts. I don’t think, though, that that precarity is solely financial, I think it’s existential too, and I feel the latter is exacerbated by the former.

Already, in response to an impending or occurring cultural crisis, what I’m seeing is a whole lot of profoundly dispiriting economic arguments for why the arts are important. Basically: because they contribute as much or more to the economy as anything else.

I can see the thinking behind this but it seems to me to be a dangerous road to go down, because it’s effectively a capitulation to the idea that art *must* make a financial argument for itself...

...and that by extension everything, all activities, interests and ideas, must be able to demonstrate their value to the economy in order to proclaim their validity.

This is to me an impoverished intellectual and artistic culture. It’s also a very fragile one because that argument only holds up as long as the culture industry is profitable.

Almost every argument I’ve seen so far disengeuously blurs art with the industries that surround it. They are not the same thing. Art dealing is not art; publishing is not literature etc.

That’s not to say that in the capitalist system in which artists work those structures don’t need each other, it’s more to say that I think there’s a very real danger of us collectively losing the ground on which any non-economic argument for art can be made.

There’s also a danger that these industries enter a period of loin-girding inwardness in which they entirely forget the artists who produce the work on which the whole shaky edifice is based.

Worse, I’ve noticed a growing assumption in coverage of these issues that if the culture indistry fails art will somehow cease to exist.

I personally feel entirely comfortable saying I don’t give a shit what art contributes to the economy. It’s inherent personal, cultural, political, even spiritual value cannot be quantified...

...and to attempt to quantify it is to be drawn, ironically, into the work of negating and nullifying its power.

I would also add that actually the vast majority of art-making still takes place outside of any mainstream industrial context and fulfils a purpose for artists and communities that has no strictly economic function whatsoever.

That isn’t going anywhere. It will never go anywhere. People are not just going to give up on expressing and exploring themselves and documenting their lives and experiences and communicating what cannot be said straightforwardly.

I want to see arguments made for art that rest neither on arid economics nor bullshit neuroscience pushing a dubious programme of self improvement.

I think out of that can come a renewed understanding that much of art’s importance comes from working against economic, structural and cultural power, not with it.

This is not to say: let all those industries and the brilliant people who work in them go. Not by any means. It’s simply to say: we need a new sense of the collective project that doesn’t elevate the structures of commerce over the work on which they rely...

...and which stops shying away from the need to build an ideological and artistic vision outside of and away from the frankly self defeating rhetoric of the markets.

It’s not my job to “contribute to the economy”. It’s not any writer or artist’s job. We do, of course, in all sorts of ways, but that’s a side effect.

This article from last year was in my timeline today, for example. It asserts that actually we need “English majors” so they can help economists make their arguments through “stories”. Lol no thanks mate try again https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/19/worlds-top-economists-just-made-case-why-we-still-need-english-majors/