Measuring Art

The battle is an old one, but we have lost our way. I’ve been a musician all my life, surrounded by composers, singers, jazz musicians and rock guitarists, but also painters, poets, playwrights and actors, and we’ve heard it all before: don’t you want a proper job? Art doesn’t pay. I know. And then there was university, plunged into a social group that comprised mathematicians, engineers, lawyers, doctors, future politicians and future CEOs—and we’ve heard it all before: But what’s the point of what you do? Art doesn’t conform to normal standards of ‘usefulness’. I know.

On April 25, Maria Miller confirmed that the current government wants to prove the financial worth of the Arts, to ‘demonstrate the healthy dividends that our investment continues to pay’ and to show that ‘culture is central to bringing about growth’. Her comments provoked a backlash, but not the one I’d hoped for. With few exceptions, all the counterclaims set out to justify that the arts were financially viable (see here). If we argue like that, we’ve already lost.

Capitalism is not something to be proud of. At best, it is a ‘useful’ economic model, one that (can, theoretically) adequately structure human material needs. At worst, it is a systemically unfair mechanism that guarantees one person’s loss as the only means of another one’s gain. I’m not about to rehash das Kapital here, but one thing is undeniable: Capitalism is not natural. It has been constructed, modified, resisted; we haven’t always had it, and I look forward to a time when we renounce it. There can be other models—it is possible to conceive a different way of arranging society.

The rub is that ‘growth’ is inbuilt into Capital—neoliberalism sucks more and more of our world into the control of the market. We no longer only speak of the value of things, but of the time we spend alive (the working week, pro rata salaries), and more recently, of the education market and intellectual property. And as more of our lives become controlled by Capital, the possibility of critiquing Capitalism diminishes correlatively. A recent example is the positively Orwellian demand—now quietly mothballed—that the Arts and Humanities Research Council prioritise research on the ‘Big Society’ when giving out grants, or lose its allowance. Academia very nearly became a place where you couldn’t criticise government policy—or at least, not get paid for doing so.

Art now finds itself in the same position. Good art, real art, is valuable precisely because it encourages a mode of Being outside the everyday systems of Capital. Work used to be something people had to do so they could enjoy life; now it is sold to us as the highest form of living. Art reminds us that ‘living’ is itself enough, and envisions a society where that life is recoverable. To live is to live in time, and in a world where not only everything I own but every second I spend alive is measured financially, art is itself a critique. From forty minutes (minimum-wage value: £4.13) with a Bruckner symphony that makes you hear geometry, or an hour and a half (£9.29) with a play that questions your place in the world, to ten minutes (£1.03) in the Rothko Room at the Tate Modern, where the small walls and huge canvases challenge you to think through a different idea of what it feels like to be, art measures time and value differently. Things are accomplished in those minutes that are not conceivable in the traditional terms of productivity. The very notion of a piece of music… a score might give stability through time, but must be performed in time—ephemerally—to exist at all; meaning different things at different times, and in some way (when, for example, I imagine a familiar piece to myself, in its entirety, instantaneously) existing completely outside of time… unsettles the very nature of measurable, quantifiable time. Not just time: five dollars of canvas and oils is worth millions if you want to pay for it, not a cent if you don’t like it, or could have immeasurable personal significance because of how it makes you feel. Art cannot be justified financially because it calls into question the validity of thinking financially at all. Living in art shows a different way of living, a more rewarding way of living—a more ethical way of living.

And so the questions posed by my concerned interlocutors in the first paragraph are not separate, but answer one another. In some ways the fact that art doesn’t pay is the point of what I do. The arts are a space to critique the harmful forces of Capitalism and the limited mode of existence that is imposed upon us by contemporary, globalized, digitized, monetized society. To demand that the arts, too, be brought under the control of the market, is to suppress the final possibility of liberation from it; to declare victory by demonstrating the arts’ capital worth is, in fact, to concede defeat.