7/27/2019 Why the artworld is the New Communist International

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ArtReview44

Cover of issue 6 of the English-language

version ofThe Communist International, October 1919

Mike Watson Why the artworld is the new Communist International

During his 1996 party conference speech,

Tony Blair famously said, Ask me my three

main priorities for government and I tell you:

education, education and education. In part

for the audacity of such a sentence it sets out

to identify three priorities for government and

settles for one and in part for the shift in focus

that it at least ostensibly embodied, this line

has entered the consciousness so much as to be

instantly recognisable 17 years later. On reflec-

tion, the sincerity of Blairs sentiments is

questionable. The former prime minister did

preside over the introduction of tuition fees

after a commitment to keep to Conservative

party spending plans in the first term of oce,

and then a further rise in fees. Indeed it was

Labour that commissioned the education review

that led to the recent third rise in fees in the

, to between 6,000 and 9,000 per year.

The corporatisation of higher education is a

trajectory that crosses over party boundaries

and has gained so much momentum as to be

beyond challenge through conventional

political channels. It is arguably for this reason

that education has increasingly taken the centre

ground in political and social discourse in the

period since Blair made his famous speech.

Where education was once seen as a soft

policy area secondary in mainstream politics to

economics, fiscal policy, foreign policy and law

and punishment, it is now seen as fundamental

to political discourse both at a mainstream and

alternative level. This shift in focus is arguably

motivated by two principal factors. Firstly,

the final collapse of Soviet Communism during

the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by a

massive collapse in the worldwide economy that

started in 2007, and the inability of the political

left to mobilise with convincing alternatives to

capitalism in the intervening 17 years, has left

us in need of new modes of thinking and new

strategies for which our current knowledge

base is clearly inadequate. Secondly, while the

academic left fails to provide convincing

alternative social models, funding has been

stripped in the and this is increasingly

reflected throughout Europe from the subject

areas that might most reasonably be expected

to deliver those alternatives. We have a situation

in which people need to get into debt to study

a narrowing range of subjects that are increas-

ingly reflective of the needs of industry. Taken

to its ultimate conclusion, such a system will

soon be lending money to as many people as

possible to school them in the principles of the

financial model which they will pay into when

they graduate and begin to work in the interests

of that same model.

With the nation state in the being

hollowed out, emptied of its social responsi-

bility and reduced to the position of a defender

of the rights of the powerful without losing any

of its power to enforce law and intimidate,

it must fall to others to pose a viable alternative

to the current system. In light of the diminish-

ment of the states role, a nonstatist option must

be prepared by the political left, regardless of

whether individuals personally veer towards

a statist vision of politics. This is simply because,

following the current trajectory, we will soon

have a situation in which the state resembles

little else than a malevolent giant guarding the

palace against the hordes. Without an alterna-

tive to the values that it enforces through

a mixture of instruction and coercion, the sum

of human knowledge will become reducible

to what is useful to the financial machine

the aforementioned palace.

What relevance does this have to art?

Well, as Mark Fisher put it, talking at

a conference entitled Joan of Art: Towards

a Free Education, organised by myself and

held at , Rome, in April of this year, the

artworld in a sense replaces the Communist

International as a worldwide network and

refuge for alternative thought.

In light of a convincing

alternative existing in reality,

it is left to the artworld to

feign one: to grow an alterna-

tive within the empty husk

left over from the dismantling

of the state.

Joan of Art:

Towards a Free

Education is

in residence

with Gervasuti

Foundation,

Venice, for

the duration of

the Biennale