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Text by Juliet Jacques

It’s intensely depressing that over a decade since the financial crash of 2008 and the consequent rise of far-right demagogues and authoritarian regimes worldwide, the most pressing issue for various British public figures appears to be “cancel culture”. Complaints about this abound in mainstream media, from actors like John Cleese and Laurence Fox to journalists such as Julie Burchill and Toby Young; you can’t even open a billionaire-owned newspaper any more without some well-established, well-remunerated middle-aged commentator screeching about how they’ve been silenced. (Indeed, I’d never heard of Fox until he was “cancelled”.)

This usually just means individuals or groups, be they old friends or strangers on Twitter, find the person irritating or unpleasant, or their attempts to be controversial dull and reactionary, and publicly tell them. Writer Huw Lemmey summed up this dynamic in his parody A Christmas Cancel, when the Ghost of Columns Yet to Come tells struggling 1990s journalist Dominic Bacon to “do what every other columnist does when they’re washed up, intellectually moribund, losing all public respect, struggling to understand any social phenomena of the past three decades [and] out of ideas” – “get yourself cancelled”. By now, the cycle is obvious: say something inflammatory in an article or (if that’s too much effort) a tweet; highlight the most aggressive responses from people you intended to provoke; write a follow-up article (or tweet) about how you’ve been “cancelled”. Repeat until this becomes a financially viable career, knowing that no one who matters will press you on the content, context or consequences of your statements, let alone what else you have to say or why anyone should care to hear it.

You might think such a tedious grift would soon burn out, especially within an online culture fuelled by outrage, much of which is far more justified in a society where all other mechanisms to hold the powerful to account, particularly journalism, have been corrupted and degraded. It’s boring to read, and after just 300 words, I’m struggling to imagine a mindset that wouldn’t find it even more boring to write about. It’s only sustainable because of institutional control of the discourse, with plenty of precedents: think of the sheer effort put into subsuming trans and non-binary people with op-eds questioning their identities and attacking their organisation after Time’s 2014 “Transgender Tipping Point” article suggested a permanent turn against trans-exclusionary feminism, or the behaviour of political pundits after the 2017 general election made them look ridiculous, as two years of telling their readers that nobody wanted redistributive politics were followed by Corbyn’s Labour improving their vote share by nearly 10% on the previous election in 2015. (They simply doubled down on their criticisms to make sure that this never happened again, getting what they wanted in December 2019.) The coalescence of “cancel culture” and “anti-wokeness” (itself a rebranding of “anti-political correctness” after people got wise to that) narratives lets these commentators, and their paymasters, attack trans rights, anti-racist and equality movements simultaneously, while telling themselves that they are still the iconoclasts – thus sustaining both their financial positions and their self-esteem.

None of these people are in much jeopardy, quickly picking up work with right-wing outlets if liberal ones reject them; the absurdity of it all was highlighted recently when philosophy professor Dr Kathleen Stock accepted an OBE and immediately complained about no-platforming. Given their reluctance to address genuine, top-down threats to free speech such as when South London duo Skengdo x AM were first banned from performing drill music that could be understood as “distressing or violent” (along with several other acts), and then given a suspended sentence for breaching that injunction, one can only imagine how they might find Orbán’s Hungary, where gender studies courses were outlawed; Erdog˘an’s Turkey, where artists are imprisoned for their depictions of the flag or working with Syrian refugees; or Brazil, where Bolsonaro tweets videos of artists to encourage his supporters to attack them. Tiresome as they are, no one should wish such fates on them; we don’t want the UK to become any more like these countries than the Woke Stasi imagined by some of our most fevered columnists. It is up to artists and writers, especially those on the left, to shift the conversation away from these disingenuous arguments about free speech. Instead, we can talk about subtler processes of cultural engineering that have evolved since 2008, how these have intensified during the pandemic and make it ever harder to creatively express ideas that actually question the nature of social relations.

Outright censorship of specific works or artists, either through government legislation or (more commonly, especially after an obscenity trial) court order, is rare in modern Britain, where right-wing politicians and publications realised that art became far less powerful if they looked like they were ignoring it. Think of outrage about art in the UK and the obvious reference point is the endless headlines about the Young British Artists in the 1990s, about which aesthetic (and often, but not always political) conservatives fulminated whether an unmade bed, elephant dung or formaldehyde-pickled animals should be considered art. None of their work was ever likely to be banned as it posed little threat to anyone’s ideology or interests, and the publicity engine was profitable for all concerned until the public tired of it. Certainly, there was little comparable to American AIDS-era controversies about Robert Mapplethorpe or Andrés Serrano’s works, but what the British right took from Senator Jesse Helms’ attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts was confirmation that they could use their control over funding bodies, universities and – unlike in the US – the national broadcaster to choke off subversive art as early as possible.

This goes some way towards explaining why so little controversy about art moved beyond the art world during the 2010s, with the void it left filled by “cancel culture” discourse. By accident or design, neoliberalism has made it harder for new artists to emerge – and not just through the ongoing gentrification of cities that have passed the point where artists were useful and now make it almost impossible for anyone on a low income to live in them. Tuition fees and student debt, introduced by Labour in 1997 and massively hiked by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, discourage young people from taking degrees less likely to lead to lucrative careers, in the context of government defunding of arts and humanities departments and media denigration of such subjects as unworthy of study. It was not for nothing that Margaret Thatcher reduced subsidies for adult education during her first term, nor that Arts Council England made brutal funding cuts even before the worst of the 2008 “credit crunch” hit. All this makes for a more bourgeois, less critical culture, while the replacement of public funding by philanthropy makes it harder for artists who don’t want to take money from oligarch-owned institutions to function.

Over the last 20 years, the relative absence of emerging artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians from television and radio has also been striking. Spaces for them to show their work or communicate their ideas to a mass audience have largely vanished, as commercially minded network executives decided there was no interest and axed arts programmes such as The South Bank Show and Arena from their prime-time slots on terrestrial channels. Discussions about art remained in enclaves, the most outward-facing being (ever-diminishing) culture sections in broadsheet newspapers, but otherwise those in the art press, galleries and fairs, and other comparatively sealed environments. Hit hard by the decline of the music press and the end of television programmes that acted as showcases for alternative bands or avant-garde film, the counterculture of the late 20th century dissipated, having been reliant on structures that helped some work to shift from the underground to the mainstream. Even though plenty of this type of work was and is still being made, the divide between these (nebulous) concepts became a gulf, with innovative or experimental art having less impact on politics or wider culture than ever before, with far more attention paid to well-funded pop music, TV and Hollywood films, especially the ubiquitous blockbusters.

After the defeats of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, it feels like we’ve gone back ten years. We have an economic crisis that an emboldened Conservative government will meet with sweeping cuts, justified by a media who insist that “there is no alternative”, with a Labour opposition timid about offering any, and unlikely to fight even to keep the cultural gains of the Blair era such as free access to museums. After the collapse of Anglo-American left-populism, we have a larger and more politically aware, but demoralised and fragmented group of people fighting rearguard battles in the absence of a movement to unite them or represent them in their struggles against exploitative employers or landlords, or the loss of public services.

Opposite, Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani, Helen Cammock and Lawrence Abu Hamdan share the Turner Prize 2019. Photography © Stuart Wilson / Getty Images. Courtesy Tate

After Thatcher’s smashing of the left and consequent transformation of the Labour Party into “capital’s B-team”, the arts became an important site of resistance and hope: a means of saying “we’re still here”, and inducting audiences into radical ideas and culture. They also provided physical spaces for people to meet – a loss acutely felt during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite all these challenges, many artists have adapted to working online, with exhibitions and events going digital, and art schools teaching on Skype or Zoom. Interesting (and politically engaged) art continues to emerge despite the loss of funding and mass-media support; movements led by art unions, such as Tate United, staged high-profile strikes and demonstrations against institutional redundancies and cuts, building on longer campaigns to end unethical corporate sponsorship of museums and galleries and becoming part of a summer of insurrection with the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against attacks on trans rights.

Considering how these protests arose from such long-term pressure on the arts, brought to a head during the pandemic, it’s worth reconsidering the demands we make on artists and how realistic (or reasonable) they are. It has always been a role of artists, in the broadest sense of the term, to raise questions about the state of society and envisage a better one, and it has long been enticing for artists to put their talents at the service of transformative political projects. Tai Shani – one of four nominees whose decision to share the Turner Prize in 2019 was an admirable display of valuing solidarity over individual recognition – was right to insist that art workers should “demand the impossible”, and the emphasis on workers is crucial. We cannot expect art or artists alone to stem the tide of the conservative assault on culture, let alone the rise of the far-right: our Culture for Labour letter, signed by more than 500 people, didn’t make a dent on the Tories in the election of 2019; post-punk and hip-hop did little to stop Thatcher and Reagan’s New Right; the mobilisation of artists in the Spanish Civil War didn’t prevent Franco’s victory; and we’ve all heard the sardonic Peter Cook line about those Berlin cabarets that did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.

Even if artists are less likely to feed into a major political party’s programme than they were two years ago, it is still incumbent on them to consider themselves as workers. It is vital that they be part of linked struggles against attacks on trade unions and labour rights, gentrification, funding cuts to arts bodies and institutions, tuition-fee rises and attacks on university arts and humanities departments, assaults on the BBC and Channel 4 (despite the degraded nature of their current output), and the ongoing takeover of our public sphere by oligarch-owned media. This way, artists might attain not just the conditions to live in cities with cultural centres and fund their work with secure jobs, but be able to reach mass audiences and play an important role first in shifting conversations about censorship away from the concerns of the privileged, and towards – perhaps – the creation of a more intelligent, equal and democratic society. ◉

University & College Union strike at Royal College of Art, London. harun-farocki-institut.org