Conclusion

Satire is a powerfully critical medium, prompting viewers to reconsider our personal and collective assumptions, structures, integrity, and actions. Yet its criticism is not particularly constructive. Satire tends to destroy but not rebuild. It shines a spotlight so harsh that it throws all it illuminates into sharp relief, making visible invisible structural relations. But to propose alternatives would be to undermine the nature of the genre itself. Satire reveals to us what is not working, what contradicts itself, where the dissonance lies, where the absurdities have gone unnoticed and unremarked. It is up to us to embark from this critical standpoint to imagine and then construct unforeseen alternatives.

Art-world satire published between 1750 and 1850 is surprisingly coherent in the concerns that it raised across this century and yet, here at the end of our investigation, we are left without a clear pathway forward. 1848 and the initiatives of the corps entier des Artistes proposed a failed utopia. Their proto-socialist reconfiguration of the art world’s fundamental structures attempted to rectify the concentration of opportunity in the hands of an elite few, endeavoring to subvert the economy of symbolic capital by redistributing artistic opportunities to broader swaths of the artistic population, thus prioritizing the material well-being of artists and acknowledging the fundamentally economic nature of artistic labor. Yet this system failed in large part because artists were unwilling to abandon the lucrative, though unproductive, currencies of prestige, renown, and, fundamentally, elitism.

The evolving and expansive trope of the inglorious artist, though known by many names—the bohemian artist, l’artiste-peuple, artist as laborer, the struggling artist, the starving artist, the unexceptional artist, the inglorious artist—gradually emerged in the ancien régime after the category of the artiste libre was introduced by Louis XVI. The category of the inglorious artist multiplied and complexified from the French Revolution onward when corporate structures were dismantled and never entirely replaced, opening the door to an art world that orbited around a private art market. The proliferation of inglorious artist subtypes across the Empire and Restoration ultimately coalesced in the figure of the bohemian artist during the July Monarchy, as the bourgeois art buyer emerged as his natural antagonist.

The inglorious artist, caught between his basic material and economic needs, his yearning for success and glory, and the vulgar and vain desires of his art public, popularized the image of the starving and struggling artist as a vehicle for criticism. The starving artist has now become nearly globally pervasive and an extremely tenacious trope.

At its inception, the trope of the inglorious artist revealed the internal inconsistences of the early capitalist art world: though artists were increasingly expected to cater to the private market, dominant notions of genius prioritized an economy of symbolic goods that eschewed material gain in favor of “anti-economic” or disinterested values such as “prestige” or authority, trafficked by “cultural bankers.”¹ Two-hundred years before Pierre Bourdieu developed this conceptual vocabulary, eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century artists had already developed a sizable satirical language to mock this emergent system.

The development of a “cultural industry,” as Bourdieu termed it, which operates with an economy of symbolic goods, is anti-economic in discourse alone.² It operates on a pre-capitalist logic, dressing itself in the discursive robes of corporate economies where those that practice liberal arts are expected to avoid participation in commerce and can do so via protections that enable this disengagement. Art-world satire reveals that capitalist art worlds that operate on pre-capitalist logics are shrouded in hypocrisy and absurdity. These hypocrisies can be located in the gap between discourse and structure—a gap that satire is particularly adept at rendering visible and risible.

Discursively, artists are counseled to avoid commerce and gravitate toward prestige, but structurally, artists are thrust into a market of competitive individualism where only a lucky few are empowered to produce intellectually challenging works that contribute to the progress of the arts, and the rest, as art-world satire complains, must choose between commercially viable artwork, manual workshop labor in the arts, or outright destitution if they refuse either of the previous options. And in this environment of competitive individualism, the gatekeepers of entry into that art world, art-world satire further complains, are bourgeois art buyers who are unqualified judges because their motivations are not disinterested.

The debates around the Revolutionary patente laws emerge as a pivotal moment in the history of the trope of the inglorious artist. The image of the starving artist was wielded by eloquent and strategic writers like Quatremère de Quincy to argue for fine arts’ distinction from other forms of commercial work, reifying the fine arts as an anti-economic category but adapting the argument to suit a capitalist economy: that artists starve is proof that they are anti-economic. For art and artists to remain anti-economic categories within a capitalist economy, the myth of the starving or struggling artist has been absolutely essential. The Republican idealists of 1848 were unable to imagine a solution to this Catch-22: if the artist ceased to starve, the artist also ceased to be anti-economic, and thus also ceased to be, by this particular definition of “an artist,” an artist.

This conversation continued and continues still, affecting and indeed underpinning the political economy of the Anglophone art world—a world to which this author belongs. John Ruskin’s essays delivered in Manchester in 1857 proposed a “Political Economy of Art.”³ Framed as a solution to a labor surplus but expertise shortage, Ruskin proposed strategies to recruit, train, and employ “our man of genius.”⁴ Clement Greenberg’s infamous “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” essay of 1939—a favored straw man of many an art history professor—expressed his horror at the conflation of high art and low art categories via the invasion of the aesthetics of kitsch in the realms of fine art.⁵ But he also tracked structural historical reasons for such a shift, locating them in the “falling away of aristocratic patronage,” which left artists vulnerable to “markets of capitalism” and specifically to “bourgeois society precisely because it needs its money.”⁶ Hans Abbing’s 2002 Why Are Artists Poor? carefully tracks the many ways in which poverty has been baked into the structure of the arts economy, wherin a very small proportion of artists make more than most artists—indeed more than most people in any profession—whereas the majority of artists make far less than this lucky few, and indeed, far less than average in most professions, prompting us to wonder if there is a profession with greater income discrepancies than the arts.⁷ More recently Ben Davis’s powerful 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013) teases out many of the same contradictions this book explores, observing: “[the] definition of ‘art’ . . . 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.”⁸ Initiatives like the Paying Artists campaign in the U.K. and Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE) in the U.S. have established payment guidelines for the use of art institutions to ensure that all artists have a better chance at earning a living wage, establishing basic standards for compensation.

What these writings and initiatives have in common is a desire to disentangle our expectations that artists must be poor and anti-economic within a capitalist system. Ruskin and Greenberg are closest in spirit and chronology to the art-world satirists of this book, who straddle two somewhat conflicting concerns. The first is that artists struggle with material precarity and should not. And the second is that far too many people of far too mediocre talent wish to claim the title of artist. Davis, Abbing, and campaigns such as Paying Artists and WAGE are more inclusive in their stance, and in so doing harken more to the goals of the Société Populaire et républicaine des arts of the French Revolution or the corps entier des Artistes of the Second Republic—institutions designed to be more radically inclusive in their membership, although important distinctions and exclusions nonetheless remained. Davis, in particular, points out that, rather than identify with the working and middle classes to which artists materially belong, artists functionally align themselves with the interests of their ruling-class art buyers in order to maintain a professional and vocational relationship to their artistic production. Importantly, this alignment allows artists to maintain a position of cultural distinction. We must be attentive to the fact that, within a capitalist art system, it is advantageous to play the role of anti-economic mascot.

We claim that art is universal and yet the art world is startlingly elitist. Research consistently demonstrates that employment in the arts is not a vector for social mobility, and museums and galleries primarily attract white audiences of high socioeconomic status with college or graduate level educations.⁹ In order to adhere to an anti-economic definition of the fine arts in a system of competitive individualism, have we effectively sacrificed the livelihood of the majority of artists in order to brighten the glory of a very small few? By maintaining an exceptional sphere—the art world—in which pre-capitalist logics dominate in a capitalist economy, have we also constructed a system that will always necessarily be elitist, plucking only a few to enjoy the upper echelons of glory, and leaving the rest inglorious? What would an art world look like if the myth of the starving artist was just that, a myth? And most importantly, which cultural norms would we have to abandon and adapt to reimagine an art world whose glory did not ride on the backs of the inglorious?