Precarity int poverty

Once a year Dudley is allowed a little critique as a treat. Criticism can corrode class solidarity and should be used sparingly; A criticism of the title of The White Pube’s recent book Poor Artists.

Poor Artists attempts to critique instability in the contemporary art world, but stretches the word poor far past what it actually engages with. What it mostly describes is precarity, not poverty: the insecure, underpaid conditions faced by a very specific slice of young professional, educated cultural workers. These experiences matter, but they are not poverty, and presenting them as representative flattens struggle. Actually it’s a portrait of disillusionment with access.

The book calls out galleries, art schools, and funding bodies. Very valid. But it implies that this narrowly defined, London-centric career driven experience is standard. It centres the art school-educated, culturally connected millennial and treats their precarity as a defining social condition, ignoring the people in low-paid, inflexible jobs, or who never had the chance to study art at all.

Crucially, the book does not situate these struggles within the broader context of the UK’s economic reclassification and dilapidation. Instability is rising across society, far beyond cultural institutions. Many people face harsher precarity and in fact, galleries, residencies, and funders are among the last to feel real decline. The institutions critiqued are some of the most benign colonial projects after the libraries. If you think this is bad, wait till you see what’s happening in cricket!!!!

The cultural worker occupies a relatively privileged position, even within precarity. They have access to formal art education, professional networks and internships. They benefit from support and permission to pursue art (its obvious there Granny likes them). They can rely on connections to galleries and funders, pursue unpaid projects with lower existential risk, and enjoy cultural capital that provides mobility, influence, and visibility. While their work may be insecure, it comes with autonomy, exposure, and professional opportunities that make them far more resilient than many others in comparable financial situations.

By contrast, many workers lack agency, workplace rights, and the structural flexibility to even consider a creative path. They face low wages, rigid hours, and jobs where precarity is not a choice but a daily risk. Many of these jobs are also unsafe for LGBT or other marginalised people, who may face harassment or discrimination. For others the bureaucracy they have to work with to stay alive or in the UK is designed to maim. This stark difference highlights how the precarity described in the book is not equivalent to systemic deprivation or poverty—it is a narrowly experienced, highly mediated form of instability. And artists in positions of relative privilege have a responsibility to engage in real, meaningful solidarity with workers across sectors, not just fellow cultural workers.

The book’s framing constructs a myth of artistic exceptionalism in struggle. It presents this relatively privileged and supported experience as heroic, unique, or emblematic, in reality it is largely disconnected from wider class struggles. The result is a portrayal of precarity as if it were a defining condition of artistic labor broadly. Even within the arts, the position the book describes is rare. Many artists survive without networks at all.

The young professional artists relative resilience, networks, cultural capital, and institutional support remain invisible. This allows both authors and readers to sidestep recognition of privilege. Effectively it risks reenforcing the exclusion many people feel with art even while trying to do the opposite. As with most current leftist critique coming out of the UK, those who failed the neoliberal project are totally absent, and the winners of class mobility get to say what the working class is, while others live in survival mode while totally othered within the arts.

When critique becomes an end in itself, it risks functioning as a kind of contained faux politics—legible, repeatable, and ultimately safe. A performance of opposition thats at the same time oh so cosy with power.

There was a period of more overtly anti-globalisation art 15 years ago —projects and interventions that were often dismissed (in both art school and galleries) as too direct, too political, or unsophisticated by those with easier relationships to power. I miss the days of The Yes Men’s and LABOFII.

Many current iterations of institutional critique presume a baseline fluency with institutional codes. People who know how to navigate funding systems, write proposals, and perform reflexivity in recognisable terms, while positioning themselves as marginal. Sstructural inequalities are recast as psychological conditions, obscuring the uneven distribution of the very tools required to participate at all. (I just can’t hear anything more about imposter syndrome- I don’t see an uneasy relationship to power as a problem at all.)

The institution is treated as something external—an object to be analysed or aestheticised—rather than as a set of conditions that unevenly determine who can appear within it. For those who failed the class mobility project since the 80s, the institution is not a site of critique, but an unstable terrain that must first be survived. (And if we manage to, we then also have to be educated on our history with some romantic working class from 50 years ago that we can’t recognise)

I am tried with the rebrand of figures who previously avoided substantive political engagement in art, now repositioning themselves within a moment of heightened crisis and responsibility. As material conditions worsen, the stakes shift. Those who avoided this struggle should feel pressure, not diffuse it through self-referential critique of glass ceilings.

Art does not need to be political. But it should not pretend to be.

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I wrote the above based on the title of the book, but it could have easily been about so many other things— a reoccurring narrative among the aspirational working class artists. I dint want to critique the content, because I felt like I would be doing someone else’s homework. But I will add two things.

1. Mentioning UBI for artists AND The Paris Commune together— nothing more oxymoronic than that. The idea that artists, as a special cast, ought to be given economic protection, while other workers don’t— as if only they are a net positive for society, hits hard against the commune. (Where the idea you are not your job as a cast, was fought for so hard— to death. Artists fought alongside ALL workers, with the bakers who where treated the worst, being central. This was then distorted by Mr middle class Marx on some working class breadcrumbs, and fed back to us as per this book and so on and so on. I will get into that properly in the future.)

2. The mention of Dali as an anti racist surrealist if fucking hilarious! He got thrown out of the group because he was friends with Mussolini, and said Hitler was sexy.

I hope it’s obvious I am not being territorial about politics, because its good if people get activated. But this is not it.

I will say, once you start talking about Hitler, it’s time to back away from the internet. And thats one me.

LASTLY, AN APOLOGY!! I wrote this with help from ChatGPT—something I wouldn’t want to do with my stories or poems— but otherwise it would’ve taken a week to make. That reality is exactly what this piece is about: how much time and labor it takes to participate in cultural systems. I am sorry!! But if you don’t need Ai to survive the system, because you can write really boring documents already, well good for you. The left in the west is technophobic and its a bit embarrassing, that said I am already so sick of people using it without any editing at all. It has this awful dead rhythm to it.

I wrote this from bed on the edge of psychosis, and having to take a week off once again. I’m fine now, but I think material conditions and life realities are important contexts. I have now banned myself from new ideas when bed bound.

PRVEIOUS CRITISCIM

NO DEADLINES NO MASTERS— notes on the dodgy back street art masters alternative School of The Damned

THE LONE COMMUNIST— a short love story about people who dont understand how to do equality

CLASS WAR— and how it is perpetuated

I don’t want to leave you with the feeling of being conned by my having wrote this with the help of a machine, so i leave you with a bigger one— A song called Lithium by a band called Nirvana… from the 60s not the 90s. Good luck with yourself.