If the stakes weren’t so high, it would almost be funny, advocating for the necessity of journalism about art—not even art itself—as the rules-based world order crumbles.
I began writing this letter after watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s history-making speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said. There is no going back. “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
It’s not just that we have not seen weaponization of culture at a scale like this since the Cold War. It’s that culture is being used to justify a scandalous consolidation of power and resources on a scale that has never occurred in the US.
Compared to the Cold War, in which the US used the arts as a tool of public persuasion to fight the threat of communism, today words and images are being used to frame neighbors as enemies, cast authoritarianism as fait accompli, and engender a sense of powerlessness in the face of the machine. Artists and cultural institutions are under threat by policies that affect their funding and their freedom of speech. While we are witnessing an uptick in the use of the arts in policy for repressive ends, that isn’t the inevitable outcome of combining art and governance. Incorporating art in policy also has the potential to support healthy democracies, human rights, and human flourishing.
The social, political, and economic upheaval we are living through is best described as what Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called an “interregnum.” The concept, which he developed while interred as a political prisoner under Mussolini, has been regularly invoked in recent political analysis. It describes a gap or rupture in systems of social orders that allows repressive systems to take control, and is increasingly invoked to help make sense of the democratic backsliding occurring in the US. As we build out the Civic Culture vertical, I find myself thinking about the role of art in building cultural hegemony, which, according to Gramsci, is a vital part of any political project.
The arts contribute to constructing cultural worldviews, which institutions and the people that lead them need to confer the moral and intellectual legitimacy out of which political legitimacy emerges. Conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart re-packed this idea with his “Breitbart Doctrine,” which states that “politics is downstream of culture.” The Breitbart Doctrine has dramatically shaped the socio-political landscape in the US today, and I think, helps point to the role of the arts, art journalism, and criticism in policy analysis.
If democracy works via public debate, then it’s journalism’s role to keep the polis educated. As art journalists, our role is to report on and provide analysis about how and why the forces shaping the arts are connected to the democratic project. The problem is that with both art media and local journalism eroded, there are few outlets for this kind of reporting to occur.
The Civic Culture Desk at Boston Art Review is the only operating magazine vertical in the United States dedicated to reporting and analysis about how power, policy, and politics affect cultural production. It began with a question: Can reporting about art, culture, and politics support democracy by forming an infrastructure of civic engagement? This reporting responds to gaps in both journalism and the US political economy.
As a magazine founded on the idea that the arts are a public good essential to healthy societies, we believe in taking seriously the role of the arts and culture in the rupture Carney pointed to. This means looking at both how art is being weaponized to facilitate the rise of authoritarianism and how it can be a bulwark against it. As policy is increasingly written and implemented through cultural channels like social media, arts writing takes on extra weight because today, cultural analysis is political analysis.
In his address, Carney said about Soviet communism, “The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.” There are so many ways I can think of that this applies to the arts and art institutions.
The US is the only superpower that has no cabinet-level government representation of the arts. This leads many to incorrectly conclude that the US doesn’t have cultural policy. Quite the opposite. The lack of a central authority responsible for overseeing cultural policy means that in the US, cultural policy is diffuse. It’s sprinkled, piecemeal, across the government and civil society. It’s in policy implemented by the Departments of Education, State, Labor, Housing and Development, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Environmental Protection, to name a few. This decentralized nature makes it very hard to cover and the lack of coverage creates a confirmation bias that contributes to the popular perception that the US doesn’t “have” or “do” cultural policy.
Contradicting this perception are an array of policies that affect all aspects of artists’ lives. These include policies that affect access to affordable housing and studio space; policies that make health insurance and unemployment benefits available to 1099 gig workers; policies that incorporate the arts in public education and grant cultural institutions nonprofit status; and laws impacting labor unions and collective bargaining. In the US, there is significant policy that affects the creative sector and its workers. The problem is more semantic: When we don’t name things they remain invisible.
The goal of the Civic Culture Desk is to educate the public about cultural policy in the US by producing rigorous reporting that makes visible the concrete relationship between art, politics, and the policies shaping the conditions in which artists and institutions operate—building a shared public vocabulary around arts policy that, over time, strengthens and empowers the sector.
So far this has included tracking proposed bills designed to support artists making their way through the legislature, publishing interviews with government officials tasked with overseeing arts organizations, covering the impact of private philanthropy, and holding institutions, including museums and universities, to account for their management.
In Carney’s speech, he called on the collective strength of western liberal democracies. “We are no longer just relying on the strength of our values but also the value of our strength.” I keep thinking about how this also applies to the arts.
Why do I keep quoting the Canadian prime minister speaking in Switzerland to talk about art and art journalism in New England? As we launch the Civic Culture Desk, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the local, national, and international intersect and inform each other. Whether it’s the targeting of artists by authoritarian regimes, or a pandemic, the same truth holds: what happens abroad happens at home. And, now, more than ever, what happens at home is happening to the world. The murder of civilians—including a poet—by ICE in Minneapolis, and the organizing in response, proves the power, responsibility, and importance of local action.
Tracking the news of the US sending additional forces to the Middle East as the conflict widens makes for heavy timing to launch something new. As national and international institutions, norms, and systems of governance break down—or, worse, are used to target arts communities—arts journalism bears an urgent responsibility to report on the work of local and hyper-local artists, organizations, networks, and policy. To better understand the work of artists and arts workers in New England, we have to connect it to what is happening outside our region.
The Civic Culture Desk’s efforts will have roughly three tracks: We’ll report on policy that affects the arts to update local communities about the news and policies existing and proposed at the city, state, and federal levels that set the conditions for the arts to thrive, or not. We will produce analysis about the relationship between art and politics by looking at the relations of the power players, including universities, think tanks, consultancies, NGOs, and government agencies, setting what happens locally in context with other sectors and other regions. And we’ll try to keep you informed of the goings-on with regular roundups of events, actions, and news affecting artists and cultural producers both locally and nationally.
Other things you can expect are a regular column, reported pieces, research deep dives, guest essays and op-eds by practitioners and thinkers in the field.
And most importantly, we want to hear from you. From grassroots actions to federal policies, if you have something we should know about or want to see more writing about, let us know!
Contact me at kim@bostonartreview.com or submit a tip through our tip line.
