why the artworld is the new communist international
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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