Culture Wars: Art, Politics and Capitalism

Written between 2016 and 2024, four years either side of lockdown, the articles collected in this volume have the benefit of straddling this watershed in Western capitalism, and of documenting, from the battlefields of the culture wars of this period, the shift from the neoliberalism of the last 45 years to the brutal reality of stakeholder capitalism that has been built around us in the five short years since 2020. What they document is not only how art has been turned into propaganda to the exclusion of any other function, but also how much we, as a society, miss art now. Today, the space art once held open for thinking, expression and debate has been shut down with the force of a portcullis, with us trapped in a digital prison from which the freedoms we once associated with art - however naively, given the expansion of the culture industry into every aspect of our lives since the Second World War - have been banished, censored and criminalised as a threat to the security of the state and safety of its citizens. These articles address many aspects of art and culture in Britain over the past decade, including independent film both before and after lockdown, the politics of mural and banner painting, the contested role of documentary photography, the exhibition strategies of our art institutions, the culture industry as a vehicle for corporate public relations, what remains of protest as a form of political expression, the duties of poetry today, the political function of digital ’selfies’, and changes in the English language itself. And since they take, as a historical principle, that is is impossible to understand the changing roles of art and culture under capitalism without also understanding the different politics they serve, these articles discuss both the changing forms our politics have taken and the changing politics of those forms.