Keep politics out of art

If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving the EU. As someone on the left, I’ve always argued a left-wing case for leaving. It is, to say the least, an unfashionable position, usually met with anxious looks, sullen silence or overt hostility from one or other artist, curator or art bureaucrat.

That the art world should be against Brexit should come as little surprise. It’s striking, however, how far art has become involved in the burning political questions and controversies of the moment, to the extent that making art is often seen as nothing more than an extension of political activism — as happened last month when London’s Photographers’ Gallery staged a project by Swedish artist Jonas Lund, a four-day event titled Operation Earnest Voice, in which Lund opened a ‘fully functioning propaganda office’ whose mission was to ‘devise an online campaign to reverse Brexit’.

Much contemporary art is now steeped in rehearsing the full spectrum of cultural–political issues. Last year’s edition of the Turner Prize was a case in point — institutional racism, queer identity and the conflicts of the Middle East were the contemporary political backstory on which the artworks staked their ground. In the case of nominees Forensic Architecture — a team led by academic Eyal Weizman who use digital forensics to contest human-rights violations committed by states against citizens — the notion that what they do is art is entirely secondary to its function as political intervention. Commenting on his group’s nomination, Weizman quipped that: ‘I would … rather lose [art] prizes and win [human rights] cases.’