Boston Art Review // Whither Local Art Journalism Amidst the Collapse of the World Order?
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.
