Lists
Lists
Corby, Vanessa 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4019-9195
(2025)
‘Well, I think that’s quite sufficient’, the irresolvable deadlock of class struggle in the arts.
In: Visual arts, narrative and social class, 24-25 April 2025, University of Turku, Finland.
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Abstract
‘Why, when I have written so much about processes of domination, have I never written about forms of domination based on class? Or ‘Why, when I have paid so much attention to the role played by feelings of shame in processes of subjection and subjectivation, have I written so little about forms of shame having to do with class?’ (Didier Eribon, 2019 [2009]: 19).
This paper offers a provocation to arts-based disciplines shaped by identity politics, to enquire not only into the continued marginalisation of the experience of social class, and denial of opportunity for people from poorer and working-class communities in creative occupations, but to articulate the complex ideological context that impedes, mishears, and misrepresents any attempt to redress that exclusion.
This critique is grounded in an analysis of the curation and reception of the exhibition Lives Less Ordinary: Working Class Britain Re-seen. Curated by Samantha Manton at the extraordinary gallery Two Temple Place, London from 25th January – 20th April 2025, this exhibition brought together works spanning five decades made by 60 artists in Britain to address the ‘crisis of working-class representation and lack of discussion around class difference in the arts’ (Manton, 2025:16). Lives attempts to reframe working-class subjectivity beyond ‘the objectifying middle- and upper-class gaze’ that has determined its representation to date, instead revealing the diverse inflection of ethnicities, genders, and sexualities that inflect the felt experiences of class.
This curatorial strategy, while responding to the cultural context of the UK, speaks to the broader, pan-European and US political landscapes divided by populism, where right-wing programmes of austerity and anti-immigration rhetoric go hand in hand with cuts to arts funding. If the arts are to tackle their present precarity head on, it is imperative that they acknowledge the direct correlation between the Right’s claims to represent ordinary people, and its ideological rejection of the arts. Systemic prejudice in the arts does not merely exclude working class modes of being and thinking, but, I argue, its deafness to what Žižek calls the ‘irresolvable deadlock that is the reality of class struggle’ renders, the field culpable in its own socio-economic precarity (Žižek, 2023:46). This paper, therefore, takes the cultural hegemony of the arts to task, calling for greater inclusivity not to provide a mere enhancement to the discipline, but as a radical restructuring of its understanding of inclusivity that is imperative to their survival.
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