Art and Inequality

An AFSEE/III sub-project, co-convened by Mike Savage (convenor of Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice III research programme) and Armine Ishkanian (co-convenor of the Politics of Inequality III research programme)

This sub-project reflects on the potential of visual art’s critical power to contest and reimagine the relation of past/present/future in a world of intensifying economic and social inequality. We deliberately explore this issue in a double-sided way:

(a) reflecting on how the art world is saturated with economic and commercialising imperatives that limit the power of conventional artistic critique to meaningfully contest economic instrumentalism, and how art can therefore be implicated in processes of wealth accumulation. These imperatives can constrain both artistic and curatorial choices, with profound implications for questions of representation. How can we imagine an emergent politics that acknowledges the way that inequalities are sustained and accumulate over long periods of time, is committed to addressing ‘historic wrongs’ and charting possibilities of alternative futures.

(b) considering how artistic strategies of innovative practice and adaptation of technologies respond to and contest the legacies of colonialism, settler colonialism, dispossession and enslavement embedded in contemporary modes of power enacted through class, gendered and racialized inequalities. Can art enable us to imagine living otherwise?

Professor Mike Savage, (Professor, Department of Sociology and Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Programem Leader)

Professor Armine Ishkanian, (Executive Director of the AFSEE programme and Politics of Inequality Research Programme Co-Leader, LSE III and Professor in Social Policy, Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Dr Michael Vaughan, (Research Officer, LSE III)

Professor Ellen Helsper, (Politics of Inequality Research Programme Co-Leader, LSE III and Professor of Digital Inequalities, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)

Dr George Kunnath, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III.

Art and Inequality Roundtable 2

On Tuesday 13 June 2023, the Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice theme and the Politics of Inequality research programmes co-hosted the second roundtable on Art and Inequality, bringing together academics, doctoral researchers, AFSEE Fellows, and MSc students for a day of discussion and exploration. It was a successful collective exercise to challenge ourselves and our theories to examine the relationship between art and inequalities from diverse theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological perspectives.

The aims of this event were two-fold:

1) to create a space of discussion on art and inequalities drawing on researchers and practitioners from across disciplines and methodological approaches

2) to push the discussion of art and inequalities into new directions of research.

Session1:Visualising and contesting property: How does the art world construct economic capital, and wealth accumulation? (Mike Savagae, Sarah Kerr, Kristina Kolbe, Michael Vaughan)

Session 2: Art as a form of resistance and challenge to inequalities: how artistic strategies of innovative practice and adaptation of technologies respond to and contest the legacies of colonialism, settler colonialism, dispossession and enslavement embedded in contemporary modes of power enacted through class, gendered and racialized inequalities (Armine Ishkanian, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Jite Phido).

Art and Inequality

Team

Events