DISSOLVING THE SPHERES: WHAT THE CULTURAL SECTOR STRIKES MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF THE ART MUSEUM

Tate workers recently began their fifth week of strikes. If you’re unaware or unsure of the reasons, here is a quick rundown: the Tate gallery received a government bailout of £7 million, out of the total £1.57 billion allocated to the culture sector following COVID-19 lockdown measures. Despite this, the Tate soon announced there would be over 300 redundancies of staff from Tate Enterprises, the gallery’s commercial wing. These are the lowest-paid workers in the gallery overall, including retail, publishing and catering staff. And, as is the case across all sectors hit hardest by the impact of COVID-19, a significant number of them are BAME. 

As Tate United, the striking workers, demand, just 10% of the bailout money could be used to save these jobs. Furthermore these cuts should not be taking place when several senior members of Tate staff still receive a six-figure salary. If the total bailout is simply not enough, why is the Tate not lobbying the government for more? Additionally, it has also transpired that the Tate have begun recruiting for Visitor Experience Assistants (outsourced via Securitas) - and Enterprises staff were not made aware of these opportunities. 

The Tate recently published a page on their website to “address” the redundancies. On the point of six-figure salaries, they state that nobody at Tate Enterprises earns this amount. The salaries of Tate’s executive board are apparently irrelevant, especially that of Maria Balshaw and Francis Morris, directors of Tate and Tate Modern respectively. The subtext here is that those individuals who greet and serve the Tate’s visitors on a daily basis are technically detached from the gallery itself. Therefore these people are losing their jobs because they are not considered relevant to what the Tate describes as a “public duty to promote the right to art for everyone”.

Of course the Tate is not the only art gallery making devastating job cuts. The Southbank Centre, a stone’s throw away, has announced it will make 63-68% of its workforce redundant. The Hayward Gallery is sacking all of its front of house staff, bar one manager. And that’s just London. Over 1,000 cultural workers face losing their jobs in the wake of COVID-19, even those whose employers have received bailouts.

And this is not the first time that gallery workers have been made redundant en masse, lost their worker rights or resorted to protest. Several instances following the 2008 economic crash and austerity measures are cases in point - some indeed involving the Tate. As Clara Paillard writes, “While budget cuts left local authorities having to pick between funding museums and libraries, child and elderly care or other local services, national museums embraced the austerity agenda rapidly and with little hesitation. This is unsurprising when most of these institutions are governed under the auspices of boards of trustees appointed by government.” Additionally there is the reliance of such institutions upon retail income, a residual impact of New Labour policy and the neoliberal landscape, which has had an especially detrimental impact here. 

What I want to address is the notion of “duty”, as proclaimed by the Tate in their COVID-19 statement. The key phrase, “public duty to promote the right to art for everyone” underlines how public art museums were originally configured to operate, and how fundamentally this has shaped their sociocultural role. The notion of a “right to art” belies a highly liberal conception of art possessing inherent social good. This is despite an undeniable exclusivity to the access of art and its language. The public art museum was formed around this societal divide, its very function depending upon it. 

Its development in England followed a pattern of projects, plans and legislation in which culture became a tool for exercising new forms of power. Nineteenth-century reformers identified practices of “high culture” as a means for solving social ills, and as a tool for civilising the population. 

This development ran in tandem with the Victorian notion of civility, which required the conception of two spheres. One sphere would be negatively coded: made up of the “rough and the raucous”, the “uncivilised”, the working-class. The other would be of polite, rational society. Those who belonged to the former sphere were excluded from the other sphere, by virtue of being “visibly different” in manners and appearance. Individuals could be seen to “belong” to the sphere of polite and civil society, however, if they followed its rules.

This provided the model for museum attendance, as a means of protecting the artefacts inside which had previously been displayed only for high society visitors. As an example of how these ideals translated into policies, in some museums entry was granted only once visitors had been tutored on the particular behaviour required. This included instruction booklets emphasising that attendees must change out of their working clothes, “partly so as not to soil the exhibits, but also so as not to detract from the pleasures of the overall spectacle; indeed, to become parts of it.”(1) The museum became a tool for social cultivation, in which the rough and raucous would be exposed to middle-class conduct, in turn regulating and civilising themselves. Museum attendance came to be seen as a mark of cultivation, aristocratic aspiration - often becoming the primary onus for such visits. 

Of course this is only theoretical, and as Tony Bennett concedes, the homogenous nature of museums and art galleries is actually instrumental in differentiating between social classes. Their entire function can be defined by the contradictory push and pull between social exclusions. However, this is the basis of the museum’s conceived duty to promote art as a social good -  for high culture was assigned the ability to transform the individual’s behaviour, and by extension their inner life. These conditions are still imbued in the function of the art museum today: it possesses its own sphere, a civilising and performative space which implies arts engagement exists exclusively from the “outside world”. Its purported duty to function as a social good is what gives the art museum its power.  

Today, dialogue surrounding the social function of museology addresses whether such institutions can continue to exist as these liminal spaces, in which the everyday can be contemplated or “debated”. Recently the V&A attracted controversy for “acquiring” a segment of Robin Hood Gardens. Addressing this, the director Tristram Hunt stated he was unsure about the idea of art museums effecting social justice.  “I see the role of the museum not as a political force, but as a civic exchange: curating shared space for unsafe ideas. And in an era of absolutist, righteous identity politics, these places for pluralism are more important than ever.”

The problematic nature of Hunt’s comment upon “unsafe ideas” and “absolutist, righteous identity politics” is obviously alarming (and of course it is not the V&A’s act of “acquiring” a piece of former social housing, and exhibiting it for the Venice Architecture Biennale, which is up for debate). Overall the insinuation is that the everyday only becomes of contemplative value to the art realm when it is inside the art realm, when it is “acquired”. In this liminal space, everyone and everything transcends. The obvious irony is that the “everyday” - by which I mean everyone and everything which finds itself within the aesthetising lens of the gallery - will exist anyway. It will continue to exist even when the gallery expels it, makes cuts to it, makes it redundant.

As a further example, the Southbank Centre’s first exhibition since the lockdown, “Everyday Heroes”, includes portraits of individuals of “entirely ordinary but also utterly remarkable people”, whom each contributing artist considered to have an important input during the pandemic. Not to deny the artistry of each portrait, but this evocation of “entirely ordinary” people is especially farcical considering the nature of the gallery’s redundancies, which affect its lowest-paid employees, a disproportionate number of them being disabled, young people and BAME. 

To borrow the language of the Southbank’s blurb, and not without acknowledging its dodgy wartime rhetoric, what about the workers on its own “frontline”, the frontline of culture? As the comments read on the gallery’s Instagram: these were their own everyday heroes.

The art museum can no longer romanticise and exploit the “everyday” while also pretending it does not exist. The Tate’s proclaimed duty to promote the “right to art for everyone” is liberally loose (in both senses). Clearly, art is not for everyone - certainly not when the people who work at the lowest ends of the pay scale and the forefront of the gallery experience are the first to go, and they are not even fought for. On an additional note, not everyone likes or even wants art. 

These redundancies demonstrate the art museum’s doubling down on its cultural power. In a handy FAQ section, the Tate comments that, “It is also not possible for us to sell assets such as artworks to raise funds. We are legally forbidden from, and morally opposed to, selling artworks from the collection, which we hold for the benefit of the public and on behalf of the nation.” The notion of “public” in this respect, again, highlights another divide: for the public which the Tate apparently acts to benefit seeks only to view art. This public will not find themselves as the contemplative subject matter. This public is not currently being made redundant. This public is aspirational. It does not exist. 

The art museum is premised upon the existence of the two exclusionary spheres. Let these actions against the Tate, and the fight for the rights of all art museum and cultural workers, symbolise the dissolution of these two spheres, which by their very nature cannot coalesce. If the Tate is duty-bound to champion the arts, this should begin with its lowest-paid workers. Workers should be taken in-house, private contracts dissolved. Otherwise any “benefit” or “behalf” they operate upon is for no one other than government appointed and elite trustees. The public needs to pervade the gallery, forming a singular body. 

@tate_united

@southbanksos

@pcs_southbank

(1) Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex”, 1995