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The Pink Glass Swan:

Upward and Downward Mobility in the Art World

Lucy R. Lippard

The general alienation of contemporary
avant-garde art from any broad audience has
been crystallized in the women’s movement.
From the beginning, both liberal feminists con-
cerned with changing women’s personal lives
and socialist feminists concerned with over-
throwing the classist/racist/sexist foundations
of society have agreed that “fine” art is more or
less irrelevant, though holding out the hope
that feminist art could and should be different.
The American women artists’ movement has
concentrated its efforts on gaining power within
its own interest group—the art world, in itself
an incestuous network of relationships between
artists and art on the one hand and dealers,
publishers, buyers on the other. The “public,”
the “masses,” or the “audience” is hardly
considered.

The art world has evolved its own curious
class system. Externally this is a microcosm of
capitalist society, but it maintains an internal
dialectic (or just plain contradiction) that at-
tempts to reverse or ignore that parallel. Fame
may be a higher currency than mere money, but
the two tend to go together. Since the buying
and selling of art and artists is done by the
ruling classes or by those chummy with them
and their institutions, all artists or producers, no
matter what their individual economic back-
grounds, are dependent on the owners and
forced into a proletarian role—just as women,
in Engels’ analysis, play proletarian to the male
ruler across all class boundaries. Looking at and
“appreciating” art in this century has been
understood as an instrument (or at best a result)

of upward social mobility in which owning art is -

the ultimate step. Making art is at the bottom of
the scale. This is the only legitimate reason to
see artists as so many artists see themselves —as
“workers.” At the same time, artists/makers
tend to feel misunderstood and, as creators,
innately superior to the buyers/owners. The
innermost circle of the art-world class system
thereby replaces the rulers with the creators,
and the contemporary artist in the big city (read
New York) is a schizophrenic creature. S/he is
persistently working “up” to be accepted, not
only by other artists, but also by the hierarchy
that exhibits, writes about, and buys her/his
work. At the same time s/he is often ideologi-
cally working “down” in an attempt to identify
with the workers outside of the art context, and
to overthrow the rulers in the name of art. This

conflict is augmented by the fact that most
artists are originally from the middle class, and
their -approach to the bourgeoisie includes a
touch of adolescent rebellion against authority.
Those few who have actually emerged from the
working class sometimes use this—their very
lack of background privilege—as privilege in
itself, while playing the same schizophrenic
foreground role as their solidly middle-class
colleagues.

Artists, then, are workers or at least producers
even when they don’t know it. Yet artists
dressed in work clothes (or expensive imitations
thereof) and producing a commodity accessible
only to the rich differ drastically from the real
working class in that artists control their pro-
duction and their product—or could if they
realized it and if they had the strength to main-
tain that control. In the studio, at least, unlike
the farm, the factory, and the mine, the unor-
ganized worker is in superficial control and can,
if s/he dares, talk down to or tell off the boss—
the collector, the curator, etc. For years now,
with little effect, it has been pointed out to
artists that the art-world superstructure cannot
run without them. Art, after all, is the product
on which all the money is made and the power
based.

During the 1950s and 1960s most American
artists were unaware that they did not control
their art, that their art could be used not only
for esthetic pleasure or decoration or status
symbols, but also as an educational weapon. In
the late 1960s, between the Black, the student,
the anti-war and the women’s movements, the
facts of the exploitation of art in and out of the
art world emerged. Most artists and artworkers
still ignore these issues because they make us
feel too uncomfortable and helpless. Yet if
there were a strike against museums and gal-
leries to allow artists control of their work, the
scabs would be out immediately in full force,
with reasons ranging from self-interest to total
lack of political awareness to a genuine belief
that society would crumble without art, that
art is “above it all.” Or is it in fact below it all,
as most political activists seem to think?

Another aspect of this conflict surfaces in dis-
cussions around who gets a “piece of the pie”—
a phrase which has become the scornful desig-
nation for what is actually most people’s goal.
(Why shouldn’t artists be able to make a living
in this society like everybody else? Well, almost