O welche Lust! The prisoners’ hymn of joy on being released from the dungeons in Beethoven’s Fidelio came to mind as this issue passed for press on 17th May, the day that saw a major advance in the United Kingdom’s emergence from COVID-inspired lockdown. Museums and galleries were at last allowed to reopen, and the pleasure of returning to great works of art in real life was sufficient to banish both grudging reflections on the fact that this was more than a month after ‘non-essential’ shops and fears that, as in Fidelio, freedom may yet prove temporary. As if to confirm that life seems to be returning to normal, Tate’s announcement of the shortlist for the 2021 Turner Prize received its time-hallowed negative publicity, only in this case it was directed against the prize by one of the five short-listed artists. Or, to be precise, one of the groups of artists, since for the first time the shortlist consists solely of artist collectives.(1)

This is not the first time that a collective has been shortlisted: in 2018 Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, was chosen for its works in a number of media – including video, photography, animation and model-making – designed to publicise its research into allegations of state and corporate violence.(2) All this year’s shortlisted collectives demonstrate a similar desire to use the platform provided by an art gallery to address issues of pressing social concern. Two have a strongly local focus. Array Collective, based in Belfast, creates works that use performance and exhibitions to respond to events in Northern Ireland, and Gentle/Radical, working in Cardiff, advocates for art as a tool for social change in Wales. Project Art Works is a Hastings-based collective of neuro-diverse artists and makers that explores art through collaboration both with and for neurominorities. This collective kept on working through the pandemic by staging an installation that could be viewed by the public through the windows of a closed gallery. As Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner Prize judges has observed, the shortlist demonstrates the way the prize ‘captures and reflects the mood of the moment in contemporary British art. After a year of lockdowns when very few artists have been able to exhibit publicly, the jury has selected five outstanding collectives whose work has not only continued through the pandemic but become even more relevant as a result’.

The work of the other two shortlisted collectives demonstrates that the mood of the moment can embody a critique of their hosts. In 2020 the London-based duo Cooking Sections, which uses installation, performance and video to explore the overlaps between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics, staged an exhibition at Tate Britain, Salmon: A Red Herring (prematurely terminated by the lockdown) that attacked the methods of fish farming; as a result, Tate agreed to remove farmed salmon from the menus of its cafés and restaurants. The day after the announcement of the shortlist, the fifth chosen group, the London-based Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.), a collective for queer, trans, intersex and Black people and people of colour, turned on Tate in an Instagram post that criticised the organisation on a number of grounds: its treatment of its retail, catering and other commercial staff, many of whom lost their jobs as a result of cuts made in response to the pandemic, its handling of the allegations of sexual abuse by a prominent donor to Tate, Anthony d’Offay, made by a young Black artist, Jade Montserrat, and its failure to provide artists’ groups with the same level of resource and support that it affords to solo artists, a result of ‘in-built reverence for individual inspiration over the diffusion, complexity and opacity of collaborative endeavour’.

The belief shared by all five collectives that they have a duty to challenge injustice is also an assertion that art has an overriding instrumental purpose. At the same time that the Turner Prize shortlist was announced, the Office for Students (OfS), the independent regulator of higher education in England, set off a storm of criticism with its proposal for reallocating part of its funding for universities and colleges to help them deliver subjects that are expensive to teach. For arts subjects, this subsidy is £243 per student per year. The OfS is proposing to reduce this to £121.50 for courses in art and design, music, dance, drama and the performing arts, media studies and archaeology to allow it to allocate additional sums to degrees in science, engineering, medicine, dentistry and nursing, areas in which the Government has identified professional shortages.

In response to the consultation on the proposal, which closed on 6th May, the organisation Public Campaign for the Arts launched a petition calling for the government to commit to ‘proper funding for higher education providers to continue to deliver world-leading arts courses’. Many critics pointed out that the creative industries were estimated to have contributed £112 billion to the UK economy in 2018 and the artist Bob and Roberta Smith told The Art Newspaper that these are ‘truly appalling cuts to arts subjects which will further divide society’. Although the OfS stated in reply to criticism of the proposals that the reduction amounts to ‘around one per cent of the combined tuition fee and OfS funding’ for arts students, the belief that funding for arts subjects can be sacrificed in order to provide additional subsidy for science, technology and medicine has uncomfortable implications that may yet have long-term consequences if it becomes an accepted principle.

Given the events of the past year, it may seem hard to argue that people studying medicine and technology in particular should not receive increased funding. The purposes of those subjects are, after all, clear. Admirable although it has been, in the short term the work done by artists during the pandemic is evidently less quantifiable in terms of social benefit than the contribution made by researchers into vaccines, to take only the most obvious example. It is possible to argue that the emphasis on the instrumental value of art asserted, for example, by the Turner Prize shortlist helps to support a belief that higher-education courses can be judged in terms of measurable social value. It is certainly the case that belief in art as an instrument for achieving social and political ends is shared by radical artists and by governments who justify spending public money on museum and galleries in terms of the way they help to alleviate social exclusion or discrimination based on race or class. Without denying that the criticisms aimed by B.O.S.S. at Tate may be justified, the timing did not match ‘the mood of the moment’. The joy and relief that greeted the reopening of Tate and the country’s other art galleries on 17th May suggest that their significance to the public runs far deeper than the purposes identified by governments – or even many artists.

1. This year’s exhibition of new works by the shortlisted artists will be shown at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, 29th September–12th January 2022. The winner will be announced on 1st December.

2. See ‘Editorial: The Turner Prize’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 160 (2018), p. 995.