Cork Street, London, the middle of summer. Another mid-tier gallery; another exhibition opening. The room is packed, but barely anybody is looking at the paintings. At least two men, their backs to the walls, have accidentally bumped into the canvases. Now a third. Nobody seems to notice, or care. This may be an exhibition, but the art is reduced almost to an irrelevance. Everyone is here for the free wine, for the gossip, to see people and – most importantly – to be seen. Who cares what’s on the walls?
It’s a situation observable nearly every day in London, and also in New York and Berlin – cities where the art world has swelled to the portly size at which people tend to forget that the point of an exhibition opening isn’t just to network and stay in the loop, but to see art. I’m far from the only one who has made note of this strange phenomenon of disinterested art audiences: similar scenes pop up in Alex Hyde’s Exhibition and Dave Eggers’s Contrapposto, both recently published novels set in the contemporary art world, both disillusioned with the ambivalent and privileged attitude of many of the people who work in it. Rather than the glamorous image of the art world common in films and on television, these new books form part of a recent trend (alongside Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures and Paula Hawkins’s The Blue Hour) of social realist “art world novels”, works more interested in the entitled, exploitative and exclusionary side of contemporary art.
In Hyde’s novel, one idealistic art student is singled out for praise for being “[t]he only one at a private view looking at the art… he’d stand for a long time looking at work that didn’t have the depth to merit a second glance, but he tried.” It’s a satisfyingly cynical observation – but it’s hard to blame people who spend most of their time in the art world for being distracted. New York has gone from having 123 galleries in 1955 to having around 1,500 in 2026; London has undergone a similar transformation. During some weeks, you could go to five exhibition openings a night and still not see everything. At least half of what you do see is barely worth looking at, with inflated prices that make you question what, exactly, is going on. This heady mix of oversaturation and hyper-commercialisation means that many of the people working in the art world are oddly disinterested in looking at art. Why bother, when there’s another zombified, soulless abstract painting on every wall you turn to?
Meanwhile, the young Midwestern artist at the centre of Eggers’s Contrapposto has just completed a series of full-length portraits of various models for his debut solo exhibition when the gallerist calls to tell him that they are too large to hang on the walls. “She bullied him into taping one end to the ceiling and the other to the floor,” Eggers writes. “The gallery was so small that when people began arriving, and drinking, in minutes someone had brushed against [the portrait of] Bilyana and sent her feet drifting back to the wall like flypaper. All night, people holding tiny plastic glasses of red wine backed into Cricket’s work. The gallery was so small, so crowded. Someone spilled on [the portrait of] Anders.” It’s an exaggerated display of the entitled behaviour that can make exhibition openings so insufferable for those who do care about the art, rather than the party attached to it.
The art world throws up barrier after barrier to keep out working-class people – and in both novels, it’s those who are most privileged who tend to be least interested in the art itself. Cricket, the artist-protagonist of Eggers’s book, uses his earnings from working at a train station café to take art classes in Chicago. He moves through the art world with a constant wonderment at how so many people seem to take it for granted. Hyde’s Rabble, meanwhile, got her first camera from a “catalogue that took petrol tokens if you saved enough. Dad let me use some for my birthday, then Pete put in some cash.” She, too, is troubled by the laziness of many within the art world, marvelling at her fellow art students who sit around all day doing nothing at all. It takes a lot of privilege to forget what a ridiculous thing it is to be paid to look at, think about, and make art.
Wealthy art students might enjoy “put[ting] on a detached and impoverished air” – but that doesn’t extend as far as giving up any of their privileges. After one of Cricket’s classmates graduates, she goes “to Madrid to work at the Prado – some kind of research position arranged by her uncle, whose bank was a primary donor to the museum.” For those who don’t have an influential uncle, the first step into the art world often means becoming what Hyde refers to as one of “the universal girls with their Masters of Arts” who work behind the desk at a commercial gallery, “sent to collect the dry cleaning from time to time, throw pine cones for the
In one particularly depressing section of Contrapposto, Eggers charts with banal precision the menial tasks often required of these gallery assistants, many of whom receive no pay – another trap to weed out those who don’t come from a privileged background. The first assignment given to Cricket, working as an unpaid intern at a relatively unimportant gallery, is to “separate the hardware” in three jars that each contain a mix of nails, screws, nuts and bolts, “such that each jar has only one kind of thing in it.” Later, in what amounts to a promotion within this mind-numbing internship, he is allowed “to tape the bubble wrap closed” as his boss packages paintings whilst de-installing an exhibition. Otherwise, much of his time is spent “sitting on a chair, guarding an empty room.” If Émile Zola was dropped into the contemporary art world, he might write something like this.
Still, Contrapposto isn’t without at least a little idealism. One of Cricket’s friends visits him at the gallery. “In all the world there’s nothing worse than art bureaucrats,” she insists, shocked to find him working under such conditions. “They take something wild and gorgeous and urgent and they find a way to make it sterile and numb… Every day in art should be like running down a hill, arms waiving, shrieking. Not sitting at a desk writing down auction prices.” Cricket quits his internship and runs down the street, laughing. It’s an oddly optimistic scene for a novel so pessimistic about the state of labour within the art world. There is still space, Eggers suggests, for rebellion and principles and manic enthusiasm.
But cynicism creeps into both novels. Reality takes hold, life moves on, and the characters realise that it’s rather difficult to have a life in the art world if you’re not willing to shed at least some of your anti-capitalist principles, play the market and make some money out of the whole thing. In short, they become the bureaucrats they had so reviled in their youth. Most of us do, given enough time. Hyde ambivalently charts Rabble’s transformation from an idealistic young student to a well-off art world operative in a tailored suit jacket, “pissed off” because a collector is selling several paintings by the same artist at the same time. “If new work floods the market now,” she explains, “the value comes down and we lose our grip on sales in New York as well as London, Seoul. Can’t you persuade him to hang on? Or sell one by one over a longer period of time?… He must know it’s a black mark on his book if he does this. Can’t you have a word?”
Similar transformations occur in Contrapposto, where one character – previously an enfant terrible who dreamed of starting a new art movement and thought she was the reincarnation of Albert Camus – delivers a full-throated defence of the business side of contemporary art: “You’re such an ass,” she says when Cricket balks at the slick commercial gallery she is opening in a building owned by her stepfather. “This is how artists have power. We sell work. You’re implying there’s nobility in powerlessness. That’s been an idiotic trope for too long – that participating in the business side of it taints you. Do you know how dumb that is? That artists have to be these fragile little wood nymphs that are too precious to touch the money?” These novels are being published a month after one of the industry’s largest galleries, Pace, announced it would be reducing staff by 20 per cent and cutting 50 artists from its line-up. Similar moves are taking place across the art world, with oversized galleries contracting in response to a recent dip in the market. Reading these two novels, it’s hard not to lament over the young dreamers who have transformed into hardened shills for an industry they once despised – without quite realising how disposable they have become in the process.
What, though, are the alternatives – especially for those who don’t have their stepdaddy’s money to fall back on? A 2024 report from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre found that only 5.2 per cent of those working in UK museums, archives and libraries come from a working-class background. Initiatives like Meg Molloy’s Working Arts Club in the UK, a free-to-join network which hosts careers workshops and roundtables, have emerged to support working-class people who work within the art world – but there’s only so much they can do. Many people have no choice but to drop out of the art world, unable to work for low or no pay, unable to break through in an industry that so favours those who can afford it. One of Eggers’s characters becomes a shipbreaker in a small town on the Turkish coast; one of Hyde’s becomes a technician at a sixth-form college in her hometown. It’s a strange, sad loss for the individuals who are forced out of the art world by its elitism and lack of support for working-class practitioners – but it’s also a profound loss for the art world itself, which is made far poorer for being so damned rich.
[Further reading: The avengers of the Odyssey]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment