The Spiritual Entrepreneurs by Nikhil Sharda

The worst sin any artist can commit is to refuse to be bought. In the crude rhetoric of self-interest that dominates contemporary politics, this sin has potentially become blacker still. If you argue, as Rupert Murdoch does, that the market is a transcendent moral force, then any artist who refuses its values exhibits the worst form of moral turpitude. They literally place themselves beyond morality.

‘To succeed,’ Murdoch says, ‘you have to produce something that other people are willing to pay for.’ Artists, through their very existence, challenge that definition of success. By working with no certainty of economic reward, artists demonstrate there are other values and other measures of achievement.

Of course, it’s traditional for artists to be poor. This poverty, morally dubious in itself, is mitigated if it’s ultimately in the service of money. As with Van Gogh, the moral dishevelment of poverty becomes attractive if it creates a work that will later accrue staggering monetary value. It’s acceptable for artists to be spiritual entrepreneurs, venturing their lives on a gamble that they too will triumph in the market, even if only after their death. In fact, as far as the market is concerned, death is a definite advantage.

Artists like to think that art matters for reasons that have nothing to do with its financial value. The market tells them the same thing, since that glimpse of possibility is precisely what makes art so saleable. And artists, like everyone else, have to eat: despite what rubbish is spouted about ‘psychic income’, poverty is a soul-destroying experience. So artists make their truces with capital, some positive and productive, some not so positive. The get-out clause is the art itself: perhaps, even in the all-encompassing, inescapable suffocation of global capitalism, something true and alive will flicker, however briefly, before it’s ground into pap by the cultural machine.

Every now and then the vexed relationship between artists and money boils to the surface, as in the toxic debate that surrounded the Sydney biennale boycott, which protested Transfield Services’ $1.2 billion contract for offshore detention centres.

I don’t intend to canvas the rights and wrongs of the boycott or the issues behind it, although it’s fair to say that much of the public debate has been depressingly ill-informed. The controversy did, however, expose starkly the relationship between art and power. Many statements in the immediate aftermath, particularly the unprecedented ire from federal government ministers, made clear that artists can be as ethical and political as they like, as long as they don’t forget that they are mendicants.