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P1: KAE Trim: 138mm × 216mm Top: 15.3pt Gutter: 50pt
IBBK105-FM Visual Culture Demy 216 × 138 December 8, 2015 13:51
List of Illustrations
1 Marcel Duchamp, Tzank Check, ink on paper, 1919

Copyright © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP
Licensed by Viscopy, 2014 32
2 Claes Oldenburg in The Store, installation view of
exhibition at Ray Gun Mfg. Co., 107 E. 2nd St.,
New York, USA, 1 December 1961–2 January 1962
Photo credit: Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection/
Getty Images 37
3 Asger Jorn, Fin de Copenhague, (detail), artists’ book, 1957
Copyright © Asger Jorn/COPYDAN
4 Asger Jorn, Poussin, oil on canvas, 1962
Copyright © Asger Jorn/COPYDAN
5 Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into
the Met. Museum?, colour poster, 1989
Copyright © Guerrilla Girls
Courtesy of www.guerrillagirls.com 74
6 2011 MOCA Gala – An Artist’s Life Manifesto, Directed
by Marina Abramovié – Inside, colour photograph, 2011
Photo credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Entertainment Collection/Getty Images 83
7 Patrick Robert, Civil War in Liberia, photograph used
in United Colour of Benetton Campaign, 1992
Photo credit: Patrick Robert/Sygma 108
vii
ART AS ENTERPRISE
8 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance:

Freshkills Landfill, 1977–80 (Talking with worker of
the New York City Department of Sanitation),
colour photograph
Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York 116
9 Harrell Fletcher, Blot Out The Sun, video still, 2002
Copyright © Harrell Fletcher
Courtesy of Harrell Fletcher 124
10 Mayamiko Artists Preparing Textiles in Malawi, colour
photograph, 2014
Photo Credit: Paola Masperi, 2014 136
11 Andrea Zittel, smockshop London, installation view,
Sprüth Magers, London, 19 September–3 October
2009
Courtesy of Sprüth Magers, London 140
12 Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, Pacific Trade:
Occupation & Exchange, installation view of exhibition,
2011
Photo Credit: Lisa Hilli, 2011 150
13 (Left) Osei-Duro and Dzidefo Collaboration, 2010
Photo credit: Molly Keogh, Producer/Leila Hekmat,
Photographer Copyright © Osei-Duro
(Right) Exterior view of Dzidefo workshop in Kpando,
Ghana, 2012
Photo credit: Grace McQuilten 160
viii
Acknowledgements
The authors would firstly like to acknowledge the generosity, time

and contribution of the artists, art organizations, social enterprises and
industry professionals who have contributed to the body of knowledge
represented in this book. We would also like to mention the invaluable
support of a number of grants that have resourced our research, which
includes a University of Melbourne research collaboration grant (2011),
a Myer Fund grant (2012) and a Churchill Fellowship that supported
international site visits to art organizations, collectives and enterprises
(2011). Sections of Chapter 2 have previously appeared in a scholarly
journal article by Anthony White published in Reading Room (2009),
and in Grace McQuilten’s book Art in Consumer Culture (2011). Grace
would particularly like to thank the artists and staff at The Social Studio
for their humour, generosity, patience, artistic rebellion and belief that
the world can change for the better.
ix
IBBK105-01 Visual Culture Demy 216 × 138 December 8, 2015 13:44
Introduction
Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art

examines the interaction of art with social questions by directly
addressing art’s place in the economic systems of consumer society.
The concept of social enterprise is the model for understanding that
interaction. Artistic practice offers unique strategies for change and
innovation by embracing risk, exploring ideas without determining
an outcome, thereby enabling us to think differently and to mediate
between individual and collective experience. At the same time, art has
been increasingly subject to market forces, which have the potential
to evacuate its critical capacity. This book looks at the rebellious
dimension of art, its capacity to incite critical reflection on society, not
from an oppositional perspective but as a “social enterprise” operating
on the inside of economic systems.
This means engaging with the realm of art’s production, a territory
that is rife with ethical, social and political complexity; a set of
economic and human processes that often become opaque in the
reception and distribution of art. This lack of transparency relates to
a fundamental anxiety in contemporary art; that an understanding of,
and engagement with, the realities of art’s production might threaten
its critical and aesthetic autonomy. As this book argues, addressing art as
enterprise is a means to consider the economic and social entanglements
of artistic practice in the context of contemporary capitalism. This does
not signal a gesture of defeat; rather it repositions art as a simultaneously
productive and critical force within contemporary economic systems.
This approach builds upon an extensive body of political, philosophical
1
ART AS ENTERPRISE
and sociological discourse that illuminates the contemporary economic

landscape as one in which the historical notion of the subordinated
worker in industrial production has been replaced by the self-exploited
creative labourer of the knowledge economy. This includes, but
is not limited to, the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Slavoj Žižek, Theodor Adorno,
Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau.
The ways in which the art world and the domain of social en-
trepreneurship have been brought together, a phenomenon which this
book sets out to critically document and evaluate, is not simply a means
to think of how art might benefit society in broad terms. It also provides
a new way of understanding how art can attain greater independence
within a global economic system that appropriates creative activity
for both social and economic ends. In both art and social enterprise
there are inevitable tensions in the relationship between non-economic
and economic values. Historically, in both the social sector and the
arts, a critical distance from the market has provided a vehicle to
sidestep this conflict. However amid the rise of globalized capitalism,
neat divisions between public and private have given way to an all-
encompassing market economy that has appropriated the social sector
and the arts in corporate processes. In other words, there is no “outside”
of the market from which artists can stage critique.1 Despite all
attempts by artists to escape the commercial mechanisms of consumer
culture amid the rise of capitalism over the twentieth century, artistic
activity continually collapses back into the folds of economic systems;
either directly as commodity, or indirectly as advertising for galleries
and museums, or providing marketing and cultural value to large
commercial corporations.2
Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated in an
economic system – it depends on money for its creation, for the
livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution, and it is in this sense that
art must be understood as an enterprising activity. Even in the case of art
that is produced through government and philanthropic funding, artists
and art organizations are expected to account for its value either in
terms of tourism, employment, or other measures dictated by funders.
The line between public and private has become so indeterminate that
it is difficult to conceive of anything being funded without some vested
interest. However profit-making is often not the goal of artists, and this
is where social enterprise may provide a model for alternative forms of
2
INTRODUCTION
economic organization in the arts, a model that enables greater creative
and critical freedom because it provides independence from reliance on
one single source (for example government, philanthropic or market)
for financial support, and it prioritizes non-economic values within
the mechanisms of the mainstream marketplace. The social enterprise
model may also therefore address other inequities in the art system
itself, including the financial insecurity faced by many artists and arts
organizations and conditions of work for artists and art workers.
Enthusiasm about the possibility for social entrepreneurship to
promote economic sustainability and social inclusion through art needs
to be balanced, certainly, with a degree of caution. As has been recog-
nized by many art theorists and sociologists, the focus on commercial
revenue-raising inherent to private enterprise activities runs the risk
of compromising the core purpose and creative freedom of artists,
as well as presuming that art should be primarily directed towards a
social purpose. There has been increasing concern among theorists
and critics about the links between social practice in contemporary
art and complicity with neo-liberal political agendas.3 And yet this is a
situation that the arts already face in the context of a reliance on public
funding, corporate support and in the inextricable entanglement of art
with the art market. Building on the existing discourse about social
practice, this book argues for a far more explicit acknowledgement of
and engagement with the role that economic systems play in deter-
mining the conditions in which art is made, received, distributed and
sustained.
The approach taken in this book to the subject of art as enterprise
involves several different methodologies. Ideas gleaned from the work
of modern and contemporary thinkers working in the scholarly fields of
art history, philosophy and sociology are integrated with the findings of
less formal, more journalistic forms of writing and criticism by authors
in the process of coming to terms with recent developments in the
fields of social practice art, creative social enterprise and contemporary
art. This approach reflects a dual concern to intertwine more historical,
academic analyses with less systematic thinking produced in response
to forms and practices which have not yet been formally codified.
This duality reflects another aspect of the book which views the latest
and most contemporary developments in the interactions between
art, social issues and economics in the light of and in comparison to
twentieth-century and earlier practices and ideas. The rationale for this
3
ART AS ENTERPRISE
approach is to privilege neither the historical nor the contemporary

but rather to provide a richer, more finely textured background for
understanding recent innovations and a longer view within which to
situate changes that may seem unprecedented but on reflection are
shifts, re-emphases and differences in degree to what has gone before.
Beyond this dual interest in both scholarship and criticism and in both
the historical and the contemporary, the approach of the book is to
ground a new conception of the relationship between art, society and
the economic realm in an analysis of specific case studies. These case
studies draw upon a field research that includes: an industry round-
table discussion held at the University of Melbourne in 2012 which
explored the relationship between art, economic systems and social
benefit in contemporary art practices; and international site visits to
art organizations, collectives and enterprises in Australia, Cambodia,
Ghana, Uganda, the UK and the USA as part of a Churchill Fellowship
in 2012. The analysis of selected cases provides insight into practical
issues faced by artists and art organizations, giving more weight and
depth to the more abstract assertions that writing on modern and
contemporary art is often prone to.
Chapter 1, Why Art as Social Enterprise?, provides an overview of the
field of social enterprise more generally and its relationship to artistic
practice in particular, while also considering the important role that
art plays in society as an independent and critical practice. Chapter 2,
Art, Money and Society, provides an historical background by reviewing
the work of artists who have staged critique in the context of the
increasing commercialization of art in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Chapter 3, ‘Bad’ Art and its Social Benefits, shifts focus away
from questions of aesthetic quality and benevolence in contemporary
social practice and instead foregrounds the economic forces that have
influenced the rise of social practices in contemporary art. A critique
of the charitable ambitions of social practice leads to a discussion of the
social value of art that might be considered ‘bad’ rather than ‘good’,
taking in a range of both historical and more contemporary practices,
including the work of Asger Jorn, the Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot,
the Chapman Brothers and Richard Bell. The interest in social equity
outside of the art system raises questions about the inequities of the art
system itself, including issues of human labour, exclusion and inclusion,
and transparency in funding and the interests of sponsors within the art
system.
4
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 4, Art as Enterprise, therefore explores issues around the
exploitation of human labour in the contemporary art world, including
unpaid and underpaid art assistants working for Marina Abramović
and Matthew Barney, the deliberate exploitation of labour by Santiago
Sierra and the use of wage labourers in the socially oriented practices
of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher. As this analysis
demonstrates, the art system as it currently stands needs to develop
new labour models before it begins thinking about how to address
broader issues of class division and social inequality. Chapter 5, Art
as Social Enterprise, examines the potential of social enterprise to address
these issues through case studies of organizations including Mayamiko
Designed (UK and Malawi); Andrea Zittel’s smockshop (USA); The
Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle (Australia); Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative
(Ghana), Osei-Duro (US and Ghana); the Women of Kireka (Uganda)
and the Reciprocity Foundation (USA). One of the principal questions
posed by the model of art as social enterprise is whether it can sustain
artistic practice as a critical, creative and independent activity within
the machinery of capitalism. Moreover, how might such enterprises be
generating social and economic value, as a result (rather than a driver)
of artistic value? This chapter focuses on how these various cases have
managed the tensions that lie at the heart of art as a social enterprise;
with the potentially conflicting and contradictory interests of artistic,
social and economic goals.
At the heart of the book is the conviction that artists can, and have,
engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of what can be
understood as social enterprise. Artists are striving for independence
to create works that emphasize human agency and critical thought
on the inside of consumer culture. Art has held an important place
in human history because it offers ways of thinking ‘other’. Art as
Enterprise examines how this is manifesting in contemporary artistic
practices around the globe.
5
1
Why Art as Social Enterprise?
Contemporary art engages with social and economic forces and this
can result in both radical practices that challenge society and it can also
result in complicity with the forces of contemporary global capital.
Questions that must therefore be asked in this context include: how
are these engagements impacting on art’s freedom and critical capacity
in society; what agency do artists have in the economic management
of their practices; and what inequalities are being produced through
the system of contemporary art itself? The very idea of ‘engagement’
means venturing into complex and murky territory.
As political and social theorists from the 1970s onwards have contin-
ued to discover and describe, the possibility of an external position from
which to critically reflect upon and challenge the inequalities produced
by advanced capitalism has disappeared. Rather, forms of resistance
and social transformation are now occurring within the institutions
and mechanisms of production, consumption and exchange. The
most effective form that this resistance might take is the subject of
differing critical viewpoints; with thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix
Guattari, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Paul Virno advocating
a radical critique of contemporary capitalism through the generation
of new forms of collectivity, while political theorists Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe argue for organized action within the institutions
of representative politics.1 In Agonistics: Rethinking the World Politically,
Mouffe writes: ‘I advocate a strategy of “engagement with”. Such a
strategy includes a multiplicity of counter-hegemonic moves aiming at
a profound transformation, not a desertion, of existing institutions.’2
This idea of ‘engagement with’ is an important framework within
6
WHY ART AS SOCIAL ENTERPRISE?

which to understand the emerging phenomenon of art as social
enterprise.
In contemporary art, the rise of social practice since the turn of
the millennium has coincided with the growth of creative and cultural
industries worldwide, and an increasing awareness of both the political
dimension of art, on the one hand, and the cultural and aesthetic
dimension of politics, on the other. An important and often overlooked
piece of the puzzle in this area is the economic mechanisms that drive
and sustain these forms of artistic practice. Further consideration needs
to be given to the specific motivations of those who fund socially-
engaged art projects, the distribution of profits from the sale of artworks
that result from social practice, the impact of practical issues of financial
sustainability on these artistic practices, and the involvement of those
who are presumed to benefit. It is amid these questions that the model
of social enterprise in the arts is emerging.
This chapter looks at the relationship between art and society
in the context of changes in the relationship between public and
private funding in the global economy. It provides an overview and
background for understanding how the idea of art as a social enterprise
is even conceivable. The unique nature of arts enterprises, which often
remain small-scale, economically precarious, and heavily reliant on
the work of volunteers, has rarely been examined in relation to their
affinities with the model of social enterprise. Social enterprises are
hybrid organizations situated between the public and private sector
that combine enterprise activity with the generation of social benefits.
In recent times there has been a growing consensus that the social
enterprise model can transform the systems that produce inequality
by promoting economic capacity, social inclusion and community
development.3 They can also generate shifts in thinking about social
problems, encourage a critique of inequities in commercial market
economies, and provide avenues for social innovation.4 In this, they
share certain qualities with activities undertaken within the domain
of artistic practice, which also has a unique ability to generate critical
thinking and change within society, and to mediate the relationship
between the individual and the collective through the articulation of
differences.
Art has started to play an important role in the global development
agenda, not only because of its specific aesthetic qualities, but also
because artistic practice is intertwined with economic growth and social
7
ART AS ENTERPRISE
development, evident in the rise of creative industries worldwide.5

The affinity of art with global economic and cultural development is
both promising and problematic. In The Expediency of Culture, George
Yúdice presents an important critique of the way that art has been
adopted to advance the interests of cultural capitalism, including its
affiliation with the idea of ‘big society’ instead of government support
for social welfare. A ‘big society’, as championed by the Conservative
Party in the UK, involves an increasing shift from the public sector
toward private enterprise, and is worthy of critical attention.6 Yudice
also looks critically at the instrumental role art is playing in globalization
and how the economic rationalist views of the creative industries have
threatened some of the inherent qualities of art. He writes, ‘In this
context, the idea that the experience of jouissance, the unconcealment
of truth, or deconstructive critique might be admissible criteria for
investment in culture comes off as a conceit perhaps worthy of a
Kafkaesque performance skit.’7 The contemporary political climate in
many countries around the world, which is characterized by ever-
louder calls to shrink the public sector, means that arts organizations
increasingly struggle to gain access to government funds to a degree
that philanthropic support can only partly counteract.
In this climate, artists and arts organizations have been forced to be-
come more entrepreneurial, both in seeking private sponsorship, and in
engaging with commercial markets. Many artists and arts organizations
are wary of reliance on corporate sponsors and the commercial market,
however, for the risk of compromising qualities of independence, criti-
cal freedom and artists’ agency. This helps to explain a growing interest
in alternative models of organization including social enterprise, which
might allow for greater independence from the demands of both private
and public funding. Greater independence has the potential to also
provide greater artistic and critical freedom, providing more scope for
the kinds of artistic practices that Yúdice refers to above. In order
to understand the relationship between art and these new forms of
economic organization, it is first important to consider the broader
context of art’s relationship with global economic forces.
Art and the Global Economy

As the creative sector of the global economy has grown in significance
in recent years, art, economics and the social sector have become
8

increasingly interdependent. There have been crossovers between these
fields throughout history, in phenomena like art philanthropy, the art
market, and community art projects. Moreover, as a recent exhibition
about the Medici family titled Money and Beauty: Bankers Botticelli and
the Bonfire of the Vanities demonstrated, the modern banking system
developed alongside the Renaissance, the most important artistic flow-
ering in the history of the Western world.8 What is significant about
more recent developments in this space, however, is that initiatives
linking art to social outcomes have given private enterprise a newly
important role. Some examples are the development of the creative
industries; the rise of public/private partnerships in the arts; and the
emergence of artists who are strongly business-minded or even take
business as their prime mode of operation.
The creative industries model currently influencing public policy
in the arts assumes that a great deal of modern economic activity has
much in common with the activity of artists – the radical, creative
disruption that characterizes both entrepreneurial activity and avant-
garde practices.9 That the term ‘disruptive innovation’ has become
a catch-phrase in business speaks volumes – that it is a synonym for
ruthless competition is troubling. As Jill Lepore describes, ‘There are
disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars
[. . . ] Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized
by terror.’10 The benefits of the creative industry model, according
to those who advocate for its expansion, lie in harnessing creativity
to spur economic growth. An inherent danger of the model is the
instrumentalization of artistic activity – seeing it chiefly as an economic
rather than aesthetic or social good – and the often insecure, risky
and exploitative employment profile of the typical creative industries
worker who belongs to a segment of the workforce known as the
‘precariat’. In other words, the creative economy model, which shuns
traditional ideas of collective labour protections, also has a significant
social downside.11
In another parallel development, the increasing profile and im-
portance of senior business figures on the boards of major cultural
institutions has brought an economic rationality and market focus to
the decision-making processes of these organizations. This corporati-
sation of the arts is also reflected in the expansion of the role of
arts administrators, who have increasing control and influence over
artistic practice and the distribution of funding. The danger is that
9
ART AS ENTERPRISE
these managerial forces are ‘industrializing’ a sector that is better

understood, in Ben Eltham’s words, as ‘a set of social relations’ rather
than an industry exchanging goods and services.12 Those on the side
of market-based thinking in the arts often promote the idea of the
democratization of culture. However as Michael Sandel has argued
in What Money Can’t Buy, when activities not otherwise connected
to exchanges of money are given a price, the perceived, intrinsic
value of the activity dwindles.13 A concrete example of this is found
in publicly funded German theatres, where it has been shown that
for actors the introduction of economic considerations to their work
strongly diminished their artistic motivation.14 In the context of art
museums, Victoria Alexander suggests that corporate sponsorship tends
to negatively impact on the scope and type of exhibitions being staged.
In her study of the impact of funding on the curatorial practices of
major art museums and galleries in Australia, she writes:
It is clear that funders prefer to sponsor certain types of exhibitions,

those that help funders meet the goals behind their philanthropy. In the
aggregate, corporations fund more popular and accessible, but less scholarly,
exhibitions, compared to exhibitions that museums underwrite with internal
funds.15
This puts pressure on artists and art institutions to produce work

that is popular, easy to consume and favourable to the underlying
marketing and branding strategies of those, philanthropic or corporate,
who invest money. While sponsorship of the arts is often measured in
terms of cultural capital and social return, it is increasingly expected
to translate back into business dollars. As Austin Harrington writes,
‘the new commercial elites have a greater interest in the short-term
reconvertibility of cultural capital back into economic capital’.16
The confluence of art with commercial interests is evident in global
economic data. According to a report issued in 2012 by UNESCO
(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
the value of cultural and creative production in the global economy
was measured at 1.6 trillion USD in 2007.17 To put this into context,
the value of the cultural and creative industries was nearly twice
that of international tourism. Moreover, this is a rapidly expanding
sector. Data gathered from OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development) countries demonstrated that in the 1990s,
10

economic growth in creative economies grew at twice the rate of
service industries and quadrupled the growth rate of manufacturing.
In the European Union, the growth of the creative sector from 1999
to 2003 was 12.3% greater than the growth of the overall economy.18
While there is conflict about the relationship between cultural and
creative industries (considered broadly) and the visual arts (specifically),
this rapid economic expansion has been particularly evident in the
visual arts, with world export of artworks more than doubling from
$10.3 billion USD in 1996 to $22.1 billion in 2005.19
It is difficult, however, to precisely measure the scale and volume
of visual arts organizations and producers due to the fragmented,
individuated and informal nature of the sector. A report that was issued
by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2007 to address precisely
these problems of inaccurate data in the creative industries worldwide,
argued ‘the cultural sector exploits an infinite raw material – creativ-
ity – which proves difficult to trace in physical form’.20 The authors
found that there were particular issues related to the documentation
of employment in the arts, with classification and data gathering
methods tending to overlook the informal and self-employed nature
of much creative work. This led to many ‘hidden or “embedded”
cultural occupations’ that were not evident in statistics on creative
industries, making it difficult to document conditions of employment
and production.21 This raises important questions about the equitability
of the arts as an industry. What we can glean from available data is that
cultural industries, and the visual arts component of those industries,
are a significant economic activity in many countries throughout the
world. But how is this activity supported financially?
While the art market itself is growing at a rapid pace globally,
government funding for the arts has been in steady decline.22 This
indicates a growing role for the private sector in sustaining artistic
practice, production, and reception. Deloitte, a major financial service
operating in the art market, issues an annual Art and Finance report
documenting trends in the international market. In the 2013 issue, this
growth of the market was a preoccupation. The report noted:
The unprecedented development of the art market over the past few years
has resulted in the ‘financialization’ of the art market. Art is now seen not
only as an object of pleasure, however, also as a new alternative asset class
with interesting business opportunities.23
11
ART AS ENTERPRISE
It is interesting to note that alongside this affirmation of the growth in

the private art market, the Deloitte report also acknowledges greater
difficulties for practitioners in the field as a result of this private
expansion. At one point it describes how ‘the globalisation of culture
has led art organisations and cultural related companies to confront
a number of strategic issues critical to reaching their goals’.24 Part of
this increased complexity relates to a decline in government funding,
which has traditionally supported the creation and development of art,
as opposed to the sale and re-sale of artworks, which is the primary
interest of the private market.25 Global data providing a breakdown of
funding sources for the arts is very difficult to obtain. Looking at trends
on a region-by-region basis, however, we can see a pattern of decline
in government support for the arts at the state level, with a parallel spike
in the growth of the private sector globally.
In the USA, government support for the arts was significantly
affected by the global financial crisis of 2008. Since then, with an
economy in recession, the arts have seen a continuous reduction in
public funding. The Art Newspaper reported in 2011 that arts funding
in the USA had reached a record low, with local support declining
21 per cent and federal funding decreasing as much as 30 per cent since
the global financial crisis.26 Alongside this was a rise in arts organizations
operating at a deficit. Despite positive forecasting, the decline contin-
ued in 2012.27 This trend has also been evident in the UK and Europe,
which has similarly suffered from the effects of the global financial crisis.
A policy report issued by the European Network on Cultural Manage-
ment and Cultural Policy, titled Responding to the Crisis with Culture,
expressed concern about a decline in both public and private support
for public art museums, despite the growth of the private art market.28
The report responded to this situation by encouraging new business and
governance models. Even in Australia, which was relatively unscathed
by the global financial crisis compared with other nations, the same
trend has been observed, with a decline in public funding coinciding
with a 98 per cent increase in private sponsorship in the period 2001 to
2011.29 Despite such observations and advocacy for the creation of new
business models, so far there has been very little offered in the way of a
tangible alternative to the existing binary between non-profit, publicly
funded institutions and for-profit galleries and auction houses.
What this tells us is that the demands of the private art market
are becoming an increasingly significant force in determining the
12

production and reception of artistic activity worldwide. The explosion
of entrepreneurship in the arts can be seen as a response by artists to
their struggle for government funding. On the flipside, the resulting
increase in self-employment has led to unregulated working conditions
and commercial interests impacting on the types of artistic works
being produced and disseminated. The uncertain boundary between
entrepreneurship and exploitation in the arts provides ground for
heated debate. In Critique of Creativity, Gerald Raunig argues that the
supposed creative freedom provided by an increasingly privatized arts
industry, with its attendant ‘precarious’ working conditions including
the predominance of casual and contract labour, is akin to ideological
enslavement. He writes, ‘In the context of the creative industry it
would thus be more apt to speak of a “massive self-deception” as
an aspect of self-precarisation.’30 Equally, there is criticism about the
influence of government policy on creative freedom and innovation
in the arts. Public policy makers have a tendency to be risk-averse
in their decision making about funding, which is counter-intuitive to
contemporary arts practice, stimulated by experimentation and risk.31
Over-funding of the arts is hardly an issue at the moment, however,
where arts institutions and individual artists are adapting to a public
sphere increasingly defined by competition. As David Throsby ob-
serves in The Economics of Cultural Policy, ‘Enterprises such as performing
companies and public art galleries are facing greater competition for
earned revenue, and sources of unearned revenue, such as donations
and sponsorship, are harder to come by than they have been in the
past.’32 This increasing competition for both public and private funding
is having a profound impact on the types of art being produced and
exhibited. Annette Van den Bosch raises this in Art and Business, where
she argues that not only does competition undermine cooperative rela-
tionships between art institutions, but also results in boring exhibitions.
She writes, ‘Along these lines, the research suggests that art is shaped
by mundane organisational processes.’33
It is hardly surprising, in this context, that artists have been venturing
out on their own to find alternative opportunities for the exhibition and
distribution of their work. This is by no means a recent development,
and has been occurring gradually over the last several decades, partly
in line with the increasing privatization of the public sphere in the
wake of global capitalism’s growth and expansion. In Arts and Creative
Industries, a report commissioned by the Australia Council in 2011,
13
ART AS ENTERPRISE
the researchers observe a gradual shift toward privatization and indi-

vidualism in arts production stemming from 1960s ideologies about
creative freedom. This has led to an increasingly entrepreneurial spirit:
‘Independent cultural producers were acting in ways akin to small
business entrepreneurs; they were self-employed and looked to take
advantage of niche, emerging, fleeting markets.’34 The problem with
this increased entrepreneurship, as evidenced in the same report, is
a simultaneous exploitation of artists for commercial interests and a
deferral of responsibility for problems in the arts away from social policy
makers and onto individuals.35
There is no doubt that free market ideology dominates many
aspects of contemporary society across the globe, including gov-
ernment policy, the non-profit sector and commercial enterprises.36
One of the results of this shift from public to private is that non-
profit organizations are increasingly taking on the responsibilities of
government in addressing cultural issues, the distribution of wealth,
the promotion of community and the development of local culture.
This is reflected in the idea of ‘the big society’ as public policy in
the UK and a parallel push for the growth of ‘civil society’ in other
countries worldwide, similarly driven by reduced state support.37 The
idea is that as governments withdraw funding from social services, the
community sector can step in to address the resulting gaps. As a result
of these policies, non-profits have greater influence in shaping public
policy. As Burton Weisbrod argues in The Future of the Nonprofit Sector,
‘The growth of nonprofit sectors throughout the world is thrusting
nonprofits into the central debate over the organisation of society.’38
However in the case of arts institutions, many non-profits are compet-
ing for funding and resources, and as a result, are adopting commercial
fundraising strategies. As Paul DiMaggio argues, ‘Many legally non-
profit enterprises operate in a manner calculated to optimise revenues
or are at least pressed to do so by significant parts of their business
environments.’39 This has been evidenced in the explosion of the social
enterprise sector; a hybrid of non-profit and for-profit organization
models that aim to generate income to support socially motivated
projects.
It is possible to draw a direct correlation between this rise of social
and cultural entrepreneurship and a growth in social disadvantage.
Throsby, for example, observes ‘a profound impact on the public
sphere – the arena within which policy is made – shifting the locus
14

of power from public to private agents’.40 This is having a negative
impact on issues of social welfare. As Throsby argues, the move from
public to private is ‘diminishing the public sector’s capacity to address
serious issues to do with disadvantage, inequality, denial of rights, and
so on’.41 The creative industries are an obvious manifestation of this
privatization of what once was public, and also indicate a shift in the
way we understand the commercial marketplace.
While there is much uncertainty and ambiguity about exactly what
constitutes the creative industries, there is no doubt that they involve
the production, distribution and sale of artistic and creative work across
fields of design, media and visual art production.42 They represent an
evolutionary development of the ‘culture industry’ of the 1960s as
theorized by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school and defined
by the rise of mass media and the homogenization of popular visual
culture.43 What we now see is that all aspects of art, both small and large
scale, ‘high’ and ‘low’, popular and elite, are of interest to business. As
David Cropley writes in The Dark Side of Creativity, ‘creativity and the
process of exploiting creativity – innovation – are essential ingredients
of competitive business’.44 Cropley suggests that not only is creativity
exploited in the creative industries, but it can be harnessed for highly
detrimental purposes in society including, at its worst, strategies for
warfare. He writes, ‘Thus creativity has two basic sides – the bright
and the dark.’45
While the creative and culture industries are pushing art to have an
ameliorative social role and economic utility, what Yúdice describes as
‘expediency’, art also has an important rebellious function, a capacity
to engage with and expose social problems.46 This problematic rela-
tionship between art and society is also evident in theoretical tensions
between the disciplines of art history and sociology.
Art and Society

The question of art’s role in society is an important issue in the
context of a rapidly growing private sector, which is creating greater
confusion around the lines between public policy, artistic practice
and economic development. While conventional sociological views of
what makes for a ‘good society’ tend to focus on qualities of efficiency
and social inclusion, political theorists emphasize the contested nature
of the social sphere, including qualities inherent to democracy such
15
ART AS ENTERPRISE
as disagreement, the negotiation of class politics and political resis-

tance.47 Art certainly has a role to play here; both in mediating the
complex relationship between the individual and the collective and
in articulating difference.48 This is the basis of Nikos Papastergiadis’
analysis of contemporary cosmopolitanism, where he argues that artists
play a significant role in negotiating cultural difference. He writes,
‘I have been arguing that artists do not deliver documents which
reveal the condition of cosmopolitanism but, rather, that they take an
active role in the mediation of its emergence.’49 Art therefore has a
complex engagement with the social; it has the potential to enhance
human-to-human communication, while it also challenges existing
social hierarchies and gives voice to experiences of social exclusion.
Art problematises the idea of ‘good society’ in a number of ways; by
facilitating debate, for example, or by deliberately alienating audiences
as a form of critique. The drive for art to play a beneficial role
in addressing social problems therefore runs into conflict with art’s
engagement with political discourses and practices. This is the basis
of Jacques Rancière’s critique of the ‘ethical turn’ in politics and art.
He argues:
Breaking with today’s ethical configuration, and returning the inventions

of politics and art to their difference, entails rejecting the fantasy of their
purity, giving back to these inventions their status as cuts that are always
ambiguous, precarious, litigious.50
Here we find the source of an ongoing tension between the fields of

art and sociology. Within the discipline of sociology art has been a
troublesome subject, partly attributable to ongoing debates about the
autonomy of art, whether art should be considered for its inherent,
particular aesthetic properties, or be considered in the context of
its production and reception, its social context. Sociologists have
approached art tentatively, not wanting to encroach on the territory of
aesthetics. Similarly, art historians have been tentative in approaching
art from a sociological point of view, not wanting to run the risk
of destroying the sensorial, imaginative and visceral qualities that
distinguish art and give it meaning in the first place. While political and
philosophical critique has had a huge influence on art criticism from the
1960s onwards, in response to the perceived failings of the project of
modernity, the rise of post-modernism brought with it critical impasses;
16

most notably a predicament where the supposed end of art history and
the failure of oppositional critique resulted in an embrace of sensation
and affirmation and the a-political, which was prevalent in art of the
1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that modern art was innately elitist and
upper class encouraged many artists and critics to reject the traditional
institutions of art. Bourdieu argued ‘it can be seen that museums betray,
in the smallest details of their morphology and their organisation,
their true function which is to strengthen the feeling of belonging in
some and the feeling of exclusion in others’.51 In response to such an
attack on the role of art in society, contemporary art historians such as
Johanna Drucker now reject oppositional criticism altogether. In Sweet
Dreams, Drucker suggests that ‘criticism’s prescriptive effect paralyzes
the inventive impulse of making’ and instead advocates for artistic
‘complicity’ as a way of reviving art in the contemporary economic
sphere.52 In Social Theories of Art, Ian Heywood also cautions against
political and oppositional art criticism, suggesting, ‘Art needs a history
and a theory that is capable of being supportive and complementary to
practice.’53 Supportive and complementary criticism, however, runs
the risk of affirming the status quo and ignoring the influence of social
systems on arts practice. At worst, it presents a cynical celebration of
commercialized art. As Peter Sloterdijk argues, cynicism in contempo-
rary consumer culture serves to reinforce conservative ideologies.54 A
cynical embrace of art’s commercial utility is evident in the approach
of Drucker, who writes, ‘In an already fully corrupted world, one in
which consumerism holds sway, commercial images provide a standard
for production.’55
The problem with this position is that it overlooks an important
aspect of art; its difference to commercial culture and populism, in
particular its ability to create space for articulating political differences.
For Ernesto Laclau, it is precisely through the process of articulation
that class politics emerge. He argues that ‘classes exist at the ideological
and political level in a process of articulation and not of reduction’.56
In Art Power, Boris Groys advocates for the political qualities of art,
arguing that all modern art is political in its very nature. Each new
artwork, he suggests, offers a challenge to the existing canon of art,
presenting a provocation and testing the boundaries of the art system –
this is the inherent and dynamic nature of art from modernity onwards.
By constantly shifting its internal balance of power, art counteracts the
17
ART AS ENTERPRISE
homogenization of popular culture and ensures a constant differen-

tiation. From this perspective Groys defends the museum, criticized
by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as the pinnacle of cultural elitism, and
instead suggests it is the perfect site to promote social equality. He
sees modern art as an antidote to commercial culture, and suggests
that the popular rejection of oppositional art amounts to a celebration
of commercialism. He writes, ‘So the call to break loose from the
museum amounts de facto to a call to package and commercialise art
by accommodating it to the aesthetic norms generated by today’s mass
media.’57
The American author Eleanor Heartney also warns against the
disavowal of political critique in the arts. In Defending Complexity, she
writes, ‘The idea has taken hold that politics is like a virus, sucking all
the aesthetic sophistication and formal intelligence out of an artwork,
and leaving behind only an empty husk of tired propaganda.’58 As a
result, she observes an increasing rejection of both political art and
social critique in contemporary arts practice. Instead of destroying the
potential of art, she suggests that political and social contextualization
can enhance our appreciation and understanding of both art and
ourselves:
But I don’t believe that the value of art is diminished when critics return
it to the complicated economic, political, social and psychic systems that
brought it forth. On the contrary, art’s complicity in our messy realities is
the real reason that it holds our interest and has something important to
tell us about who we are. Because no other participant in the art system is
interested in these questions, it is the critic’s fate to take them on.59
In her discussion of the relationship between art and politics, Mouffe

also sees the political potential of art emerging in its engagement with
society, arguing ‘I am convinced that artistic and cultural practices can
offer spaces for resistance that undermine the social imaginary necessary
for capitalist reproduction.’60 It is evident, however, that there has been
a significant shift away from the idea of art as revolution, evident in
avant-garde practices of the twentieth century, and towards the idea of
art as ‘engagement with’, evident in the idea of social practice.
Critical discourses relating to the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art,
accelerated by the 2008 global financial crisis, have sparked new debate
about the political role of art, on the one hand, and the social benefits
18

of artistic practice, on the other. While theorists such as Claire Bishop
question the ethical imperative of social practice and instead privilege
greater aesthetic autonomy, Grant Kester has been outspoken in his
criticism of dominant art theory discourse’s distaste for practices that
engage productively with the social. He challenges the tendency for
theorists and critics to rely on oppositional thinking and romanticism
about the artist’s transcendent role. He writes ‘a simplistic and totalising
notion of revolution continues to function as a kind of phantom limb
for many artists, theorists and activists’.61 By contrast, he advocates for
more complex forms of artistic engagement with social and political
systems, forms that allow for both collaboration and individual action.
In this regard he draws upon Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of radical
singularity, where the subject is shaped through social relations but
also has agency.62 These debates around art’s social role are explored
in Chapter 3 in relation to specific artworks and exhibitions. For the
time being it is important to stress that contemporary art’s engagement
with social and political practices reflects a broader conflation of culture
and politics, what Michel Foucault described as biopower in the late
1970s, and more recently what Hardt and Negri describe as biopolitical
production, the production of social life itself.63
The theoretical conflict evident in art-historical and sociological
approaches to art’s role in society points to an important quality of
art in modernity; it tends to be problematic, paradoxical, and self-
conscious in a way that unsettles a harmonious view of social life.
For sociologist Niklas Luhmann, art is important for the very fact that
it irritates rational modes of knowledge. In Art as a Social System he
writes, ‘Art tests arrangements that are at once fictional and real in
order to show society, from a point within society that things could
be done differently, which does not mean that anything goes.’64 From
this perspective, art has a capacity to incite change, and this in itself
causes discomfort for those who are not comfortable with risk and
uncertainty. What is obvious is that the relationship between sociology
and art is a complex one that speaks of conflict between freedom
and social order.65 Moreover, art mediates between individual and
shared experience – it is a mode of communication that facilitates both
connections and disagreements between people, which is at the core
of the very concept of ‘society’.66 The very problematic nature of art
in society represents its unique value in undermining conventions and
encouraging new ways of thinking. In the words of Theodor Adorno,
19
ART AS ENTERPRISE
‘the task of art today is to bring chaos into the order’.67 The challenge
for art in the contemporary moment is therefore to find a way in which
the increasingly business-oriented model of funding in the arts does not
destroy art’s ability to question society and articulate social and political
difference. One model available in the contemporary context is that of
social enterprise.
The Social Enterprise Model and Art

Social enterprise discourse has developed in line with an increasing
convergence of public, private and non-profit sectors, which we have
already seen in the context of the arts. As a result of this convergence,
an increasing number of hybrid organizations have developed that
bring together business methods with the aim of producing social
benefit.68 Definitions of social enterprise vary widely, both in theoret-
ical discourse and in practice. What appears consistently among such
definitions and instances is a convergence between public and private
models of organization, along with an over-arching priority to privilege
social outcomes over economic returns.69 The vast majority of social
enterprises are organizations led by a social, cultural, environmental
or economic mission consistent with a public or community goal.
They trade to fulfil this mission, derive a substantial portion of their
income from trade, and reinvest the majority of their profit/surplus in
the fulfilment of their mission.70
The field has its origins in cooperative movements in developed
countries and in micro-finance initiatives in the developing world
from the 1970s onwards, and has seen a critical mass develop at the
turn of the twenty-first century. While there is general consensus
that social enterprise is a recent and rapidly expanding field, there is
uncertainty about the exact scale and scope of social entrepreneurship
around the world. In the UK alone it is estimated that there are
68,000 enterprises operating, employing around a million people and
contributing over 24 billion pounds to the economy. Similar numbers
are cited in other European countries, however the accuracy of these
estimates are disputed, partly due to the hybrid nature of many social
enterprises, which might also be classified as either NGOs or for-profit
businesses.71
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor conducted a major survey on
social enterprise activity in 2009, taking these issues into account. The
20

survey involved 150,000 interviews with individuals across 54 countries
worldwide, in both developing and developed countries, to assess the
prevalence of social enterprise activity. They found social enterprise
activity rates averaged 2 per cent globally, although this varied depend-
ing on the particular geographic region. The areas of strongest activity
were the USA, followed closely by the Caribbean, Latin America and
Africa, with European nations following. This shows that the model has
adaptability across economic and social contexts and various stages of
development. However there was a strong correlation between social
entrepreneurship in liberal political states, showing an alignment with
late capitalist economic and social processes. The researchers report
that ‘inter-regional variations show that, in general, higher SEA [social
enterprise activity] rates correspond to more liberal economies’.72
The category of culture and recreation was the third largest category
of social enterprise activity, representing 12 per cent of the total
worldwide. This may be accounted for in the increasing emphasis on
cultural and creative industries in the global development agenda.
The innovative character of the social enterprise model exists in
its distinction from traditional social welfare provision, which rein-
forces categories of disadvantage through a model whereby those in
positions of privilege provide assistance to those who are poor. This
perpetuates a lack of capacity among those experiencing disadvantage.
Slavoj Žižek has been strident in his criticism of this more traditional
approach to charity. Those who believe in charity, he argues, ‘very
seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying
the evils that they see. But the remedies do not cure the disease
they merely prolong it; indeed the remedies are part of the disease.’73
Instead, he suggests that we need to change society itself; to restructure
economic and social systems that enable poverty in the first place.74
Social enterprises go some way to effecting this very change by
providing a new model of intervention where the focus shifts from
servicing the poor to enabling those experiencing disadvantage to
become the agents in their own economic and social development.75
This capacity depends, however, on the ability of those running the
enterprise to manage the tensions between social benefit and economic
viability, and the degree to which those experiencing disadvantage are
involved in the creation and management of the organization.76
Each organization has to negotiate relations of power both within
the enterprise itself and in relation to external stakeholders including
21
ART AS ENTERPRISE
the state, local communities and global economic systems. The issue
of the distribution of power is all the more important in the context
of international development where histories of colonization intersect
with the expansion of global capital in new forms of economic
colonialism. There is no single model or solution to address these
complexities, and in the field of critical development studies theorists
have firmly shifted away from thinking in terms of universal goals. As
Walter Mignolo argues in Globalization and the Decolonial Option:
Pluri-versality as a universal project is quite demanding. It demands, basi-

cally, that we cannot have it all our own way. The struggle for epistemic de-
coloniality lies, precisely, here: de-linking from the most fundamental belief
of modernity: the belief in abstract universals through the entire spectrum
from the extreme right to the extreme left.77
Thinking about globalization as a complex negotiation of power and

difference reflects the characteristics of contemporary capitalism, which
involves both great inequality and also greater mobility across eco-
nomic, geographic and cultural boundaries. This is the focus of Thomas
Piketty’s influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which
looks at the rise of wealth and income inequality in contemporary
capitalism. The factors that have influenced this trend towards greater
inequality, he argues, are the result of relationships of power and both
individual and collective action. He writes:
The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social and political
actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of
those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of
all relevant actors combined.78
It is in this sense that social enterprise can be understood as one of many

new forms of organization that bring together individuals and groups
with a shared focus on the redistribution of social and economic capital.
While the hybridity of social enterprises can make the boundaries
between business and social purposes somewhat opaque, thereby
leaving room for commercial exploitation, social enterprise differs
from mainstream business in its foregrounding of non-economic values
and activities including social connection, community development
22

and education. It is worth noting that in the Global Entrepreneur-
ship Monitor survey, it was documented that the vast majority of
enterprises were either non-profit or hybrid models, with only a
minority identified as for-profit.79 Social enterprise has activated the
commercial marketplace as a ground for generating income for social
purposes, particularly employment and income generation for those
experiencing disadvantage. This ability to provide employment and
economic advancement talks to Žižek’s ideas about addressing the root
causes of poverty, rather than focusing purely on relief.
Any consideration of the social enterprise model in the arts, how-
ever, must take into consideration the importance of artistic freedom,
critical thought and institutional independence. As we have seen, art
has an important role to play in influencing society to think critically
and to encourage us to embrace change. Art feeds and also troubles
consumer culture, and this is an important factor in stimulating change.
Art should therefore be recognized for creating social value in and of
itself, rather than being held confined to achieving specific instrumental
or therapeutic goals. However alongside these broader questions of art’s
ability to generate social benefits, the art world also needs to address
its own structural inequalities. In contemporary economic systems, art
is enterprise – it costs money to produce, it employs labourers at all
levels of production and distribution, and it is increasingly expected
to generate profits. In Don Thompson’s survey of the contemporary
art market, The Supermodel and the Brillo Box, he describes ‘The very
highest levels of the contemporary art world are brand- and event-
driven.’80 Meanwhile in High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity,
Isabel Graw describes an increasingly competitive and individualistic
atmosphere for artists in the contemporary marketplace. She describes
this as ‘increasing economic pressure to succeed in view of the
compulsive wholesale exploitation of life in celebrity culture’.81
It is in this light that artists are exploring new forms of economic
and social organization including social enterprise – looking for greater
agency in the organization of their labour and practice, greater finan-
cial independence from funders and sponsors, and a more equitable
distribution of profits from art’s production and consumption. Along
with financial independence come other ripple-out aesthetic and social
benefits including greater space for artistic and social critique, along
with the potential for collective action and a critical engagement with
23
ART AS ENTERPRISE
cultural capitalism. As Yúdice argues, ‘If other institutions of the public

sphere will not take us there, then perhaps only art can mine the muck
of our fears and confront the clandestinity of corrupt military, oil,
pharmaceutical, and surveillance-security enterprises aided and abetted
by those who rule.’82
In her critique of the economic conditions of artists, Angela
McRobbie actively incites the art community to consider ‘radical social
enterprise’ as an alternative to the existing creative economy.83 Art as a
social enterprise is not emerging because art should be entrepreneurial;
it is emerging because art is already deeply engaged with contemporary
economic systems. Artists have not given up on the potential for
creative and critical freedom, and the emergence of social enterprise
reflects this. However the ability of social enterprise to address struc-
tural inequalities in the art system and beyond is uncertain, and depends
in large part on the negotiation of power and differences within each
organization. A critical analysis of this emergent territory is the focus
of Chapter 5.
As literature across the fields of public policy, sociology, economics
and art theory demonstrate, art is playing a significant role in society at
an economic level. However, the economic forces that drive contem-
porary art’s production and reception also threaten the very qualities
that account for art’s relationship to society; including space for cri-
tique, artistic freedom and the articulation of political difference. This
is an important consideration in a climate that has seen rapid growth
in private funding of the arts. Before delving more deeply into cases of
social practice and social enterprise in contemporary art, it is necessary
to first consider the art-historical background to these developments.
Chapter 2 therefore presents a historical review of artistic practices
that have aimed to subvert or critique the economic complicity of art,
in order to understand the dance of critique and complicity that has
characterized art’s relationship to society in modernity.
24
2
Art, Money and Society
This chapter examines the various responses on the part of artists and
art theorists to the problem of how art, society and money interact.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, avant-garde art movements have
often made direct links between art, money and society. From Charles
Baudelaire’s advocacy of artists such as Constantin Guys who focused
on the fashions and customs of the new, moneyed classes in nineteenth-
century Paris, to the Italian Futurist’s aggressive marketing strategies
and self-promotional rhetoric in the early-twentieth century, to the
contemporary context in which artists such as Damien Hirst have made
their own strategies for career advancement and economic success the
subject of their art, we have seen an intensification of the relationship
between art, money and society. The primary definition and purpose
of the art object within society now seems to be that it is a commodity
bought and sold in a market. Reflecting on this situation for the kind
of avant-garde or modernist art that has often been described as a form
of opposition to capitalist economies and the society they propagate,
James Meyer argued in a roundtable published in 2008 by Artforum on
art and its markets that ‘The history of modernism is in part a history
of the marketing of the new.’1
Among the many critical responses to this aspect of modern art
has been to see art not as autonomous from its social and commercial
context, as in the traditional romantic model of the free creative spirit,
but rather as a kind of ‘social enterprise’. Theodor Adorno’s Culture
Industry was a pioneering text in understanding the links between art,
money and society under the conditions of modern consumerism.
25
ART AS ENTERPRISE
Partly a manifesto for the critical potential of art, and partly a prophecy
of doom for the end of creative freedom, Adorno understood that in a
consumer culture, art had to renegotiate its position. As Donald Kuspit
explains:
Art is for Adorno the social enterprise where the thought of freedom is
strongest, and therefore the enterprise in which society endangers its own
authority, is at odds with itself [. . .] It is simultaneously an instrument of
social conformity and of individual rebellion, of social coercion and self-
consciousness.2
Whether maintaining a critical or complicit position in relation to

society, or a combination of both, art has enormous potential to unleash
new ways of thinking, new models of community engagement, new
understandings of society, and new relationships to commodity culture.
Indeed, for every artist who seemed to warmly embrace the blurring
of the lines between art, money and society, there have been those
who sought to resist that easy slippage, as the following survey of artists
and critics will demonstrate. In what follows, some major moments
in this relationship are sketched out in order to give a sense of the
historical developments that have led to the contemporary situation
and to understand the various strategies and tactics that are possible
from an aesthetic point of view.
The Nineteenth Century: Art, Design and the Growth

of Private Enterprise
Since the nineteenth century, artists and art writers have frequently
concerned themselves with the proper relationship between art, money
and society. In certain intellectual circles in the Victorian era in
nineteenth-century Britain the view was that art was a place where the
forces of industrialization and commercialization germane to modern
capitalist society, with all their deleterious effects, could be halted in
favour of a more aesthetically enriched culture, with attendant social
benefits. Theorists such as John Ruskin and William Morris argued for
a more humane society in which the arts would take a key role, limiting
the alienating effects of industrialization and commercialization.
Ruskin argued that the spirit of competition inherent to capitalism
worked against integrity and beauty in architecture. As a counter to the
26
ART, MONEY AND SOCIETY

modern capitalistic system in which artisans, artists and architects were
competing with each other he proposed a collective ethos, reaching
back to the Gothic past, in which collaboration between aesthetic
workers replaced the economic imperative. Ruskin’s ideas were very
influential on thinkers like W.G. Collingwood, who argued in 1900
that the state should ‘undertake education and be responsible for the
employment of the artist’ hoping to substitute ‘a spirit of cooperation
for that of competition’.3 William Morris, whose thinking was also
heavily indebted to Ruskin’s, railed against the commercialism of his
era as part of a radical aesthetic programme to resist the penetration of
commodification into every sphere of modern life and turn contem-
porary capitalist society on its head. Like Ruskin, Morris proposed a
return to a medieval guild based system that preserved the dignity of
work and of the aesthetic objects that were its outcome. In his words,
real art must be ‘made by the people and for the people, as a happiness
for the maker and the user’.4 At a broader level he proposed a new
socialist society built on such principles made of ‘culturally sophisticated
communes, democratically controlled by the artist-workers who will
constitute their free citizenry’.5 A broad set of initiatives related to
these ideas, but at the level of consumption rather than production,
also saw an effort in later years to provide broader accessibility of art
for working class people – a push which resulted in the establishment of
Mechanics’ Institutes and such organizations as the Workers’ Education
Association.6 In his designs Morris put great emphasis on handmade
artefacts, which for all their beauty and evident integrity at an aesthetic
level would nevertheless be prohibitively expensive to produce for a
mass market, due to his rejection of the machine made, thus generating
the central conundrum of the arts and crafts movement: their work was
only accessible to the wealthy.7 Arts and Crafts designers were stuck
with either producing for an elite market or with accepting the reality
of an industrialized capitalist market.8
In France during the same period several significant developments
took place in the relation between art, money and society. One of the
great rule-breakers artistically and politically was the painter Gustave
Courbet, whose realist style, which incorporated gritty depictions
of the working classes and thereby addressed a completely different
social stratum than artists normally concerned themselves with, went
together with a socialist political sensibility. In 1855, his attempts to get
outside the constraints of the official exhibiting system organized by the
27
ART AS ENTERPRISE
government of the day, he mounted his own exhibition space, called

the Pavilion of Realism, right outside the official exhibition venue. This
development was quite new as very few artists before this time had
so definitively rejected the official organs of exhibition. Courbet, in
order to oppose the government, had to set himself up as a kind of
private enterprise, with an advertising hoarding, an admission fee and
other trappings of capitalist endeavour. So he may have been a socialist
but he was also a businessman. For all his commonality with William
Morris, Courbet embraced an entrepreneurial model of capitalist self-
promotion in order to make his works and his ideas known and appeal
to a public outside of the public sector. As we know from various
statements the artist made during his lifetime, Courbet was aware of
some peculiar aspects of the market. Noting that the notoriety attached
to his oppositional political stance at the time of the 1871 commune had
led to a massive increase in the prices paid for his work, he also argued
that collectors and the public were ardently focused on the question
of what his painting were worth in dollar terms. As Isabelle Grew has
argued, such statements can be taken as evidence that ‘in the nineteenth
century, high market value was already capable of consolidating an
impression of artistic importance’.9
In his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life on the artist Con-
stantin Guys, Charles Baudelaire explicitly connected modernity to ‘the
ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’.10 Through depicting and re-
sponding to the passing quality of newness in modernity, including the
changing fashions and customs of wealthy bourgeois society, Baude-
laire’s ideal modern artist combatted the academic obsession with the
past as ultimate authority. At the same time, for Baudelaire newness also
resisted the levelling effects of commodification. As Walter Benjamin
explained, in Baudelaire’s thinking newness ‘represents that absolute
which is no longer accessible to any interpretation or comparison’,
which meant that the ‘inestimable value of novelty’ was an antidote
to the degradation suffered by those things which, as commodities,
have a price on their head. As Benjamin pointed out, however, what
Baudelaire was unable to see was that newness is not only ‘art’s last
line of resistance’ but also ‘the commodity’s most advanced line of
attack’.11 Modern art’s obsession with newness and ephemerality was
not something that inherently opposed the world of commerce but
rather was shared by and had its origins in commodity culture.
28

The French Impressionists aggressively seized the new modernity
and the capitalist society that went with it. This was true not only
for their subject matter – the cityscape, cafes, fashion, new industries
of tourism, particularly landscape tourism – and style but also in the way
they organized themselves. In 1873, they wanted to exhibit outside
the official salon system and so formed a kind of corporation, or Joint
Stock Company, called the Société Anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteur,
graveurs. As Richard Brettell has argued,
They decided they wanted to be independent professionals, rather than

government sanctioned artists [. . .] They paid dues so they had money to
rent the space and handle the printing costs [. . .] on the chance that the
money could be paid back through the exhibition as a capitalist enterprise.12
This is a crucial aspect of Impressionism – it was a model of free enter-

prise, an expression of modern bourgeois individualism. Impressionism,
which recorded the exhilarating visual spectacle of modernity, and
urban and suburban pleasures, gave pleasure and identity chiefly to the
middle classes who were its main purchasers and the social segment to
which the work was addressed. Although some Impressionist painters
documented the tensions of modern, capitalist society, and the price
paid for the rise of the new middle classes, Impressionism’s earlier
registering of deep transformations in French society ends in a quiet
acquiescence in a kind of art for art’s sake.13
Another important factor to consider in the nineteenth century was
the role of the art dealer and commercial gallery. The commercial
art gallery only came into existence in the mid-nineteenth century,
before which time collectors purchased mostly from artists, academies
and auctions. As Pamela Fletcher has argued, the new figures and
organizations in the art world, dealers and commercial galleries who
adopted modern retail practices, including fixed prices and prompt
payment, worked in an artist’s favour in granting easier access to regular
purchasers and payments, but they also came with strings attached.
In the 1860s English dealers such as Ernest Gambart were starting to
instruct their artists about what kind of pictures would sell and which
not.14 Moreover, dealers such as Durand-Ruel began to profit from
the increasing tendency toward the solo exhibition of artists, partly
encouraged by the efforts of Courbet and Edouard Manet to set up
29
ART AS ENTERPRISE
their own individual pavilions.15 By promoting the work of individual

artists and then purchasing their work so as to establish a monopoly over
their trade, such dealers were able to make handsome profits.16 Thus
began an influence that would be increasingly telling in the history of
the relationship between art, money and society.
Early Twentieth Century: Avant-Garde Art between Opposition

and Accommodation
In 1909 the Italian Futurist Marinetti, continuing a theme in modern
art first discussed by Baudelaire, called for the destruction of libraries
and museums and for an art that would dispense with the past and
heedlessly pursue the ever-changing spectacle of modernity.17 As
Marinetti and Sant’ Elia explained in 1914:
the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its imperma-

nence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must
build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment
will contribute to the victory of Futurism.18
The Futurists proposed a world in which continual obsolescence and

renewal were the norm so that they could more effectively dominate
the market. As Claudia Salaris has argued, ‘Marinetti possessed [. . .]
gifts that he utilized in a self-conscious effort to promote Futurism
in much the way that one would promote an industrial product that
is to be introduced into the market and publicized.’19 Among the
strategies the Futurist leader adopted was to saturate the market, giving
away mountains of free copies of publications, touring endlessly, giving
public presentations, and deliberately fomenting public disputes in
order to attract the attention of the media and the public. These
approaches to publicity were inimical to the cloistered ideal of the art
for art’s sake model of the Symbolist movement that the Futurists had
superseded. They would have their apotheosis in the work of Fortunato
Depero who dedicated a great deal of his career in the 1920s and
’30s to producing commercial art, even arguing that all art historically
was essentially a form of advertising, thus turning the high/low and
elite/popular dichotomies inside out.20 At the same time, the Futurists
became embroiled in a series of social movements of a nationalistic and
right-wing tenor which led directly into the upheavals of the postwar
30

period that culminated in the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascist party.
The Futurists ended up more or less producing an official state art; a
kind of advertising for totalitarianism.
Elsewhere in Europe and the USA a more clearly ironic attitude
to the rise of capitalism and the commodification of culture arose
among artists such as the Dadaists. By far the most shocking and
profound contribution of the Dadaists in this realm was made by the
work of Marcel Duchamp, who, in a series of Readymade sculptures
such as Fountain – a store-bought urinal displayed on its side, signed
R. Mutt, and entered for an exhibition in 1917 – challenged several
preconceptions about the nature of art. These included the relative roles
of skill and accident in the work of art; the role of the exhibiting gallery
[whether public or private] in ratifying and therefore defining what can
be accepted and discussed as a work of art; and the aesthetic status of
the unique artistic work in comparison to the mass produced object.21
As Dawn Ades has argued, among the many things the readymade
achieved was to respond to the phenomenon of window shopping,
wherein consumers of the new, burgeoning range of manufactured
goods experienced the commodity object at an aesthetic level, with
or without an attached financial transaction.22 In so doing Duchamp’s
readymade ‘highlights the traditional hypocrisy of pretending that there
is a contradiction between ‘Art’ and ‘Commodity’ and that aesthetic
and commodity values are totally opposed to one another’.23 In a later
series of works, Duchamp further exploited the ambiguities between art
and commerce, such as his Tzank Cheque 1919 (Figure 1), a fake cheque
which, signed by the artist, had a potential value determined both by
its imagined status as a promissory note and its more viable status, given
Duchamp’s increasing fame, as an art work which could be exchanged
for financial return. In yet other related projects Duchamp issued
virtually unmarketable products including Beautiful Breath perfume and
a series of optical illusions on mechanically rotating disks, as well
as issuing handmade bonds in a company solely occupied in casino
gambling.24
In other contexts neighbouring Europe, such as in post revolu-
tionary Russia, the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power
in October 1917 by overthrowing the parliament after which time
Russia was administered by the Soviet or worker’s council. This led
to the complete reorganization of society, the abolition of private
enterprise, and the introduction of a centralized government. These
31
ART AS ENTERPRISE
Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, Tzank Check, ink on paper, 1919.
political developments had a significant impact on art, in that the

revolutionary government – which had nationalized important private
art collections – became the principal art patron. Constructivist artists
like Alexander Rodchenko dedicated themselves from 1921 to pro-
ducing a new, abstract art for this new society. Constructivist art would
eschew what Rodchenko and others saw as the bourgeois arbitrariness
of traditional aesthetic production, as well as its traditional autonomy
from the broader social sphere, and embody principles of efficiency,
collective production, and utility. In such ideas were founded some
of the principles of modern design, which drew upon the egalitarian
dimension of William Morris’ thinking but without the natural motifs
and tendency to the handmade, and which culminated in the Bauhaus
ideal of integrating art, craft and modern industrial production.
In line with his ideals Rodchenko also produced advertising for the
products of Soviet society including cookies, candy and baby pacifiers.
As Angela Völker has pointed out, here ‘the artists saw a fulfilment
of their desire to exert influence on a grand scale, for they were
now publicizing the new political and artistic ideas as the same time
as the product’.25 In this sense the artist could serve the revolution
by helping the new planned economy to sell products. Few of the
Constructivists would continue working in this vein as the Soviet
Union in its totalitarian phase lost its tolerance for innovative art. As
Völker points out, in more recent times the ideals of Constructivism
have been continued yet travestied through an aetheticisation of society
32

in the form of mass advertising and consumerism which is completely
at odds with the ideals of efficiency and utility artists like Rodchenko
originally favoured.26
Among the European Surrealists beginning in the 1920s, a fas-
cination with the world of commerce made itself felt. Reacting to
the reestablishment of bourgeois order in Europe in the aftermath
of World War I and the Russian and German revolutions of 1917–
1919, the surrealists attacked the settled society of their contemporary
milieu with an aesthetic program that sought to undermine the status
quo through the weapon of Freudian psychoanalysis. The leader of
the Surrealists, André Breton, praised the irrational thought processes
associated with dream states as a salutary antidote to a world dominated
by logic and reason and argued for the liberation of subconscious drives,
in a romantic privileging of the individual imagination. However, for
all this emphasis on the individual, one of the primary motifs of the
Surrealist movement, the manikin or dummy, was an image of human
identity as a thing, as can be seen in Eugene Atget’s photographs
of store window dummies reproduced in the pages of La Revolution
Surrealiste.
This widespread interest in the manikin among the Surrealists was a
response to the shocks of industrial capitalism whereby human beings
are commoditized and mechanized. Karl Marx argued that under
capitalism, relations between people become like relations between
things and one contemporary manifestation of this was the reduction
of the modern factory worker to a kind of automaton. Another man-
ifestation was the domination of commodity culture, with its logic of
infinite exchangeability, which not only rendered products equivalent
through money but also people (as consumers) equivalent to things
(what is consumed). Like other avant-garde artists, such as Duchamp,
the Surrealists were exploring the deathly eroticism within consumer
culture. In the 1930s and ’40s, however, they would come in for
criticism from modernist critics for dallying too much with consumer
culture. Artists such as Dali, who worked closely with Hollywood,
were described as kitsch for producing ‘commercial propaganda’ and
possessing a ‘sense of chic’ commensurate with the role of a ‘court jester
to bourgeois society’.27
Accompanying these developments in the economy of the arts was
a gradual growth in the art market, and a proliferation of dealers, both
larger, such Durand-Ruel and Bertheim June, and smaller, such as
33
ART AS ENTERPRISE
Berthe Will and Ambroise Vollard, particularly in Paris.28 Another fig-

ure, André Level, organized an investment group of collectors known
as the Peau d’Ours who purchased from dealers and artists from 1904.
After several years of purchasing, in 1914 they sold their collection,
which included Matisse and Picasso, making a considerable profit, and
voluntarily donated 20 per cent of their profit to the artists.29 At this sale
it was therefore discovered that ‘the avant-garde art of the past [. . .] was
highly profitable as an investment’.30 Another important development
in this period was the phenomenon of collectors becoming dealers, as
well as critics and artists becoming collectors and dealers in their own
right. André Breton, who attacked speculation on art in his writings,
operated or advised commercial investments in art of his own or others.
Marcel Duchamp also worked as an art dealer on and off in the 1920s.
As Christopher Green has commented, in the case of Breton’s own
collection as installed in his house in Paris, ‘It provided an alternative
space for an alternative life lived against the middle-class grain, and
yet this was a life funded at crucial moments by profit in a buoyant
art market.’31 Clearly the art market remained important for even the
most radical and innovative art practices.
Postwar Art: Gestures to Pop

Many art critics with an eye for the social impact of the arts have
fought strenuously to maintain the boundaries between high art and
commodity culture. Most famously, Clement Greenberg, in his article
Avant-Garde and Kitsch of 1939, argued that Pablo Picasso’s modernist
paintings demand a self-reflective, mental activity on the part of the
viewer that is anathema to the easily digestible, ersatz art – Hollywood
film, pulp fiction and pop music – produced by industrialized mass
culture. Nevertheless, in the same article he argued that:
No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable

income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite
among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut
off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of
gold [. . .] And now this elite is rapidly shrinking.32
In other words, for Greenberg it was not the avant-garde’s connection

to an economic base that was at issue, but rather through what
means, and how it would be maintained in the face of a diminishing
34

wealthy class to pay for it. In 1939 Greenberg still believed that the
most appropriate base would be a socialist one. What such statements
failed to take into account, and could not foresee, was the massive
commercialisation of the avant-garde that would take place almost
immediately after World War II.
The contemporary art world on both sides of the Atlantic during
the 1950s was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the
movement known in Europe as Art Informal. This gestural painting
movement had sought a completely novel and abstract artistic language
to lend freedom and bodily immediacy to artistic creation and thereby
defeat the world of industry, commodification and administration.
However, it had fallen prey to the forces of the commodity, as artists,
dealers, collectors and journalists turned the novel expressive gesture
into a recognizable art brand that could be purchased to decorate
corporate lobbies, form the backdrop for haute couture fashion photo-
graphs and adorn the covers of chic magazines. Jackson Pollock, who
became a kind of media superstar almost in spite of himself, thus paved
the way for a new relationship with the market forces that had been
conditioning the art world in previous decades.
There were several responses to this co-optation of the avant-garde
artist. Some artists sought mediums and approaches that excluded them
from the commodity system in ever more radical ways. Artists in the
Minimalist, Earth Art and Performance genres of the 1960s and 1970
created art works that were site-specific, outside the gallery system
or connected to the physical presence of the body and its ephemeral
appearance in time and space in an attempt to circumvent the in-
stitutional, discursive and marketing dimensions of the modern art
market, all with limited success, as galleries expanded their operations to
incorporate such works and traded in artefacts related to the ephemeral
or larger scale aspects of their work. Another approach artists took was
to directly invite an explicit entanglement in the broader commodity
system that underpinned their production, a path followed by some
Neo-Dada and Pop artists of the postwar period.
The use of mass cultural detritus, mechanical or chance operations,
and readymade strategies were exemplary of Dada and Constructivist
attacks on the institution of art and its autonomy from the broader social
context through breaking down the distinction between the aesthetic
work and its social substrate. When these techniques were taken up
again in the work of Neo-Dada and Pop artists, including Robert
35
ART AS ENTERPRISE
Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Daniel Spoerri, one response on

the part of historians and critics, such as Peter Bürger, was to describe
these latter artists as a ‘neo-avant-garde’: a collapse back into the art
institution and its economic underpinning in the commodity culture.33
As Hal Foster argues, many of these artists, particularly the ‘proto-
pop and nouveau realiste reception of the readymade did tend to render
it aesthetic, to recoup it as an art-commodity’.34 However, there is
currently a very lively debate about these figures’ exploration of avant-
garde’s entanglement in commodity.
One approach to understanding the commodity status of innovative
visual art in the first half of the 1960s lies in an observation made by the
literary historian Merrill Cole who points out that there are two types of
novelty. One type, associated most closely with the commodity system,
‘consolidates the ego’s petty securities and its sense that the world is as
it should be’.35 Another type of newness, which associated with certain
forms of Modernism, achieves two things: it ‘shatters the rigidities and
complacencies of the ego’ and holds out the ‘painful promise of what
the world and the self could become’.36 These comments apply to the
work of many artists in this period but to give a concrete example
here, the following discussion focuses solely on the work of Claes
Oldenburg.
Claes Oldenburg’s work directly after World War II sought to
‘restore the excitement and meaning of simple experience’, by tran-
scending art’s ‘use as a commercial counter’, and his 1959 installation
of trash, The Street engaged with the dejecta of society and exemplified
disorder and decay.37 As trash lacks value and has outlived its usefulness,
it cannot be readily appropriated or recycled by society for any purpose
and thereby defeated the enervating process of commodification.38
However, by the 1960s there was a system in place whereby such works
could be accepted into the system of capitalist exchange. As Oldenburg
observed, ‘the whole thing had become totally commercial [. . .] People
were arriving in Cadillacs’.39 Oldenburg sought to resolve this dilemma
by engaging directly with the realm of commodities in his next work,
The Store, in 1961 (Figure 2). This was an installation in a disused store-
front on the Lower East Side of New York City. Visitors to the shop
were invited to purchase a series of plaster and muslin objects painted
in brightly coloured enamel paint that formed replicas of merchandise
such as food and garments.
36

Figure 2. Claes Oldenburg in The Store, installation view of exhibition at
Ray Gun Mfg. Co., 107 E. 2nd St., New York, USA, 1 December 1961–2
January 1962.
In the case of his depictions of edible items, by wilfully savouring

the way food is presented in shop displays and advertisements – its
glossy texture, its fluidity – Oldenburg emphasized the visceral quality
of his work by evoking the bodily processes of ingestion and digestion.
Oldenburg, who was concerned with the somatic dimension of the
human body, was depicting commodities from an earlier historical
period belonging to the childhood experience of the viewer. The
gaudy colours and glistening surfaces of Oldenburg’s painted plaster
merchandise look back onto a past of the commodity, when the
fulfilment and participation embodied in a child’s fantasy of fulfilment
rummaging in the five and dime store or drooling over lollies at the
local general store was still a living possibility. However, the suggestions
of degradation and decay bring about an awareness that any shiny new
commodities will also fail to satisfy and are destined to become the
useless garbage of tomorrow. Oldenburg tackled the commodification
37
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Helm was a man of medium size, and about forty years old; hard-
featured, and not intelligent looking. It was believed, at Florence that
a relative, known as “Old Tex,” furnished money to clear him from the
meshes of the law, and to send him to this country. If ever a
desperado was all guilt and without a single redeeming feature in his
character, Boone Helm was the man. His last words were: “Kick
away, old Jack; I’ll be in h—l with you in ten minutes. Every man for
his principles—hurrah for Jeff Davis! let her rip.”
GEORGE IVES.
We have only a few words to add to the account already given of

this celebrated robber and murderer. He was raised at Ives’ Grove,
Racine county, Wisconsin, and was a member of a highly
respectable family. It seems that life in the wild West gradually dulled
his moral perceptions; for he entered, gradually, upon the career of
crime which ended at Nevada, M. T. His mother for a long time,
believed the account that he sent to her, about his murder by the
hands of Indians, and which he wrote himself. It is reported that
sorrow and death have been busy among his relatives ever since.
BILL BUNTON.
Followed gambling at his regular calling, at Lewiston, Idaho in the

winter of 1861-2. In the summer of 1862, he shot a man named
Daniel Cagwell, without provocation. There was a general fracas at a
ball, held on Copy-eye creek, near Walla Walla. Bunton was
arrested; but made his escape from the officer, by jumping on a fast
horse and riding off at full speed.
The first that was afterwards heard of him was that he turned up in
this country. In person, Bunton was a large, good-looking man, about
thirty years of age, and rather intelligent. He had been for some
years on the Pacific coast, where he had lived as a sporting man and
saloon keeper, He was absolutely fearless, but was still addicted to
petty theft, as well as to the greater enormities of Road Agency and
murder. His dying request, it will be remembered, was for a mountain
to jump off, and his last words, as he jumped from the board, “Here
goes it.”
Of Johnny Cooper we have already spoken. A word is necessary
concerning the history of
ALICK CARTER
which forms a strong contrast to the others. It appears that, for

several years this eminent member of Plummer’s band bore an
excellent character in the West. He was a native of Ohio, but
followed the trade of a packer in California and Oregon, maintaining
a reputation for honor and honesty of the highest kind. Large sums
of money were frequently entrusted to his care, for which he
accounted to the entire satisfaction of his employers. He left the
“other side” with an unstained reputation; but falling into evil
company in Montana, he threw off all recollections of better days,
and was one of the leading spirits of the gang of marauders that
infested this Territory. It is sad to think that such a man should have
ended his life as a felon, righteously doomed to death on the
gallows.
CYRUS SKINNER
was a saloon-keeper in Idaho, and always bore a bad character.

His reputation for dishonesty was well known, and in this country he
was a blood-thirsty and malignant outlaw, without a redeeming
quality. He was the main plotter of Magruder’s murder.
BILL HUNTER.
Probably not one of those who died for their connection with the
Road Agent Band was more lamented than Hunter. His life was an
alternation of hard, honest work, and gambling. That he robbed and
assisted to murder a Mormon, and that he was a member of the
gang, there can be no doubt; but it is certain that this was generally
unknown, and his usual conduct was that of a kind-hearted man. He
had many friends, and some of them still cherish his memory. He
confessed his connection with the band, and the justness of his
sentence just before his death. His escape from Virginia, through the
pickets placed on the night of the 9th of January, 1864, was
connived at by some of the Vigilantes, who could not be made to
believe that he was guilty of the crimes laid to his charge.
STEPHEN MARSHLAND
was a graduate of a college in the States; and, though a Road

Agent and thief, yet he never committed murder, and was averse to
shedding blood. He was wounded in attacking Forbes’ train, and his
feet were so far mortified by frost when he was captured, that the
scent attracted the wolves, and the body had to be watched all night.
Concerning the rest of the gang, nearly all that is known has
already been related. They were, without exception, old offenders
from the Pacific coast. The “bunch” on Ned Ray’s foot was caused
by a wound from a shot fired at him when escaping from the
penitentiary at St. Quentin, California. This he told, himself, at
Bannack.
JAMES DANIELS.
This criminal, the last executed by the Vigilantes, it should be

generally understood, murdered a Frenchman in Tuolumne county,
California, and chased another with a bowie-knife till his strength
gave out. In Helena, he killed Gartley, whose wife died of a broken-
heart at the news; threatened the lives of the witnesses for the
prosecution, and had drawn his knife, and concealed it in his sleeve,
with the intent of stabbing Hugh O’Neil in the back, after the fight
between Orem and Marley, at the Challenge Saloon. He said he
“would cut the heart out of the ——!” when an acquaintance who
was watching him, caught hold of him and told him he was in the
wrong crowd to do that. Daniels renewed his threats when liberated,
and was hanged; not because he was pardoned, but because he
was unfit to live in the community.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CONCLUSION.
“All’s well that ends well,” says the proverb. Peace, order and
prosperity are the results of the conduct of the Vigilantes; and, in
taking leave of the reader, the author would commend to the sound
sense of the community, the propriety of maintaining, in readiness for
efficient action if needed, the only organization able to cope with the
rampant lawlessness which will always be found in greater or less
amount in mining camps.
At the same time, let the advice be well understood before it is
either commented upon or followed. Readiness is one thing;
intermeddling is another. Only on occasions of grave necessity
should the Vigilantes let their power be known. Let the civil authority,
as it increases in strength, gradually arrogate to itself the exclusive
punishment of crime. This is what is needed, and what every good
citizen must desire; but let the Vigilantes, with bright arms and
renewed ammunition, stand ready to back the law, and to bulwark
the Territory against all disturbers of its peace, when too strong for
legal repression, and when it fails or is unable to meet the
emergency of the hour. Peace and justice we must have, and it is
what the citizens will have in this community; through the courts, if
possible; but peace and justice are rights, and courts are only means
to an end, admittedly the very best and most desirable means; and if
they fail, the people, the republic that created them, can do their
work for them. Above all things, let the resistless authority of the
Vigilantes, whose power reaches from end to end of Montana, be
never exerted except as the result of careful deliberation, scrupulous
examination of fair evidence, and the call of imperative Necessity;
which, as she knows no law, must judge without it, taking Justice for
her counselor and guide.
Less than three years ago, this home of well ordered industry,
progress and social order, was a den of cut-throats and murderers.
Who has effected the change? The Vigilantes; and there is nothing
on their record for which an apology is either necessary or
expedient. Look at Montana that has a committee; and turn to Idaho,
that has none. Our own peaceful current of Territorial life runs
smoothly, and more placidly, indeed, than the Eastern States, to-day;
but in Idaho, one of their own papers lately asserted that, in one
county, sixty homicides had been committed, without a conviction;
and another declares that the cemeteries are full of the corpses of
veterans in crime and their victims.
Leave us the power of the people, as a last resort; and, where
governments break down, the citizens will save the State. No man
need be ashamed of his connection with the Virginia Vigilantes. Look
at their record and say it is not a proud one. It has been marvellous
that politics have never intruded into the magic circle; yet so it is, has
been, and probably will be. Men of all ranks, ages, nations, creeds
and politics are among them; and all moves like a clock, as can be
seen on the first alarm. Fortified in the right, and acting in good
conscience, they are “just and fear not.” Their numbers are great; in
fact, it is stated that few good men are not in their ranks, and the
presence of the most respectable citizens makes their deliberation
calm, and the result impartially just.
In presenting this work to the people, the author knows, full well,
that the great amount of labor bestowed upon it is no
recommendation of its excellence to a public that judges of results
and not of processes; but one thing is sure; so far as extended
research and a desire to tell the truth can effect the credibility of such
a narrative, this history has been indited subject to both these
regulations, since the pen of the writer gave the first chapter to the
public.
If it shall serve to amuse a dull hour, or to inform the residents of
the Eastern States and of other lands of the manners and habits of
the mountaineers, and of the life of danger and excitement that the
miners in new countries have to lead, before peace and order are
settled on an enduring foundation—the author is satisfied. If in any
case his readers are misinformed, it is because he has been himself
deceived.
As a literary production, he will be rejoiced to receive the entire
silence of critics as his best reward. He knows full well what criticism
it deserves, and is only anxious to escape unnoticed. And now,
throwing down his pencil, he heaves a sigh of relief, thankfully
murmuring, “Well, it is done at last.”
J. M. CASTNER,
Mayor of Virginia City,

AND
JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.
Will Attend to all Claims and Collections,

And also to the preparation of
Legal Papers, Affidavits, Conveyancing,

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF DEEDS, &c.,
And generally to all business entrusted to him by persons out of the
City.
Office—Over the Idaho Restaurant, two doors from the office of the
Montana Post, Virginia City.
Virginia City, Montana, October 23, 1866.
IDAHO
RESTAURANT!
Two doors from office of Montana Post,
VIRGINIA CITY, - - - MONTANA.
TABLE ACCOMMODATIONS EQUAL TO BEST IN

THE CITY,
And best of Liquors dispensed at the bar by Jos. McGee.
ALSO, ACCOMMODATIONS FOR A FEW NIGHT

LODGERS
Good Clean Beds. Charges Moderate.
Oct. 23, 1866. J. M. CASTNER, Proprietor.
GURNEY & CO.’S BOOTS AND
SHOES.
Constantly on hand an immense assortment of the above well known
custom-made
BOOTS & SHOES,

Mining Boots, English Cap Boots, Light and Heavy Sewed and
Pegged Calf Boots,
GENTS’ GAITERS, SHOES, SLIPPERS

and all varieties of Men’s wear.
LADIES’, MISSES’, BOYS’, & CHILDREN’S
SHOES,
BALMORALS & GAITERS.
RUBBER BOOTS
Manufactured expressly for the trade.
ARCTIC, BUFFALO and RUBBER OVER-SHOES,
at their old stand,
Wallace St., Virginia City, M. T.

D. H. WESTON.
The Tri-Weekly Post!
PUBLISHED EVERY
Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Morning,

By D. W. Tilton & Co.
D. W. TILTON, BEN R. DITTES.
Office, corner Wallace and Jackson Streets, Virginia City, and No. 52
Bridge Street, Helena.
Terms of Subscription:
One Year, $16 00
Six Months, 10 00
Three Months, 6 00
The Montana Post
BOOK and JOB
PRINTING OFFICE!
CORNER OF WALLACE AND JACKSON STREETS,
VIRGINIA CITY, - - MONTANA TERRITORY.
ALL KINDS OF FANCY

AND ORNAMENTAL
PRINTING,
Executed with Neatness and Dispatch.
We have the latest improved
POWER PRESSES,
Together with a large assortment of
NEW STYLES OF JOB TYPE,

Which enables us to do work
IN BETTER STYLE AND MORE EXPEDITIOUS
Than any other office in the Territory.
We have on hand a large stock of

BUSINESS CARDS!
Of every style, size and variety.
To which we invite the attention of all.
The Montana Weekly Post!
Virginia City, Montana Ter.
PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY, BY
D. W. Tilton & Co.

D. W. TILTON, BEN R. DITTES.
Office, Corner Wallace and Jackson Streets,
VIRGINIA CITY, - - - MONTANA
Terms of Subscription:
One copy one year, $8 00
do six months, 5 00
do three months, 3 50
The Post is issued every Saturday, and contains
Complete and Reliable Intelligence!

From every point of the Territory.
Anything that relates to the Mining and Agricultural interests of
Montana, will always be found in its columns.
► All persons should send a copy of the Weekly Post to their
friends and relatives in the States. It will be sent from the office of
publication to any address.
Transcriber’s Notes
Minor errors or omissions in punctuation have been fixed.
Page 6: “sojurn in the gulches” changed to “sojourn in the gulches” and “sedate
inhabiants” changed to “sedate inhabitants”
Page 8: “source of “difficulites,”” changed to “source of “difficulties,””
Page 11: “deringer” changed to “derringer” and “all prevading” changed to “all
pervading”
Page 14: “ruffians and marauder” changed to “ruffians and marauders”
Page 20: “under the serveillance” changed to “under the surveillance”
Page 25: “was jound naked” changed to “was found naked”
Page 31: “unfortnuate pair” changed to “unfortunate pair” and “preceeding them”
changed to “preceding them”
Page 33: “to strike to the” changed to “to strike to thee”
Page 34: “devine origin” changed to “divine origin”
Page 37: “Friends, however, interferred” changed to “Friends, however, interfered”
Page 38: “to wary to fall” changed to “too wary to fall” and “sieze hold of them” changed
to “seize hold of them”
Page 41: “assassinnation was” changed to “assassination was”
Page 42: “lover of whiskey” changed to “love of whiskey”
Page 46: “twelve o’clock m.” changed to “twelve o’clock p. m.” “would be enable”
changed “to would be enabled”
Page 47: “wollen scarf” changed to “woolen scarf”
Page 48: “double-barrell” changed to “double-barrel”
Page 53: “wandered what had become” changed to “wondered what had become”
Page 55: “ows its euphonious appellation” changed to “owes its euphonious
appellation”
Page 56: “seasonable conviction” changed to “reasonable conviction”
Page 58: “two Road Agent” changed to “two Road Agents”
Page 59: “You’r the man” changed to “You’re the man”
Page 61: “tremenduous roar” changed to “tremendous roar”
Page 69: “friends, sweetharts” changed to “friends, sweethearts”
Page 70: “burry Dillingham” changed to “bury Dillingham”
Page 76: “of coarse” changed to “of course”
Page 77: “eithers of the robbers” changed to “either of the robbers”
Page 78: “the milenium” changed to “the millennium”
Page 80: “ceasless and active wickedness” changed to “ceaseless and active
wickedness”
Page 82: “embryo or the order” changed to “embryo of the order”
Page 83: “Demsey’s Ranch” changed to “Dempsey’s Ranch” and “emergining half
drowned” changed to “emerging half drowned”
Page 86: “little experience prevent” changed to “little experience prevented”
Page 89: “far to astute” changed to “far too astute” and “befor Ives” changed to “before
Ives”
Page 93: “exhile from Montana” changed to “exile from Montana”
Page 94: “acqueous sympathy” changed to “aqueous sympathy”
Page 96: “was ubiquitious” changed to “was ubiquitous”
Page 102: “to strong for” changed to “too strong for” “one of the crisis” changed to “one
of the crises” “they were to strong” changed to “they were too strong”
Page 104: “matters to extremeties” changed to “matters to extremities” and “simpathies
of all men” changed to “sympathies of all men”
Page 105: “possossion of a citizen” changed to “possession of a citizen” “Romain said”
changed to “Romaine said”
Page 111: “enlivend the spirits” changed to “enlivened the spirits”
Page 114: “his quondom” changed to “his quondam”
Page 116: “calm and quite” changed to “calm and quiet” “lantarn and some stools”
changed to “lantern and some stools”
Page 117: “A lable” changed to “A label”
Page 120: “there red perplexity” changed to “there read perplexity”
Page 121: “the of charge” changed to “of the charge”, “to accouut” changed to “to
account” and “caused alleged received” changed to “cause alleged received”
Page 124: “Dueth John” changed to “Dutch John” and “close wacth” changed to “close
watch”
Page 128: “chained own” changed to “chained down” and “without much strugle”
changed to “without much struggle”
Page 130: “preceeding chapters” changed to “preceding chapters”
Page 134: “for repentence” changed to “for repentance”
Page 139: “addressed a gentlman” changed to “addressed a gentleman” and “Arbor
Resturant” changed to “Arbor Restaurant”
Page 141: “hung in pnblic” changed to “hung in public”
Page 144: “dis dying regards” changed to “his dying regards” and “to hang to long”
changed to “to hang too long”
Page 147: “GEROGE SHEARS” changed to “GEORGE SHEARS”
Page 149: “instantly siezed” changed to “instantly seized”
Page 150: “two hundred and fity” changed to “two hundred and fifty”
Page 154: “its perpetratration” changed to “its perpetration” and “Magruder” changed to
“Mugruder”
Page 159: “the neighberhood” changed to “the neighborhood”
Page 161: “therunto belonging” changed to “thereunto belonging”
Page 162: “off the trial” changed to “off the trail”
Page 163: “have forgotton” changed to “have forgotten”
Page 164: “to hard” changed to “too hard”, “six time” changed to “six times” and “had
everything been manged” changed to “had everything been managed”
Page 171: “what was intendend” changed to “what was intended”
Page 173: “seemed imposssible” changed to “seemed impossible”
Page 175: “his enemey” changed to “his enemy”
Page 178: “if ho” changed to “if he”
Page 179: “attendeant surgeons” changed to “attendant surgeons”
Page 185: “rode of with him” changed to “rode off with him” “regailing themselves”
changed to “regaling themselves”
Page 186: “unanimously condemed” changed to “unanimously condemned” “wagon-
boss order them” changed to “wagon-boss ordered them”
Page 187: “burry him” changed to “bury him”
Page 193: “impared his usefulness” changed to “impaired his usefulness”
Page 195: “diggins struck” changed to “diggings struck”
Page 196: “overpower by superior” changed to “overpowered by superior”
Page 197: “I am the gentlemen.” changed to “I am the gentleman.”
Page 207: “consciense oppressed” changed to “conscience oppressed”
Page 209: “loose his brains” changed to “lose his brains”
Page 217: “eroneous constitution” changed to “erroneous constitution”
Page 218: “been recommeded” changed to “been recommended”
Page 220: “sdeuction of” changed to “seduction of”
Page 222: “came to Calfornia” changed to “came to California”
Page 223: “believed the accoent” changed to “believed the account”
Page 224: “gang of mauraders” changed to “gang of marauders”
Page 225: “caused a by wound” changed to “caused by a wound” and “In Helana,”
changed to “In Helena,”
There are two chapters labeled XII in the original and no chapter labeled XXXII. This
has not been changed.

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Pluri-versality as a universal project is quite demanding. It demands, basi-

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