Poor Artists by The White Pube review – how to make it in the art world | Books

The White Pube, the shared identity of critics Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, has always greatly advanced the idea of ​​art criticism. The name is an ironic twist on both the “white cube” method of art presentation and the blue chip gallery of the same name. The pair set up a website in 2015 and have become notable essayists and critics who have refused to conform to the expectations of the art world establishment. Every time they write, they seem to ask themselves and the reader: What is criticism?

Poor Artists is their first book, and although they tell us in the introduction that we are “reading a piece of art criticism,” they also ask us to “let go of any expectation of rationality.” Most art reviews are not about a fictional main character, various monsters and ghosts, or a novel-like narrative arc. The book focuses on Quest Talukdar, an aspiring artist who learns how the art world chews up and spits out its artists. Muhammad and De la Puente build the book around Quest’s quest (ahem) to make it as an artist. For the book, they interviewed 22 anonymous artists and art world figures and used this material as the basis for a series of strange Ali Smith-style vignettes featuring talking babies, zombies, a professor made from discarded art, beheaded critics, etc the ghost of Gustave Courbet, among other curiosities. Also interspersed are short chapters about real works of contemporary art, often performances that critique the art world itself, as well as references to real artists, galleries and people.

Quest is a kind of fictional amalgam; It combines De la Puente’s Liverpool identity, Mohammed’s love of old paintings and their shared experience at Central Saint Martins, where they met as art students exhausted by the commercialization of the London art world. But she is also an inherently empty figure, for she is a vessel for the competing, conflicting voices of the people she encounters, who in turn are mouthpieces for the views of the White Pube and the various people he has interviewed. The constructed, representational nature of the book’s structure is extremely didactic, sometimes even painful. But the faster it got, the stronger and more hopeful I could feel the authors’ narrative. It seems written for readers who have not previously had the space or guidance to think about how art is valued and policed. Unlike many artistic texts, it is not written for other critics.

At its core, the book attempts to solve the thorny, eternal problem of what art is. Quest’s struggles are based on questions about the meaning of art and how it should exist in the world. Within book art, art is defined variously as something that “begins where language ends,” “simply something someone did because they wanted to,” “an interpersonal skill that one can practice and use to improve one’s… to question your relationship to the world” and so on, an opportunity to “change something and have it change you in return”. Quest never resolves these conflicting definitions of what she wants to do with her life. She tries to find a way to deal with her insolvability.

Poor Artists critiques the art world as it exists: the convoluted funding applications, the sycophantic gallery dynamics and snooty collectors, the art schools that overpromise and underdeliver, and the poverty and precarity of life as a working artist. It is not particularly critical of any art per se, except to disparage “beautiful.”” Art designed to appeal to “Magpie” collectors and influencers.

Sociopolitical criticism stands here for art criticism in the same way that it often stands for contemporary art. Muhammad and De la Puente examine dysfunctional structures of inequality through Quest’s naïve eyes, but it is beyond the scope of the book to think particularly critically or interpretively about the art she sees and makes. The conclusion is simply that it should be easier to be an artist and that there should be room in the world to do things just for the joy of doing them. What happens next is unclear: How would the fabric of society change if we recognized the centrality of art to the human experience? The many voices in Poor Artists make us think about how we can find out.