All art isn't political

But arts education is being run by former politicians who are pushing a purposeful agenda onto a realm they don't understand

Tuition fees protests, 2010. Source: Telegraph

For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs. Thoughts on Writing uses language as a way into wider cultural and political issues.

This post was sparked by a recent Creative Review article titled How much should arts unis be pushing purpose? The article is paywalled, so you may have to rely mainly on my account of it.

Initially, I was encouraged by the questioning framing of the headline. But the article leans heavily in the ‘Of course they should be pushing it’ direction, albeit with nods towards providing employable skills “even to those employers or clients who don’t themselves have the same purpose-driven priorities”. There are contributions from Pete Thomas, course leader at Liverpool John Moores University, and Sana Iqbal, designer/strategist and relatively recent graduate.

But the main contributor is Polly Mackenzie, recently appointed Chief Social Purpose Officer (a new post) at UAL.

Let me get straight into what I found remarkable about the article—and it’s meant more as a general observation, rather than anything personal.

As you’d expect from the job title, Polly Mackenzie is a champion of purpose and sees it primarily as a bottom-up demand from a new generation of politically aware students: “I think that the increasing movement towards thinking of art as a form of activism, and as the artist as a citizen, is both exciting and important and part of a wider sense of purpose, I think, across the whole higher education sector, actually.” She goes on: “the momentum for that comes from the students.”

Given my morbid interest in purpose, I found myself wondering how people end up being Chief Social Purpose Officer at UAL, and it led me to a realisation that should strike you as weird, maybe even staggering, at least if you’re old enough to remember the politics of 2008-2012.

How many of today’s politically aware UAL students are aware that their Chief Social Purpose Officer was Nick Clegg’s Head of Strategy for the 2010 election campaign and then Director of Policy from 2010-2015, during the time of the infamous u-turn on tuition fees and consequent trebling of fees to £9,000/year? The u-turn that saw students take to the streets in a blaze of incandescent rage (pictured at the top of this post)?

I don’t mean this as a criticism of Polly Mackenzie herself. There is a coherent argument that the Lib Dem tuition fees pledge was a mistake and the increase could even be defended as progressive. (I’m not making that argument, just acknowledging it exists.) Either way, politics is messy and imperfect. And people are entitled to move on to other careers without necessarily being held accountable for life.

But Chief Social Purpose Officer? Leading the charge for ‘art as a form of activism’? All of it unquestioned or even mentioned in the Creative Review article? It’s hard to see it as evidence that people are more politically aware than ever.

And it gets weirder.

My morbid research reminded me (I think I half-knew) that James Purnell is Vice Chancellor at UAL—former Work and Pensions Secretary and Culture Secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, before resigning with an overt swipe against his leader, and eventually leaving Labour Party politics altogether.

And so it was that I found myself reading James Purnell’s LinkedIn. And I discovered that he’s fallen under the spell of a name we’ve heard round these parts before…

Sinek!

Every time!

I’ll give Purnell some leeway for including that “for good or ill” disclaimer—I’m with the ill crowd. But it’s a testament to Sinek’s undoubted charisma that he has been able to turn such a lightweight, pseudo-scientific story into such an influential talk and book—to the point where he’s influencing a former cabinet minister and Vice Chancellor at one of our leading creative universities. I wish I could do it!

But all this is prologue to a serious point I want to explore.

In Polly Mackenzie and James Purnell, we have two former politicians leading a social purpose agenda at UAL, which trains 19,000 students in design, advertising, fine art, fashion, programming, performing arts and much more besides. It’s a highly consequential case of what I’ve talked about in these posts before—purpose parasitism. Purpose doesn’t create its own institutions, it takes over the creative ones. And it will continue squatting there like a toad until artists use their wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off.

And all of this is more urgent than it might appear.

Read the Creative Review article and you would be forgiven for thinking—what’s the problem? What’s the issue with teaching creative students to think about sustainability when they’re creating the fashions of the future, or designing for disability when they’re creating software, or choosing their clients with care if they’re working in advertising and branding? Surely that’s self-evidently a good thing?

To which I answer: exactly. It’s self-evidently a good thing. If you leave creative institutions to teach creativity, and leave creators to pursue their craft, then it’s an insult to think this ground wouldn’t be covered. All of these issues are part of the creative challenge—it’s why we need creativity. And while the challenges evolve over the years, the bigger question of professional ethics isn’t new—and it’s the most ahistorical arrogance to think it is. To single out graphic design as just one case, do these people know about the First Things First manifesto from 60 years back? Or the brilliant analysis of it by Michael Bierut, where he compares it to “witnessing a group of eunuchs take a vow of chastity”? Or the moral introspection of Bill Bernbach and others, which I’ve touched on in previous posts? These debates have been going on for decades, at a high and thoughtful level, all without being framed as ‘purpose’.

Because purpose is a different beast that comes with a different agenda. It eases people in by talking about nice things like diversity and sustainability, but there is a reason purpose exists now, as opposed to 60, 40 or 20 years ago. Since 2008 and the crash that brought down Gordon Brown, the bigger idea has been about reframing the role that business claims for itself in the world—not as a discrete realm where for-profit enterprises enjoy the privilege of limited liability in return for sticking to their limited remit (selling things for which there is a market, within the rules of a game set by government and social norms)—but instead as an alternative power centre that proudly sets out to shape wider society through talk of answering to ‘stakeholders’, for whom corporations decide what is best without giving them the actual stake of shares, salaries or votes.

If all that sounds high-flown, it gets real very quickly in the Creative Review article. Here’s one key paragraph, including quotes from Polly Mackenzie:

Although ‘art as activism’ has been around since time immemorial, it has often manifested as protest, she says, rather than actionable measures. In her role, she is keen to understand “our responsibility to actually drive those values into our industries in particular, but also into politics, into governance, into local communities”.

Note the framing here: artists and creators of the past were unfortunately too concerned with protest: shouting from the sidelines, from some place outside the realm of business, maybe Parliament Square. Now we’re more enlightened. It’s about ‘driving those values into our industries’. Yes, Mackenzie goes on to mention politics, governance and local communities too—there’s interesting ground there. But primarily it’s about driving change in industry—specifically, among the businesses lining up to employ these students lumbered with their massive debts.

All this is a clue to what’s really taking place here—it’s not students pushing a purpose agenda into industry; it’s a corporate purpose movement pushing its agenda back into creative education, hoping to convince sincerely idealistic students that corporate life is a reliable channel for their idealism.

This is the fundamental conceit of purpose: to frame corporations as a channel for personal moral fulfilment. It’s a fairy tale that allows people to feel good about themselves while taking the time-honoured corporate route into Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo or Unilever. If previous generations favoured ‘protest’, maybe it’s because they saw the necessary limitations and compromises of the corporate realm and recognised the spaces that lie beyond it: the spheres of art, community, religion, civic life and (to whatever extent it can escape business) government.

I’m not making an anti-business argument here. Businesses are fine inventions. One thing they can be fine at is paying you enough to have a decent life outside work, which might include all kinds of human creativity and flourishing—writing poetry, travelling the world, raising a family. They can also be hubs of community—places where you meet friends, even life partners. And they can be places where you might feel proud of something you’ve put into the world, if you’re one of the lucky ones.

But they’re also machines for making profit, and generations of decent people have been alert to what this entails. The pursuit of profit in a competitive market might lead you to make compromises or do dodgy things. So be on your guard: businesses are algorithms that will lead you in a certain direction without the correcting force of external regulation, or the internal check of your conscience and judgment. Purpose says otherwise: for-profits are imbued with moral purpose, and the more money they make, the more they will deliver on that purpose. That way, a thousand WeWorks, Theranoses, FTXs and Facebooks lie—and lie and lie and lie. And millions of disillusioned students-turned-employees follow in their wake: people who bought into the fairy tale and feel increasingly let down.

Designer Sana Iqbal gets into this in her honest contributions to the Creative Review article, where she is upfront about some of the pressures that have already come up in her career.

“When I was an intern, I remember working on a BP and Science Museum green-washing document, and felt the need to offset the evil by designing in the evenings for Stop the War Coalition,” she recalls. “I did question the senior designer on the ethics around the content, especially when it was aimed at children. Whilst the project still went ahead, I hope it made the senior team self-reflect. Students and junior designers may not be in positions of authority, but questioning evil is a small victory towards positive change.”

It’s a tale many will recognise, because none of it is fundamentally new. Previous generations of designers have wrestled with the same ethical challenges, in various gradations of grey. And most people will be familiar with the thought processes: Maybe it’s OK to work on that questionable project if it’s funding the pro bono thing you’re doing on the side. Maybe it’s a small victory if you speak out—but then has anything really changed, or is it just making yourself feel better, and maybe making someone else feel worse? (The senior designer no doubt had their own values and ethical calculations—and they can get complicated when you have salaries to pay or a family to support.)

None of this goes away over the course of a career, although financial and reputational success can allow you to be more selective over your work, perhaps specialising in non-profit and cultural sectors. Certainly, none of it goes away when a thousand corporations are continually telling a story of purpose. For years, Bulb was the non-evil alternative to BP—an energy B Corp with right-thinking values and best-in-class branding. It didn’t stop them costing taxpayers £6.5 billion, with murky stories emerging about how they were never that green in the first place.

So if there’s nothing new in all this, why am I so concerned about purpose?

The answer comes partly in this quote from Sana Iqbal, which includes one of the core catechisms of the modern age: All design is political. (You can also glimpse it in a contribution from Pete Thomas, where he nods towards the importance of teaching ‘criticality’.)

The idea that All design is political, or All art is political, or All everything is political has been around a long while—it was already established when I was a student getting my head around postmodernism and critical theory. But it’s become mainstream in the years since, to the point where it almost seems obtuse to argue against it. Don’t you realise that denying that All art is political is itself political!

That’s the problem with the argument—it’s a totalising philosophy that allows no escape, because to deny it is supposedly to signal your political naivety. And it doesn’t just apply to art, it subsumes everything into the political. All poetry is political, All floristry is political, All knitting is political, All astronomy is political. How could it not be, given that everything we do sits inside a web of power relationships and cultural assumptions?

This is how politicians end up running arts universities. Once you subsume art into politics, you have given up the whole game—all art ultimately becomes about a demonstration of the right political virtues, rather than a demonstration of craft, imagination, talent, humanity, transcendence. Of course, art can choose to be political (I did it by writing political poems every day for three years). But art is a different realm to politics: a different, deeper way of engaging with the world. And this is more than a philosophical argument—because subjugating creativity to politics leads to worse creativity.

You see this everywhere when you look at actual creative people. To pick a current case, Rick Rubin has been doing the rounds promoting his book The Creative Act. Listening to a recent interview, one insight that leaps out is that creativity is absolutely not about purpose or goals:

“It’s not done through thinking, it’s done through feeling and emotion and connection. Thinking happens after. When you see a movie you love… you’re not thinking ‘oh I love it because of this, this and this’… You just love it because you’re IN it. Afterwards, you might ask—why was this so much better than all the other movies I’ve seen? And then you try to figure it out. But it doesn’t happen the other way round. It’s the feeling that comes up in you that tells you it’s great, and then afterwards you try to reverse-engineer: why did I like it? And sometimes you can’t figure it out and that’s fine.”

This is such an essential aspect of creativity that I will now try to capture it in a new aphorism. Please imagine me delivering it on a TED stage with Sinekian charisma if that helps it work for you:

Creativity ends with why.

Get it? The why comes at the end, not the start. Instead of defining your reasons, values and goals at the outset, you start with openness and curiosity, and you follow unexpected detours and for-the-hell-of-it experiments. Somewhere down the line, you might reveal to yourself why you were doing any of this in the first place—or you might not. Either way, it’s not about pursuing a purpose, because that is necessarily a closed mindset: by focusing on an endpoint, you block yourself from noticing all the interesting detours along the way: the stuff that doesn’t fit with the route you planned in advance, but which might lead to the real thing you’re looking for.

Rick Rubin is talking mainly in the context of pure artistic expression, but when it comes to advertising and branding, the open mindset is even more important. The purpose-driven model of creative education urges young people to look inwards and define their values, before driving those values out into the world of business. But what if this is looking through the wrong end of the telescope?

Instead of thinking introspectively about their own values, what if young creatives were urged to look outwards? Don’t assume you have it figured out: realise the job is to communicate with people who don’t think like you. Embrace that and seek common ground among the differences. Aim to transcend the political with humour, awe, wonder, anger or the other emotions that connect us. And do it all with a humble appreciation that we’re all flawed and morally imperfect. As Rick Rubin says, “You’re putting yourself into it, flaws and all, weirdness and all, ugliness and all… Much of the great art that ever came out was originally frowned upon and vilified.”

Building your creativity on purpose dooms it to failure: you will always be outflanked by history. And in the here and now, it puts you in an uptight frame of mind, forever fearful of straying off the tramlines or being contaminated by the world around you. If your goals are truly political, go into politics—where you are sorely needed. But if you’re a creator, you choose a different life.

Imagine a world where 19,000 creators emerge every year, from one university alone, all with defiantly open minds and committed to their craft and the adventure ahead; all confident enough to see through the purpose spiel from the corporate employers, just as they see through the pledges of certain politicians. To me, that’s a more powerful idea than ‘All art is political’ or (to circle back to the opening quote from Polly Mackenzie) ‘the increasing movement towards thinking of art as a form of activism’. Both sound righteous, but they’re fundamentally an acceptance that art lives in the realm of the political, and answers to its masters. Art and creativity are bigger than that: they challenge the powerful by not recognising their power. If you want to make a politician feel uneasy, tell them this: all art isn’t political.

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Thanks as ever for reading. I’d be particularly interested to hear from any readers involved in creative education. You can comment, email, or try out the Substack Notes feature—still evolving but looks interesting.