(roughly from the late 1960s to 2014, with interruptions)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n Many artists still remember what it was like to do, say, painting 10 or 15 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019d constantly be asked: \u201cWhy, when everything\u2019s on fire (did we even know back then what \u2018everything\u2019s on fire\u2019 really meant?), are you sitting here painting pretty pictures, selling an outdated medium, and endlessly repeating yourself? Have you even tried turning your brain on, comrade? The real brave artists are out there building complex trash installations in the name of progress, while you\u2019re just selling your soul to capitalism and clinging to the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2012, I was doing a master\u2019s degree in art at Kingston University. I painted, more or less in secret \u2014 afraid to show anyone. Because anytime someone brought in a painting for critique, the tutors would suggest turning it to face the wall. Or burning it, turning the ashes into jelly, and eating it. (And no, that\u2019s not my fevered imagination.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also recall a very commercial gallery, Hauser & Wirth<\/em>, exhibiting a giant ark overflowing with sacks. Any work \u2014 no matter how obscure \u2014 was accompanied by a dense wall of text proving the artist definitely knew who Deleuze was, and what an oneirosignum<\/em> might be. Viewers wandered through exhibitions wearing wise expressions, murmuring things like, \u201cElegant. Very elegant.\u201d The ability to appreciate visual poverty and dense theory was the mark of refined taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, wealthy collectors in sleek glasses happily bought installations made of cardboard scraps and beer cans \u2014 as long as they were doused in Deleuzian dressing. The market was lively enough to sell almost anything. People assumed such art would climb in value, just like boring but reliable investments like Picasso or Gauguin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever didn\u2019t sell was usually dumped in the nearest bin \u2014 a not insignificant amount of \u201cimportant\u201d contemporary art now floats around on garbage islands in the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that these \u201celegant\u201d artists rarely earned a penny from their art and mostly worked as graphic designers was not only accepted \u2014 it was seen as honourable.<\/p>\n\n\n It elevated them above the lowliness of bedroom paintings and gallery sales. Painting still existed \u2014 it even sold now and then \u2014 but only if served with a complex theoretical post-post-meta-meta garnish, with a faint aftertaste of capitalism critique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The audience, sipping Cristal, did not object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, the British art world was almost entirely white and British. Artists and collectors were submerged up to their Carrara-marble bald spots in a very specific European and North American context. Despite the fashionable anti-colonial wailing, there was little real interest in anything outside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (the peak period: 2014\u20132020)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n But the seeds of change were already sprouting from the very discourse that had dominated for decades. If you spend long enough critiquing European logocentrism, post-colonialism, and the like, eventually you have to start including people in art who aren<\/em>\u2019<\/em>t<\/em> white male grads of elite art schools. Migrants, people of other races, cultures, orientations, genders \u2014 and, as it turned out, not all of them wanted to read Deleuze and Bataille.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This shift might have remained theoretical if not for the arrival of international collectors and the sting of domestic recession. That combination started to whisper, not so subtly: if you keep letting only those in who know Benjamin Buchloh isn\u2019t a brand of booze, the whole thing might just collapse. And so the art world was forced to admit: not all artists and collectors wear delicate glasses, sport pale noses, or hold degrees in philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soon, long-winded explanations of \u201cphenomenological regressions in media transformation\u201d began to wither. In their place bloomed identity politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artworks came with the justification that someone with this identity<\/em> would naturally produce this kind of work<\/em>. If you came from a local cult, it made perfect sense to weave or sculpt tributes to that background. But for those without such identities, it suddenly wasn\u2019t clear what<\/em> they should be doing. Everyone began digging for a rare, precious, minoritised trait in themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those who couldn\u2019t find one no matter how hard they tried began expressing shame \u2014 about everything. That at least helped preserve the status quo. And so, despite the \u201ctextile biennale\u201d of 2017 in Venice \u2014 filled with traditional weaving, female practices, and plenty of na\u00efve ceramics \u2014 most successful artists remained white, cisgender, British or European men of a certain age.<\/p>\n\n\n What was most striking was how people who, just yesterday, couldn\u2019t discuss the weather without citing \u201cdisjunctive synthesis\u201d or \u201cthe empty signifier,\u201d suddenly rediscovered tarot and horoscopes, occultism and shamanism. It was like watching former Soviet Young Communist Leaguers suddenly starting to cross themselves in the ’90s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Painting began returning to the biennale and museum scene, but no longer accompanied by critical theory. After all, a canvas is a commodity and a relic of the European colonial tradition. Instead, works were now served with a unique identity sauce \u2014 suggesting that the painting organically sprouted from the artist\u2019s origin, gender, or oppression. Suddenly, everyone remembered female spiritualist painters like Hilma af Klint and began making what was now called \u201cspiritual abstraction\u201d: smears and gestures on canvas born not of form or composition, but of trance, ancestral voices, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s now hard to believe that Mayfair galleries once exhibited candy installations and life-sized bag-stuffed arks. These days, it\u2019s tough to find a major gallery that doesn<\/em>\u2019<\/em>t<\/em> focus on painting. Most abstract painting shows still come with texts about how the artist \u201cbreaks boundaries\u201d and \u201cchallenges everything\u201d \u2014 because mass-market still loves a good rebel, why wouldn\u2019t art? But usually, there\u2019s no real political or conceptual backbone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why? Probably because no one wants to scare off the collector who wandered in by accident. No one expects them to know Foucault or care about obscure rituals. They just need to buy something<\/em> \u2014 or the gallery shuts tomorrow. Be a slave trader, a serial killer \u2014 no problem. Just buy an abstract piece for your living room. The gallery will ensure the artist continues to \u201cquietly deconstruct\u201d the conventions of painting and sculpture, of femininity and masculinity, of human and too-human \u2014 but keeps silent on any real political issues with actual disagreement. It seems the capitalists have finally stopped funding critiques of themselves, and while minoritised identity is still \u201cimportant,\u201d it now feels more like inertia than a real trend. As for Deleuze \u2014 forget it. Irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you look, for instance, at the artists represented by one of London\u2019s leading galleries, Hauser & Wirth, you could loosely divide them into three groups: esoterica and Deleuze; identity and the local; and painting with a dash of minoritarianism. The first group last exhibited sometime around 2012, the second in 2017, but those working with abstraction, scale, and painterliness \u2014 they were on yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n In the biennale and museum context, things play out a little differently than in commercial galleries. There you\u2019ll still find rugs, Deleuze, and a range of oppressed identities with declared political positions \u2014 though increasingly toothless ones. Still, painting is starting to creep in even there. Museums are often state-funded, which means they serve the interests and uphold the values a state wants to see reflected. In the European and American lens, the main institutional line remains tolerance \u2014 a leftist discourse in art that effectively acts as a mandatory uniform for any kind of public expression. As a result, any artist applying for a grant will try to wrap themselves in whatever identity and values the museum in question is looking to promote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But state funding seems to be drying up. Projects feel increasingly commercial, saleable. It looks like the era of identity-leveraging may not last much longer. Which makes sense \u2014 you can\u2019t run an election campaign on tolerance alone, and the broader ideological support for \u201ceverything good against everything bad\u201d is fading fast. So now artists are left to sell their work more or less independently… And who shows up at that moment? That\u2019s right \u2014 painting. After all, even if an artist comes from the most oppressed and marginalised background imaginable, you usually can\u2019t tell from the painting. And if you discreetly omit a few personal details, you can even sell that same painting to the alt-right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sounds like good news, right? But some of these trends are worrying. First, it feels like support for the arts is shrinking from all sides \u2014 both public and private investment is dwindling. Second, the fact that the most popular medium is also the easiest to store and resell\u2026 doesn\u2019t that suggest that more and more people are anticipating forced migration, a quick liquidation of collections, and a mad dash toward the Canadian border?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another ever-shifting aspect of the art world is art education \u2014 the great machine that has churned out pale Deleuzians, vibrant rug-weavers, and abstract painters tearing down every boundary imaginable while muttering quietly into their sleeves. In the past 15 years, tuition fees at top British art schools have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled. Meanwhile, student intake is growing across the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I started the Painting course at the Royal College of Art in 2017, there were 45 of us in the cohort. Now, it\u2019s about 150. In 2010, one student would occupy a studio space; by 2017, it was two per room; by 2025, it\u2019ll be four. The number of one-to-one tutorials with tutors has dropped by almost a third since 2017, and with so many students, the quality of feedback has declined \u2014 it\u2019s simply harder to remember each person. Queues for technical workshops and libraries grow in step with rising tuition fees. Universities are gradually turning into diploma vendors, and students into either cash cows or just plain customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, while diplomas from the RCA, Goldsmiths, or UAL are seen as valuable and offer career prospects (especially in China), people will continue to pay for prestigious degrees \u2014 even if the education part quietly disappears. This bubble will likely burst sooner or later, but when that happens is anyone\u2019s guess. For now, everyone seems relatively content \u2014 except the rare student who wasn\u2019t born into an oligarch\u2019s family and can\u2019t produce \u00a350,000 a year for tuition (scholarships and student loans aren\u2019t doing great either). But every year brings a fresh crop of students, and they don\u2019t know how things were five years ago \u2014 they\u2019ve got nothing to compare it to. So they manage to teach themselves on their one square metre of studio space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the many dissatisfied are a few brave souls still determined to spread knowledge for something less than fifty grand. That\u2019s how independent art schools are born. Trouble is, their independence often means they can\u2019t sponsor student visas, and therefore can\u2019t admit international students \u2014 who, by the way, pay three times as much as domestic ones. That makes it very tempting for mainstream institutions to accept only foreign applicants. You end up with courses where 90% of students speak to each other in Mandarin. And independent schools also struggle to compete with the juggernaut marketing machines of the RCA, UAL, and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what does this all mean for the market? Each year, more and more artists graduate, competition skyrockets (for example, this year the Jackson\u2019s Art Prize had around 15,000 applicants), and it becomes easier and easier to find artists who fit a particular goal or niche perfectly. The days when an artist could afford to be erratic, unpredictable \u2014 unless you were Maurizio Cattelan-level \u2014 are gone. Artists are, first and foremost, an investment. That\u2019s always been the case, but rarely has it been taken quite so literally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a massive oversupply of graduates, art programmes, and lagging demand, no one wants to invest in someone seen as \u201crisky.\u201d Maybe their work is too varied to be easily recognisable, or they\u2019re the \u201cwrong\u201d nationality, or they speak too freely and might say something controversial tomorrow, leading collectors to panic. What the market wants are convenient, likeable artists \u2014 whose canvases can hang in a bedroom and show off the collector\u2019s refined taste. And there\u2019s no shortage of those. With such an abundant pool, you can select for maximum convenience and likability. Nothing personal \u2014 just business.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/raychan-kjq6cdyodam-unsplash.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a>Period 2: Identities, Textiles, and the Na<\/strong>\u00ef<\/strong>ve<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a>Period 3: Yet Another Return of Painting and Selling Your Soul to Satan (as Strategy)<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a>An Art Degree \u2260 An Education<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n
<\/a>The Artist as Investment<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n
<\/a>