{"id":132,"date":"2014-10-28T15:01:28","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T15:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=132"},"modified":"2022-03-13T10:41:45","modified_gmt":"2022-03-13T10:41:45","slug":"against-pocket-money-loans-critique-of-an-artwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"Against Pocket Money Loans: Critique of an Artwork"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have just seen a photograph of a new artwork that has appeared on Stroud Green Road in North London. A shop is decked out to look like a payday loans shop, but aimed at kids. There\u2019s even a promotion of the work in The Independent<\/a>. Perhaps this is just glib satire that needs to be left alone. But perhaps it is more sinister.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

It is fair that art might want to be socially critical – that works make incisions into everyday life. But what is the critique here? And who is it aimed at? The newspaper article says that this is a critique of consumerism and the type of advertising that payday loan companies use. So the answer is clear: this is an artist who is saying to the population of a poor part of London, I am going to show you how awful it is that you are duped into taking out these loans with high interest rates. I, obviously knowing better than you, I, not fooled by this type of advertising, will show you how bad it is. This is art schooled with the bourgeois consciousness never having experienced the real internal struggles that people in Stroud Green might have about whether they need to turn to loan sharks to put food on the table. As though the decision is taken lightly by people because of some adverts. As though they don\u2019t get it. Artists would do better not to project their own bourgeois myopia on to the lived suffering of others.<\/p>\n

And of course the solution to the suffering of others: someone with the capital or connections to take over a shop and the ability to get a plug in a national newspaper will make a glib ironic artwork that will teach the truth, unveiling that amid the enormous accumulation of commodities people struggle between debt and poverty – like those struggling people didn\u2019t know already, like they need some artist to speak for them. And not only that. As ever the critique of consumerism doubles back on itself and becomes the sales pitch of an entrepreneurial artist: the Independent says, \u201cThe shop, which will be open for two weeks on Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park, will highlight other aspects of youth consumerism by selling art prints deriding cash-for-gold pawn shops.\u201d If only people\u2019s real suffering could be allayed by the purchase of a morality token in the form of over-priced bad art: maybe some wish they could take this artist\u2019s derision of their intelligence into their homes and keep it forever. But the prints were never aimed at those who might have taken out loans, were they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have just seen a photograph of a new artwork that has appeared on Stroud Green Road in North London. A shop is decked out to look like a payday loans shop, but aimed at kids. There\u2019s even a promotion of the work in The Independent. 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