No easy answers: Artwashing
- Andrew Conroy
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Do we really want to just wash and go?
As more and more forms of ‘washing' emerge and take root in a cluttered cultural landscape, it wouldn’t be an enormous stretch to conclude that the 21st century is in a bit of a mucky state. Whether greenwashing, sportswashing, artwashing, woke washing, rainbow washing or bluewashing, power has developed a pathological obsession with latching onto noble and niche causes in order to help launder its image. You might have thought that greywashing was the older counterpart of youthwashing (‘co-opting young people in a self-serving manner without addressing their concerns,’ as Hedi Viterbo puts it), but it’s actually greenwashing in more muted form. Where greenwashing is loud, demonstrative, excitable and prone to making wild claims, greywashing takes a different approach: vague, ambiguous, full of loopholes and, well, actually a bit dull.
It’s tempting to take the view that, while not without its problems, all of this washing is generally a Good Thing; part of branding’s ethical awakening and a sign that late capitalism is not just a self-serving rascal but something that has grown up, cleaned up, and wants to Do Its Bit to help a world that has taken a weird and unnerving geopolitical turn. But this would overlook the fact that ‘the wash’ has been subject to much resistance and fierce criticism and can actually undermine and weaken the things it co-opts. In one of his Meditations for the anxious mind, Frankie McNamara points out that 'Pride used to be a protest. Now it's a QR code where the most powerful companies in the world get to advertise how ethical they are. For these corporations, queer struggle is just another way to launder their image as socially liberal.’
Sportswashing, perhaps the most prominent form of the wash, seems to be regarded as a slightly different beast, one where fans have been as open to criticism as the investors and institutions that use sport to cleanse their image. Fans, so the myth goes, will give anything for success and trophies, including turning a blind eye to questionable takeovers and suspect partnerships that cause rival supporters and critics to call foul play. But such is the noise and outrage that can accompany attempts to sportswash, it’s debatable how effective it is as a method of camouflaging or offering a surface-level rehabilitation of Dirty Deeds. Successive World Cups have been rife with horrific accounts of their human and environmental impacts, and the media space these stories take up means that those who try to use the event for the benefit of their own appearance are rarely given much leeway by commentators and critical fans alike.
Artwashing, by contrast, sits in a slightly different space. While sports fans might suppress their moral convictions for the odd Carabao Cup win and a tilt at European competition, the art world often trades its morals for mere survival. But artwashing is far from new: as Joanna Walsh notes, ‘Artwashing isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of art, and it has a history: since before the Medicis, art has been commissioned to make power look good.’ Because it doesn’t usually come with the rabid tribalism and intense rivalries of sport, art stands as an even more effective cloak because it wraps itself in progressivism, ‘good taste,’ and bourgeois refinement. It can also operate in a more stealthy manner. Claudia Seldin points out that property developers routinely weaponise temporary street art and independent galleries to rebrand areas:
Temporary artwashing is a cheap yet profitable strategy by developers to revamp the small-scale quickly with the aim of gentrifying the location prior to the completion of the construction, for the purpose of benefiting future sales. Additionally, they use this strategy to rebrand themselves (mostly digitally) as performers of an important sociocultural urban role in an attempt to clean up their negative image.
This is where artwashing operates with a quiet efficiency that sportswashing can only dream of. It takes the radical, localised energy of street art and turns it into a Trojan horse for land speculation. Before the spray paint has even dried, the community that inspired it is priced out. The local culture isn't being preserved as much as it is being hollowed out and used as a fashionable mask for corporate expansion.
In a digital age, does social media make it easier for companies to successfully wash themselves, or does it make it easier for activists to call them out? When it comes to art, what role should curators play in resisting artwashing within their own institutions? What, if any, responsibility do artists have when they discover their work is being funded or used by a company with a poor ethical record? Can a company successfully ‘reverse’ a poor reputation through long-term arts funding and patronage, or does the label of artwashing stick permanently? When activists stage protests inside galleries - like throwing liquids or gluing themselves to frames - does it help the cause against artwashing or alienate the public?
These are some of the things we’ll be touching on in this month’s No Easy Answers discussion group, which will be the last before we take a month off for our summer hols.
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