The White Pube’s new book exposes the dark side of the art world

Poor Artists  – a new book by art critics Gabrielle de La Puente and Zarina Muhammad, published by Penguin this month – is based on extensive research, interviews with 22 people and over a decade’s worth of insider experience, but it’s far from being a one-note polemic. It’s kind of uncategorisable: technically it’s non-fiction, but it reads more like a wild, surrealist novel, following a composite character – Quest Talukdar – as she journeys through the art world, struggling, selling out and eventually arriving at something like peace. 

Muhammad and de la Puente have been ruffling feathers in the art world since 2015, when they launched The White Pube – a collaborative project which publishes criticism, reviews and essays; organises grants for working-class creatives, and in 2021 launched a manifesto for a new art world, which railed against racism and nepotism in the industry and demanded Universal Basic Income and affordable housing for everyone (not just artists). Poor Artists, their first book, expands upon the themes that have preoccupied the pair throughout their career, and it’s every bit as witty, provocative and irreverent as the writing that has made their name.

While it is concerned with the specific experiences of artists in contemporary Britain, the book makes an appeal for a more universalist politics, and advances a vision of art as something for everyone: artists are not positioned as a separate and distinct class, deserving of special treatment, but as people struggling with the same problems which have been inflicted on the population as a mass scale. It’s bleak and infuriating in parts, but hopeful too. I came away from it feeling both inspired by the possibilities of what art can be, and saddened by how those possibilities are frustrated by grotesque inequality, and the grubby, cynical and predatory ways in which the industry around it operates.

I spoke with de la Puente and Muhammed about the process of writing the book, whether people can buy their way to success, the problems with government funding, the art world’s silence about Gaza, and more.

How did you create Quest Talukdar, the book’s protagonist?

Zarina Muhammad: She came along quite late, after we had been writing for about five months. She’s called Quest because Q is the letter halfway between G and Z, and Talukdar is my grandmother’s maiden name. It also feels like a fitting name, because she goes on a hero’s journey through the art world – we were thinking a lot about dramatic structure, because it’s so different to the kind of criticism we’ve been writing in the past.

Gabrielle de la Puente: We wanted the book to be educational, to some degree, like a weird textbook that shows how the mechanics of the art world operate. Quest feels like the perfect Gandalf figure for that, because at the start of the book, she gains a little bit of information, then she goes to level two, she gains a bit more, and then it’s level three. She moves through the book like it‘s a game, until she gets to the final boss – the Art King – and just vomits in his mouth. 

And how was the content of Poor Artists informed by the interviews you did?

Gabrielle de la Puente: One of the conclusions we got from writing the book is that community in art can sometimes be more important than money. If you’ve got people who inspire you and artists to learn from, maybe you don’t need to go to art school. If you’ve got people that you share your resources with, maybe you don’t need funding. And I think that politics – that we need to do things together rather than try to go it alone – came through in how the writing happened. It didn’t matter that any one person said this or I said this or Zarina said this; it just became a shared project. 

So much of Poor Artists is about how material conditions affect people’s ability to produce art, and in particular the housing crisis. What kind of effect is that having?

Zarina Muhammad: We’re speaking from different contexts. From my end in London, it feels like I’m still struggling with the question of how you are meant to pay your rent, pay for rent on a studio, and still fit in the time to actually make things. The housing crisis affects everyone, across all sectors, but artists in particular have to deal with precarity on multiple fronts, with their pay, with their housing, and with their studios. Studios are so expensive and often in precarious locations; the rug’s always going to be pulled out from underneath you.

Gabrielle de la Puente:  Affordable studio spaces in Liverpool have completely evaporated. In the ‘Sheila’ chapter at the end of the book, the artist group is only able to be there because they’re property guardians of a disused space, which is autobiographical, but that space doesn’t even exist anymore because it got turned into a fucking paintball experience. The path for artists in Liverpool is getting smaller and smaller. People feel like they have to leave for other cities, but once they do, they find that the same issues exist everywhere. 

When we interviewed people for the book, the most amazing solution to the housing crisis was also the most depressing: we found someone who was living in their studio secretly, in a compartment they’d built in the walls, hiding from the security guards and pissing in a bucket at night. That’s kind of cool, but it’s also really shit like that we would have to put our bodies through such stress and discomfort to hold on to the thing that we want to do. 

The most amazing solution to the housing crisis was also the most depressing: we found someone who was living in their studio secretly, in a compartment they’d built in the walls, hiding from the security guards and pissing in a bucket at night – Gabrielle de la Puente

One of my favourite chapters of the book is when Quest attends Will’s gallery opening and realises he’s paid for everything himself. Can people really just buy their way to success in the art world?

Gabrielle de la Puente: We have a monthly grant where we give a working-class creative 500 quid. We get all these applications from different people and a lot of what they are saying is: ‘I’ve had this one amazing opportunity come in and everyone thinks I’m successful now, but I’m not. I haven’t got any money, I’m living in a shit hole, and I can’t afford to go back to London to try to audition for more things. So is that it for my career now?’ I see that happen all the time, and we try to make them feel better with one £500 grant that’s not going to do anything – it’s like passing the same 20 quid between your mates, just on a larger scale. 

And I also see the opposite of that, which is the people who can afford nice materials. There’s a big difference between a painting done on a ready-made canvas from Home and Bargain versus someone who was able to buy an unprimed canvas. They’ve got all the tools. They’ve got the high-end oil paint. They’ve got the studio space to be able to stretch their own canvas. The finish of that work at the end is going to feel more luxurious and unfortunately, more professional. It’s painful to know how many artists exist in this country, but can never be taken seriously because they can’t afford the bare minimum to make the art they’ve got in their head a reality.

Arts funding in Britain is notoriously bad. But beyond that scarcity, the book also critiques how government funding can force artists to adhere to a narrow definition of ‘public value‘ and incentivise certain kinds of work, in ways that might be quite limiting. What are some of the problems with the current model?

Zarina Muhammad:  ‘Public value’ feels like a fair cop when it is the public purse, so that’s not necessarily the location of my specific gripes. But there is an ever-shrinking pot of public funding, and that pot gets laundered through galleries and institutions. They are the gatekeepers, they are the arbiters of what is good and tasteful, and what is worthy of that public money, as opposed to the funding going directly to artists. There are other models that exist in various places across the world, some of which we mention in the book: Norway has a working grant where artists can apply for a part-time stipend for a few years; there’s currently a test-run trial of a Universal Basic Income for artists in Ireland. And historically, Leo Castelli [an art dealer] had artists on payroll who could just produce regardless of what sold. 

The market obviously puts pressure on artists to produce certain kinds of work, but I also think there are so many artists who have to fit the shape of their ideas into the specific hoops of public funding. Public value is a fair thing to ask for, but when it’s the only source of stable funding, it does place a demand on the work that people are producing. It’s worth questioning that, and the effect that it has on the art that we see.

What do you think about the art world’s response to what’s happening in Gaza? It feels like a meeting point of so many of the book’s themes.

Zarina Muhammad: When the government takes away funding, rich people fill the gaps. And who are rich people? They’re people who have got money in unethical ways, because [distribution] of wealth doesn’t happen ethically. There have been so many examples of arms dealers like the Zabludowiczs existing in the art world and funding London galleries. I think the sharp end of organising in the art world is now the Strike Outset campaign [against the Outset Contemporary Art Fund], which we are media partners with. It‘s a refusal to work with Outset, a refusal to have your work bought by them, and a boycott of their activity in any form. Outset’s Founder and Director is Candida Gertler. She and her husband Zak are close personal friends with Benjamin Netanyahu – they hosted his 70th birthday party at their home in Tel Aviv. Zak Gertler has donated to Netanyahu’s political campaign and to the Jewish National Fund, an organisation which funds illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And they have been funding so many different projects and institutions across the art world.

There’s quite an odd divide where artists on the whole lean quite progressive, but institutions are really slow to change, and I think that’s because their funding models are so tied up with various different stakeholders that artists don’t have access to. So it becomes this collision where artists want some kind of statement and institutions have their hands tied, regardless of how the people within those institutions feel as citizens.

Gabrielle de la Puente: I agree with that, but I think a lot of it is just racism as well. The difference between the response to the war in Ukraine versus the genocide in Palestine is night and day. Everyone was willing to hang Ukraine flags in galleries and put on shows by Ukrainian artists, instantly. And since then… I think the silence says a lot.

Poor Artists is out now