Contemporary Art and Class: Reassessing an Analytical Category

"The end of the workers’ movement is not the same thing as the end of either capital or the working class .... Indeed the class relation has only become more dominant since the end of the workers’ movement". It is one of the paradoxes of our time that, while statistical data reveal that societies are marked by social discrimination and staggering inequalities, the idea of class has virtually lost the political dimension that once informed it. Generally speaking, the term ‘class’ describes a group of individuals, within a hierarchical society, who share a set of politically relevant socio-economic attributes. But irrespective of how it is framed, the notion of class is today often dismissed as obsolete, or reduced to being merely descriptive and ideologically neutral even when it is not confused, as in the Great British Class Survey, with the notion of status. The supposed obsolescence of class affects not only the notion of a ‘working class’, but also, and perhaps more surprisingly so, that of the ‘bourgeoisie’, a category which not long ago seemed indispensable for social and cultural analyses.There are grounds to argue, however, that ‘class’ should not be expunged from, but rather urgently reinserted into, the conceptual armature of the humanities, not least because, as Beverley Skeggs has maintained, today class is so ‘insinuated in the intimate making of self and culture that it is even more ubiquitous than previously articulated, if more difficult to pin down’.