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Estate agents see artists as their best friends, pioneers willing to venture into the danger zones of suburban sprawl bringing class and culture in their wake. The artist as a colonist, a missionary or evangelist, the curator as colonial officer!

Artists go where others fear to tread, a wonderful romantic vision of the artist as adventurer, a trope that feeds on the belief of the exploratory nature of art practice itself with a deep-seated site for fantasy in the faith of the process of ‘making’ as a journey of discovery. It is of course rooted in the Western history of subjugation and exploitation where the heroic is presented as the saving grace of forces of enslavement and domination. The mythic proportions abound: the metaphor of the uncharted landscape, the mind as a dark continent to be explored, artistic exploration as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the more libidinal desires of Rider Haggard or John Buchan. We also see the artist on Cameron’s journey,

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

At a time when much philosophy and certainly art theory has expunged absolutes, truths and anything that even gives a hint of being transcendental the artist hero somehow persists. In part this gives way to two complementary forms of separation that lead to guilt and finally self hate.

The first is the sense that artists are hard done by, forced by an ‘unaccepting’ society to struggle for their very existence. The forces of the establishment are rallied against them and they are fighting a guerrilla war against complacency, conservatism and cultural indifference. They seek out the poorer quarters of town, to live with ‘the salt of the earth’, to slum it. But with solidly middle-class backgrounds they are also ‘othered’ in the sense that the life of penury they are forced to enjoy is alien, and imagined as temporary. Guilt then is created in the gap between individuation as heroic gesture and the impossibility of identification with an imagined other that has little interest in their adopted indigence.

The second level of guilt echoes the first. The ‘art world’, ‘the art market’ is anything else than a site of struggle. It is a very comfortable, self–indulgent lifestyle of luxury and extravagance. Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Brice Marden et al, parade their success like peacocks and the move from garret to mansion seems a heartbeat away from Hackney, Kreuzberg or Dumbo. The market is a money laundering activity at heart and like any other stock exchange its chief concern is the generation of capital. The artist sitting in the freezing attic looking up to the stars sees their own career path as a move towards the penthouse or the villa in Antibes. In this sense Cameron’s hero’s journey has its triumphant return. Whilst the artists as they sit in cheap bars are railing against the evils of neo-liberalism hsip on an absinthe guilt by association.

My point is not to pick on artists’ self indulgent sang-froid or tar them with the same brush as the real estate developer but to delineate the territory of contestation. Recognising complicity is a step in developing strategies of refusal. Artists cannot place themselves outside of the site of confrontation of urban development they are often on the front line. And recognising that the movement of capital that inflates art prices is akin to the south sea bubble of real estate values is to acknowledge the role that art and artists play in maintaining this economy. Artists are amongst the lowest paid. A recent Swedish report showed that there has been little change in this in the last couple of years and sadly and perhaps not surprisingly, women fare worse than men. What the report also indicated that artists also have a much higher level of inherited income than average. What this implies of course that artists tend to emerge from more well to do middleclass families. This is perhaps hardly a surprise either but, looking at the make up of art schools and galleries, and biennials, and fairs, and art magazines one gets a picture rather of an opening up of culture than a reinforcement of existing class barriers.

The metaphor of colonisation is therefore more apposite. The colonist is the true subject of the middle class. The origin of the word colonise is from the Latin colonia meaning ‘country estate’. The colony is like the summerhouse that is so popular in Sweden; a place where you can go and rough it, get closer to nature and live the simpler life. Thus to live in the poorer parts of the city is like having a country house without all the mud, and bugs and lack of plumbing. The curator as colonial officer also seems a good fit. These were the middle management of the empire, the petty generals who enforced the rules and built the bureaucracy. Its is telling in the literature of the colonizers there are so many stories of them going mad or going native.