‘The Class Ceiling’: How Art Galleries Create the Middle-Class

I moved here from a small town near Brighton 3 months ago*, where free access to world famous galleries was unsurprisingly out of the ordinary. Since then, I’ve spent many a Saturday walking along Southbank towards the Tate Modern, National Gallery, and Tate Britain’s exhibitions.

However, the more I examine my fellow exhibition attendees, and encounter the monoculturally middle and upper-class status of my friends who have gone to art school, the more the idea of the gallery as an inclusive space crumbles. In 2020, The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport’s report on ‘Taking Part’ found those with typically middle and upper-class professions were almost twice as likely to have visited a gallery in the past year (Great Britain. Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, 2020). Similarly, in 2015, the Warwick Commission released a report pointing to a stark gap in access to the arts, finding that 87% of museum visitors are from higher socio-economic groups (Neelands et al., 2015). According to the BBC’s Great British Class Survey, which surveyed 161,400 people, working classes are the least likely to engage in what they questionably refer to as ‘highbrow cultural capital’ – for example, art galleries (Savage et al., 2013).

These numbers nod to the arts’ deep-rooted wrangling with class inclusion. And it’s not just a surface-level mismatch between public taste and the contents of galleries. The art industry perpetuates a vicious cycle of exclusivity: the economic precarity of artistic careers, the systemic pathologisation of working-class tastes in the media, and the chronic failure of the arts sector to face up to its exclusivity perpetuate a sense that these free institutions are made for, and indeed help to create, the middle and upper classes.

Hold on: what is class, anyway?

Contemporary Britain has a complicated relationship with class. Since the 1970s, the UK government has used the Nuffield Schema (National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification) to categorise social class. The schema principally divides the working from middle and upper classes through occupation: distinguishing between those employed on ‘labour contracts’ and those on professional or managerial ‘service contracts’ (Savage et al., 2013). This view of class is used to quantitively measure its effects and economic characteristics.

But does this system capture the social and cultural ways we construct and experience class? Pierre Bourdieu would say not. According to Bourdieu, your class is not just defined by economic but also by cultural and social capital.

Cultural capital is the set of valued ways of acting informed by someone’s social field – for example, their upbringing. When we feel comfortable in a social field, Bourdieu argues, ‘there is ‘ontological complicity’; we are like a fish in water’ (Osa-Amadasun, 2013). Who feels like a fish in and who feels like a fish out of water manifests in engagement with cultural goods such as galleries. Visits to the gallery, how to behave within them, and how to properly appreciate ‘art’ as a distinct cultural form is defined as an acquired form of ‘embodied capital’ by Bourdieu.

Social capital is another predictor and characteristic of class. Social connections can be translated into cultural or economic capital, fuelling the disparity in pay between those raised in upper class households – which typically have high social capital – and those in working class households.

Hopefully, this begins to paint a picture of class as a complex, intersecting combination of cultural, social and economic characteristics.

Middle and ‘elite’ classes, alongside high economic capital, have high social and cultural capital. In contrast, the working classes tend to have poor economic, social, and capital (Savage et al., 2013). The nuances of these characteristics are important. These class characteristics are reproduced by the ability of elite classes to decide what cultural capital is. The elite classes are maintained by the labelling of cultural characteristics of non-elite classes as ‘lesser’.

And why does this matter? The interconnection between engagement in cultural spaces and class indicates that art galleries are a playing field for constructing and maintaining middle-class identity (Jackson et al., 2005). Learning about Bourdieu’s ideas a few weeks ago made something click in my head. Until then, the many day trips my parents took me on to galleries felt benign. Something which I understood as a chance to explore culture, and learn new things. To be honest, it was a little boring to a 7-year-old me. But now I realise: visits to galleries are a form of capital.

Why are all of my creative friends rich? The economic precarity of artistic careers

Your favourite artist probably has something in common with your own identity. Be it class, race, gender, or politics – I, for one, find myself habitually seeking some sameness in the artists I love. For 16-year-old me, Tracey Emin’s subversive projects of political rage reawakened my artistic taste buds, with relatable chaotic expressions of feminine rage. One of her pieces is an applique blanket – which would typically conjure up feelings of safety and domesticity – recording shocking and jarring descriptions of her rape in 1977. One corner reads ‘I’m not late – you’re lucky.’ A stark expression of the rage I feel at the widespread assault of women.

This begs the question – why would you visit a gallery if you didn’t see yourself represented there?

Part of working-class exclusion can be found in economic barriers to creative careers. To be an artist requires economic capital – oodles of it. Findings by the British Sociological Foundation place the proportion of working-class creatives in the UK economy at 8% (Brook et al., 2023) – the lowest level in decades. Research by Creative Access points to a lack of financial safety net as a barrier to young artists navigating precarious early careers (Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK, 2024), with unpaid internships, and casualised contracts as the norm – especially for those without wide social networks to establish their careers.

At this point, it is important to note the ways representational exclusion can intersect with other characteristics. The ways class is experienced are interrelated to the issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. Many articles could be written about the selective inclusion of women only in the form of nudes in art galleries (Hessell and Rudnick, 2024), and the impact this has on inclusion in the art world. However, for the sake of concision, my article attempts to focus on the commonalities of working-class exclusion.

Broadly, it’s not hard to see how the underrepresentation of working-class artists translates into a feeling that the art world – even a free outing to a gallery – isn’t for you.

Nathan Wyburn, a working-class portrait artist from Ebbw Vale, cites his sense of being out of place as deep-rooted in material barriers to the art world. He saw being an artist as an unrealistic prospect from a long and short-term perspective – from being unable to access conventional art materials as a child to being unsure he could earn a steady income. To solve this, he used affordable materials – notably marmite on toast. In an explanation of his portrait of Simon Cowell made of slices of Marmite on toast, he pointed to his need for affordable materials:

“I was buying things like a loaf of bread to make a toast artwork instead of a canvas that would have cost £30 and some oil paints that would have cost £100,” (BBC News, 2023).

He links this to his aversion to art galleries:

“Quite often there’s a bit of a fear towards going into art galleries – ‘I can’t really go in there, I’m not posh enough” (BBC News, 2023)

Nathan points to class as the often-invisible buyer of access to the art world. When I was 16, I saw it at its root – parents splashing out hundreds of pounds throughout an A-level to provide their children with art supplies needed to create. And this is where it begins – a creative sphere dominated by those who can pay their way in.

Deeper than money: the gallery as capital

But is it all about money buying access to the art gallery? Well, the art gallery is a symptom of what makes class so complex in the UK. Not only do they represent class, but they are key to its creation.

As a 15-year-old, I remember being baffled at the stagnancy of the Tate Modern – something I now attribute to a hyper-individualist creative culture. Indeed Banksy – the anonymous working-class graffiti artist, has denounced the art gallery’s value as a way of providing access to art. In 2015, he criticised its ‘“predatory art speculators”, denouncing the museum as ‘a bad place to look at art’ through its ‘‘over-corporate blandness’ (Banksy, 2015). Visiting for the first time with friends, the people standing silent, sedate, and ‘thoughtful’ in front of each piece felt like a bizarre performance. The gallery had a subtle, unacknowledged sense of detachment.

Simone Scherger and Mike Savage (2010), Sociology Professors at the University of Manchester, define the art gallery as a form of cultural capital used to reproduce a ‘feel for the game’ in climbing the class ladder. They’re not only implicitly exclusive – as Nathan Wyburn’s account of being a working-class artist states – but a tactic of reproducing the middle class.

The Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy report (2005) describes the gallery as possessing ‘symbolic baggage’. Galleries aren’t being visited by the working class because they fundamentally represent and create the middle and upper classes. Devine (2004) notes that cultural socialisation is essential to class mobility: working-class parents who produce middle-class children apply similar strategies to their middle-class parental counterparts. To enter the gallery is to become middle class. With wealthy artists and wealthy observers, the gallery is made by and for the ‘taste’ of the middle and upper class.

No space for the working classes: The classist construction of taste

The gallery perpetuates the idea of ‘taste’ as a middle-class construct through the chronic erasure of working-class-ness. When these spaces are used as tools for intergenerational maintenance of class (Scherger & Savage, 2010), to be working class in the art gallery is pathologised.

Evans and Whiting (2024) say that British art galleries sideline working-class identities to maintain for fear of it being detrimental to their image. Fleming (2021) writes that diversification of the gallery is often synonymized with a decline in quality, as both the viewers and curators of galleries enforce their exclusivity.

This often has a financial motive – the state funded gallery is often dependent on donations and thus prioritise wealthy audiences and fail to diversify their curators (ibid). Nomination and recruitment processes are made to prioritise familiarity. career advancement, and wealth. This leads to wealthier backgrounds dominating the boards of galleries and failing to deal with the deep-seated wrangling of the sector with class inclusion.

The symbolic baggage of the gallery can also lead interest in working-class talent to be voyeuristic. Natalie Chapman, a working-class artist, notes the explicit sense of discomfort in galleries towards her class – despite her beautiful portraiture drawing on themes of unemployment, drug abuse and her transitory childhood:

We want to see the work, but not its roots, the product but not the class. Explicit working-classness is not welcome in the clinical gallery as it goes against its ‘classy’ identity.

This dynamic might be less obvious to those who dominate the gallery as their characteristics fit a meritocratic and behavioural standard. The art gallery is often seen as a performatively neutral space – the arts are ‘democratised’ to anyone who wishes to visit while working-class people’s exclusion from visitorship and creative careers is erased.

Bourdieu’s work allows us to see this as amounting to symbolic violence: the specialisation of the gallery towards middle and upper class audiences and employees (Evans and Whiting, 2024) acts as a subtle but nonetheless effective way of reinforcing exclusion. As Andersen (2021) writes, under meritocratic ideas of society which permeate the gallery, working-class identities must subordinate to the middle class, therefore not ‘disrupt’ its ‘classy’ brand.

As a characteristic of the middle class, the gallery perpetuates a vicious cycle of exclusion. The economic precarity of artistic careers leaves those with financial safety nets scrambling for a few poorly paid roles. This lack of working-class artists makes visiting galleries a form of cultural capital used to create middle and upper-class adults. Against a backdrop of pathologised working-classness, when visiting the gallery we become victims of upper-class individualism which sanitises the gallery from critical dialogue on the chronic but invisible ‘class ceiling’

A way Forward?: Breaking the class dynamic of the gallery

All in all, the art gallery needs a revamp.

In times of economic downturn, with politicians pointing to the light as the end of the tunnel of ‘economic growth’, it is hard to argue for revitalising the creative sector. So perhaps it must be left to the creative sector itself to try and fix its wrangling with inclusivity.

I was recently inspired by meeting Freya Aquarone, a Mentoring Officer at Arts Emergency – a charity helping underrepresented people break into creative industries through tutoring with industry professionals. The gravity of her work left an impression on me for several reasons. It tackles exclusion with the help of artists inside the industry – using them to provide underrepresented groups with the cultural and social capital needed to break into artistic careers, dismantling the sector’s typical individualism and subsequent complicity that creative professionals have in exclusion.

Moreover, it reflects a creeping scepticism of high-level institutions. Maybe the future of art isn’t to be found in our major institutions – which are too often sanitised and devoid of the diversity of background needed to muster universal public benefit. An article in DAZED (Waite, 2023) celebrated the opening of ‘Unknown Friends’, an exhibition by arts charity Hypha Studios and the Working class Creative Database in an unused office block in central London.

The Working Class Creatives Database is another organisation that ‘puts working-class creatives at the forefront; A space for conversation, connections, and sharing of opportunities, skills, and knowledge’ (Working Class Creative Database, n. d.).

This gives us a hint at what a truly inclusive space could look like. Found outside the prominent publicly funded institutions: a space critiquing power structures; one of collectivism, dialogue, and shared – not exclusive – forms of social and cultural capital.

*at the time of writing