In her PhD dissertation (2017) Frances Hatherley discussed three working class artists who had risen to prominence in the art world but whose core class content had never been discussed by the critics. She makes “three case studies, each addressing aspects of working-class femininity: Jo Spence’s Class-Shame series, the photographs collected in Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh, and Carol Morley’s film The Alcohol Years.” Rather than simple pointing to the absence of analysis Hatherley creates an idea of an Anti-Pygmalion Aesthetics with which to better understand the class aspects of the work of these artists. This doctoral thesis is dynamite in the foundations of the classist art establishment.

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The level of inaction from many within the profession’s establishment is both deafening and revealing. To quote US novelist and activist James Baldwin: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you [don’t] do.”

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Introduction

It has been quite difficult to write this seminar.  The difficulty has not been in knowing what to say, but in recognising the responsibility that comes with saying it.

Writing this rather than speaking free-form is itself a departure for me but one I need to do.  I need to write because I feel the energy, the archaic electricity of solidarity that means what I speak is already immersed in others.  I see this as important in ways far beyond the latest academic submission.

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The A Level fiasco of 2020 appears at first to be a series of manoeuvres in which an algorithm provided naked evidence of university access being biased.  A Levels – Advanced Levels – provide the educational borderland, the sifting space where young people get sorted in readiness for their university applications.  In the period between school leaving (aged 16) and with two years of study, the grades of these Advanced Level qualifications decide which university a student attends.  Each university and course sets its own standards – A* as the highest, and with conditions of entry based on the accumulation of as high a series of grades as possible.  Oxford, Cambridge, Russell Group universities and courses in Medicine and Law tend to set the highest tariffs.  Results day is an annual event in England and Wales as the populace focuses on who has achieved and who has not.  This carnival dominates late August media coverage with a stampede by broadcast and print media to join in the furore.  It all seems so natural, so common sense, although I had to add this description as I was reminded by an Italian colleague that such a system is not at all common, and is really rather ridiculous.

Ridiculous or not, this system is so well ingrained in the national psyche that we often miss the massive significance it has in maintaining social stratification.  The scandal of 2020 was that we saw things anew, stripped of the usual acceptance of success being rewarded/ failure being discarded we saw that the system was loaded, biased, unfair and discriminatory.  State schools were disadvantaged, private schools given priority, the better-off pupils finding easier access to the prestigious spaces of learning.  As goes every other year – except this year, the sifting process of examinations did not even take place.

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