In 1958 Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a groundbreaking book called The Affluent Society. In it, he wrote about how, even if we don’t realize it, the opposite poles of scarcity and affluence affect how we think about almost everything, from proper government economic policies to social interactions.
I started thinking of that book while I was walking through an art exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington DC. It’s called “With Passion and Purpose” and it’s scheduled to be up through October 5 in the East Building, but you never know, these days.
The description of the exhibit says that it’s loosely organized into themes of music, abstraction, figuration and portraiture, civil rights and social politics, as well as landscapes. I picked up on all that as I walked from room to room, but I also sensed that lurking behind these themes was a unifying thread of scarcity.
If you’re an artist and you’re trying to imbue your subject with dignity, it could mean that the subject is already thought to have it—like if you’re painting George Washington. But it could also mean that the artist is sensing a lack of it and is trying to right a wrong.
Traditionally, many Black American artists from Jacob Lawrence to Jean Michel Basquiat—and all these featured in this collection—serve as witness to various economic, social, and personal scarcities to which both they and their subjects are vulnerable. I found particularly hard-hitting a 1990 mixed media piece in the show called Poverty by Benny Andrews. Other standouts include a 2017 triptych called Resurrection Story with Patrons, by Kara Walker, and Rose Piper’s 1947 painting Young Woman’s Blues.
As we mentioned last week, most art before the Modern period portrayed abundance in some sort whether the artist was Rembrandt or George Caleb Bingham. The turning point seemed to be the tail end of the 19th century when a handful of artists decided the only way to be honest and genuine in their art was to portray society as they really saw it—awash in alienation, injustice, increasing economic inequality, and despair. This continued into the twentieth century. Think of popular American artist Edward Hopper, most of whose work—including his famous and iconic Nighthawks—portrays the alienation and disconnectedness in modern urban life. There’s scarcity, just not of the type we usually think of when we hear that word.
Understanding want and scarcity is very difficult for people who have an abundance. Art is one of the few things that can pull us across that frontier.
