The Art World and The Kitchen Table

There is a sentence I have heard in different forms for years: the art world.

I have probably used it myself.

Who is in the art world? Who has entered it? Who has been accepted by it? Who is represented by the right gallery, shown at the right fair, collected by the right museum, invited to the right festival?

We speak about it as if somewhere there were a door.

And someone guarding it.

The longer I work with photography and art, however, the less convinced I am that this place exists.

Or rather, I think it exists, but only as one place among many.

Howard Becker understood this long ago when he called his book Art Worlds, deliberately using the plural. Art, for Becker, is not simply what happens between an artist and an object. It happens through networks of cooperation: the person making the work, certainly, but also the printer, technician, curator, editor, gallery, publisher, critic, collector, audience and all the people whose usually invisible work allows an artwork to enter the world.

Once you start looking at art this way, something shifts. The mythology of the solitary artist becomes difficult to sustain. And so does the mythology of the single art world.

I was thinking about this recently while reading a passage from Hettie Judah’s recently released book, How To Enter The Art World…AFTER a late start / a first career / raising children / caring for parents / recovering from illness / a crisis of confidence / leaving it in disgust, describing two places that could hardly seem more different: Art Basel Miami Beach and Asylum Studios in Suffolk. One belongs to the spectacular machinery of contemporary art: the fairs, collectors, celebrity sightings, champagne, money and visibility. The other is an artist-run environment where somebody staples blankets over a doorway so that children can watch a film next door, while tea and biscuits sit on a table.

Which one is the art world? The obvious answer is both.

But I wonder why it still feels necessary to say that.

Perhaps because we have become very good at confusing visibility with value.

Gregory Sholette offers an even more unsettling image. He calls the enormous territory of cultural production that remains largely invisible to major institutions the dark matter of the art world: informal, amateur, autonomous, activist, self-organised and non-institutional practices, alongside the enormous population of professionally trained artists who never achieve substantial institutional visibility.

The metaphor is beautiful because dark matter is not nothing.

We cannot see it, but without it the universe would behave differently.

And perhaps the same is true of culture.

Remove the people organising tiny exhibitions without budgets. Remove the photographers publishing books that will never enter major collections. Remove the people teaching workshops, editing other people’s work, running associations, writing applications, putting chairs out before openings and putting them back afterwards. Remove artist-run spaces, small publishers, volunteers, cultural managers, independent curators, people producing festivals while simultaneously making their own work.

Remove the people making things at night after their children have gone to sleep.

What remains?

Certainly not an art world I would particularly want to inhabit.

Sholette argues that this supposedly peripheral cultural production is not peripheral at all: the visible art system actually depends upon the much larger invisible ecosystem surrounding it.

And, strangely enough, Romania appears in the genealogy of this thinking. Sholette has spoken about being invited by curator Dóra Hegyi to the 2008 Periferic Biennial in Iași, Art as Gift, while he was developing the ideas that would become Dark Matter 

Perhaps that isn’t entirely accidental. Because Romania knows quite a lot about making culture in the gaps.

The Romanian art worlds

There is something peculiar about working culturally in Romania.

The institution is present and absent at the same time.

There are museums, universities, galleries, public institutions and funding mechanisms. There is AFCN. There are municipal programmes, European programmes, cultural institutes, embassies and private sponsors. Romania has even formally created the legal category of the professional cultural worker, with methodological rules for its registry introduced in 2025.

And nevertheless, much of the culture I encounter seems to exist through an extraordinary amount of improvisation.

One person is artist, curator, fundraiser, producer, communications department and driver.

A project exists because somebody lent a space.

A residency happens because somebody knew somebody with a house.

An exhibition happens because the artist found the money to print it.

A festival survives because twenty people perform jobs whose names will never appear on the poster.

Research into Romania’s independent cultural sector confirms the less romantic side of this improvisation: unstable income, lack of fixed employment and heavy dependence on external project funding have made precarity a structural feature of independent cultural work.

Yet something else has grown from those conditions. Micro-institutions.

People build for themselves the structures they cannot find around them.

There are plenty of examples in Romania. Celula de Artă began in 2017 in a small storefront window on Carol Boulevard in Bucharest, with a remarkably simple idea: art could be encountered directly from the street, at any hour, without anyone having to enter a gallery. Over time, that small space developed into an independent platform encompassing exhibitions, collaborations, residencies and international projects. It did not wait to become an institution in the conventional sense. It built its own context.

Newer artist-run spaces such as SCÂNTEIA+, meanwhile, are attempting to create ambitious exhibition contexts outside the traditional museum or commercial-gallery model. Together, these initiatives demonstrate something important: an artistic ecosystem can be built from the bottom up, rather than simply validated from the top down.

A particularly revealing example is Spațiul Indecis in Timișoara, an artist-run initiative that began quite literally because a group of artists decided to create the space they felt was missing around them. In its early years, the rent and running costs were covered from their own salaries and other work; only later did the group begin applying for project funding. What makes their story especially relevant is the contradiction they openly acknowledge: creating opportunities for other artists, organising exhibitions, writing funding applications and keeping an independent space alive can gradually consume the very time and energy they need for their own artistic practices.

These things are not waiting rooms for the real institution. They are institutions.

Perhaps smaller. Perhaps temporary. Perhaps precarious.

But real.

And perhaps we need to stop judging their success according to how closely they eventually resemble the structures they were invented to escape.

And then… there is time

There is another currency in the art world that we discuss far less frequently than money.

Time.

For years the mythology of the serious artist has required unlimited access to it.

Stay in the studio.

Travel.

Take the residency.

Go to the opening.

Stay afterwards.

Network.

Move cities.

Spend three months somewhere.

Be available.

Be visible.

Produce.

Repeat.

It sounds perfectly reasonable until another human being depends upon you.

Then, the geometry changes.

I am particularly interested in the artist who works at the kitchen table in stolen minutes around caring for a family-the image mentioned in the page I was reading-because suddenly this isn’t an anecdote at all.

It is another model of artistic production.

And perhaps another art world.

There is a remarkable Romanian interview in Revista ARTA in which the artist Anca Bodea is asked how she reconciles being an artist, professor, woman and mother. She refuses the premise of the question. She says she never experienced these identities as mutually exclusive. But she adds something crucial: no parent can maintain high standards in every role without help.  

That second part matters.

Because otherwise we turn resilience into another demand.

Look, she managed.

Yes. But how? With what support? At what cost?

Who looked after the child while she installed the exhibition?

Who cooked?

Who collected them from school?

Who stayed home when they were sick?

Who could accept the residency and who had to decline it?

Who had uninterrupted time?

Who worked between 10 p.m. and midnight?

These questions sound domestic. They are actually questions about the structure of the art world

Motherhood itself increasingly enters Romanian artistic practice rather than remaining hidden behind it.

Romanian artist Andreea Alunei describes her work as emerging from two intertwined events: the death of her mother and the birth of her daughter, and uses painting to hold mortality, motherhood, spirituality and cultural identity simultaneously.

Oana Tudose writes about motherhood as changing her position within an intergenerational inheritance of women, textiles, stories and care: she is no longer simply receiving what previous women carried but deciding what she herself will carry forward. That inheritance materialises in textile paintings, tapestries, sculpture and wearable objects .

I find this important.

Because motherhood is usually permitted into the biography after the important information.

Artist. Lives and works in. Exhibited at. Awarded. Represented by.

And somewhere outside the official biography there is the fact that somebody has been raising another human being.

But what happens when we stop treating care as the interruption?

What if it is part of the practice?

What if the interrupted time, repetition, anxiety, tenderness, domestic objects, children’s drawings, stitching, collecting, repairing, remembering and constant awareness that everything disappears are not obstacles standing between the artist and the work?

What if some of them are the work?

The Kitchen Table…

I keep returning to that kitchen table.

Perhaps because I understand it better than the glamorous opening.

An artwork made in stolen minutes around caring for a family.

There is something almost embarrassing about admitting how much work is made this way. We still prefer the studio photograph: enormous windows, unfinished canvases leaning against walls, beautiful disorder, the artist alone.

The kitchen table ruins the mythology.

There might be cereal on it. Homework. A laptop. Thread. Scissors. Prints.

A funding application that has to be submitted by midnight.

Someone asking where their socks are.

And an artwork in the middle of all of it.

Maybe that is not a compromised studio. Maybe it is simply another studio.

Claire Bishop’s writing on participatory practice complicates the picture further. If an artwork can consist partly of participation, pedagogy, encounters and social relations, the boundary around artistic production becomes increasingly porous. 

Then organising a workshop may not necessarily be something an artist does instead of making art.

Building a community may be part of the practice.

Publishing may be practice.

Curating may be practice.

Research may be practice.

Teaching may be practice.

Walking with other photographers may be practice.

Stitching into a photograph may be practice.

Talking may be practice.

Making the conditions in which somebody else can make something may even be practice.

This interests me because for a long time we have been asked to specialise.

What are you? Photographer? Artist? Writer? Curator? Cultural manager?

Choose the appropriate box.

But perhaps the box belongs to the administrative system rather than the creative one.

My experience has increasingly made me suspicious of these divisions. Photography led me towards editorial activity. The magazine and books towards words. Words towards objects. Objects towards stitching, collage and installation. Working with my own images led naturally towards thinking about other people’s images; that led towards editing and curating; curating towards constructing contexts; contexts towards communities.

I don’t experience these as departures from photography.

I experience them as consequences of looking.

And perhaps this is why I am increasingly uncomfortable with the word career when we talk about art.

Career suggests a line.

Beginning here.

Going there.

Preferably upwards.

But artistic lives rarely behave like that.

They disappear.

Restart.

Turn sideways.

Become quiet.

Become visible.

Become invisible again.

A child is born.

A parent becomes ill or dies.

Money runs out.

Someone takes another job.

Someone moves back home.

Someone spends five years making something nobody sees.

Someone organises exhibitions instead of having them.

Someone stops photographing and begins sewing through photographs.

Someone returns ten years later.

Bourdieu helps explain why we mistake one particular trajectory for success: artistic fields produce their own systems of legitimacy. Institutions, critics, galleries, collectors and other actors do not simply discover value; collectively, they participate in establishing what becomes recognised as valuable.

But a hierarchy is not the same thing as a truth.

And visibility is certainly not immortality.

Maybe this is where I disagree slightly with the idea of dark matter. I understand Sholette’s metaphor, and structurally I think he is right.

But from inside the darkness, it isn’t dark. People know one another. They see one another’s work. They exchange books. They organise things. They borrow equipment. They recommend somebody for an exhibition. They sit together after an opening.

They teach. They argue. They make things.

They stop. They begin again.

The darkness exists primarily from the perspective of the centre. From the edge, the edge can look remarkably like a world.

And Romania is full of these worlds.

Some survive for decades. Some survive for one exhibition.

Some receive public funding.

Some are built almost entirely from friendship.

Some desperately want institutional recognition.

Others are suspicious of it.

Most probably move between these positions depending on whether the rent is due.

There is nothing particularly romantic about precarity.

I don’t want to turn lack of money into artistic purity.

An artist shouldn’t have to be exhausted in order to be authentic.

A mother shouldn’t have to prove that she can do everything.

An independent cultural organisation shouldn’t have to perform miracles with €3,000 and call the result resilience.

Sometimes what independent culture needs is simply money, infrastructure and time.

But perhaps support does not have to transform every small organism into a large one.

Maybe we could support alternative art worlds without requiring them eventually to imitate Art Basel.

So perhaps the question I am left with is no longer:

How do I enter the art world?

You have been in it for years.

The more interesting questions are different.

Which art world am I already part of?

Which one am I helping to sustain?

Who is invisible from where I am standing?

What am I willing to exchange for visibility?

And perhaps most importantly:

What kind of world do I want my work to make possible?

I think about the children watching a film behind blankets stapled across a doorway in Suffolk.

I think about Art Basel Miami Beach.

I think about a very small gallery that ran many, many shows.

I think about photographers walking together through a city.

I think about exhibitions built with too little money and too much work.

I think about a parent waiting for the house to become quiet before returning to an unfinished image.

And I think about the kitchen table.

Maybe somewhere on it there is a photograph, a needle and a piece of red thread.

Tomorrow morning it will become a kitchen table again.

Tonight it is an art world.

****

References & resources:

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/art-worlds-25th-anniversary-edition/paper

https://www.hoxtonminipress.com/products/how-to-enter-the-art-world

https://www.darkmatterarchives.net/

https://www.gregorysholette.com/dark-matter-by-gregory-sholette

https://revistaarta.ro/ro/interioritate/

https://www.curatorymagazine.com/post/andreea-alunei

https://www.rri.ro/rubrici/eveniment-cultural/expozitie-a-artistei-oana-tudose-la-mntrplusc-id621406.html

https://www.si.edu/object/artificial-hells-participatory-art-and-politics-spectatorship-claire-bishop%3Asiris_sil_1095409