This essay first appeared in the October 2026 issue of The Critic.

The idea of leaving the art world is one of the art world’s most predictable tropes. With banal regularity, a report suggesting that artists on average earn less than the minimum wage appears or that galleries are still unaccommodating of some class of artist, and a suggestion that opting out it is the only way to survive follows. 

The artist cried wolf. Because Britain’s art schools expanded rapidly after the turn of the millennium, low pay is the market’s signal that we do, in fact, have too many artists. Calls for sympathy with burnt-out cultural administrators also justifiably fall on flat ears. Indeed, there is a tradition, documented by the critic Martin Herbert in his essay collection Tell Them I Said No, of high-profile artists, such as the Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn, of distancing themselves from the art world as an artistic strategy. 

Exiting the art world is one thing. We live in the age of artistic boycotts that prove that art matters little to non-artists. But an exodus of artists from art itself, rather than their mere refusal to perform, would be quite another. If we hold as our ideal of an artist a person who cannot live but for art, is it even ontologically possible to stop being one?

Yet this retreat is beginning to unfold. In June, the joint Turner Prize winner Tai Shani declared on social media that she may be looking for a new job because art practice was no longer bringing her satisfaction. Art’s transformative potential, she suggested, is squandered today in competition for niche audiences, who approach all work with “dismissive speed” and with pre-emptive “boredom”. 

Shani is part of a generation of Millennial artists who have ideologically dominated the discourse of contemporary art for over a decade. Her art activist peers have now occupied positions of power in the institutions, only to find that this counts for little aesthetically. At that level, this artist’s protest is understandable.

Harder to reconcile is the fact that Shani’s work is emblematic of a tendency that has fuelled the “niche-dom” of which she now complains. One of the mechanisms is social: that coalition, who came of age in peak art world, instigated the moral codes that now paralyse everything. But a more profound explanation lies in the aesthetic that this group, which effectively counts among it all remaining artists of its generation, has made central.

Main images: Tai Shani, M.I.A.S.M.A., 2026. Kunsthalle Bern, photo: David Aebi.