ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the ideological change from Keynesian culturalism to monetarist populism generated and financed the new art of the era: from proto-Punk performance to postmodernist object sculpture. The International Monetary Fund crisis led the Labour government to look at ways of 'devolving' high culture, advocating social democracy by making the Arts Council of Great Britain financially and ideologically accountable to 'the public'. The chapter suggests that critical postmodernist accounts of British art in the '80s suppressed the importance of forms of cultural practice not associated directly with institutionalized art. A reaction against Modernist Internationalism in art and criticism is largely symbolic, signifying the cultural last gasp of a dying national imaginary in the face of totalizing globalization. In the mid-to-late 1970s practice, theory, criticism and art history interlocked around the question of photography and its relation to the 'crisis' in modernism.
