words Dilsah Kondakci
In a world where art is as much about capital as it is creativity, Poor Artists arrives like a Molotov cocktail in the gallery lobby. Part fiction, part nonfiction, this debut from the UK-based art critics Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad—a.k.a. The White Pube—takes readers on a chaotic journey through the treacherous terrains of the art industry. Told through their fictional protagonist, Quest Talukdar—a working-class Muslim art graduate from Liverpool—the story explores burnout, precarity, systemic racism, and growing disenchantment with the art world from a working-class artist’s perspective.
Since 2015, The White Pube has been the art institutions’ favourite headache. What began in art school has transformed into an internationally followed platform for first-person critiques and unapologetically political insights. Their impact extends beyond their digital home (or blog) at thewhitepube.co.uk and social media but also for impactful actions like publicly calling out Tate’s handling of its racist Rex Whistler mural in 2020, or for their 2019 billboard campaign across London and Liverpool exposing the art world inequality and nepotism.
Through the protagonist Quest’s journey, Poor Artists analyses the wealth disparity, racism, and institutional hypocrisy that fortify the art world’s walls in the UK, making it feel like an exclusive, dull country club for the rich and well-connected. When Quest ultimately chooses to abandon the art world hustle to “make art” on her own terms, the book delivers its most striking message: true artistry can flourish beyond the industry’s broken framework.
While tracking down The White Pube, I took the opportunity to discuss their debut, the art world’s hypocrisy, and Instagram—where they’ve gained the most visibility (also because even ‘revolutionaries’ can’t escape techno-feudalism these days).
In Poor Artists, the line between fiction and nonfiction seems blurred. How do you define your work?
Gabrielle: Having trained as artists instead of writers, we are less precious about categorising. It matters to booksellers and our publishers because they need to know how to market it. People will see it the way they need to. If you’re someone researching different artworks, you might view it as nonfiction, since the book includes so many curated lists—valuable data for research. But if you’ve never considered the art industry, you might just enjoy it as a romp! I love that maybe it can do both. When we had the very first meeting with Penguin, we said to them that we would love this to be the book that we wish we’d read 10 years ago. Sometimes, during the writing process, we’d make these comments that it’s a fun textbook.
The transitions between chapters are quite abrupt; you read a fun or surreal narrative, only to suddenly encounter a real artist’s story, often with political undertones that bring a sense of seriousness. These shifts made me reflect on the absurdity and destabilisation within the art industry itself again. Was that intentional?
Gabrielle: It was that very artistic instinct of feeling that this was the only way we could write the book, and only afterwards did we sit down and consider why. Maybe the form we decided on had its own purpose and effect—to do exactly what you’ve just said, which is to destabilise the reader. Working in the industry offers no stability at all, so we could only write it that way.
Zarina: Before we started writing the book, I was very keenly aware that I wanted to be reading fiction that was surreal or magical or played with the weirdness of life and the world. I was reading a lot of Japanese fiction where loopy things happen, and it’s fine. No one’s too bogged down in reality. Like Kafka on the Shore, that whole mystical, magical realist thing. It felt like making art. You feel this pull in a certain direction, and only once you’ve made it can you step back and see what it’s done.
You criticise art fairs like Frieze both in the book and outside of that but still engage with them. Is it a strategic move, ‘working within the system to create change from the inside’?
Gabrielle: I like to think none of it exists. Zarina goes every year.
Zarina: I go every year because I’m in London. It’s (Frieze) such a huge part of London’s art calendar that not going would feel it would be a specific choice, and it’s a specific choice I’m not interested in making. I want to go just because I’m nosy. I like to see what’s going on. It forms the backbone of the discourse across the rest of the year as well. Their yearly theme is normally the art world’s trend for the year before, and then it dies at Frieze. It’s also just nice to say hello to people. I see the fair and the magazine differently, though, and the institution itself is also problematic.
You’ve described it as ‘sociopathic’ for social media influencers to build a following and capitalise on people’s love, drawing parallels to the art world. You also have a growing community on Instagram. What does genuine community mean to you? Is it a place where capitalism can’t set up shop?
Gabrielle: The White Pube wouldn’t exist without social media because that’s been our distribution system for the writing that we produce. For years, we’ve had a very bad relationship with that because it didn’t feel like a community. To better interact with our audience, we moved to alternative platforms like Discord, which feels more like a secret den clubhouse chat than a space where everyone shouts at the same time. It’s more intimate, and we’ve been able to form more genuine friendships through interacting with our audience on Discord than we have in 9 years of Instagram.
In the book, we discuss Instagram as something artists often feel they need to avoid being forgotten and to gain opportunities. But at the same time, many also feel pressured to perform a specific type of social media user just to make a dent in the timeline. It’s important that Poor Artists captures these different facets while acknowledging the real distrust of Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram. We don’t want to put our special art that we’ve spent all this time crafting, through their machines, nor do we want anyone else to have to do that either. I believe that Instagram is detrimental to the art world.
Zarina: It’s detrimental because of its shape. It has that guy Zuckerberg at the top, and he dictates the algorithm. It comes from above. The algorithm dictates your experience or the shape of it dictates user experience. It’s a horizontal, hierarchical shape. There’s a lot of power concentrated at the top, which is the wider problem with society that power is concentrated at the top. I guess the shape of all of the things that we’ve been talking about, like the Discord, and even the community on-site, offline, all of those things are exciting and have value because the shape is way more nebulous than the linear hierarchy of Facebook, IG, and X.
When the war between Russia and Ukraine erupted, numerous arts organisations were quick to express their solidarity with Ukrainian artists. However, when it comes to the genocide in Palestine, there is a striking silence. Some institutions like the Barbican and the Royal Academy have even suppressed Palestinian voices. How do you perceive this hypocrisy?
Zarina: It speaks to the fact that the way galleries are governed is so separated from the actual way they are run. The governance, the decision-making process, is so far away from the people working within them. Every time I march through London on a Saturday, I see half of the London art world. I see people with their mates, with their families, partners, and kids. It’s so nice, and there is so much activity on the ground—not just with artists but with arts workers like curators who are working in these galleries, invigilation staff, ticketing staff, and visitor experience staff. Yet, these galleries maintain an entrenched level of racist silence from the top down. The decision-making isn’t something the majority of the staff participate in; it comes from that direct, top-down level.
Institutions are scared to lose funding for being overtly political. Whether that’s funding from the government or private philanthropic sector, like funders such as the Zabludowicz, who are arms dealers, or from Outset Contemporary Art Fund. We are working at the moment with Strike Outset, which is a call to boycott the funding from and activity with Outset Contemporary Art Fund because their co-founder, Candida Gertler, along with her husband Zach Gertler, has contributed donations to Netanyahu’s political campaign. They hosted his birthday party at their home in Tel Aviv, and the Outset Bialik Arts Residency they run involves international artists being invited to their home in Tel Aviv to work with partner organisations that provide weapons, manufacturing, and repair for the Israel Defence Forces.
Many UK artists have signed up to Strike Outset. However, the problem is that Outset provides so much funding to a wide range of arts organizations and purchases artwork at Frieze for institutions like Tate and the National Collection. Their funding is deeply embedded in the arts ecology, making it hard to cut out.
Speaking of, the book vividly captures the emotion of disgust. What aspects of the art industry disgust you the most?
Gabrielle: It’s the disparity between how much the heads of Tate are getting paid versus the person on the front desk. That gap shouldn’t exist. Also within that, the gap between how much the artists are getting paid, who are coming in and keeping the building alive. Without the art, there would be no gallery in the first place. It feels really disgusting.
Zarina: For me, it’s The King*.
*The mention of ‘The King’ refers to the idea of a single, powerful figurehead who controls or influences the direction of a gallery or an institution.
Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad. Particular Books, £20
