Discussing Our Intangible Labour

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There is a quiet defiance running through the conversations gathered in this programme. It is not staged as a manifesto, nor framed as a critique in the usual polemical sense. Instead, it emerges obliquely, through lived experience, shared anecdotes, hesitations, laughter, and moments of recognition between artists who have learned, often painfully, how art persists outside the smooth surfaces of institutional culture.

The Intangible Labour exhibition, taking place at the basement gallery of the Leicester Adult Education centre on Belvoir Street, does not announce itself as a corrective to the contemporary arts system, yet it implicitly asks a difficult question: what has been lost as artistic practice has become increasingly administered, professionalised, and governed by technocratic norms? Listening to the artists speak, one hears not a rejection of structure per se, but a growing fatigue with systems that mistake compliance for care, metrics for meaning, and visibility for value.

Much of what is described in this discussion never appears in funding reports or strategic plans. The hours spent applying for opportunities that lead nowhere. The emotional toll of rejection. The social labour of navigating spaces where class, accent, embodiment, or neurodivergence quietly disqualify you before your work is even seen. The constant oscillation between being told to treat art as a business and being reminded, often harshly, that it will never quite be one. This is the labour that remains largely unacknowledged, yet it shapes artistic life more profoundly than any single exhibition or sale.

From a metamodern perspective, this matters because we are living through a period of cultural recalibration. The postmodern critique of grand narratives and institutional authority has done its work, but it has left behind a vacuum often filled by managerial rationality. In the arts, this has taken the form of bureaucratic substitution: where meaning once arose from shared cultural practices, it is now increasingly inferred from process, compliance, and professional signalling. What the artists in this programme articulate, often indirectly, is a desire to move beyond both naïve romanticism and hollow proceduralism.

The exhibition itself offers a clue as to how this might be done. There is no prescribed route through the space, no explanatory apparatus telling the viewer what to think or how to behave. Works are encountered rather than consumed. Live music drifts through the gallery, not as an accompaniment but as an act of presence. Text appears where it needs to, and remains absent where it would only close down interpretation. In this sense, the exhibition functions less as a managed experience and more as an invitation to form one’s own path.

This approach resonates with a broader metamodern sensibility: a willingness to hold structure and openness in tension, to acknowledge systems without surrendering to them, and to rebuild meaning through situated, relational practices. Rather than rejecting institutions outright, the conversation gestures towards something quieter and more difficult: the cultivation of small, resilient cultural ecologies grounded in trust, shared effort, and mutual recognition.

What becomes clear is that independence here does not mean isolation. On the contrary, the strongest theme running through the discussion is community, not as a branding exercise or a networking outcome, but as something that forms through making, showing up, and staying with one another over time. Friendship, collaboration, and shared risk become forms of infrastructure in their own right, substituting for systems that often feel extractive or indifferent.

In this light, the idea of ‘intangible labour’ takes on a deeper significance. It names not only the hidden work of being an artist, but also the invisible processes through which culture renews itself: the passing of skills, the holding of space, the courage to remain experimental in environments that reward conformity. These are not inefficiencies to be streamlined away. They are the very conditions under which art remains alive.

For Radio Lear, this conversation sits at the heart of an ongoing enquiry. What might it mean to treat broadcasting, exhibitions, and cultural platforms not as delivery mechanisms, but as shared spaces of attention? How might we support artistic practices that resist being reduced to outputs, while still engaging the realities of funding, infrastructure, and sustainability?

There are no simple answers offered here, and that may be the point. Instead, the programme invites listeners to dwell in uncertainty, to recognise the costs of over-management, and to imagine forms of cultural life that are neither nostalgically pre-institutional nor resignedly bureaucratic. In doing so, it suggests that the future of the arts may depend less on better systems, and more on our willingness to revalue the human, relational, and often unmeasurable work that sustains them.