ACCENT WORK

When I wrote Against the Rhetoric of Good Intentions, I didn’t expect it to become the first instalment in a series where I respond to statements that people in the art world make in passing.

But alas - here we are again.

The art world continues to churn out self-congratulatory statements of solidarity whilst their actions - and their throwaway comments - suggest otherwise.

So, I suppose this is the second chapter in a series I am, for now, calling Listening Exercises: Notes on how art-world speech betrays its politics.

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Whilst on my lunch break, sitting outside the cafe where I work, I put on a podcast about class in the art world, fully leaning into the stereotype of myself. A few minutes in, the host announced they were going to ‘have a bash’ at discussing class. Red flag. Still, I kept listening, hoping it was just clumsy phrasing rather than a sign of how they understood the weight of the topic.

Then it came: an anecdote about not understanding a reference made by a man from Barnsley in a film about Barnsley, featuring people from Barnsley.

The host paired their confusion with a passing joke about the man’s accent. My initial suspicions were, unfortunately, confirmed.

‘Fluro’

In the film, the interviewee mentions a love of ‘fluro’

For me, this word conjures up fluorescent shop signs that hung in Blackburn’s old covered market [where my family used to sell tripe]. Those signs evolved into the flashing signs you see outside today’s vape and corner shops. The word carries the entire sensorial world of those markets: the gossip that moves like a call-and-response, overlapping smells, colour and noise vying for your attention. One word, and I am taken back to childhood, family, community.

In contrast, the host of the podcast reveals that they had to Google the word and found nothing. That gulf - between embodied memory and blank search results - is precisely the point.

Being from Blackburn, I am used to how institutions treat the Northern accent: something to mimic, misunderstand, and project onto. Media regularly uses it to signal someone who is a bit thick or miserly; a shorthand for lack. So when the host made a quick, unexamined reference to the Barnsley man’s accent, it wasn’t neutral but a reminder about how easily class and regional identities can be flattened.

In that moment, the host embodied what I call spectoral chauvinism: the refusal to suspend one’s own cultural assumptions when encountering art that emerges from outside their normative frame. It is a form of looking that reinforces power rather than distributing it.

This is a recurring problem when discussing class in art spaces: the reflexive need to protect one’s reputation. Institutions and individuals insist that they’ve addressed the issue, as if past acknowledgement shields them from present critique - a kind of moral grandfathering they award themselves. Hosting the conversation isn’t enough; you have to enter it in good faith, with an awareness of the limits of your own perspective.

This podcast episode felt entirely antagonistic for precisely this reason: a southern host discussing Northern identity and class issues with two northern working-class artists and writers, while seemingly missing both the nuance and the reality of what the guests were actually saying.

I have more to say about the episode itself, but that will have to wait for the next instalment of this reluctant series.

For now: your accent joke isn’t neutral. Stop patting yourself on the back and listen.