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The recent closure of the Dublin City commercial galler y Hang Tough Contemporary on Exchequer St in Dublin 2, through the forced or voluntary process of liquidation, provoked me to question what constitutes ‘contemporary art’ in Ireland today. Especially when we frame the same question against the late Sinéad O’Connor’s words: “I come from a country where there were riots in the streets over plays. That’s what art is for... Artists are agitators”.

Hang Tough Contemporary opened its doors in 2021 to a public under the masks and regulations of the pandemic. The director, Michael ‘Rubio’ Hennigan, described the gallery as the “natural evolution from his Hang Tough Fine Art printing and framing studios”. The announcement of the closure of Hennigan’s printing and framing studios, which were in business for over a decade, preceded the announcement on social media of the gallery’s closure.

Gossip surrounding the gallery’s closure was shared and discussed privately in my Instagram DMs and WhatsApp groups weeks before the official announcement on social media. “Sad” was the common adjective used in the artists’ reactions, voiced in respect of the staff and the artists who would experience the financial and emotional fallout from the closure. Was the gallery an act of blind ambition? Heart over head? A badly timed business move?

It was undeniably an ambitious enterprise, rolling out successive solo exhibitions on a three-week turnaround basis. The societal context from which the gallery emerged painted it as a pandemic art gallery fling. Yet it could also be judged as a labour of love, as all art affairs are, or an act of business bravery or foolhardiness on the part of its director. However the current liquidation of Hennigan’s business triumvirate does relegate the gallery to the straw that broke the horse’s back, even if it didn’t.

Opinions vary regarding the gallery’s critical value to the Irish art scene. It was definitely a much-needed new gallery space, for painters primarily, to support and exhibit their work in an urban environment of extortionate rents and a city culture devoid of gallery and studio spaces. That said, I know artists who turned down exhibition offers due mainly to a critical perception they had of the gallery.

It’s difficult to describe what that critical perception might be without getting deep in the weeds. To my mind the gallery lacked, or didn’t get the opportunity to consummate a vision beyond its “sleek, well designed purpose fitted exhibition space... With large arresting windows”, which sounds a lot like an estate agent’s pitch.

From the perspective of an art critic rather than an artist, the gallery’s “natural evolution” from the printing and framing studios lacked something meaningful or critical beyond the sale and framing of art objects for those who can afford them. But was Hang Tough Contemporary any different from more established and critically recognised commercial galleries in Dublin or in any other cosmopolitan metropolis?

The difference is perceptual, not structural. The commercial gallery will always be what it is, a business at the centre of consumer capitalism. If you ever visit New York City, head down to Rockefeller Plaza to check out the scale and bling of Christie’s Auction House. Art is big business. During the global financial crisis of 2008, the art market boomed at the same time as the housing market crashed. The top-tier commercial gallery is the ever-flowing and starlit tributary towards Christie’s and the 1%.

If I were to distinguish Hang Tough Contemporary from another commercial gallery in Dublin, like Mother’s Tankstation Limited, located down by the quays and the smell of Guinness (some might say a case of apples and oranges), I would say the mercantile wizard is fully hidden behind the curtain at the latter. Sure, it is a cover story, but it is a sophisticated one.

Whereas the bright and airy Hang Tough Contemporary brought to mind the galleries that populate Walter Benjamin’s arcades of consumer capitalism at its most diamantine; the place where you procure the seasonal art gift that comes with a bespoke frame, or a mirror that refects the room not the person.

Bottom line, all commercial galleries are places where people of money and power consume and collect objects to decorate their homes or flip on the secondary market for more money. As one New York artist says in the infamous essay by Graig Owns entitled The Problem with Puerilism, written in 1984, at a time when the bohemian East Village of New York was being flooded by new art market forces: “Paintings are doorways to collectors’ homes.” The artist is a pawn in this elitist empire.

Art with a capital A — what was once called the ‘avant garde’ — has never been immune to becoming the status quo, especially in a world that increasingly deals in pretty and happily framed pictures. The avant-garde artist is a contradictory figure, working both sides of the divide of subcultural and economic allegiances, and smiling with their mouth if not their eyes.

Such facial gymnastics remind me of what Theodor Adorno once wrote about art’s purpose being to make us unhappy, so we can sober up to our drunken production and consumption of culture. According to the early philosophy of the Frankfurt School, the only hope for society was culture’s opposition to the economy. Culture’s mission was to critically question society, not to passively merge with the image-drunk society we unavoidably guzzle down today.

The fact is the commercial gallery is a gloved claw in respect to the artist who wants to critique the societal status quo, not massage it. We have to turn a blind eye, artist and audience, in our experience of contemporary art in a commercial setting. The commercial gallery represents acceptance and affirmation for the artist, but also a compromise in the artist’s critical engagement with the world. If we view contemporary art as more than its exchangeability, and envisage its critical purpose in opposition to a passive and a affirmative alignment with the status quo, then culture can come before money. However, we need more art spaces that are not so integrated with a commercial agenda.

But that’s all well and good for the artist who has been born into money, or acquired it through the lottery of life. You have to pay to be an artist in this world. For those artists who do not have financial backing, the commercial gallery represents hope where hope is in short supply. From the ever-dwindling hope of the artist’s parents, to the self-inflicted hope that is always tainted with hopelessness in the artist’s psyche.

Hang Tough Contemporary opened at the moment when hope was on its last legs culturally. The gallery made its presence felt on the local art scene. It’s petty, but the name was a put off, an obvious pun and brand extension of the framing studios. I was indifferent to the gallery until I recognised artists whom I would categorise as ‘critical’ appearing on the gallery’s exhibition roster. Then I noticed, in my role as art lecturer, younger students listing Hang Tough Contemporary as a gallery they recognised, ahead of the more established Dublin galleries, such as Kevin Kavanagh, Green on Red or Kerlin Gallery, which they didn’t list at all.

Commercial galleries are a mainstay of cultural production. My main fear is that the only alternative and template for artists in Ireland today is the commodification of their art via social media and the commercial gallery space. Karl Marx called commodity a fetish, an object not valued in and of itself, but in its exchangeability. The image of the artwork on Instagram is a commodity fetish that artists now deal in promotionally, and deal with psychologically.

For someone without the means or predilection to collect art, which was an explicit focus in the mainstream newspaper coverage of Hang Tough Contemporary, galleries can become places, free places, where people (including artists) can critically reflect on their own natures and complicity with a consumer capitalist society that rewards the rich and devours the poor. Art can be affirmative, but it can also be critical of itself and society at large.

In an interview with the novelist Martin Amis on the occasion of the publication of his novel Money, the author says to Germaine Greer: “Money — in short-hand — is the opposite of culture”. That was 1984. That said, artists have to survive if not live in a consumer capitalist society. It’s up to the artist, however, how far they lean into such a society without bearing their critical teeth●