artwashing
artwashing noun: the use of art and artists in a positive way to distract from or legitimize negative actions by an individual, organization, country, or government, originally in reference to gentrification.
Noun
artwashing (uncountable)
- The use of art and artists in a positive way to distract from or legitimize negative actions by an individual, organization, country, or government, originally in reference to gentrification.
- When a commercial project is subjected to artwashing, the work and presence of artists and creative workers is used to add a cursory sheen to a place's transformation.2014 June 24, Feargus O'Sullivan, “The Pernicious Realities of 'Artwashing'”, in Bloomberg
- They, and the artists, fear The Denizen risks becoming a similar ghost building. They are also deeply suspicious of the “artwashing” strategy, through which civic bodies, hand in hand with the developers, use culture as a Trojan horse for the advancement of the developers’ schemes.2017 October 10, Anna Minton, “Developers are using culture as a Trojan horse in their planning battles”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
Forms of artwashing
| alternative form | art-washing |
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Origin of artwashing
From art + -wash + -ing.
Questions about artwashing
- What does artwashing mean?
- Artwashing means the use of art and artists in a positive way to distract from or legitimize negative actions by an individual, organization, country, or government, originally in reference to gentrification.
- What part of speech is artwashing?
- Artwashing is a noun.
Words near artwashing in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: artwashing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “artwashing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/artwashing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.