From starving artist to entrepreneur. Justificatory pluralism in visual artists' grant proposals

Inspired by French pragmatism and using Bourdieu's notion of “refraction” as an indication of a field's autonomy, we explore in-depth what kinds of justifications visual artists deploy to legitimate their requests for government money. Based on 494 government grant proposals from visual artists between 1965 and 2015 in Belgium, we find six such justifications. The reputational, esthetic, and romantic justifications are grounded in autonomous criteria of worth, such as artistic CVs, the work of art itself, and a compulsive desire to make art. Since the 90s, social, academic, and entrepreneurial justifications bring in heteronomous criteria, or refractions of field-external values. Artistic practices become increasingly legitimized through engagement with social/political issues, academic methods and terminology, and an entrepreneurial spirit. We empirically show how the refraction of governmental logics is multi-faceted, yet always related to or combined with artistic concerns, which we interpret as characteristic for the artistic field's persisting autonomy in the face of heteronomous pressures.     

Art Without A Market: Creating Artistic Value In A Provincial Art World

Symbolic interactionism is defined as the study of social acts and social objects. Paintings are social objects whose value is almost entirely created in the social acts called art worlds. Important art worlds are currently organized as art markets, in which art is created, exhibited, bought, sold and discussed by artists, museums, dealers, collectors, and critics. In St. Louis, where fieldwork was done, the art market is marginal; art schools and faculty artists replace dealers, collectors, museums, galleries, and critics in the local production of art, the creation of art value, and the determination of artistic status.     

Baptism of Blood: Bodies Performing for the Law

This article undertakes an analysis of Ron Athey’s and Hermann Nitsch’s performance art and blood rituals to show how their radical artistic spectacles are necessary acts of defiance in contemporary art and society. They open up the possibilities for subjects to redefine their relationship to the big Other. The author argues that the use of blood is at the centre of both of these artists’ performances and has the potency to unsettle and attack the patriarchal system of social authorities. At the same time, the popularization of such artistic and bloody practices has led to the appropriation of blood in mainstream popular culture. By referring to popular artist Lady Gaga and her use of blood in recent performances, the article demonstrates that blood is divested of its symbolisms and becomes a mere commodified product. The comparison between performance artists and popular artists like Lady Gaga reveals how blood is used in different ways to facilitate each artist’s project. While Athey’s performances stress blood as the site of the reality of the body in pain, and Nitsch’s as a celebration of both Eros and Thanatos, Lady Gaga’s performances by using fake blood separate blood from the body and meaning.     

对上海街头艺人管理法规制订的思考

上海制订街头艺人管理法规应注重:对街头艺人的管理方法体现社会对文化艺术的态度、对弱势群体的关注以及对公众利益的维护;对不同类型的街头艺人实施分类管理;通过教育和宣传,为艺术型街头艺人创造良好的社会氛围;应制订政府管理部门的服务规范;制订艺术型街头艺人认证标准应体现上海文化特色。     

Making It in a Cover Music Scene: Negotiating Artistic Identities in a “Kmart‐Level Market”

This research examines how musicians understand art and commerce in a music scene dominated by cover bands. Drawing on thirty semi‐structured interviews and one hundred hours of ethnographic observation, I find that most musicians self‐identify as artists yet perceive social status to be rooted in commercial success. This research details what it means to “make it” in an art world that offers little institutional support or remunerative reward for artistry. Musicians employ three approaches to negotiate the disconnect between artistic identities and commercially defined status: segregating their artistic and commercial pursuits, locating artistry in their commercial work, and justifying their commercially viable activities as a means to attaining a comfortable lifestyle. This on‐the‐ground account of commercial influences’ effects on musicians informs post‐Bourdieusian research on fields of cultural production. I suggest that future research on culture producers must distinguish between social status—a position in a social hierarchy—and interpersonal respect. When esthetics are marginalized as a basis for status, musicians’ status becomes bound to employment opportunities and expansible relative to the extent of the scene.     

Art Criticism and its Power Over Women Artists - An Inquiry into the Sources of Gender Discrimination in Jewish Palestine/Israel, 1920-1960

Discrimination against women in the Western field of Visual Arts persists, even today. In this article I reflect upon the formative years of the field of Visual Arts in Jewish Palestine/Israel. I examine what role art critics took in the emergence of the systematic forms of artistic malestream domination. I also analyze which strategies allowed art critics to develop their position as the "knowers" of high art. While artistic malestream practices have not only held back female artists in the past, they also still affect women's artistic careers. Thus, the exposure of these concealed mechanisms can inform both academic scholarship and the artistic discourse.     

Repossessing Border Space: Security Practice in North American Border Art

Abstract

This paper discusses how the visual arts engage in representing border crossing experiences and, more specifically, how art interrupts border security practices and their rituals. After introducing the history of North American border art and different approaches to issues of border crossing, the paper will concentrate on specific works. It argues that the selected works of art perform interventions that confront the public with the borderlands as a place of violence and death. At the same time, artists are shown to employ different artistic strategies of symbolically re-possessing the borderlands for undocumented migrants who – when crossing it – experienced it as an existential obstacle.     

Mediating claims to artistry: Social stratification in a local visual arts community

Participant observation was employed to analyze the stratification of artists in the visual art world around a small northeastern American city. Reflecting their art world reputation, artists' strata included naifs, hobbyists, serious amateurs, aspiring preprofessionals, and professionals. The local careers of some artists moved progressively from lower to higher reaches of the system; as they moved upward, their level of professional commitment, art world involvement, knowledge of art, skill, and artistic style tended to change also. Except among professionals, the great majority were women. Overall, certain art styles were selectively favored. The most important selective mechanisms were formal art education, professionalization, artistic style, network centrality, jurying, and sales. With a few recent exceptions, truly naive and imitative traditional styles were excluded from the upper levels in favor of modernist abstraction, innovative figuration, or sophisticated forms ofart brut.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 12th World Congress of Sociology, International Sociological Association, Madrid, July 1990.     

“The Spider Is Alive”: Reassessing Becker's Theory of Artistic Conventions through Southern Italian Music

Howard Becker wrote that art is constructed, and understood, according to conventions. However, Becker does not adequately explain how artists negotiate historical circumstances affecting their work. Using the southern Italian phenomenon of tarantism and its music, I address how contemporary musicians employ conventions to transform sounds with deviant connotations. The alteration of musical conventions reflects material social conditions in the Salento region and provides insight into the formation of a Salentinian cultural movement's ideology. By accounting for how social groups contend with history, I argue that sociologists must reconsider the theory of artistic conventions.     

Aesthetics of disaster as decolonial aesthetics: making sense of the effects of Hurricane María through Puerto Rican contemporary art

ABSTRACT

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to re-assert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics.     

Friedrich Nietzsche,Dmitrii Merezhkovskii,and the Russian Renaissance

The artistic, poetic, and literary movement in the years between 1890 and 1917 has long been known as the “Silver Age,” a name that does not convey the movement’s essence and one that was mostly used retrospectively. The artists, philosophers, and writers of the day gave their own name to this cultural flourishing, the “Russian Renaissance,” because they believed they were embarking on a rebirth of literature, culture, art, and religion similar to that of the European Renaissance. In their search for a new aesthetic vision, the Russian Renaissance turned to the classical world, especially ancient Greece. But their view of that culture was distinctly shaped by works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This article will highlight the particular, crucial role of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii in bringing a Nietzschean view of Greece into the Russian Renaissance. Merezhkovskii’s Nietzschean celebration of the classical world, and his belief that this world could reinvigorate Christianity and Russian culture, proved greatly influential for the artists, poets, and philosophers that followed him.     

Gender and the Artist Archetype: Understanding Gender Inequality in Artistic Careers

Women artists are systematically disadvantaged across cultural fields. Although some of these disadvantages resemble gender inequalities in non‐artistic work, such as lower pay, underrepresentation, work–family conflict, and symbolic devaluation, others are unique to artistic careers. In this essay, I extend Acker's work on the implicit gendering of the ideal‐typical worker to show how gender implicitly organizes social expectations around artists and artistic work. I highlight themes emerging from past research on gender relations in artistic careers, which suggest that the ideal‐typical artist builds on a masculine model in at least three ways. First, collective understandings of creative genius center a masculine subject. Second, bias in aesthetic evaluations systematically favors men over women. Third, the structure of artistic careers, particularly the need for entrepreneurial labor and self‐promotion, requires artists to engage in behaviors that are more socially acceptable in men than in women.     

Underground testing: Name-altering practices as probes in electronic music

Name-altering practices are common in many creative fields—pen names in literature, stage names in the performing arts, and aliases in music. More than just reflecting artistic habits or responding to the need for distinctive brands, these practices can also serve as test devices to probe, validate, and guide the artists’ active participation in a cultural movement. At the same time, they constitute a powerful probe to negotiate the boundaries of a subculture, especially when its features are threatened by appropriation from the mass-oriented culture. Drawing evidence from electronic music, a field where name-altering practices proliferate, we outline dynamics of pseudonymity, polyonymy, and anonymity that surround the use of aliases. We argue that name-altering practices are both a tool that artists use to probe the creative environment and a device to recursively put one’s creative participation to the test. In the context of creative subcultures, name-altering practices constitute a subtle but effective form of underground testing.     

Investigating the organizational everyday: a critical feminist approach

ABSTRACT

This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada's art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.     

Selling art to the world in Chelsea

This paper explores the dynamic interaction that occurs between large-scale social processes, urban development and the production of artistic expression and meaning through an analysis of art and urban change in the West Chelsea district of New York City. I begin my analysis with a discussion of specific works of art and expand to the local and global context to which these works respond and help to construct. Both urban space and artistic production, consumption and the social meaning attached to art by artists, critics, audiences and other art world actors have felt the impact of the turn to free market policies and ideology that have attended global economic restructuring and the rapid pace of globalisation. At the same time, art's new role as an engine of urban commerce and the accompanying expansion of the art market have helped to shape city districts like West Chelsea and have left their mark on the work that is exhibited and sold there. My analysis integrates a close study of two works of art exhibited in West Chelsea, interviews and other ethnographic data and recent literature on the arts and urban restructuring and the perspective of critical theory. I also provide photographic documentation of social interaction and the built environment of West Chelsea as it evolved in response to the expansion of the art worlds there. A secondary aim of this research is to contribute to a larger discussion about the social role and critical capacities of art in today's social, economic and political climate.     

Symbolic Violence and Collective Identity: Pierre Bourdieu and the Ethics of Resistance

Social movement researchers have only recently begun to make use of the rich explanatory leverage offered by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice. The normative implications of his framework remain almost entirely undeveloped. This paper seeks to redress these shortcomings by applying central concepts from Bourdieu's work—symbolic violence and his realist philosophy of science—to social movement analysis. Using North American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer collective identities to illustrate this application, the paper advocates shifting analysis of collective identities from models based on negotiation to one based on domination and advocates treatment of social movement organizations as sites of justice amenable to normative evaluation and critique.     

FROM PRINTS TO POSTERS: THE PRODUCTION OF ARTISTIC VALUE IN A POPULAR ART WORLD

The activity of a gallery in an art world is centered not only on the distribution of works, but also on the development of a clientele. This involves convincing potential customers that works have both artistic and economic value. The traditional path of valuation of works is through the gatekeepers of the high art world. There are, however, art worlds whose works have not passed through these high art gatekeepers, but which are nevertheless successful in maintaining a clientele. This article examines the process by which this popular art world establishes a positive value for its art when it has no access to the legitimating institutions of the high art world. Data were gathered primarily through interviews with gallery directors, employees, and artists, both from the popular and high-art worlds. The sample includes 18 popular galleries and 10 high art galleries in the Chicago area. “Popular galleries” are defined as those galleries located in the shopping districts of cities or in suburban shopping malls. Many are part of larger chains, and all carry prints by well-known artists, works of lesser known artists, and some posters.     

Career development among young disabled artists

This paper reports on the experiences of 47 young disabled artists and the interaction between disability, impairment and the arts in their educational and career pathways. The artists were finalists in the VSA arts/Volkswagen of America Inc. Program, an arts‐based program intended to showcase the talents and accomplishments of young disabled artists aged 16–25. A few artists found their impairment to be a barrier to making art. Many, however, did not think their impairment affected their ability to make art, and a few thought it actually enhanced their artistic ability. These finalists often cited art as a tool for overcoming impairment‐related, disability‐related and other barriers. In this paper we identify effective strategies that these young artists used to further their arts careers. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings and provides recommendations to support young disabled artists in their educational and career efforts.     

Almost Like a Real Band: Navigating a Gendered Jazz Art World

Professional jazz has been organized around two contradictory cultures. Historically, the jazz art world has followed norms of meritocracy, which promote equality across boundaries of race and class. At the same time a culture of exclusivity, anchored in gendered essentialism, has severely limited female participation. By analyzing interview data with artists from the Hamilton College Jazz Archive, we illustrate how these contradictory cultures of inclusion and exclusion operate to channel women into feminized roles in the jazz world. We then discuss how women employ a number of strategies to work around the culture of exclusivity and capitalize on the norms and values of musical meritocracy. Despite institutional openings in professional jazz that emerged following the women’s movement, female jazz artists continue to face strong barriers toward full equality in the jazz world. Although female artists consistently demonstrate that they possess equal musical skills to male musicians according to the norms of meritocracy that guide professional jazz, women remain on the margins of the jazz art world.     

Portraits and collaborations: a reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald

This reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald as a photographer, storyteller and teacher highlights Ewald's methodology, her manner of presenting work and her images. First, in describing Ewald's artistic practice, I discuss the innovative ways she collaborates with children, sharing control over the process of visually representing children's lives, their stories and their faces. I also describe her influence as an educator and suggest that researchers as well may benefit from Ewald's approach to exploring individuals' social realities. Next, I propose that Ewald's body of work provides a rich source of material for those interested in the analysis of visual culture. As an example, I focus on Ewald's American Alphabets, which presents four visual alphabets and deals with questions of identity and language. The collaborative images simultaneously address and raise sociological questions and offer a compelling visual example of the confluence of gender, race and social class. I finish with a discussion of Ewald's two latest collaborations—In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits in Richmond, Virginia and Towards a Promised Land from Margate, England. In these new works, Ewald places larger‐than‐life portraits in symbolically meaningful public spaces. Her public art involves a complicated and conceptual exploration of context.