Volume 8, Issue 2

This paper offers the framework of an agonistic politics of invitation to nuance the political implications of contextually- and temporally-specific cultural policy invites that bring to light a range of conflicts. Invitations are conceptualized with respect to their rationale, form, role expectations, and responses in three empirical vignettes: (1) the collectivized articulation of Berlin’s trans-disciplinary Koalition der Freien Szene as future invitee in local cultural governance; (2) the counter-invitation formulated by New York City’s People’s Cultural Plan to tackle ongoing racial inequities in the municipal Cultural Plan; and (3) uninvited graffiti responses to Vancouver’s Chinatown public art call to reconcile century-long discrimination against Chinese Canadians. The paper argues that invitations crucially shape and condition future spaces of possibilities for collaborative urban cultural governance.

Much has been written about artists’ precarity and dependency on institutions. Precarity is a de-economisation of freelance artists and ‘asymmetry’ on which cultural economy and arts policy relies. Speculation early in 2020 was that Covid-19 drew attention to the unethicality of these relationships but what has changed? Here, pre-pandemic and rapid response research on UK freelance theatre artists are brought together to suggest that the #CultureReset has been little more than a resetting of the stage with all props and players returning to previous positions. Pre-pandemic, the separation of artists from the language, policymaking, business and decision-making of professional subsidised theatre represented an unethical rationality. Covid-19 interrupted and transformed all cultural activity with a disproportionate impact on freelance artists, particularly in performing arts. Yet during 2020 and 2021, previous value systems (the rationality of the field) were maintained. Early hopes for improved conditions diminish as institutions and governments restore previous behaviours, counter to the ‘new normal’ advocated. A global crisis could not change the ‘value problem’ of artists in the arts. Moreover, pity procured for artists during the pandemic has further infantilised and devalued them. These findings call for greater scrutiny of the ethics of arts management and policy and new more collaborative approaches to solving the value problem.

In this article I will look into the role of writers towards cultural policy in Mexico. Although artists generally do not participate in policy planning, some specific writers and their literary cenacles have been fundamental in shaping Mexican cultural policy. This relation between writers and the state will be analysed through some literary groups and their relation to politics and cultural policy in the 20th century, a relation that in the 21st century has changed as writers and their publications have lost terrain to social media. FONCA was the institution that resulted from this relationship dedicated to foster artistic production from 1989 to 2020. I will analyse FONCA and Mexico’s arts policy, updating previous studies, from a dual perspective: as a writer and researcher that has been beneficiary and judge of its programmes.

This paper argues for the importance of mixed research methods in capturing the voices and perspectives of artists to understand the territorial nature of cultural policy. A pilot study, Co-Motion: Dance and borders, used an experimental, interdisciplinary approach of epistemological pluralism mixing improvised dance methods with survey data to understand the cross border professional experiences of dance artists on the island of Ireland. We see territorial mobility as both a policy practice and a construct, and sought to explore the impact and reception of that mobility on artists. Bringing together mixed methods allows for showing the affective nature of policy as well as telling via survey data. Reflecting on this experiment reveals the divergence and complexity that mixing methods may prompt and highlights the need for a methodological approach that recognises artists’ aesthetic way of knowing as crucial to capturing the embodied nature of cultural policy frames and contexts.

Ausgehend von den konzeptuellen Arbeitsansätzen der frühen künstlerischen Institutionskritik zeigt der Beitrag beispielhaft, wie Künstler und Künstlerinnen im Kampf um moralische und ethische Fragen im Kunstfeld immer mehr zu tonangebenden kulturpolitischen Akteuren wurden. Als machtvolle Stimmen mit einer eigenen Expertise in identitätspolitischen Debatten richten sie kulturpolitische Entscheidungsprämissen neu aus.

In March 2020, Michelle Ryan, Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre, an Australian dance company that includes both disabled and non-disabled dancers, was awarded Australia’s highest dance honour by the Australia Council, the federal arts funding body, for her transformative leadership of the company. Almost simultaneously, the very same Australia Council removed funding support for Restless, threatening the company’s survival. This essay examines Restless’s response to the fundamental incoherence of the Australia Council’s decision and situates it within the broader context of the company’s own evolving practice in disability art, which in effect saw it attempt to create policy in the field. I outline the government policy contexts that underpin both the funding cuts and Restless’s pivot to an alternate source of funding: the ideologically driven ‘culture wars’ underpinning the Coalition government’s hostility to the arts sector, and the establishment of a National Disability Insurance Scheme that enables individual ‘clients’ to access money for arts training. Finally, the essay examines the implications of a dance company receiving funding from a disability service provider rather than from a mainstream arts funding body, questioning whether this is a further ‘ghettoization’ of disability art.

This paper centralises visual artists in policymaking processes. It foregrounds the ways artists influence and determine the policies that affect their lives, practices, and careers through their higher art education in London (UK) art schools between 1986-2016. The uninvited and indirect processes by which artists are shaping policies using their education is captured through artsbased/informed methods developed for listening, analysing, and interpreting alongside grounded theory methodology. The practitionerled approach is key to noticing and raising the subtle agitations in the actions and inactions that underscore artists’ role as policy progenitors. Artists’ relationships with professional development and their experiences of structureless pedagogies, which are aligned to artistic myth are foregrounded. Their acceptances, rejections, and reframing of their fine art curricula is where their influence in shaping policy sits.

All over the world, Covid-19 revealed long-term issues concerning the structural vulnerability of artists and cultural workers. In Greece, during the first lock down, an independent initiative, Support Art Workers (SAW), brought to the spotlight artists and cultural workers and their needs and narratives about what needs to be changed in Greek cultural policy. Organised around and expressed through an online and offline activism campaign, SAW enabled them to articulate their particular status and needs-both in that particular timing, and with forward-looking approaches on overall policy adjustments required in Greece. Such an advocacy-rooted mobilisation holds particular interest in a country where cultural policy has focused predominantly on cultural heritage, largely ignoring contemporary cultural production. Through focus groups and interviews with artists and cultural workers in 2020 and in 2022, we capture the main narratives of artists and cultural professionals in Greece and what has remained from this mobilisation.