Art After Gentrification (original) (raw)
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Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape
Routledge Research in Art and Politics, 2021
Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods. Since the 1980s, art and artists’ roles in gentrification have been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban spaces illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.
Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification
Urban Studies, 2003
Gentrification involves the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment. This paper reconsiders the role of artists as agents, and aestheticisation as a process, in contributing to gentrification, an argument illustrated with empirical data from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Because some poverty neighbourhoods may be candidates for occupation by artists, who value their afford ability and mundane, off-centre status, the study also considers the movement of districts from a position of high cultural capital and low economic capital to a position of steadily rising economic capital. The paper makes extensive use of Bourdieu's conceptualisation of the field of cultural production, including his discussion of the uneasy relations of economic and cultural capitals, the power of the aesthetic disposition to valorise the mundane and the appropriation of cultural capital by ma...
Public artistic practices in favour and against gentrification
Post-industrial practices have led to the homogenization of the city, not only in its aesthetic but also in its population. Cities nowadays marginalise ethnic groups and working-class people, traditional inhabitants of those territories, while at the same time attract transitional population as managerial workers, students and tourists; people who can afford to live in these new paradises of consumption. In this new capitalist age, the role of art and cultural practices is vital as a tool for the regeneration of these areas. From galleries and museums to art in the public spaces, culture, in general, has had an increment in government and private support, not for the anti-utilitarian art for the art´s sake, but because art is a tested tool that generates both economic profit and social control. In this paper, I will address how art practices especially those in the public realm are used as tools for capitalist power, to redevelop spaces that can lead to gentrification processes, but also how art also can be a resource to resist and fight this devastating process.
Everyone is Not an Artist: Autonomous Art Meets the Neoliberal City
The crisis of neoliberal urbanism and its production of polarised, fragmentary and exclusionary cities is explored as an effect of the biopolitical schema of the ‘milieu’: a schema, Foucault claims, by which the ‘pastorate of souls’ is converted into the depersonalised collective ‘population’, and life is elevated and protected as an autonomous value but also degraded as fungible commodity. Within this, the historical function of aesthetics and its increasingly central role within urbanism and urban government is interrogated, from modernist architecture’s attempts to design the entire ‘anthrogeographic’ terrain, to community art, creative regeneration schemes and parks, and public and site specific artworks. The article explores the parallel between the securitising effects of the urban capitalist milieu, which acts to fix life within normative bandwidths, and the implications of artistic autonomy that strives to return to the everyday, thus fixing all life within the bandwidth of aesthetics. The contemporary and officially sanctioned use of relational or participatory art projects in particular within the UK’s zones of ‘regenicide’ - generally, condemned social housing - is read as paradigmatic of biopower’s contradictory elevation and degradation of life. If crisis capitalism targets housing - the ultimate structure of care - as a last means of surplus value extraction, then autonomous art, through its pursuit of the sites and spaces of everyday life, finds itself on a collision course with the trajectory of economic development. The article makes a reading of how it is precisely through autonomous art’s universal exoneration of life (encapsulated by Joseph Beuy’s slogan ‘everyone an artist!’) that it becomes amenable to the opposite use: a propaganda tool for gentrification by which housing can be withdrawn and life rendered naked and exposed to the relentless forces of the market. In this way, the intricate and fundamental relationship between biopolitics and autonomous art is exposed.