The Thing Hamburg: A Temporary Democratization of the Local Art Field (original) (raw)
Related papers
Democratization of Art: Screaming against the walls
Screaming Against the wall: How to start a pacific and meaningful dialogue between the cultural institutions and the community, 2019
Through the investigation of the online users’ background and their communication methods we can identify different groups. These groups are virtually created by the different points of view, beliefs, education, and workplaces of the users who are engaging with each other online every day. The cause of these distinctions can be identified in the so-called social media phenomenon Filter bubble, which is the intellectual isolation that occurs when social platforms, website use algorithms to assume information about what a user would like to receive and then give back to it the information from their database according to the previous assumptions. This means that the daily engagement and discussion between users on the various platforms is potentially limited to a dialogue between like-minded individuals. In this paper we will see how this limitation has a deep impact in recent years on the inner division of society and how the lack of inter-class communication exasperates the social conflicts dividing highly educated people and those from a less educated background or the working class, as well. We will see how the online community and new technological tools have radically changed the way we perceive knowledge, by neutralizing – or democratizing – the global debate about different issues in every different human field. It means that we will acknowledge how new-born online experts in one field can fight and counterbalance the self-referential dialogue of the consolidated experts in the same field (the expertise) which is still present in the academic world. There will be a clear necessity for the most well-known cultural institutions to recreate an inter-class dialogue to counterattack the rise of the populist movements, antimigrant ideologies and the why cuts of cultural funds are harmful to culture itself, in its ability to preserve the human heritage and make it available to everyone. We will start this analyzation of the cultural institutions, focusing especially on contemporary art and modern art museums, based on a fundamental concept: the concept of the Democratization of Art. The museums are social agents whose public (or private) funds should be fully used to facilitate social inclusion, change and they should be aware of the changing of the community they are working with. We will analyse different typologies of museums based on two different criteria: how they work with the local community and how they deal with the contemporary issues of granting accessible knowledge. By doing so we will try to underline the necessity of public engagement in the museums’ spaces through a contextual approach. This contextual approach is composed of three main factors or processes: the actualization process, the learning programmes activities and the experiences of co-narration and co-curation of exhibitions inside the museums. Museum experts need to let the community interfere, act, discuss their works, their curatorial ideas, they have to change their way to write and speak by getting out of their intellectual academic sphere to attract into these cultural institutions people who are, nowadays, not interested in the museums’ activities seeing museums and galleries like a palace where elite people are confined trying to maintain their status quo and their privilege as highly educated human beings. Furthermore, we will have a brief discussion about the different level of accessibility of the different museum objects, texts, panels through the labels and critical books produced by curators, external authors or staff of the museum/gallery itself. This last part will investigate the written language used in various museum contexts to underline how the academic and intellectual tone, which Peter Walsh called the unassailable voice in 1997, is still present.
Between Aesthetics and Politics: Socially Engaged Art on the Internet
Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne
The author discusses the changes in the model of democracy that have occurred since the Internet began. The hierarchical model of representative democracy is replaced on the Web by participatory democracy. On the example of Siksa and Bread Resolution (Rozdzielczość Chleba), the author shows up the transformations of the model of literary communication on the Internet. She also indicates ethic role engaged art takes in the contemporary society. Artists that produce socially engaged art do it in the name of those who do not exist in public space, those whose voice is not heard and who cannot defend themselves. Nevertheless, the author comes to the conclusion that the real democratic revolution can only take place outside the Web.
Web, Art ,and Political Discourse
The research focuses on the field of Internet art, net.art, which followed the emergence of the World Wide Web and often manifested as a result of the need to find alternative ways to deal with and circulate works of art other than the established mechanisms of the dominant market. It is here that we come across one of the first attempts to criticize corporate aesthetics and the commercialization of information through the paradigm of net.art’s pioneer, the Serbian artist Vuk Cosic. This will be the motive to trace a particular field of artistic-activist practice, that of Tactical Media, which have been closely associated with Internet art. The theoretical foundation on which Tactical Media was based is situated around the theory of French philosopher Michel de Certeau on the practice of everyday life, which is transformed into a political tactic. Through the examples of Heath Bunting, ®TM ark and Yes Men we will encounter practices which combine net.art with Tactical Media and develop as forms of critique towards neo-liberal hegemony. In the last chapter, the space of the Internet is proposed as another real space, according to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. The following dilemma emerges; whether the heterotopia of the Internet will function as an illusory space which enhances the illusion of real space or whether it will manage to become another real public space, through its political constitution, which can also be a result of its contingent artistic treatment. We will follow the thought of theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Julian Stallabrass, Rosalyn Deutsche and Oliver Marchart, in order to comprehend, through the theory of the political as antagonism and politics as hegemony, that it is not enough for a public space to be physically or institutionally defined as such in order for it to effectively perform its function.
Urban Citizenship: Democratising Democracy, 2017
The political potential of aesthetic experience and dialogical aesthetics in social art. In: Krenn, M., Morawek K. (Eds.). (2017). Urban Citizenship - Democratising Democracy. Vienna: VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst
Public Operation: Net Art, Sociology, and Practicable Media
Practicable. From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. MIT Press, Leonardo Book Series, 2016
There has been very little sociological observation of the " artistic experience " as interaction: between people and objects in a situation of cultural exchange and active encounter with the work of art. Even rarer are the anthropological or pragmatic excursions into what these objects " do " or " cause-to-be-done " to those who create and experience them. There are, it would seem, several explanations for this, among them the great divides—between nature and culture, between object and subject—inherited from modernity, and the unwillingness of a still relatively young sociology to encroach on issues treated by such adjacent and more established disciplines as aesthetics and the history of art. As a result the act of reception—the work of art as such—and emotion have long remained the poor relatives or the black boxes of the sociology of the arts. Structural and functional analyses of the artistic act 1 have focused more on behind-the-scenes aspects and the placing of works in the museum or on the market. 2 The works themselves have also remained a background concern for the more Constructivist and interactionist schools of sociology, which, while proceeding from a thorough examination of all the intermediate elements in the creative process, somewhat hastily exclude any differentiation between them. 3 However, together with the sociology of the arts, other domains have given attention to the " objects " fueling, and resulting from, coordinated human activities. The sociologies of sociotechnical networks, situated action, and distributed cognition have shown themselves less timid about incorporating " objects " into their activity analysis schemas, being ready to approach the interconnection between technical and social activities more directly. 4 Here the relationship with technical objects no longer has to do with exploitation or alienation; on the contrary, it functions in the mode of acquaintanceship and contact, and even of play. This interpretive shift enables a fresh look at different domains of social life: the production of scientific discoveries and industrial innovations, not to mention the most ordinary everyday activities now founded on a large range of technical objects, which are themselves subject to the test of social relationships. 5 By resituating social interaction in places, practices, and worlds of objects, these sociologies offer alternatives to the technical determinism and social Constructivism approaches. Looked at as other than mere signs or symbolic representations of cultural and social issues thought to unfold prior or subsequent to their handling, technical objects appear to fuel social exchanges and contribute to the dynamic of interaction by offering the actors new resources and backup. Two concepts, " holds " and " mediation " —have enabled the sociology of the arts to benefit from these theoretical advances. As used by Christian Bessy and Francis Chateauraynaud, the concept of " hold " is intended to provide, in an active mode, an account of the perceptual grasp and the assessment of objects: the concept was chosen for its symmetrical character, which invites thinking in terms of both what " offers a hold to " and what " has a hold
Interventions in Digital Cultures, 2017
How to intervene? Interventions are in vogue in digital cultures as forms of critique or political actions into public spheres. By engaging in social, political, and economic contexts, interventions attempt to interrupt and change situations—often with artistic means. This volume maps methods of interventions under the specific conditions of the digital. How are interventions shaped by these conditions? And how can they contribute to altering them? In essays and interviews, this book interrogates modes of intervening in and through art, infrastructures, techno-ecological environments, bio-technology, and political protests to highlight their potentials as well as their ambivalences. rezension/german: Julia Preisker: https://rezenstfm.univie.ac.at/index.php/tfm/article/view/104