Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011

During the 1980s, cultural studies in Britain – and elsewhere – took an uncritical populist turn. The field of study had hitherto focused, with a distinctly oppositional orientation, upon the arts, popular and mass culture as sites of ideological contestation. Yet, increasing concern with describing and indeed celebrating processes of cultural consumption – the active audience, resistance through rituals etc. – lost sight of economic and political struggle over the circulation of culture in society. This cultural populist tendency became less concerned with questioning the status quo and unwittingly, in effect, endorsed neo-liberal development over the past thirty years. Mainstream cultural studies thus ceased to be a critical means of analysing the present cultural condition and tended, instead, to identify itself with it. That was possible because the prevailing culture was incorporating the very kind of dissent that cultural studies as a field of research and education had sought to support and foster. The prevailing culture today is characterized in this article as cool capitalism. Tracing the historical transmogrification of the meaning of ‘cool’, the article presents the concept of cool capitalism – the incorporation of disaffection into capitalism itself – and examines its origins in African-American culture, and its incorporation and neutralization over time, in order to characterize the most pronounced features of mainstream culture around the world today. In conclusion, the article calls for a renewal of critique in the public interest that applies multidimensional analysis to a wide range of issues. The analytical purpose is to account adequately for the ontological complexity of cultural circulation in various symbolic, economic, political and ecological contexts under neo-liberal capitalism. In this respect it aims to clarify the object of contestation for critical cultural intervention in the public sphere.

This article considers the development of cultural policy as part of New Labour’s Third Way governance and identifies three rhetorics of state-funded art: art as a form of cultural democracy; art as an economic driver; and art providing solutions for social amelioration. The text describes how the liberal conception of art and culture, i.e., having universal benefit as a public good, was extended to function within wider policy directives that were ultimately aimed at driving Third Way conceptions of public good. It provides a critique of the positivist claims for state-funded art as producing social transformation and instead points to how art commissioned as part of culture-led regeneration was instrumental and complicit with an agenda of privatization and marketization. It suggests that this has had negative consequences for democracy.

The tensions that exist in thinking around politicized collaborative art are exemplified by the theoretical positions taken by Claire Bishop and Grant Kester. Bishop argues that the autonomy of the artist is indispensable to the critical function of collaborative art, and that this is impeded by an ‘ethical turn’ in criticism that promotes ‘the sacrifice of authorship in the name of a “true” and respectful collaboration’ (Bishop 2006a: 181). By contrast, Kester affirms that ethical reflection is a central feature of collaborative art, where the artist must overcome their own privileged status in order to create an equal dialogue with participants. This article is an attempt to move beyond the polarized form of debate between these two theorists. It argues that collaborative art is defined by a contradiction where an apparently free aesthetic space is superimposed on the social and institutional reality of art with all of its implicit exclusions. Despite appearances, the positions of Kester and Bishop are complicit in their attempt to expel this contradiction. This article argues that this contradiction must be regarded as the foundation of the political in collaborative art. In doing so it suggests that Ranci concept ‘dissensus’ offers scope for mapping the paradoxical complexity of the interdependence of ethical, aesthetic and political issues in the liminal space between art and the social.

Adopting the form of a retrospective review of the temporary site-specific public art programme curated by Mary Jane Jacob at the Spoleto Festival in 1991, this article contextualizes the project with reference to both subsequent critical responses and the broader informal professional reception of the programme. Consideration is given to the contestation of traditional museum practices; the construction of counter-histories; questions of affect and ethical positioning; questions of mediation and the conditions of critique; and the reputational stakes involved in experimental public art outside the traditional centres of the contemporary art world. The article concludes by asserting the importance of attending to everyday operational and reputational practices in constructing critical accounts and analyses of public culture.

Recently a multitude of artists’ endeavours to creatively engage with the public space have become more aligned with the temporal than the spatial. This shift away from traditional notions of public space has allowed for an increasingly elusive, radically dispersed number of events and intervals to occur. Projects incorporating site-specificity have also shown a greater preoccupation with so-called non-spaces and non-sites. Many such artworks can be characterized by their movement from the grandiose to the more intimate in scale. Practices rooted in institutional critique now foreground playfulness rather than pontificate, although nonetheless maintaining a concertedly premeditated approach incorporating multiple angles, vantage points, and media. Much recent art has been involved with a choreographic turn as artists stage, configure, and orchestrate their creative actions. This article discusses a variety of these projects including artworks by Mark Boulos, Harrell Fletcher, Sharon Hayes, Toby Huddlestone, Tino Sehgal, Jane Tsong, and The Yes Men.

BOOK DESIGN. A PRACTICE FOR EVERYDAY LIFE, DAVID CROSS AND CLAIRE DOHERTY (EDS), (2009)Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, (276 pp.), coloured illustrations, ISBN 9783866783331, Paperback, £20 A COMPANION TO MARX’S CAPITAL DAVID HARVEY, (2010) London: Verso, (368 pp.), ISBN 9781844673599, Paperback, £10.99 ‘RE: PUBLIC’, TEMPLE BAR GALLERY AND STUDIOS, DUBLIN, 19 JANUARY – 13 MARCH 2010 THE FALMOUTH CONVENTION, 20–23 MAY 2010 ‘WAR ZONE AMSTERDAM’, AMSTERDAM, 8 SEPTEMBER – 17 OCTOBER 2011OPEN #18, 2030: WAR ZONE AMSTERDAM, JORINDE SEIJDEL AND LIESBETH MELIS (EDS), (2009)Rotterdam: NAi Publishers/SKOR, 160 pp., English edition: ISBN 978-90-5662-710-2, Paperback, Є19.50, Dutch edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-709-6, Paperback, Є23.50 GRACELANDS, DROMAHAIR, CO. LEITRIM, IRELAND SHOW AND TELL: A CHRONICLE OF GROUP MATERIAL London: Four Corners Books, 272 pp., ISBN 978–0–9561928–1–3, Paperback, £22.50