Pascal Gielen

Civil society around the world is increasingly dealing with global questions, whereby it also begins to assume transnational forms of organisation. The arts, with their ability to project alternative realities and communicate ideas, can play a key role in addressing public and political problems. In looking at different platforms, activist groups, and new forms of citizens? initiatives, this book asks how cultural and art initiatives can both question and strengthen the civil domain. Social scientists, cultural theorists, activists, and artists explore how arts and culture can offer various strategies and forms of organisation for a locally rooted society in a globally connected context.

Political Space and Cultural Dissent

The Art of Civil Action

Nico Dockx

Following half a century of neoliberalism, there appears to be a new ideology in the making, called 'commonism.' This book attempts to map these new ideological notions through examples and artistic practices, as well as critical reflection. How are the commons constituted in society? How do they shape the reality of our living together? What strategies and aesthetics do artistic commoners adopt? Is there an alternative and more just future imaginable through the political ideology of the commons? Commonism claims to be better aligned with the ecological and social reality of today than capitalism. Perhaps it is also closer to how social relationships actually function.

A New Aesthetics of the Real

Commonism

Nav Haq

In today?s globalised world, terms such as multiculturalism and pluralism assume a shared culture with shared values and convictions about openness, democracy, and equality. This in turn can be seen as a monoculture of views and attitudes. Yet being able to deal with differences, paradoxes, and ambiguities results from a learning process and does not just happen on its own. Art has played a pivotal role in this process since the dawn of modernity, and artists in particular have the ability to play with cultural conventions. This book gives a platform to art and artists who dare to challenge the rules of our globalised, monocultural society, and explores their successes and failures.

Understanding and Addressing Monoculture

The Aesthetics of Ambiguity

Guy Cools

Karolien Byttebier

Sidi Cherkaoui

"The Ethics of Art" explores the growing ethical consciousness within the artistic community, as it relates to art's production and distribution mechanisms. It attempts to show how the artistic community engages in creative, social dialogue based upon the potential of the body. The first of this book's two sections, "Ecosophy," focuses on eco-art practices and the ways in which the ethical turn in the arts implies a greater receptivity to our environment. The second section addresses the contemporary dance scene as an example of this phenomenon, showing how it exhibits renewed interest in "caring" for one's body, rather than transgressing it, both on the individual level and on that of the larger "body politic" of cooperation and collaboration. In this volume, the singular voices of artists are as important as the scholarly contributions.

Ecological Turns in the Performing Arts

The Ethics of Art

Today's networked society offers us many possibilities for transmitting information, for interactive communication, mobility and flexibility. It also has a latent side effect: it renders the world 'flat.' Time-honored hierarchies, traditions, elites and canons are subject to the challenge of eroding movements. In such a flattened, horizontal world, art institutions are finding it hard to survive. After all, institutions traditionally represent verticality: historic profundity, tradition, dignity and certainty. In "Institutional Attitudes," Kenny Cupers, Bart De Baere, Ann Demeester, Jimmie Durham, Alex Farquharson, Mark Fisher, Pascal Gielen, Marc Jacobs, Sonja Lavaert, Thijs Lijster, Isabell Lorey, Markus Miessen, Chantal Mouffe, Gerald Raunig, Patricia Reed, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Blake Stimson explore the future identity of art institutions. Will they be able to reinvent historical profundity? Is this desirable? And if so, what would these new vertical institutions look like?

Instituting Art in a Flat World

Institutional Attitudes

Paul De Bruyne

Jeroen Boomgaard

In most countries art education is not immune from a large-scale reorganization. Educational institutions are increasingly required to operate as enterprises that compete for the best or the largest number of students and to express their objective and results in financial and management terms. In short, the field of education has become a 'market'. 'Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm' investigates the effects of this setup on the content and practice of artistic education and the position of art and the artist.00.

Realism Versus Cynicism

Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm

Alexandra Tryanova

A pacifist is a rare beast in a bomb shelter." The war in Ukraine challenged our idea of pacifism. Should Europe take up arms or not? Can it ease its conscience only with humanitarian aid? Isn?t Europe's attitude towards the war mainly driven by economic motives? In Passivity, Ukrainian art curator Alexandra Tryanova and Belgian sociologist Pascal Gielen engage in a dialogue about this. In doing so, they not only talk about the current political situation, but also look at themselves; at their own fears and privileges. What is passivity in our own daily doings? When does pacifism turn into resignation? How do our surrounding media and culture contribute to such an attitude? Passivity does not provide unifying answers to these questions. Rather, it looks for ways to find peace with our own mixed feelings.

Passivity: Between Indifference and Pacifism

On the Foundation of Politics

No Culture, No Europe

Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times

Paul de Bruyne

Interviews and theoretical discussion on the subject of community art from an (art) sociological perspective. What is the political and critical potential of this art form, and just how much change really is initiated? With various interviews with artists and policymakers on their stake and ambitions.

The Politics of Trespassing

Community Art

Sanatsal Çokluğun Mırıltısı

'Art sociologist Pascal Gielen defends the hypothesis that the globalized art scene is an ideal production entity for economic exploitation. These days the work ethic of the art world with its ever-present young dynamic, flexible working hoursm thematic approach, short-term contracts or lack of contracts and its unlimited, energetic freedom is capitalized within the cultural indyustry and has been converted into a standard production model. In the glow of the crative cities and the creative industry govermments embrace this post-Henry Ford work model and seamlessly link it to the globally-dominant neo-liberal market economy'--Back cover.

Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism

The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude

Barend Van Heusden

Discussions about the state of arts education often focus on the experiences, emotions and technical skills of artists, rather than the critical function of the arts in society, stages of cognitive development or evidence-based research into arts participation. Arts Education Beyond Art calls for a new artistic and pedagogical consciousness focused on art's cognitive and social processes rather than the qualities of the artistic artifact. The contributors to this volume (composers, professors, administrators, theorists, artists, actors and writers, among others) argue that art education should be embraced as a social practice; instructors have to teach students to look at life with and through art, and not the other way around.

Teaching Art in Times of Change

Arts Education Beyond Art

In his contribution to this publication the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno argues that art has been dissolved in society like an effervescent tablet in water. The arts have become an essential component of the post-Fordist production process and have to a large degree lost their autonomy. Taking up the challenge of the views of Virno, Hardt and others concerning the place and function of art in society, this book's authors consult high-profile international figures from various artistic disciplines and endeavour to gain insight into the changing circumstances in which today's creative processes arise and take shape. "Arts in society" sketches a provocative impression of the manner in which prominent artists, theorists and art intermediaries relate to economic, political, social and ecological issues. It presents an instructive narrative about power and impotence, cynicism and utopia, and nihilism and engagement aimed at all those who presently dare to call themselves artists and everyone who wants to understand the importance of arts.

The magic word these days is creativity, and not just for artists: business

Creativity and Other Fundamentalisms

Pascal Gielen about The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude

Taru Elfving

Irmeli Kokko

Artist residencies provide space, time, and concentration for making art, doing research and for reflection. Residencies are crucial nodes in international circulation and career development, but also invaluable infrastructures for critical thinking and artistic experimentation, cross-cultural collaboration, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and site-specific research. The globalization process and the demands of the creative economy have had an impact on artist residencies. Ecological and geopolitical urgencies are now also affecting them more and more. In response, many residencies today actively search for more sustainable alternatives than the current neoliberal condition allows for artistic practice. With a range of critical insights from the field of residencies, this book asks what the present role of artist residencies is in relation to artists and the art ecosystem amid transformations in society.

Reclaiming Time and Space

Contemporary Artist Residencies

In 'The murmuring of the artistic multitude' art sociologist Pascal Gielen defends the hypothesis that the globalized art scene is an ideal production entity for economic exploitation. How can the art world preserve its own dynamic and freedom? This third edition has been thoroughly updated with Gielen's latest insights into the political dimensions of art, autonomy and the relationship between art, ethics, and democracy.

Global Art, Politics and Post-Fordism

Thijs Lijster

Suzana Milevska

Ruth Sonderegger

"Is art criticism losing ground, because of the Internet and art blogs? Do people still consider the authoritative art critic (in newspapers, magazines) as their most important source to decide and filter what they want to see, read and listen to? Most recent discussions revolve around the question 'what is art criticism?'; this book explores the question: 'Where is art criticism?'. It looks at new ways and new spaces where art critics might interact with the public, works of art, artists and scholars. This book suggests criticism has shifted to different places and different stages: a 'displacement', not only with regard to media (from journalism to blogs, catalogues, and such), but also a displacement in the geographical and institutional sense."--P. 4 of cover

Pascal Gielen

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