'The City in the Biennale'

Co-Organizer and Host of the Panel: "Localities, Positions and Power" CFP: For the 2017 DGS Sociology of Arts meeting in Berlin, we invite papers researching the ways that cities shape art at different levels. The goal of this event is to share research and invoke dialogues about the ways that the urban is important for understanding the production, evaluation and distribution of art. Our aim is to develop an arts sociology that takes seriously place, space and cities. There are numerous collectively shared ideas about the importance of cities in art. Social scientists, historians and journalists alike envision particular cities in particular historical moments as key sites where the arts are flourishing, since at least the 20th century cities have been part of the collective imaginary of where art is produced, evaluated and distributed. Examples are legion: from the emergence of new forms and avant-garde art, such as literature or visual arts in prewar Paris, to popular music in 1980-90s Manchester, or the visual arts in New York City and Berlin and film in Los Angeles and Mumbai today. Cities have cultural, symbolic and material significance in the arts. If cities are the sites of or important nodes within art worlds, art systems, fields, networks, etc, we want to turn our attention to how, when and why this is significant. Indeed, even in an era of 'global culture' or a 'global art world', in which mobility is increasingly the norm for many in the arts, specific locales still hold significance. In the visual arts, art worlds and cities such as Istanbul, Mumbai, Tokyo and Sao Paulo are written about as 'emerging' in the global art world, with scholarly and journalistic attention paid to the development of trans-local communities embedded within global networks. The changing inter-, intra-and trans-urban constellations of art, the ideas about these cities, as well as sociological analyses of being an artist or art mediator in these places and networks, are of interest here. As urban scholars continue to urge a non-reductionist approach to understanding the specific social, cultural, economic, architectural and spatial conditions of cities, we ought also to take seriously the urban contexts of art. Cities matter. It is here that people gather, that early career artists form careers, that mobilities pass through, and where important hubs and nodes in increasing global connectivity are anchored. While much research has been conducted on the ways that the arts shape cities, including gentrification, creative cities, street art and public art research, this conference seeks to

The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies

There is an affinity between the dynamics of the art world and the dynamics of the city. The arts are used by policy makers, businesses and communities to position their cities, so as to attract investments, visitors and skilled workers. And in turn the city is conducive for artists to practice and sell their craft. The symbiotic and intertwined relations between the city and the arts have led Jean Baudrillard, a philosopher well regarded by art theorists and critics, to consider art a ‘conspiracy’ (Baudrillard and Lotringer, 2005). He was angry with the exploitation of the arts for non-art purposes. He took a skeptical and critical view of the arts, and was peeved that the arts have become more about big business and extravagant shows organized by multinational corporations. He was similarly angered that these profit-focused art activities demand to be treated with reverence and awe. Society’s relationship with the arts has evolved over the centuries (Boll, 2011; Cuno, 2006; Edwards, 1999; Ivey, 2008; Weintraub, 2003). Art is now about more than aesthetics and beauty, it is also about politics, business and society. The art world thrives in the urban milieu and, at the same time, the art world is incorporated into city-making and urban development policies. The art city evolves from a mixture of policy, circumstances and deliberate promotion. This chapter looks at this mixture.

The thing that I found interesting about doing some work on capital in Venice was that the Biennale and a Venetian financial history presented the literal and material connections we can make between art and capital. Given this, what I want to draw out today is how although many recent art practices as well as the Biennale itself has aimed to emphasise the literal and material nature of art, that grounds art in experience, this has paradoxically seemed to aid and abet the logic of financial capital giving it a privileged status as a ubiquitous and formless power. So, it was Venetian financiers who dominated and controlled a huge international bubble of currency speculation from 1275 to 1350. These financiers led the banking families of Florence and were under license of and also controlled major revenues to the Papacy and international royalty. For Venetians, these unregulated far reaching economies was a trade not in goods but in value itself, Venice was seen as " the greatest commercial success – a city without industry, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an Empire through mere trading enterprise " (Braudel). This financial oligarchy of small companies in fact were megaspeculators, thriving on the instability of nation states and the value of value itself. A trade in abstractions, in fiction and free trade mythology that resisted and deformalised physical borders and ideological boundaries. This description of the effect of capital can and has been levelled at today's economy driven politics. This is globalisation as 'the integration of trade, finance and information that is creating a single global market and culture' 1 The description of the field of capital often then, appears like this: it is material and ideological; it appears as an open territory where routine and stability is rejected, all bets are on and speculation and risk are paramount. The key problems then are that Global Financial capital is groundless and abstract whilst also being seamless and total. And, secondly, if we want to position a critical relationship to capital, we have to acknowledge somehow that a love of deregulated freedoms is paramount to a liberalism that has been fostered by not only capital but stands for the ethics of a critical art practice. This is not so much that art is assimilated or commoditised by capital but a deeper philosophical point that they operate with the same principles. I find this particularly relevant to the Biennale in both the aims of the business of the art project as a whole, as well as its curation and the artworks that make it up. So if art and capital share this liberalist credo, what this means then is that our descriptions of the power of capital are now central to what we understand as critique-and vice versa. Just to rehearse this then, this is especially so when we can identify capital as the most pervasive substantive force written through our lives and yet we understand that our predisposition to a faith in individuality, and free agency, does not guarantee any opposition to capital but rather seems to substantiate the freedoms of capital. These questions and problems seem to ask for resistance, but here I want to argue that resistance limits agency. What I want to go through now, is how discourses on experience, temporality and the evental nature of art have extended rather than negotiated these problems. And I think this is worth dealing with not only because of the Venice Biennale, but through what is now a comprehensive shift in curation and art making to discourses on experience and exchange. The interest in experience that I want to address is not the anti-aesthetic of Hal Foster, nor is it the 1 (Thomas Freidman, 'Roll Over Hawks and Doves', the New York Times 2 Feb, I: 15)

2020

DFG, GRK 1705, The World in the City: Metropolitanism and Globalisation from the 19th Century to the Present

Geographie et Cultures , 2016

This edition of Geographie et Cultures looks at the relationship between regional or global trade and urban reconfigurations through the questions of urban development and property investments and the way cities promote their image and their claims to be cultural hubs, often while simultaneously participating in the process of nation-building. We will also look into the effects a developing art market has on cities and their practices, usages and representations. The diversification of places for the production, sale and display of art may be seen as a characteristic feature of globalisation, just as it opens up a field of historical and sociological investigation into how such new geographies are formed. The apparently unifying dimension of the art market should not obscure the diversity of landscapes and practices that have their roots in highly distinct local contexts, or the gaping inequalities between North and South in terms of access to cultural supply and local dissemination, or indeed of arts education.

* This is a conference paper for the 2017 meeting of The International Art Market Studies Association (July 2017, London, United Kingdom) This paper addresses the social economy created by 2016 Shanghai Biennale that ran from November 12, 2016 to March 12 2017. With the selection of the Indian curator/artist group Raqs Media Collective as the chief curator, the 11th Shanghai Biennale was structured around the idea to launch “the possibilities of South-South dialogue within the current scenario of a highly interconnected world.” Such an agenda has defined the selection of art works and artists presented in the Biennale – as works of video art, socially engaged multi-media installations, and performing arts being the highlights of the three-month-long show. Many events were convened around the city – including the 51 Personae Project, a collaboration launched with the local group Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society.

The annual international conference series Art and the City was initiated in 2019 and has been held in different cities every year. The primary purpose of this conference is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations among scholars with a specific focus on the intersections of art, urban spaces, the "right to the city," aesthetics, and the politics of the urban environment. It aims to shed light on various aspects related to these themes, such as artistic rebellion on the streets, the aesthetics of urban social movements, and art activism in urban spaces. The conference serves as a platform for bringing together an international team of scholars, fostering a diversity of disciplines and perspectives on the intricate relationships between urban space, art, and social change. This diversity allows for a multifaceted understanding of the ideologies, relationships, meanings, and practices that emerge from the interactions between art and the urban environment. The conference strives to offer insights and promote a better understanding of how these interactions play out in different regions, ultimately contributing to the broader discourse on urban life, art, and social transformation.

2017