WHEN ARTS MET MARKETING

This article argues that arts marketing theory is embedded in the existing context of the nonprofit arts sector – that is, Romantic belief in the universal value of the arts and producer authority over the consumer. As “a set of techniques” and “a decision‐making process”, marketing was able to sit comfortably in the nonprofit arts context during the 1970s and 1980s. However, recent recognition of marketing as “a management philosophy” has brought out incompatibilities between the customer orientation of the marketing notion and the Romantic view of artistic production. This article demonstrates that arts marketing writings embrace Romanticism through the following: generic marketing concept; relationship marketing approach; extended definition of the customer; extended definition of the product; and reduction of marketing to function. Such findings suggest that persistence of the existing belief system and the embeddedness of the market be considered when marketisation in the arts sector is analysed.     

ADMINISTRATIVE DEFINITIONS OF ARTISTS IN THE NORDIC MODEL OF STATE SUPPORT FOR ARTISTS

This article considers the role of public arts policy in producing societal definitions for “art” and “artists”. It examines administrative definitions generated and used by the Nordic system of state support for artists and reflected in its administrative categories and structures of decision‐making. Using the concepts of “artistic field” and “artistic classification system” as starting points, the article focuses on the regulated and institutionalized interaction of the state and artistic fields in decision making, and on the administrative categories emerging from this interaction. Through this interaction, professional and administrative definitions of “art” and “artist” are closely intertwined in the four countries discussed. The administrative categories examined show considerable variation between the countries related to differences in the nature of this interaction. The definition power involved in state support for artists is related to the nature of this interaction, as well as to such factors as the legitimating arguments, objectives and criteria for the support.     

SOVEREIGNTY AND SOFTWARE

This article will critically appraise two approaches to cultural policy. The first focuses upon the need for a national cultural policy in order to establish a national “common culture” among its citizens, through measures to promote the arts and popular media sectors, and set limits to the flow of imported materials into the nation. This is what has been termed the “sovereignty” model, and has historically been the driver of cultural policy debates. The second approach, which is called the “software” approach, aims to create cultural infrastructure and other environmental factors to promote a creative economy, whether at local, regional, national or supra‐national levels. It questions the historical divides between “culture” and “industry”, and between “creativity” and “innovation”, and is focused upon the development of future ideas and creative concepts. It draws upon the very different conditions associated with the development of software to those of established arts and media sectors, and aims to extend the “software” model more widely into cultural and creative industries policy.     

Le Concept de « Démocratie Raciale » dans L’Histoire Intellectuelle Brésilienne

This article aims to reconstruct the history of the term “racial democracy” in Brazilian sociological literature. This term, usually associated with the idea of “myth”, is used in many studies of race relations without little definition or clarity. This article retraces its origins, in particular by showing that the concept is not the invention of Gilberto Freyre. It then examines the evolution of its use with particular emphasis on Unesco’s research in the 1950s and the texts of Florestan Fernandes in the 1960s.     

Rules for Cultural Radicals

Abstract: This article explores the various forms of “social skill”, what we call “rules for cultural radicals”, that the Amber Film and Photography Collective (and primarily its founder and leading visionary, Murray Martin) used to create and sustain an egalitarian arts organization and oppositional cultural movement in the Northeast of England. The collective represented a radical challenge to the world of British filmmaking, featuring innovative practices of cultural work, non‐commodified forms of cultural economy and a commitment to a democratic culture. These “rules” constituted innovative forms of strategic action—visionary leadership, improvisation, risk taking, brokerage—that helped create a durable collective identity and networks of solidarity. We explore the extent to which Amber's “rules” are prefigurative of contemporary forms of cultural activism and radical artistic practice.     

Teaching creative geovisualization: Imagining the creative in/of GIS

Creative geovisualization is situated at the intersection of geography, arts, and digital humanities with a particular emphasis on visualization and mapping that preserves, represents, and generates more authentic, contextual, and nuanced meanings of space and people with an artistic and humanistic perspective and approach. This is a creative expansion in critical GIS practices and a new alternative to traditionally science-rooted approaches to GIS and mapping. Reflecting the experience of teaching a “creative geovisualization” course in an interdisciplinary curriculum, I demonstrate how critical and creative scholarship with mapping and geovisualization is introduced in the classroom and is illuminated in the students' creative practices. The class encompasses key epistemological and methodological groundings of creative geovisualization—including non-representational theories; critical cartography and GIS; the convergence of geography, arts, and humanities; psychogeography; and qualitative and affective geovisualization. Empirical examples of students' works illustrate the blending of different modes of creative engagements with GIS and geovisualization and specific ways to work with various forms of embodied, relational, interpretive, and expressive geographies. GIS and mapping become creative as they continue evolving in process, and it is time that we deeply (re-)imagine “the creative” in/of GIS in critical GIS pedagogies.     

2. BOOTSTRAPPING,SELF‐BINDING,AND OTHER METAPHORS OF ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.     

Tradition as play: pilgrimage to “England’s Nazareth”

This article explores the “invention of tradition” thesis by examining the physical and ideological reconstruction, as well as the contemporary use, of the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham, in Norfolk, England. We argue that a focus on the actions and motivations of cultural élites encourages a one‐dimensional view of ritual and ignores how traditions may be transformed in the process of re‐enactment by other members of society.     

A STRATEGIC LOGIC FOR ARTS MARKETING

Recent thinking within arts philosophy has moved further and further away from the concept of autonomous art. Nowadays art is mostly seen as an intrinsic part of everyday human life. Artistic value is conceived of more and more as something that depends largely upon experiencing the works as they are encountered within general culture. This relational perspective on art has important implications for the future development of arts marketing as a discipline. This article argues that arts marketing should primarily aim to support and reinforce the artistic functioning of artworks. It proposes that art consumers should be seen as co‐producers in the total art process and advocates that arts marketing should focus on the artistic experience as the core customer value.     

Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning

This essay addresses Gilles Deleuze's “pedagogy of the concept” as grounded in the triadic relation between percepts, affects, and concepts. Philosophical thinking based on the “logic of affects” necessarily leads to the creation of novel concepts in/for experience. Still, new concepts are themselves informed by the physicality of affects thus bridging the dualistic gap of the Cartesian subject. Deleuze's neorealist position considers the objects of real experience to be both actual and virtual. Experience exceeds private sense-data; it is a milieu providing an ability to affect and be affected. The essay presents Deleuze's virtual ontology as an unorthodox “foundation” for knowledge under the provision that the affective conditions in real experience for the actualization of the virtual will have been fulfilled. Deleuze's practical philosophy is used here to offer a model for solving the “learning paradox” that has been haunting us since the days of Socrates.     

Valuing the Arts: Theorising and Realising Cultural Capital in an Australian City

For those who make and admire artistic works, there is no question of their value. However, for others interested in economic development, the value of the arts is often more tangential, contested and questionable. While the post‐modern world of consumption and spectacle suggests to some academics and governments that the arts and cultural industries are the way of the future, others remain sceptical about their social and economic value. This is a theoretical as well as a practical issue this paper explores by offering a reconceptualisation of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital as a way of re‐assessing the value of the arts. The paper then applies this framework to quantify and qualify the value of the arts in one regional city in Australia – Geelong in Victoria – focusing on the work of two artists. The aim is to describe the interconnected processes by which the arts generate cultural capital in the form of confidence, image, individual well‐being, social cohesion and economic viability. The analysis also highlights the ongoing power relations which prescribe artistic production, circulation and valuation. The implications of such a rethinking and application go well beyond one city and region to other places grappling with the relationship between artistic production and urban well being. By focusing on the broad‐ranging process by which artistic value is created for individuals, groups, professionals, communities and governments, a model becomes available for other places to use in realising their cultural capital.     

Creative shifts and directions

The availability and “readiness” of culture as a mode of governmental control makes cultural policy a matter of great importance in any contemporary society. This is true not only in liberal democracies with established arts councils or cultural policies, it is also proactively pursued by a technologically advanced yet illiberal regime like Singapore, eager to position itself as the global “Renaissance City” of the twenty‐first century. What this “renaissance” model entails remains highly cryptic, not least because cultural terms and political markers are often elusive, but also because the very concept of “cultural policy” shifts along with the political and economic tides in Singapore. Drawing on a rarely cited essay by Raymond Williams, this article offers an historical look at cultural policy in Singapore – from its first articulation in 1978 to its present standing under the rubric of “creative industries” (2002). It considers some of the problems encountered and the societal changes made to accommodate Singapore’s new creative direction, all for the sake of ensuring Singapore’s continued economic dynamism. This article contends that cultural policy in Singapore now involves extracting creative energies – and economies – out of each loosely termed “creative worker” by heralding the economic potential of the arts, media, culture and the creative sectors, but concomitantly marking boundaries of political exchange. In this regard, culture in Singapore has become more than ever a site for governmentality and control.     

RETHINKING THE SOCIAL IMPACTS OF THE ARTS

The paper presents a critical discussion of the current debate over the social impacts of the arts in the UK. It argues that the accepted understanding of the terms of the debate is rooted in a number of assumptions and beliefs that are rarely questioned. The paper goes on to present the interim findings of a three‐year research project, which aims to rethink the social impact of the arts, with a view to determining how these impacts might be better understood. The desirability of a historical approach is articulated, and a classification of the claims made within the Western intellectual tradition for what the arts “do” to people is presented and discussed.     

Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World

Abstract: Who counts as a subject of justice? Not so long ago, it was widely assumed that those “who counted” were simply the citizens of a bounded territorial state. Today, however, as activists target injustices that cut across borders, that “Westphalian” view is contested and the “who” of justice is an object of hot dispute. This new situation calls for a new kind of justice theorizing, whose contours I sketch in this essay. Arguing, first, for a reflexive mode of theorizing, I introduce the concept of “misframing”, which can subject the Westphalian “who” to critical scrutiny. Arguing, second, for the necessity of a substantive normative principle to evaluate competing “who’s”, I introduce the “all‐subjected principle” as superior to three better known alternatives: namely, membership, humanism, and the all‐affected principle.     

Dithyrambs and Ploughshares: The Cycle of Creation and Criticism in Nietzsche's Aesthetics

Pairing Thus Spoke Zarathustra with On the Genealogy of Morality foregrounds tensions between artistic creation and critical interpretation in Nietzsche's work. From The Birth of Tragedy to his genesis of the concept, Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the real, or “what is,” in terms of a creative, form-giving force. We might therefore read Zarathustra—a linguistically experimental, richly allegorical, self-reflexive, modernist prose poem—as the pre-eminent, artistic mode of philosophical expression, at least for Nietzsche. But Zarathustra is followed by a sober Abhandlung (treatise), which professes a scientific goal of “getting to the bottom of things” by uncovering the contingency, origin, and fabricated nature of supposedly eternal, “given” values. These instantiations of Nietzsche-the-artist and Nietzsche-the-critic suggest art's “double” or contradictory nature—a nature that accents its kinship with philosophy. Zarathustra and the Genealogy, read together, hint that the destruction of idols—or de-constructive, critical interpretation more generally—is not just supplemental to, but a necessary moment within the aesthetic itself.     

Taking the discussion onward

ABSTRACT

This response to the foregoing reviews of The Poetry and Music of Science identifies common themes raised by them, responds to direct questions where this is possible and suggests further avenues of discussion. It focusses in particular on issues of the historical and cultural setting of human creativity, the particular issues raised by poetry, the differences between artistic and scientific imagination, the confusion (and de-confusion) of ‘imagination' and ‘creativity', the social and institutional framings of the sciences and the arts, the question of digital creativity and theological themes. A common emerging idea is that human creativity, whether artistic or scientific, is well-described by neither purely ‘expressive' nor ‘receptive’ actions but by a meeting of both.     

Hardworking Newcomers and Generations of Poverty: Poverty Discourse in Central Washington State

This research is part of a project that aims to reinterpret geographies of poverty in the American Northwest by focusing on the intersections of cultural and political–economic processes that produce poverty differences. This paper contributes to this aim by unpacking poverty beliefs by race at the local county level. This qualitative analysis is grounded in a brief discussion of the political economy of Kittitas County in Central Washington State, which provides space to analyze the theoretical linkages between structural and cultural constructions of poverty differences. Specifically, this paper argues that first generation “hardworking” Hispanic immigrants embody the “working poor”, while individual explanations of poverty are articulated as the “intergenerational poor”, who are racialized as white and choose poverty as a lifestyle. In this vein, many local residents use the marker of “generation” to distinguish between white, lower class individuals who choose to be poor from a group of Hispanic newcomers whose poverty stems from structural forces such as non‐living‐wage jobs and discrimination. This forms one part of a larger strategy to “blame the individual” for the existence of white poverty. This analysis poses new theoretical insights into the intersection between difference markers such as race, class, and generation and contributes to the literature on racial differences in poverty explanations. The geographical specificity of poverty discourse argues for further grounding of the poverty literature in material conditions, which will allow for more nuanced understanding of the creation and persistence of poverty in poor communities.     

A HISTORIC NEIGHBOURHOOD AS ARTS SPACE: THE LITTLE INDIA EXPERIENCE

Many cities around the world are redeveloping their neighbourhoods as arts and cultural precincts. Urban industrial zones and lower‐income residential areas have taken on new life as arts neighbourhoods in a bid to attract high‐yield visitors, propel their creative industry and brand themselves as attractive to investors and residents. This article has two aims. Conceptually it explores the notion of arts urbanization – the creation of arts spaces in cities and the socio‐spatial dynamics which they embody. Empirically, the concept is tested using the case of Singapore's Arts Housing Scheme. Under this scheme, historic ethnic precincts take on new roles as arts and creative belts. While the scheme has yielded some success by way of fostering spaces of identity and inspiration for artists, it has also generated social concerns and spatial challenges. Singapore's Little India offers an empirical setting to explore this concept. The paper argues that geography matters to the arts and that arts‐led urbanization creates distinct spatial configurations in cities. For this reason, a greater understanding of and research into arts neighbourhoods and their socio‐spatial dynamics are essential if we are to aspire to sustainable and sensitive development of cities and their creative communities.     

Sharpening Advocacy Coalitions

The concept of “advocacy coalitions” is the bedrock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), one of the most established and successful approaches for understanding policy processes across the globe. This article revisits and sharpens the conceptual definition of advocacy coalitions. We summarize the lessons from its theoretical emphases under the ACF and specify its five attributes (policy actors, shared beliefs, coordination, resources, and stability). Through this specification, we identify the ideal coalition type and several coalition subtypes. We then clarify and make a distinction between how we think about coalitions as a concept and how we approach coalitions empirically. This article sharpens the lens for describing and explaining coalitions toward better observations, theorizing, and measurements. It ends with next steps for further deepening and broadening knowledge about advocacy coalitions.     

Rethinking the Concept of Membership in Nature Advocacy Organizations

The political science literature on interest groups, particularly since Olson (1965), normally focuses on individual motivations to join groups or the incentives offered by groups to entice prospective members to join and, more important, to stay on as members over time. But what happens to our understanding about “members”—a term freighted with overtones of democratic participation—when these individuals are more likely to be passive “supporters” or “donors”? Is there a conceptual and practical distinction between the two? This article ponders this question by examining the advocacy organizations that comprise the national environmental community.