Participating in the Arts Market: A Path towards Transformation?

Closes:

31 Jul 2024

Journal

Guest editor(s)

Guest Editors

Dr Zafeirenia Brokalaki, Queen Mary University of London, UK, [email protected]
Professor Jeff B. Murray, University of Arkansas, USA

Introduction

Audience participation in the arts has long been conceptually connected to the ideals of democracy, equality and justice but also practically linked to visions of community engagement and social transformation (Lacy 1995; Bourriaud 2002; Mouffe 2008; Jackson 2011; Kester 2011). In contrast to conventional representational art forms, participatory arts allow audience members to take active part in the creation and consumption of the aesthetic experience through their collaboration with multiple actors, such as artists, activists, communities, public bodies and cultural institutions. Hence, participatory artistic experiences are usually grounded in live art practices - such as performing arts, dance, music, theatre, storytelling, installations, video, film and digital media - in which individuals, rather than objects, constitute the central artistic material and medium (Bishop 2012).

Although, ideologically speaking, participatory art aims to place pressure on conventional capitalist modes of artistic production/consumption and resist practices of art commodification (Belfiore and Gibson 2019), it is still largely exercised within a market-based economy context. For example, participatory art has taken a variety of forms including institutional programmes, state schemes, industry projects, community initiatives, off-the-fringes events, new media/digital activities and informal everyday practices (Scott 2009; Neal and Murju 2015; Miles and Gibson 2016). This paradoxical nature of participatory aesthetics have given rise to recent co-optation tendencies of informal, everyday, community and radical participatory art practices by well-established cultural institutions and commercial ventures, which have largely complicated the field.

Despite the growing academic interest, the expanding practical orientation of artists, and the increasing institutional focus and policy attention towards participatory art practice in the last decades (Miles and Gibson forthcoming), the concrete implications, outcomes and larger impact of consumer participation in aesthetics remain vague and debatable. This is mainly because insights about participatory artistic initiatives come primarily by art historians and theorists, artists and cultural scholars but there has been limited concentrated attempt to explore participants’ actual experiences of such endeavours. We, therefore, lack engagement with those who actually participate in the conception, execution, display and dissemination of participatory events and there is an underrepresentation of participants’ motivations, experiences, opinions, feelings, choices and narratives about their involvement in the arts. Further, there is scarce evidence regarding the way art participants are invited, treated, compensated and included in participatory projects.

On top of that, several critical voices have looked at the idea of consumer participation in the arts with scepticism (Zizek 1989; Ranciere 2009; Bishop 2012) and have raised significant questions with regards to the “failure” of previous institutional participatory programmes (Jancovich and Stevenson 2023; Cartiere and Schrag 2023), the “tyranny of participation” (Cooke and Kothari 2001), the “myth of participation” (Taylor 2009; Jancovich 2017) and the discursive illusion of the “cultural non-participant” (Taylor 2016; Stevenson 2019; Heikkilä 2022).

This Special Issue seeks contributions exploring the role of the art market in relation to participatory aspirations by looking at how diverse marketplace actors, ideologies, interests and axiological commitments, processes, conditions, technologies and tactics but also wider market structures, dynamics and systems shape how consumers experience “participation” in the arts. At the same time, we welcome critical perspective reflecting on failures, myths and co-optation tendencies of market-mediated participatory initiatives that can help us question previous conceptual, managerial and practical shortcomings. In this way, we hope we can envision new pathways of consumer participation in the arts that can potentially lead to individual, communal and wider social transformation.

What does participation mean today and how/why has this notion evolved over time? Is genuine participation in the arts market possible, a myth, an ideal? How does participation in market-mediated aesthetic experiences impact individuals, communities, cultural institutions and social structures? How can we re-imagine participation within the current arts marketplace?

We invite scholars from a range of disciplines, such as marketing and consumer research, philosophy, social and political studies, art history, cultural and media studies, theatre and performance studies but also from diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds to reflect on the concept of participation, the socio-political potential of art and the relationship of market-mediated aesthetics to consumer resistance, consumer activism, consumer collectives and movements. Both conceptual and empirical papers are welcome

List of Topic Areas

The Special Issue aims at acting as a platform for contributions that will be concentrating on the socio-political potential of consumer participation in the arts on different levels of analysis: a) the individual (micro): exploring the lived experiences, practices, perceptions, emotions, embodied engagements and narratives of art participants and their relationship to individual wellbeing and change: b) the communal (meso): exploring local and collective stories of empowerment, development and transformation; c) the institutional (exo): exploring changes in cultural institutions, the arts market, the creative sector and wider cultural environments; d) social (macro): exploring broader social/structural transformations.

Papers on the following themes are welcome:

Theories, conceptualisations, definitions, meanings and discourses of audience/consumer participation in the arts;
Histories of market-mediated participatory art movements and genealogical accounts of market-mediated participatory art practices;
Purposes, aims and visions of participatory art initiatives;
Novel methodologies, practices, processes, modes and forms of consumer participation in the arts;
Critical evaluations of different types of participatory initiatives, such as market-mediated top-down, government-funded, institutional, grassroots, everyday, self-organising, formal and informal approaches;
Current tendencies and contemporary academic incongruities around participation in the arts market;
Cases of good practice in content, process, outcome, impact of historic and/or contemporary market-mediated participatory arts activity;
Current challenges of participatory art due to intense commercialisation tendencies, institutional failures, new technologies etc.;
New conceptualisations and practices of participatory art in the digital sphere;
Strategies, techniques, methods and criteria of evaluation of the impact of participatory art practices;
Impact of participatory art practices on individual well-being, community empowerment, institutional change and wider social transformation.

More specifically, we welcome papers that explore the transformative potential of consumer participation in the arts on four levels:
Participation and Individual Transformation:

What are the different interests and motivations of diverse marketplace actors for participating in the arts and what are their visions of social change?;
What are the roles, activities and processes of different marketplace actors – consumers, artists, cultural organisations, creative enterprises, marketers, funders, NGOs and charities, activists, governmental bodies, policy-makers, media, critics, activists, cultural intermediaries, technologies, materials and objects, etc – in participatory art phenomena?;
What are consumers’ narratives of participatory engagement with the arts?;
How does participation in the arts impact the individual? What are the beneficial outcomes for different consumers and/or other marketplace actors? How does participation in the arts impact consumer identity, experience and wellbeing? How do individual identities and practices change during particular participatory projects?;
What new barriers to cultural participation have come to the surface today, by whom/what and why?;
How do artists and cultural institutions mobilise consumers to participate in the arts today? What kind of resources and processes do artists use to involve consumers in their cultural activity?; What are the privileges and benefits of artists working in participatory projects?;
How have technology and digital media influenced consumer participation in the arts?

Participation and Community Transformation

How do artists and cultural institutions mobilise locals in a community to work together and participate in the arts?;
What kind of resources and processes do artists and other marketplace actors use to organise, negotiate, coordinate, manage and maintain different collective interests, aspirations and projects of change?;
How does participation in the arts impact the community, community practices and community bonds?;
What are the beneficial outcomes of participation in the arts for community life and community wellbeing?;
How does community’s involvement in the arts change the way we experience communal/public space?

Participation and Institutional Transformation

How does consumer participation in the aesthetics might impact the arts sector?;
How does consumer participation in the arts transform the arts market?;
How does participatory art initiatives change the nature, role and impact of art?;
How do participatory art projects might be challenging well-established cultural institutions, their strategies and practices? How does participatory art might be shaping established aesthetic and taste regimes?

Participation and Social Transformation

How do different marketplace actors understand, negotiate and determine what constitutes social change?;
How do different marketplace actors play a role in shaping broader social and structural change through their participation in the arts?;
What theories of social change can be considered to understand, contribute to and present social transformation through the arts? What kind of resources, methods and processes can be used to catalyse wider social transformation through cultural participation?;
How does participation in the arts impact the society? What are the beneficial outcomes of participatory art for social/collective wellbeing? How do participatory forms, modes and processes of art differ across cultures and societies?;
What are some successful and/or unsuccessful cases of consumer participation that have led to social transformation?;
What methods, techniques, tools and criteria can we use to capture and demonstrate societal impact through the arts?

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Submisisons Open: 25 October 2023
Submissions Close: 31 July 2024

References

Belfiore, E. and Gibson, L. 2019. New Directions in Cultural Policy Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bishop, C. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books.
Bourriaud, N. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel.
Cartiere, C. and Schrag, A. 2023. The Failures of Public Art and Participation. London: Routledge.
Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. 2002. Participation: The New Tyranny?. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Heikkilä, R. 2022. Understanding Cultural Non-Participation in an Egalitarian Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jackson, S. 2011. Social Works. Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge.
Jancovich, L. 2017. The participation myth. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(1), pp. 107-121.
Jancovich, L. and Stevenson, D. 2023. Failures in Cultural Participation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kester, G. H. 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. London: Duke University Press.
Lacy, S. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Washington: Bay Press.
Miles, A. and Gibson, L. 2016. Everyday participation and cultural value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), pp.151-157.
Mouffe, C. 2008. Art and democracy: art as an agonistic intervention in public space, in Art as a Public Issue: How can art and its institutions reinvent the public dimension, Open 14, pp. 6-13.
Neal, S., and Murji, K. 2015. Sociology. Special issue: Sociologies of everyday life. London: Sage.
Ranciere, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.
Scott, S. 2009. Making sense of everyday life. Cambridge: Polity.
Stevenson, D. 2019. The cultural non-participant: Critical logics and discursive subject identities. Arts and the Market, 9(1), pp. 50-64.
Taylor, M. 2016. Nonparticipation or different styles of participation? Alternative interpretations from Taking Part. Cultural Trends.
Zizek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.