The Arts in Solidarity: Navigating Funding Constraints and Shifting Paradigms of Growth and Competition

Description

This event is a working assembly convened by the Partisan Social Club (Hewitt and Jordan), UK, and Casco Art Institute as part of the SPACEX-Rise exchange project. With contributions from Gertrude Flentge, Yazan Khalili, Laura Alexander, Justin O’Connor, Andy Hewitt, and Mel Jordan. The conversation will be chaired by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes.

Title: The Arts in Solidarity: Navigating Funding Constraints and Shifting Paradigms of Growth and Competition

Venue: Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Casco HQ
Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht, Netherlands

13 April 2024, 13:00–17:00

With contributions from Gertrude Flentge, Yazan Khalili, Laura Alexander, Justin O’Connor, Andy Hewitt, and Mel Jordan. The conversation will be chaired by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes.

This event is a working assembly convened by the Partisan Social Club, UK, and Casco Art Institute as part of the SPACEX-Rise exchange project.


Description: There is no doubt that the long-standing embrace of neoliberal capitalist economic and political ideologies by the UK and Dutch governments has profoundly impacted social life. These policies, which favor free-market capitalism, limit government intervention, advocate for deregulation, privatization, and spending reduction, unsurprisingly demonstrate that the once-imagined commitment to civil society by both nations, in practice, aligns more closely with a commitment to de-socialize.
Advanced neoliberalism emphasizes innovation, accumulation, and extraction as primary technologies for economic growth. In the arts, this translates into a push for art institutions, organizations, spaces, as well as artists’ groups to adopt an entrepreneurial capitalist stance, aligning them with, and articulating them as, facets of the ‘cultural industry sector.’ Under neoliberalism, art is transformed from being a common ‘good’ to a privatized one, seemingly justifying the dwindling public funding for the arts. This change holds crucial implications for what social art practices can be: where they have the potential to contribute to the rebuilding of associational life through the restoration and revitalization of community connections and affiliations, the capitalist machinery threatens to short-circuit this possibility.
In the UK and the Netherlands, numerous major arts institutions have been compelled to align with neoliberal policies and ‘diversify’ their funding sources over the past decade, thereby limiting possibilities for economic sustainability. As we move into what some term an era of hyper-neoliberalism—a phase characterized by an amplified emphasis on market mechanisms in governance, economics, and social spheres, often disregarding public welfare—we witness the latest wave of cuts in arts funding. These cuts not only have a detrimental impact on artists’ communities; they also jeopardize the structures through which cultural and social practices take place. Recent victories for the Party for Freedom suggest a challenging landscape ahead for Dutch culture, potentially impacting the survival of social arts.
The Arts in Solidarity event raises crucial questions about navigating challenging times. It unites scholars, artists, activists, and arts organizations from the UK and the Netherlands to strategize alternatives to limiting and limited funding paradigms. Can the UK’s experience offer valuable insights? How have the arts confronted past and present challenges? Together, we will discuss and debate: How do we continue critical arts-based work when public resources are dwindling? How can we better share and common our work? How can we resist arts funding becoming a competitive process between institutions? Can arts institutions apply social and art commoning practices as methods to challenge the current economic structures of funding? How can we impact policymaking through developing new experimental, collaborative, and solidary practices? How can commoning-based responses to the demise of arts subsidies help the arts realign with radical agendas for more equitable futures?

Period	13 Apr 2024
Event type	Seminar
Location	Utrecht, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International