Realizing the Values of Art: Making Space for Cultural Civil Society 3031245970, 9783031245978

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS & THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

Realizing the Values of Art Making Space for Cultural Civil Society Erwin Dekker · Valeria Morea

Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy

Series Editors Erwin Dekker, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Andrej Srakar, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Michael Rushton, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

This series aims to provide original and societally relevant perspectives on the modern creative economy from the perspective of cultural economics broadly understood. In the past decades it is increasingly realized that value in the economy is realized in the creative industries and the more traditional cultural sectors. This series will aim to shed light on how value is created and realized and how the creative economy shapes the broader economy. We believe that trends in the creative economy are often a sign of things to come in the broader economy, this is true for the way in which work is organized, how innovation happens, how entrepreneurs act and the relevance of cities in the modern economy. The series will provide a collection of works of leading cultural economists on theoretical and empirical topics. It will cover the field in its most broad sense and focus on the current open problems and topics in cultural economics, covering micro, macro end methodological aspects.

Erwin Dekker · Valeria Morea

Realizing the Values of Art Making Space for Cultural Civil Society

Erwin Dekker Mercatus CENTER George Mason University Fairfax, USA

Valeria Morea Department of Architecture and ARTS Università Iuav di Venezia Venice, Italy

ISSN 2662-4478 ISSN 2662-4486 (electronic) Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy ISBN 978-3-031-24597-8 ISBN 978-3-031-24598-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

It took surprisingly long before economists started analyzing the arts as an industry. When they started doing so, after William Baumol and William Bowen had led the way with their study of the performing arts, they envisioned the arts as a sluggish economic sector, in need of structural help from wealthy patrons, or better, generous governments. When Mark Blaug had the guts to propose a cost-benefit analysis of cultural subsidies, he was rewarded with a ban from his beloved Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. Since 2000, the perception of the arts as industry has radically changed. Reinvented as creative industries, the arts are now believed to be an engine of economic growth and a fountain of positive innovation spill-overs for the knowledge economy. Economists were not alone in their re-appreciation of the arts. Urbanists suggested that the arts could be a tool for the regeneration of neighborhoods in decline and a magnet for cities seeking to attract the creative class. More importantly, many urban hubs around the world engaged in city marketing with the goal of attracting more and more tourists. A dystopian bestselling novel in the Netherlands imagines the future of Europe as a museum for the rising middle classes from China, India, and the Middle East. The economist of the arts Bruno Frey has proposed that the only way to seriously deal with overtourism are ‘revived originals’, a euphemism of his invention for the building of replicas of the most famous European inner-cities in Asia.

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During this same period the arts have also become central in debates about the future of Western societies. During the heights of multiculturalism in the 1990s it was believed that the arts could play a pioneering role in the creation of social inclusion, and the alleviation of social conflicts. More recently the arts have been claimed to foster inclusivity, diversity, and provide a voice to marginalized groups. Strikingly these shifts have been accompanied by a new social engagement of artists. Art for art’s sake has become a marginalized, perhaps even suspicious, pursuit. The art world has led the way in efforts to decolonize museums, has partnered with environmentalists and engineers to imagine a more sustainable future, was a prominent voice and target of the #metoo movement, and so on. One does not have to have to fully embrace the fashionable idea of artivism to realize that the days of post-modern irony and dreams of full artistic autonomy have given way to serious attempts by artists to imagine alternative futures and to bring about social, political, and economic change. These transformations have been accompanied by a widespread effort to measure the social and economic impact of the arts. Academics, non-profit organizations, and policy makers have sought to quantify the ‘impact’ of cultural festivals, investments in physical arts infrastructure, community projects, and city-branding. A small pet-industry has emerged for academics and consultants who offer tools to assess the social and economic impact of the arts, boosted by major policy organizations such as NESTA in Britain which has opened a Policy and Evidence Centre for the Creative Industries in 2018. The basic idea of the movement for evidence-based policy can hardly be contested, it suggests that public policy should be based on the best-available evidence. A similar development can be observed in the non-profit sector where there is an increasing tendency to measure the impact of projects which are undertaken to demonstrate the effectiveness of programs to donors and other stakeholders. The general direction of these developments should be welcomed. It is clear to nearly everyone that the arts have impacts beyond the aesthetic domain. It is also to be welcomed that there is an interest to look at the effectiveness of both charitable donations and public subsidies toward the arts. The social status of high art (classical music, visual arts, and theater, to name a few) have enticed many donors to give generously to the arts, frequently encouraged by attractive tax deductions. Politicians have loved attaching their names to prestigious theaters, concert halls, and the stars

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which perform in them. Questioning whether these are efficient forms of altruism or public support is only right. These developments are beautiful extensions of Mark Blaug’s early attempts at a cost-benefit analysis of art subsidies. But these measurements and the attention to the social and economic impact of the arts also risk reducing the arts to an instrument. Do you want urban regeneration? Just send some artists as pioneers. A more innovative economy? Just invest in the creative industries. A more diverse society? You guessed it. This kind of instrumentalization is not a new phenomenon, in the nineteenth century the arts were mobilized in grandiose projects to create national identities, in the twentieth century the avant-garde was co-opted to explore and promote the aesthetics and social reality of totalitarian socialist and fascist dreamworlds. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging such broader impacts, but it is mistaken to believe that the primary value of the arts lies in what they contribute to non-artistic domains, in their spill-over effects. The primary contribution of the arts lies in the cultural sphere, in the aesthetic, contemplative, playful, reflective, and inspirational values which are realized through them. This book is an exploration of the process of the realization of values through the arts. For instance, transcendental and aesthetic values for which the arts are traditionally known. But also, social values related to (group) identity, friendship and community, and economic values such as dynamism, meaningful work, and sustainability. Sometimes the values which artists and their audiences seek to realize reach beyond the private sphere, and reach in the public or political sphere. Glorification, critique, and imagination are inherent features of artistic practices. The renewed engagement of artists in recent years has shown that this can lead to fundamental conflicts about values. In the United States the arts and the neighboring humanities are involved in what some have called the culture wars. The war metaphor suggests that when one of the groups succeeds in realizing their values, the other must by necessity lose. We disagree and will explore in this book how social practices around the arts, even when they seek to realize antagonistic political values, can co-exist peacefully in what we call cultural civil society. Cultural civil society is the collection of social practices in which the arts are practiced, and values are realized, which exists next to markets and public art organizations. Our focus on cultural civil society

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and the aspirations and goals of the individuals who engage in these practices entails a rather different perspective on the role of cultural policy. In the traditional perspective the state structurally supports particular artistic activities, because they are economically unsustainable but socially desirable, or because they generate positive social and economic spill-overs. We suggest, instead, that the state should restrict itself to establishing a framework in which a diverse set of social practices around the arts can co-exist, and in which minority rights of association and expression are respected and protected. But before we get there, we must understand what it means for artists and their co-creating audiences to realize values. We demonstrate that the realization of values can be understood as a multi-stage process which takes place mostly in circles, communities, and the rich associational life around the arts. This shifts the focus away from prestigious visual art markets and official public organizations such as museums and heritage sites in favor of (amateur) practices, of a wide variety of creators, art enthusiasts, fans, and civic groups, who rely on the arts to realize their goals. Which values are realized in this cultural civil society is dependent on the intentions of different, partly overlapping, groups of individuals and the diversity of social practices which they are able and allowed to develop. Our argument might be mistaken for a romantic denial that the value or impact of the arts can be measured, or an excessive emphasis on processes and vague, intangible, and qualitatively heterogenous values. We hope to convince you that the opposite is true. A good measurement of the value(s) of the arts should be based on the values, which creators and contributors seek to realize, rather than some universal set of standards against which performance is measured. The heterogeneity of artistic forms and practices is precisely what makes the arts special. The fact that artists and audiences seek to realize more than income or utility, but seek to explore new values, embark on aesthetic and social experiments, and imagine different futures, is precisely what makes the arts an important element of a democratic and free society. Fairfax, USA Venice, Italy

Erwin Dekker Valeria Morea

Acknowledgments

Michael Hutter and Bruno Frey once discussed the ‘Rotterdam School’ of cultural economics, according to which cultural value is ‘realized’ in the conversations about art that take place among spectators, collectors, gallerists, critics, and other experts. We have both been part of this Rotterdam School for a good number of years. Its beating heart is the Econ & Culture seminar chaired by Arjo Klamer, which is currently branching out with an annual Value Based Conference. We see this book as an attempt to bring the Rotterdam approach, which might have been somewhat inward-looking, in conversation with the broader literature on the sociology and the economics of the arts, as well as academic and policy conversations about the values of the arts. As we argue in this book, creative production takes place in circles, which rely on the contributions of many different individuals, artists, and co-creating members. This project is no different, it would not have been possible without the many contributors to the seminar over the years, including Hans Abbing, Tazuko van Berkel, Peter Booth, Laura Braden, Aldo do Carmo, Carolina Dalla Chiesa, Wilfred Dolfsma, Thora Fjeldsted, Gjalt de Graaf, Christian Handke, Marleen Hofland, Lili Jiang, Amin Khaskar, Priyateja Kotipalli, Pavel Kuchaˇr, Cees Langeveld, Mariangela Lavanga, Ellen Loots, Ana Marques, Lénia Marques, Isidoro Mazza, Deirdre McCloskey, Anna Mignosa, Trilce Navarrete, Sofia Patat, Lyudmila Petrova, Karthik Raghavan, Blaž Remic, Claire Stasiewicz, Lies De Strooper, Ad van der Stok, Joke Tacoma, Paul Teule, Thomas Teekens,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Marilena Vecco, Claudine de With, and Rosa Won. They together made up the social practice which enabled this book. The good ideas in here are in no small part due to them, but as authors we will accept full responsibility for the faults which they, and our other discerning readers, will no doubt find.

Contents

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A Pragmatic Approach to Art Let’s Unwrap the Argument… There Are Many Different Values, and New Ones Are Discovered Irregularly Values Can Clash with Each Other, Sometimes Violently Measuring Values Requires Engagement with Artistic Practices Here Is How We Will Proceed References

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What Values Are, and How We Learn to Appreciate Them Market Goods and Other People Are Essential Values Are Embedded in Social Practices The Context of Values Are Orders of Worth The Values of a Hip-Hop Artist Value Discovery References

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How Artists Imagine New Worlds Forget the Solitary Genius, Artists Imagine Together Artists Operate in Circles, Which Are Sustained Through Contributions Circles Benefit From the Proximity of Circles in Neighboring Disciplines

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Within Circles, Knowledge Is Generated, and Artists Imagine New Possibilities Modernists Imagined Too Wildly, Postmodernists Too Ironically A New Form of Imagination Is in the Making Imaging and Living a Different Venice Contemporary Imagination Is About the Development of Social Practices Which Embody Values References 4

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55 57 59 61 65 67

How Participants Make Values Real Audiences Do Not Undergo Art, They Co-create It Co-creation Is Frequently Invited by Contemporary Artists and Technologies It Is Impossible to Understand the Performing Arts Without Co-creation Even in Highly Commercial Settings, There Is Extensive Co-creation The Queer Museum in Brazil Demonstrates the Importance of Institutional Diversity Informal Practices Are Not Always Long-Lasting and That Is Probably a Good Thing References

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Making Space for Cultural Civil Society The Diversity of Social Practices Around the Arts Constitutes Cultural Civil Society Cultural Civil Society Often Flies Under the Radar, but it Can Be Mapped Cultural Civil Society Operates at the Intersection of the Private and the Public Sphere Public Values Might Converge, but Co-Existence and Tolerance Are Primary Making Space Means Fostering Diversity and Protecting Minorities Making Space: Marginal Improvements References

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Epilogue: Imagining a Heterotopia References

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References

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.3 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 5.1

The Arc de Triomphe wrapped after the design of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. By permission of Victor Tsu Protests and social activities at the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. By permission of Robert James The realization of values in four phases Album covers of The Minstrel Show by Little Brother and Connected by Foreign Exchange Creative circles, colors indicate different values Stop on the alternative tour of Venice of Extragarbo. By permission of Giulia Zichella Convergence of previously disparate circles and divergence of previously overlapping circles

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CHAPTER 1

A Pragmatic Approach to Art

Abstract We present a Dewey-inspired pragmatic approach to the arts which starts from the values which artists and audiences seek to realize. We argue that these values are realized in online and offline communities in a process of four phases: value orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation. We contrast this approach to various recent approaches to the arts which have explicitly or implicitly led to the instrumentalization of the arts. Various policies have supported the arts to boost economic development, foster social inclusion, or affirm national identity, rather than for the values which artists and audiences pursue. We develop the notion of cultural civil society to describe the heterogenous practices around the arts and argue that they are a key feature of a liberal democratic society. The challenge which arises from rival and sometimes antagonistic practices around the arts is how they can co-exist peacefully. We illustrate this challenge through an examination of the recent controversy over Confederate and colonial statues. Rather than resolving whether such statues should remain or be removed, we suggest that public space should welcome different practices and allow for contestation from different minority voices in society. Keywords Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Public statues · Pragmatism · Value of art · Contestation © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_1

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Let’s Unwrap the Argument… In 2021, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was wrapped in 25,000 square meters of recyclable polypropylene silvery blue fabric and 3,000 meters of red rope (Fig. 1.1). The project opened in September of that year, about a year after the death of the artist Christo, who often worked together with his partner Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009). Like the earlier wrappings of the Pont-Neuf in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin, and a portion of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well as The Gates project they realized in Central Park in New York and the Running Fence on the shores of northern California, it attracted great crowds and intense debates over the beauty, grandiosity, and temporal nature of their art. Christo’s work has always asked fundamental questions about the value and nature of art. In 1966, he sent out a hundred wrapped boxes to the members of the Walker Art Center’s Contemporary Arts Group. Several of them, unwittingly, unwrapped the boxes and found a note from Christo inside them, which read: “The package you destroyed was

Fig. 1.1 The Arc de Triomphe wrapped after the design of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. By permission of Victor Tsu

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wrapped according to my instructions in a limited edition of a hundred copies”. Discovered, destroyed, used, unpacked, unveiled, what had the members done? Christo’s work can be read as a commentary on and questioning of branding and packaging (Lanham 2006, 54–63). His works make us think about the outside and inside of a product. What is that we are valuing? Are we supposed to look through the wrapping and focus on what is really there? Or is a product primarily what we ‘think it is’ and are the branding, the packaging, the wrapping, and the signature the essential, or even the primary real thing? Such questions take on more potency in the wrapping projects, which are temporary; the Arc de Triomphe, like the previously wrapped landmarks, was unwrapped again. Their public artworks used colorful wrappings and fencing to alter urban and natural landscapes for a short period of time, and afterward no visible sign of it was left. Unlike their fellow artists Robert Smithson and Alan Sonfist, who changed outdoor landscapes through permanent interventions, in what has been called land art, the wrapping couple preferred short interventions and the public’s engagement. The wrapping might be gone, but the memory and stories about the experience live on, in a way that resembles an economy which is increasingly focused on experiences rather than material stuff. Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed their work into an events business, where the next project was always financed and realized based on the success of the previous ones. They were independent-minded and financed their own projects. But to accomplish their wrappings they had to convince mayors and other local governors for permission to intervene in public space. The projects were also an event in the sense that they attracted crowds, attention, and conversations, and then they were gone. There is a boldness to the work in both the scale and the conviction that they did not require permanence. And yet, their wrapping practice turned into something which outlasted them. The wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe was done after both Christo and Jeanne-Claude had passed away. The wrappings have become a practice tied to the name and the oeuvre of the couple. Christo had first sketched the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in the early 1960s. This was not uncommon, many of their artworks are marked with the time it took to realize the project, such as The Gates 1979–2005. JeanneClaude recounted how it took nine years to convince mayor Jacques Chirac of Paris to wrap the Pont-Neuf, the preparations for the Reichstag started about twenty-five years before the project took place. The art

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was literally public in the sense that it took over, or intervened in public space, and so the realization of the projects was not merely an aesthetic process, but just as much a civic one: a project of community organization and political persuasion. The projects were only visible for a short period of time, but the process of realizing the art and its values had taken much longer. They worked with fabric, but their real medium, the core of their art was persuasion, of political stakeholders, residents, and finally their audience. Just like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art, this book is about art as a social practice: the process by which the values of art are realized. That process extends in time, from the first sketch of the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in 1962, to its realization in 2021, and most likely beyond in reimaginations, extensions, copies, or perhaps simply in the stories that people will keep talking about their visits to the wrapped Arc. As Igor Kopytoff (1986) once observed, objects have a life of their own, and art historians can write their biography. The work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude illustrates better than other artworks that the artistic artefact alone is not enough to realize the values of art. The wrapping of Arc de Triomphe is one element of Christo’s work of art, the practice involves others, from the governors to the ‘pilgrims’ who travel to the site, and the nay-sayers. For these public projects this is directly visible, but we believe it reveals a more general truth: the realization of the values of art is a social activity in which artists and audience co-create values. Besides the intimate relation between an artist and their material, the realization of the values of art requires, by definition, the meaningful engagement of others. For artists this frequently starts with their peers. The first reception and feedback tend to happen between artists, or between the artist and their manager, gallery owner, or partner and their circles of fellow artists. From there, if there is traction to the project, it moves outward to the circles of other producers and the audiences which are required to realize the project, to make it real. Here the purpose of the artist is confronted with the values of others in what we call cultural civil society. The art historian Michael Baxandall has drawn attention to the active nature of the process of engagement and contestation around the artwork. The audience member or artist can: “draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from,

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assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify”, well you get the gist (Baxandall 1985, 59). With the advent of digital technologies, accessible to the great majority, such possibilities have grown significantly. The books, websites, and documentaries around the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude make this process visible. They are a testament of the support and resistance, the contestation and appreciation, which accompanied the realization of their projects. The activity and heterogenous nature of this process are why we refer to values, in the plural. The realization of a work of art is both an attempt to understand its meaning (what is its value?), and a contestation over its merit and meaning (what does it contribute to or makes us aware of?). The projects of the art couple Jeanne-Claude and Christo are inevitably public not because they are unable to control the spectators’ reception and interpretation of their work, but because they depend on the spectators’ appropriation of the installations to work. The spectators must contribute and co-create; by walking, running, queuing, admiring, photographing, remembering, and critiquing the work. Afterward, Christo and Jeanne-Claude frequently sold pieces of the used fabric or preliminary sketches of the installations, the public could literally take the project home with them, and appropriate it and, thus, contribute to the next one. The values that are realized in the practices around art by anyone engaged is what we seek to capture in this book.

There Are Many Different Values, and New Ones Are Discovered Irregularly The question of the value of art has occupied thinkers of all ages, especially in the discipline of aesthetics. Aesthetics makes us think of the artistic values associated with art, for example beauty or playfulness. We both taught for several years in a program on cultural economics in which the economic values of the art are emphasized, say innovation. There we worked alongside sociologists of culture who drew attention to the social values which are realized through art, such as a sense of belonging or autonomy. To do full justice to each of these is impossible in the scope of this book. Not only because we will argue that there is one more important set of values associated with the arts, political or public values, such

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as justice or tolerance. But primarily because of the wide diversity of art practices which can be found in any society, and the equally numerous practical values which are realized through them. Art, in all its different manifestations, plays an important role in people’s lives. Sometimes we seek beauty and its comfort, at other times we engage with the arts because they allow us to be with like-minded others, or because it is an occasion to spend time with our dear ones. The arts are often a vehicle of political imagination; on many occasions the arts are also source of economic liveliness and meaningful work. Values in our pragmatic approach are not universal moral reference points, or a mark of conservatism. They are instead the reasons why individuals value the social practices they engage in. They reflect the heterogenous goals which individuals pursue. Values are realized in a process, they are embodied in practices, and it is through practices that they are made ‘real’. Realizing values has another meaning in this book, and that is that individuals will realize that they were mistaken, and that other values are more important to them. This will make them change their practices or abandon them altogether. Realizing values also means realizing what is important to us. That is a process of exploration. As John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher who we will use as a guide throughout this book, argued about values, “they are as infinitely numerous and varied as are the individual systems of action they delimit; and that since there is only relative, not absolute, impermeability and fixity of structure, new individuals with novel ends emerge in irregular procession” (Dewey 1929, 395). Change and heterogeneity are important, but that does not diminish the significance of social practices. Individuals do not exist in a vacuum, and like our analysis of the wrappings revealed, the realization of values typically relies on the contributions and participations of others. These practices have some stability, they are the relatively solid form which has emerged to realize certain values and inspire others to contribute to the activity. Christo has been wrapping since 1966 and it seems that we will continue to wrap, even now that the artists are no longer with us. The practice will most likely evolve, along one of the several pathways which Baxandall suggested, by others who: ‘draw on, parody, remodel, etc.’. One might wonder why it is important to emphasize the fairly obvious point, that values are what artists and audiences seek to realize. There is a simple reason for it. Many other approaches instrumentalize the arts,

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they turn it into a tool to achieve something else (Pratt 2010). The consequences of this approach are all around us. A lot of cultural policy today is not primarily concerned with the values of art, but rather with the social effects of arts and artists. Cities once ‘vandalized’ by graffiti writers are now being transformed with the help of co-opted street artists to make neighborhoods more appealing for prospective property owners and tourists. Artists are sent out as ‘pioneers’ into declining neighborhoods in order to revitalize them and facilitate processes of urban renewal. European cities compete to become the next Capital of Culture, because of the economic spill-over effects the audiences will generate for the city. The arts have also been put forward as a policy tool to attract the economically productive ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002). That we talk so often, and easily, about the instrumental role of the arts in modern society is no coincidence. It fits into a way of thinking in which it is believed that governments are responsible for a growing economy with interesting jobs for everyone. If we assign the government such a responsibility it can be expected that it will look at education, the arts, and science as tools to realize those ends, rather than as practices which embody values of their own. All the more so, because the role of government support has historically been extensive in these sectors. But despite what some critics believe, not nearly all the instrumentalization of the arts happens for economic reasons, or the infamous ‘economic impact’ of the arts. Cultural policy aiming at social impact is just as common. Diversity, social integration, tolerance, or access for disadvantaged groups often drive social policy and have similar effects, they turn art and artists into instruments of policymakers. Historically, this instrumentalization was a counter-reaction to the post-war decades in which the arts benefitted from generous state support and private philanthropy. The arts were considered a semi-sacred pursuit, in which artists had to have the freedom to work autonomously, that is without regard for markets and society. In hindsight, critics have recognized that this funding structure as well as the elevated status that the arts enjoyed led to a turn inward, in which art was mostly produced for an in-crowd (Abbing 2019). That development itself dovetailed with a high modernist ethic, according to which art was supposed to free itself from both internal conventions as well as external expectations. A lot of modernist art sought a kind of purity and abstraction from the contingency and dependencies of everyday life (Greenberg 1939). This ethic

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was described by the often mis-used, yet inescapable, idea of art for art’s sake. That ethic itself also arose in reaction to attempts by governments and social and economic elites to use art for their own purposes. The institution of the museum is a nineteenth-century invention which fitted the cultural agenda of (new) nation states to solidify their unity through the construction of historical identities and traditions (Anderson 1991). Contemporary artists and masters from the past were mobilized to represent the glory of the nation, and to function as symbols of national unity, above partisan debates, even though they effectively functioned to privilege one historical narrative or social group over others. Totalitarian regimes in the twentieth-century mobilized artists of the time to work for the nation, or higher ideological goals such as socialism or racial purity. The historical parallel to the present should not be overdrawn, but it is important to recognize that art often has been mobilized to further goals of governments, local, national, and international. Occasionally these goals were lofty, more often they were despicable. That is not the only form of ‘capture’ of the arts that is possible. One of the most famous periods in the arts, the Italian Renaissance, with high points in sculpture, architecture, painting, and music cannot be divorced from the patronage of the Medici family. This economically and politically powerful family supported artists to show off its wealth, to further its reputation, and to gain more political and social influence (Parks 2005). Modern art, too, has frequently moved closely to the world of private economic and political power. An appreciation of the value of art, as well as the realization of the values of art itself, requires some degree of autonomy. Yet it also requires the rejection of the idea that this can be best achieved in some social vacuum, or idealized state of perfect autonomy. The diverse values of the art are realized through social practices, rather than through an esoteric activity, where isolated individuals seek to realize some absolute goal of beauty or perfection. Somewhere between the instrumentalization of art and the absolutization of its autonomy lies the recognition that art is a social practice with its own internal dynamic and values, as well as a socially embedded ‘worldly’ practice entangled with the interests and values of the different individuals and groups in society. The values realized through art practices are partly internal and partly external to the arts and should be so.

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Recently a group of scholars working at the intersection between sociology and economics have sought to do justice to this diversity of values which are realized through the arts and other goods (Throsby and Hutter 2008; Beckert and Aspers 2011; Kjellberg and Mallard 2013; Antal et al. 2015). Their work has drawn attention to the social construction of value and the practices which shape value, as well as the value of goods beyond their market price. Their work is an important inspiration for us, but they tend to study ‘valuation’ as a social phenomenon, rather than as a process directed by the values which individuals seek to realize. Arjo Klamer in his Doing the Right Thing (2016) does put the values of actors front and center, and analyzes the realization of values as a process. But he mostly shies away from the issues of contestation and conflicts between values, which we will put front and center. Social practices around the art can be analyzed with economic models. Klamer uses the notion of shared goods which depend on contributions of the participants to the practice to sustain them. He contrasts the traditional notion of the willingness to pay with the willingness to contribute to make clear that this is not best understood as a system of production and consumption, but a process of co-creation. Kealey and Ricketts (2014, 2021) have developed a formal model along the same lines for contribution goods. They both make clear that these practices are not public goods, in the sense of being fully open. Instead, newcomers are ‘screened’ to ensure that they have something meaningful to contribute and so enrich the practice. We will demonstrate in this book that many such practices exist next to each other, together they make up the rich and diverse cultural civil society. They compete for the contributions of artists and audiences and so there is rivalry and competition between them. Most of these practices embody different values and exist in relative isolation from each other. But any specific practice will likely overlap with a number of similar ones and might be in direct conflict with several as well. From a public policy point of view there are two fundamental issues which follow from our perspective. First, how do we ensure the flourishing of a great diversity of social practices around the arts, which reflect the plurality of values which individuals seek to realize? Second, how do we ensure the peaceful coexistence of these art communities next to each other? The latter question might sound somewhat far-fetched, but recent history has proven how important this is.

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Values Can Clash with Each Other, Sometimes Violently The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minnesota in the early summer of 2020 led to a major public debate about systemic and structural forms of racism. Public statues of historical figures who had contributed to the institutions which fostered structural racism, such as colonialism, were the target of many protests. Citizens around the world questioned the legitimacy and meaning of statues like that of Edward Colston in Bristol, King Leopold II in Belgium, Carolus Linnaeus in Stockholm, and Indro Montanelli in Milan. The issue had been brewing for a while, in the years before activists had already protested statues of Columbus in Latin America and of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa. Public art, more explicitly than other art forms, has been used to convey political messages. Statues are erected as symbols of national unity and the affirmation power, to beautify the city, and more recently to regenerate neglected neighborhoods (Morea 2020). At the heart of the protests, which included the toppling and vandalization of colonial statues, was and still is, a cry for more participation in these cultural practices of (national) identity-making. A prominent claim of the protesters was that they did not feel represented by these public symbols, or worse that these symbols represented the (historical) oppression of their ethnic, racial, or social group. The activists therefore urged public officials to remove these statues. Critics of this proposed removal have suggested that it would be foolish to attempt to erase history, one should instead contextualize it. Others described the toppling of statues as an instance of ‘cancel culture’, which misguidedly seeks to evaluate historical individuals by today’s moral standards. The debate around colonial statues is part of a broader rethinking of the less glorious episodes in the political history of the West. In the United States, it is part of the discussion about the ongoing discrimination against African Americans and the long legacy of slavery and segregation. Those defending the colonial statues have suggested that they are simply part of the history of the country, although they typically acknowledge that the stories which are told about the statues should change. Critics have pointed out that many of the statues were erected long after the colonial period, and in the United States after the abolition of slavery, in order to reinforce racial inequalities (Cox 2021, chap. 1).

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Central to the debate is what the statues symbolize, which groups and what values they represent. Statues of U.S. confederates or British officials are opposed because of the ‘whitewashed’ narrative they convey. Historian Johnathan Beecher Field (2020) claims that these statues are an example of ‘epistemic violence’ and affirm racism and colonialism as heroic. To him they glorify negative values such as (racial) supremacy, imperialism, and state power, while obscuring the violence. President Trump spoke up against the toppling of the statues, claiming that it was a ‘cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion’. But also, among intellectuals there were doubts, whether taking down the statues was the best strategy. The anthropologist Lawrence Kuznar (2017) claimed that removing the statues constituted a whitewashing of history, and that they should remain as reminders of the ‘inconvenient truths’ about our past. Rather than to further obscure the dark sides of the past through removal, it might make more sense to seek ways to make these dark sides visible. Others worried that toppling some statues might be a slippery slope in which comparatively minor misdeeds could come to overshadow great achievements and the moral progress that had been made by some of the people cast in bronze or marble (Walsh 2020). Therefore, many argued that the statues should be properly contextualized, for instance through plaques, or possibly by adding other monuments next to the controversial ones. In Newark, New Jersey, for instance, the divested statue of Columbus will be replaced by a monument to Harriet Tubman, a black woman who enabled the underground railroad for slaves who sought to escape to the North. The new statue aims to bring the passers-by in active relation with the site and through the incorporation of tiles etched by local citizens (Hill 2022). The open design which will allow visitors to walk through the statue is meant to foster a different type of engagement than the grandiose statues of outsized heroic men in triumphant poses on horseback. What monuments or statues in public space enable is not fixed or predetermined (Capdepón and Dornhof 2022). Thus, when memorial sites convey a one-sided version of history, sooner or later people will demand, as we have witnessed recently, to take part in the process of shaping a better interpretation of the past transforming the public art settings into places of contestation over societal values. The protests themselves are a new form of activity at these memorial sites, an appropriation of public space which was often designed to enable public rituals.

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In Fig. 1.2 we see that protesters of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee did not merely oppose the statue, they also attempted to repurpose the site and turn it from a site of admiration and worship to a place of socializing and everyday activities. They transformed the site from a place of looking up toward a superior individual, to one of playful interaction with others. Although the large historical statues on imposing pedestals did not allow for it much, the protesters attempted to turn it into a site of co-creation, as if Christo and Jeanne-Claude had invited them to take part in the artwork. To understand this kind of appropriation and the attempt to reshape social practices require qualitative engagement with the practitioners, what do they seek to realize? These new practices and proposed changes to the public art sites seek to repurpose them as reminders of the dangers of state violence, oppression, and hierarchical belief systems about different groups of people. Such solutions are not easy to realize. What the proper context is of these statues, was part of the debate itself. John Daniel Davidson (2017), writing for The Federalist, suggested that when most of the monuments

Fig. 1.2 Protests and social activities at the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. By permission of Robert James

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were erected, during the 1920s, they served as both a testament to the sacrifices soldiers fighting for the Confederacy had made, as well as an outpour of Lost Cause nostalgia in the South of the United States. In other words, they embodied conflicting values from the start. They probably always meant and represented different things to different groups of people. But allowing such differences to exist, and to ensure they can co-exist peacefully is important. Perhaps the best way forward is in some cases the removal of certain statues, but the violent destruction of objects which are meaningful to others is certainly not the way forward. It certainly cannot serve as a model for a flourishing and diverse cultural civil society. The case of the contested public statues is therefore not merely a good example of what we mean by contestation, but also makes clear why the co-existence of artistic practices is a social problem worthy of consideration. We are living through an era of polarization, in which binary thinking and a desire to win cultural issues appear to have marginalized ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Many social differences are politicized in such a way that it appears that they can only be decided for society as a whole: one perspective must trump the others. Even scholars feel frequently tempted to take sides in the cultural debates of our time. But the reality of cultural civil society is that a great variety of cultural practices co-exist, frequently with only the dimmest awareness of each other. They allow individuals to realize radically different values every day. These diverse practices are a form of decentralization, which allow different individuals to come together, to realize some values which they share, even though they might disagree on many other things. A large attraction of major cities lies precisely in the diversity of social practices in which individuals can engage. Because of their size, they even allow for marginal practices to flourish. This variety reflects the value-pluralism which characterizes modern society. After we have analyzed the process of the realization of values in Chapters 2–4, we will lay out what our perspective entails for public policy in which the deep pluralism of modern society is the starting point. We are aware that art communities frequently have political aims, and that they seek to challenge widely shared beliefs and identities. The contestation over public statues is a good example, and we will return to it in the final chapter. For now, we suggest that cultural policy should be primarily aimed at creating space for social practices around the arts, rather than the support of specific practices. Public spaces should not seek

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to establish what the national identity is, but instead allow for contestations over public identity. In fact, we believe, our perspective has the potential to change fundamentally how we think about cultural policy and the neutrality of the state with respect to the arts. For that reason, it is also worthwhile to take a step back from the specifics in the public statue debate to make sure we understand why contestation itself is vital. Dewey already called attention to what he called ‘troublesome’ situations. These occupy a special place in his pragmatic perspective on values and society because trouble has the potential to be productive. Inspired by this work, David Stark (2009) has suggested that much of the active process of value realization and discovery happens precisely where values are in conflict with each other, or where widely accepted meanings are contested. These are moments of reconsideration and reorientation which might end up affirming existing practices or sharpening our sense that something must change. This is even more valuable in the public square, where there is an inevitable bias in favor of the status quo. Without holding any illusions of a fully free public debate, we can recognize with Jürgen Habermas the importance of an open and contestable public space, where dissenting voices are heard, and have the potential to achieve change. A key feature of the arts is the imagination it requires and the alternative artistic and social worlds which artists and their audiences seek to create. This imagination is the major theme of Chapter 3, in which we will argue that one of the key features of artistic practices is precisely that they generate alternative imagined futures. Many of these alternatives, like all good experiments, will fail, but they have great epistemic value. They generate practical knowledge about what is feasible and possible in the arts, and in society more generally.

Measuring Values Requires Engagement with Artistic Practices Our pragmatic approach to the arts differs in important ways from existing approaches. Most methods to analyze the value(s) of art regard measurement as a process in which an outside observer brings in some instrument, which can be used to determine the value of art, or the spill-over effects to society or the local economy. The measurement tool is typically not a precise instrument, but rather a theoretical framework designed to capture the different types of value associated with the arts.

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We believe that this perspective commits what may be considered a common error in the social sciences, it presumes to be able to determine theoretically, analytically, or through other external scientific means what is of importance. To some extent this is inevitable, we too must rely on certain analytical concepts such as values and practices to make sense of the world of art. But which values should count is a normative question which social science cannot settle a priori. An approach which seeks to establish beforehand which values count, which effects appear on the plus side, and which on the minus side of our social accounting, presumes to have solved precisely the question that it seeks to answer. It has assumed away the epistemic problem of what the values of art are. This complicates matters at first. Or, rather, it forces us to engage meaningfully with artistic practices. It puts the analyst on roughly the same level as the practitioners, and that is a good thing (Boltanski 2012). Rather than presuming to know what is valuable, we must discern how value is created, what values different actors seek to realize, and which values are actually realized in artistic practices. Practitioners, audiences, and critics should not necessarily have the last word, but we should take their words and actions seriously. They seek to justify the values of their practices, even more so in moments of contestation. These practices are not mere cheap talk, or forms of social signaling, although these are part of the conversations around art. In the case of public statues, there is a contestation about national identity, about the merits, or lack thereof, of certain historical individuals, and of course which values should be, and should not be, embodied by statues in public space. In sociology, it is more usual to adopt the perspective of actors. In the phenomenological approach rooted in the work of Alfred Schütz (1932) and prominently represented by Peter Berger (1963) and Viviana Zelizer (1985) we find a pragmatic approach to values and justification in line with our goal. In economics, such an approach is not as widespread. But in the work of Elinor Ostrom, the perspective of communities seeking to collectively solve problems is the starting point (Ostrom 1990). In her work, the evaluative criteria are not imposed from outside, but established in conversation with the communities which are analyzed (McGinnis 2011). Another example can be found in the work of Deirdre McCloskey. She has suggested that in her work on the rhetoric of economics that “the economist looking at business is in the same position as the art critic

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looking at the art world” (McCloskey 1994, 73). That means that in this book we are in the position of critics looking at the ‘business of art’. As we noted above, economists and sociologists of the arts have recognized the fundamental uncertainty of the value of art. The conclusion they typically draw from this insight, however, is that we are merely facing a more difficult measurement problem. There is some underlying value to the artistic artefact, but it might be very hard to establish. Instead, we suggest that values are created, performed, and discovered in the social practices around the art, they are not intrinsic to it. Artistic goods are an input into the active process in which value is created. The literary scholar Barbara Hernstein Smith has drawn attention to the contingencies of values, which for her disqualified attempts to establish normative ‘criteria’ to arrive at “presumptively objective evaluative procedures”. She suggests that the contingencies of value should make us take seriously that the “fundamental character of literary value, is its mutability and diversity” (Smith 1983, 10). It is our conviction that this mutability and diversity can only be captured when we analyze the practices themselves: to understand what individuals are attempting to realize, and to what extent they succeed in doing so. The social scientist as ‘critic’ might of course disagree with the pursuit of particular values and can question whether a specific practice realizes them. But even in this disagreement they do not have the only or final word. Boltanski has suggested we should analyze the critical capacity as it is found in everyday discourses: “this [critical] competence is not the privilege of the philosopher or the sociologist. It is constantly put to work by actors themselves” (Boltanski 2012, 27). This does not entail that the analyst takes a purely passive stance in which the arguments and justification by artists, audiences, and critics are accepted at face value. Few actors will talk in the language of values or be able to name which values they are seeking to realize directly. But the analyst should strive to arrive at descriptions and values in which the actors can recognize themselves. The pioneering economist Don Lavoie compared it to a translation process: “like any real translation this has to be a bidirectional communicative process in which economists may have as much to learn as business people if they are to come to an understanding together” (Lavoie 1990, 180). This book is such a translation effort between the social practices and explications by actors in the art world, and the pragmatic approach to values we have outlined above. Our goal is to learn from the ways in

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which artists realize values, while at the same time seeking to lay bare the coherence and possible incoherence in their efforts, and explicate as far as possible the generalizability of these conceptions of the values of art. Therefore, artistic practices occupy an important place in this book, not as ornaments, but as substantive parts of our argument. The art we discuss is not a wrapping around our argument but constitutes the argument.

Here Is How We Will Proceed To get a grip on the process of the realization of values, we have created a heuristic tool which distinguishes between four phases of the process. The phases are orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation (Fig. 1.3). Value orientation is the analysis of the purpose that artists and audiences have. Imagination is the process of exploring artistic means and practices which embody these values. Realization is the engagement and co-creation of audiences of the work through markets or social practices. Evaluation covers both the personal reflection of the individuals involved in the realization of values as well the evaluation by policymakers and academics. Through the various artistic projects we discuss in the book, it will become clear that these phases are hardly sequential in the real world. For instance imagination and realization—in Baxandall’s (1985) words— ‘interpenetrate’ each other, since the artist will typically go through various drafts and experiments before finalizing a work of art. In the second chapter, it will also become clear that the process of figuring out which values are worthy of pursuit is directly tangled up with the

Fig. 1.3 The realization of values in four phases

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process of (personal) reflection, which is phase four in our diagram, and connected through the feedback loop. To create some order, our chapters will nonetheless follow the four phases. Chapter 2 looks more in depth at what values are, the way they are embodied in social practices, and how individuals come to appreciate them. Chapter 3 analyzes creativity as a social process which happens in circles of artists, and which gives rise to both new artistic as well as social forms. Chapter 4 demonstrates the diverse ways in which art communities make values real, and the significant extent to which audience co-create the art. Chapter 5 covers how we can map and measure the significance of different social practices around the arts and explores how public and private policy can foster an environment in which cultural civil society can flourish. If you are looking for the output, impact, and result of art, you might have grown somewhat frustrated with our recurring invocation of ‘the process’. In the final chapter we propose some alternative tools to measure the vibrancy of cultural civil society. But for now, we can only say that the future is open and, for the most part, unknowable. Exploring and imagining what it can and should be is what artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and intellectuals seek to do. As our pragmatic guide Dewey has phrased it: “Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process” (Dewey 1939, 16).

References Abbing, Hans. 2019. The Changing Social Economy of Art: Are the Arts Becoming Less Exclusive? Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-216 68-9. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Antal, Ariane Berthoin, Michael Hutter, and David Stark. 2015. Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baxandall, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention. New Haven: Yale University Press. Beckert, Jens, and Patrik Aspers. 2011. The Worth of Goods: Valuation & Pricing in the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor Books.

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Boltanski, Luc. 2012. Love and Justice as Competences. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Capdepón, Ulrike, and Sarah Dornhof. 2022. Contested Memory in Urban Space. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_1. Cox, Karen L. 2021. No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books. Davidson, John Daniel. 2017. “Why We Should Keep the Confederate Monuments Where They Are.” The Federalist, August 18. https://thefederalist. com/2017/08/18/in-defense-of-the-monuments/. Dewey, John. 1929. Experience and Nature. London: George Allen & Unwin. http://library.lol/main/8C36429DD8D0F2A74E2379C21A30466E. ———. 1939. Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us. Columbus, OH: American Education Press. Field, Jonathan B. 2020. “Some Statues Are Like Barbed Wire.” Boston Review, June 12. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jonathan-beecherfield-some-statues-are-barbed-wire/. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Greenberg, Clement. 1939. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review 6 (5): 34–49. Hill, Michael. 2022. “Creating a Monument to Harriet Tubman ‘rooted in Community’ in Newark, NJ.” PBS NewsHour, January 2. https://www. pbs.org/newshour/show/creating-a-monument-to-harriet-tubman-rootedin-community-in-newark-nj. Kealey, Terence, and Martin Ricketts. 2014. “Modelling Science as a Contribution Good.” Research Policy 43: 1014–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol. 2014.01.009. ———. 2021. “The Contribution Good as the Foundation of the Industrial Revolution.” In Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons, edited by Erwin Dekker and Pavel Kuchaˇr, 19–57. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Kjellberg, Hans, and Alexandre Mallard. 2013. “Valuation Studies? Our Collective Two Cents.” Valuation Studies 1 (1): 51–81. https://doi.org/10.3384/ vs.2001-5992.142171. Klamer, Arjo. 2016. Doing the Right Thing: A Value Based Economy. London: Ubiquity Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process.” In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuznar, Lawrence A. 2017. “Opinion | I Detest Our Confederate Monuments. But They Should Remain.” Washington Post, August 18, sec. Opinions.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-detest-our-confederate-mon uments-but-they-should-remain/2017/08/18/13d25fe8-843c-11e7-902a2a9f2d808496_story.html. Lanham, Richard A. 2006. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lavoie, Don. 1990. “Hermeneutics, Subjectivity, and the Lester/Machlup Debate: Toward A More Anthropological Approach to Empirical Economics.” In Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists, edited by Warren J. Samuels, 167–84. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. McCloskey, Deirdre. 1994. Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGinnis, Michael D. 2011. “An Introduction to IAD and the Language of the Ostrom Workshop: A Simple Guide to a Complex Framework.” Policy Studies Journal 39: 169–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.2010.00401.x. Morea, Valeria. 2020. “Public Art Today. How Public Art Sheds Light on the Future of the Theory of Commons.” In Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by E. Macrì, Michele Trimarchi, and Valeria Morea, 79–91. Cham: Springer. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parks, Tim. 2005. Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in FifteenthCentury Florence. New York: W. W. Norton. Pratt, Andy C. 2010. “Creative Cities: Tensions within and between Social, Cultural and Economic Development.” City, Culture and Society 1 (1): 13–20. Schütz, Alfred. 1932. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Wien: Springer. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 1983. “Contingencies of Value.” Critical Inquiry 10 (1): 1–35. Stark, David. 2009. The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Throsby, David, and Michael Hutter. 2008. Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics and the Arts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Walsh, Colleen. 2020. “Must We Allow Symbols of Racism on Public Land?” Harvard Law Today. https://today.law.harvard.edu/feature/must-we-allowsymbols-of-racism-on-public-land/. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 2

What Values Are, and How We Learn to Appreciate Them

Abstract We analyze what values are, how they relate to more immediate ends individuals pursue, and how they give direction to the practices of artists and audiences. We start from the observation that goods bought in the market are key inputs into social practices which are produced through a combination of material inputs and the contributions of artists and audiences. Many value-based approaches suggest that values can be made explicit and listed, but we suggest that they are often embodied in social practices and hard to fully explicate. These social practices gain meaning against broader moral frameworks which exist in society, and which other scholars have termed orders of worth. We suggest that values are learned through an engagement with practices, and initially often have an aspirational nature: values are both pursued and performed. Because contemporary societies offer many heterogeneous social practices, individuals can choose which to join and seek to develop their personal identities through them. The incompatible nature of different practices is a source of potential value conflict. We analyze the process of value learning and the conflict between values through the career of the rapper and singer Phonte, known from his work in the groups Little Brother and Foreign Exchange. Keywords Values · Value learning · Social practices · Phonte · Identity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_2

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Need and desire – out of which grow purpose and direction of energy—go beyond what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They continually open the way into the unexplored and unattained future. John Dewey, Creative Democracy 1939.

Human action is purposeful; it seeks to accomplish an end. But in the process of pursuing ends, we also learn about the value of that goal. This chapter is about the way that artists and art enthusiasts determine which ends to pursue, and what values they seek to realize. This requires us to be clear about what values are and how they relate to more immediate ends and goals. We will demonstrate that values are frequently in conflict with each other and impose competing and incompatible demands upon the individual. We explore the pursuit of values and the resulting tension through the choices and reflections of rapper and singer Phonte. This case study will demonstrate that figuring out intentions and values is a process. It is, as art historian Baxandall has argued, ‘something progressively worked out in the course of handling the medium’ (Baxandall 1985, 39). He expands this to a ‘serial’ understanding of creation, in which subsequent works are different attempts at solving a problem, iterative experiments to find better ways to realize values. In that process, reflection on the relative success and failure of previous attempts is crucial. Figuring out what is of value, and what is worthy of an artist’s effort and time is a process of trial and error, it involves both value orientation and value learning. The final part of this chapter is therefore devoted to value learning and reflection.

Market Goods and Other People Are Essential Human action is purposeful, this includes the actions of artists and audiences. Some ends can be realized individually, but the realization of artistic ends is a social process. After all, artists seek to communicate something, and a viewer will at the very least have to listen and attempt to understand that message for the art to have any impact. Typically, neither the artists nor the viewer is isolated either so that an analysis of art, why it is made, and why it is appreciated means that we must analyze a social process involving multiple individuals. It could theoretically be the case that the intentions of artist and audience differ wildly. An artist might seek to express some emotional message through a painting, while the viewer might be looking for a decorative piece of art for the office. But

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for patterns of interaction of this kind to persist over time, it is unlikely that intentions can diverge this much. Instead, both makers and audiences will be drawn to artistic practices in which the intentions are, if not identical, at least partially overlapping. Therefore, there will be many different social practices around the arts, which embody different ends. This brings us to an important conceptual question: what is the relationship between ends and values? The simple answer is that these concepts overlap a great deal. Our conception of values is pragmatic, in the sense of the American pragmatism, of for example John Dewey. In Dewey’s work we find a distinction between ‘ends-in-view’ and more fundamental values. That is not to say that values have a transcendental or ideal reality, but merely that they are underlying reasons for people to pursue certain activities, or ends-in-view. As Arjo Klamer has suggested, they are the answers to a repeated why question: ‘Why is that important to you?’ After a few iterations of that question, he believes that we arrive at the level of values: “Why are you buying groceries? Why do you spend time preparing dinner? Why do you find it important to share time and conversations with friends? Why is friendship important?” (Klamer 2016, 48–49). At that point the conversation might become uncomfortable, what is one supposed to answer to the question why friendship is important? The interviewee might throw up their hands or become frustrated, because at some point we cannot dig deeper, at that point we have arrived at the value itself. It is to be expected that the number of ends-in-view—the immediate goals which individuals pursue—is high, possibly infinite. The total number of values is more limited, since several ends-in-view aim at more ultimate ends, or values. There is an ongoing debate among theorists of value and well-being whether these ultimate ends can be listed (Nussbaum 2009). As we illustrate below, we think values are contextual and discovered in new practices so that attempts at creating universal lists is misguided. This pragmatic approach to values is, however, somewhat reductionistic; it analyzes underlying values but does not seek to reduce all values to a single denominator such as utility, or price. Our approach is nonetheless close to the economic rational choice approach, which similarly starts from individual intentions. In rational choice theory it is assumed that individuals seek to satisfy their preferences. These preferences reflect the ranking of different bundles of goods. We are not interested in the goods directly, but rather in the values which can be realized with the help of goods. The economist

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Gary Becker suggested that we should think of goods bought on the markets as inputs to the production of underlying more fundamental goals or values (Stigler and Becker 1977). Individuals buy goods on the market, with which they produce what they value with additional inputs such as time, the help of others, and knowledge. Gary Becker’s approach is closer to sociology than is frequently realized. In the work of sociologists such as Howard Becker (1953) and Randall Collins (2004) we also find an approach that treats goods as inputs to social practices. When a person buys a violin, it might be merely used to show off, or decorate a room. But to use it to produce pleasant sounds will require many additional inputs, including extensive studying informed by others. Artistic practices require market goods such as instruments, ink, or paint which are then combined with knowledge, time, and effort to produce something meaningful, and that which is meaningful is typically, but not always, shared with others. This is equally true on the consumption side, where tickets for a performance merely provide access. To fully enjoy the performance typically requires attention, numerous other engaged audience members, as well as previous knowledge. The Beckerian approach blurs the sharp distinction between consumption and production, and therefore also between the idea that consumption is enjoyable but costly, while production is costly but productive. Amateurs and professional artists often derive a lot of satisfaction from the process of creation. Even if that creation is not shared, or experienced by others, they might still claim to have realized a value, or several values. This approach does not have to introduce some ad hoc idea of intrinsic motivation to make clear that we are willing to engage in costly activities such as buying goods, and exerting effort, to enjoy ourselves, and realize values. One limitation of the Beckerian approach is that it equates value with equilibrium prices. This view is rather static, but the significance of prices should not be dismissed too easily. Good economics realizes that the market itself is a process of learning, in which prices do not simply reflect costs or equilibrium values (Hayek 2014). Markets enable the mutual coordination between individuals with heterogenous preferences and suppliers with widely differentiated goods. Suppliers search for new and innovative ways to improve their products and services, and consumers learn the relevant differences through the choices they make. In this way, market prices reflect the ongoing valuation process through active engagement of consumers. The resulting price provides important

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signals to new artists about what type of products and services might be appreciated. In other words, markets coordinate. Market prices and sales volumes captured in, for instance, charts or best-seller lists, provide an interesting quantitative measure, which has proven attractive for many empirical researchers. An important strand of research even seeks to generate market prices for public goods or heritage sites which are not traded on markets, through methods such as contingent valuation (Noonan 2003). For example, an experiment conducted in 2018 demonstrated that Londoners are, on average, willing to pay £5 for the public art in their city (Tanguy and Kumar 2019). Yet, market outcomes capture very little of the qualitative differences in valuation, and they provide only a first clue about the underlying justification for valuation (Velthuis 2004). This is an important insight for social scientists seeking to understand the values around art, but it is also a fact of life for cultural organizations seeking to evaluate whether they did well. If a museum exhibit or music festival attracts many customers this is an important clue about the extent to which an event was successful, but it tells little about the quality of the engagement of the audience, or whether the event affected visitors, aspects which interest museum directors and festival organizers just as much. Cultural entrepreneurs need to interpret the engagement to be able to evaluate how well they did, and which projects they should develop in the future (Dekker and Kuchaˇr 2016). Another reason to rely on the pragmatic concept of values, is that it is much closer to the lived experience of individuals. First, an approach which makes values central recognizes the fact that people seek to realize incompatible things, competing values, which might be in deep conflict with each other (Roberts 2022). The language of values provides conceptual tools for talking about the deep conflicts between these values, instead of the abstract logic of preferences and trade-offs which dominates economic thinking. Second, values have a moral connotation which is reflected in the idealistic goals which many in the arts world (claim to) pursue. We recognize that claims about the pursuit of lofty goals in the arts are sometimes disingenuous, and in other instances strategic. But to make sense of the art practices we discuss in this book, something fundamental is ignored, when we do not consider the moral and idealistic nature of the values which individuals seek to realize. Another way of thinking about this moral dimension of values is that the arts are a crucial part of identity formation and expression for many individuals. It is often said that ‘we are what we eat’, which suggests

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a tight link between consumption patterns and our identity. Since we prefer to think of practices rather than goods, we should say ‘we are what we do’. Identity has received increasing attention among sociologically oriented economists. The economists (Bénabou and Tirole 2016), recognize that identities are to a large extent ‘performed’, something the sociologist Goffmann (1959) has argued long ago. This means that by engaging in artistic practices individuals perform who they are, both to themselves and to others. Jason Potts and Peter Earl in groundbreaking work have suggested that while individuals have a high degree of agency over which identity to pursue, they have far less agency once they have made this choice (Earl and Potts 2004). One way of thinking about this difference is that we make conscious decisions over who we want to be, but we rely on convention and the choices of others once we have decided to join a certain social practice. We orient ourselves toward others, who to befriend and who to stay away from, but largely accept social mores once inside a relationship or social practice.

Values Are Embedded in Social Practices Identity is expressed and performed through patterns of actions, just like values are realized through the pursuit of interconnected ends-in-view. This typically takes place in communities and groups. The coordination between different individuals which make up such a community is easiest when the different members seek to realize the same value or values. Occasionally the social practice is nearly identical with the values that members seek to realize, Klamer (2016) then speaks of a praxis: a practice which constitutes its own end. That is an excellent way to make sense of the elusive notion of intrinsic motivation, which posits that individuals do something for their own sake. A theory of motivation frequently invoked to explain the behavior of artists (Frey and Jegen 2001; Abbing 2002; Remic 2021). This interpretation of intrinsic motivation does not have to rely on some external psychological drive but explains that a particular social activity is attractive to an individual because it embodies the values that they seek to realize. In the contemporary economy, this tight connection between economic activity and who we are is nowhere more visible than in the type of work people seek to do. Sociologists have observed how work has taken over the role of consumption in the expression of our identity. Thorstein Veblen (1899) studied ‘conspicuous consumption’ by which he referred

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to the products which rich people bought and displayed to signal their wealth. But as luxury consumption has become more widespread, due to much greater material welfare in most Western countries, it became harder to signal superiority through consumption. Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, suggested that ‘cultural taste’ replaced conspicuous consumption as the marker of difference between the upper classes and the middle classes. Bourdieu’s work Distinction (1984) makes clear that the cultural sector occupies a special position in society. More than other sectors it allows individuals to explore and express their values. This is especially true for those who choose a career in the arts. Artists are often held up as exemplars of those who choose meaning over money, and they are represented as pioneers of ‘the new’. That is how Van Gogh’s sacrifices to make his art are celebrated: he pursued his art despite never selling a painting in his life. In the contemporary economy the idea that our career choices are some of the most meaningful we make in our lives is widespread (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Work has come to occupy a unique place in contemporary life. This is expressed in the amount of time that individuals spend on work, more time signals that we enjoy our work and value it for its own sake (Collewet et al. 2017). As well as in the type of professions young people aspire to pursue, these should allow them to be creative and express themselves (Overton and Banks 2015). It is a good example of how values are driving more and more decisions, not just in the cultural sector, but in the economy broadly. Next to work, individuals are typically part of various social groups and engage in shared practices. Around arts and culture one can think of such diverse activities as festival-attendance, choir practice, the creation and sharing of (artistic) memes, jam sessions, watch-parties, or the celebration of a national or religious holiday. These social practices aim at realizing values or embody them. As such, these practices are a rich repository of options from which the individual can choose what best fits their ends-in-view or deeper underlying values. The embodiment of values in existing practices is an important insight for it moves us away from purely rational (and individual) deliberation about which values are important. Instead, individuals can observe values being realized and join different art communities to figure out and learn what they find important. In some instances, social practices will be pursued by individuals with nearly identical goals and values. But this is not at all the most common situation, in most instances individual values and purposes are not aligned

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and an artistic practice provides sufficient overlap to allow different individuals to realize their own values. A music festival provides a good example, for some it is an opportunity to enjoy their favorite music live, for others a way to bond with friends, for some artists it is a way to realize a new innovative project, while others might simply view it as a profit opportunity to sell some food, merchandise, or drugs. The music festival is the means for the realization of these different purposes and the values associated with them (aesthetic enjoyment, friendship, creativity), which are potentially at odds with each other. Most artistic practices are, therefore, and we do not mean this in a bad way, compromises, or hybrids. They are platforms for different individuals to realize their values, for others they are simply a means toward something else. Boltanski and Thévenot devote much of their seminal On Justification (2006) to the examination of compromises which seek to satisfy multiple orders of worth at the same time. This is a result of the deep value-pluralism and heterogeneity in contemporary societies. But we believe it can equally be recognized at the individual level. Humans seek to realize conflicting values and frequently juggle between different orders of worth, not merely because their social roles demand this of them, but also because our own moral schema and aspirations are complex. Conflicts about values do not merely happen between people, but also within our own minds. These conflicts are not merely about which values are important, a question which could easily turn into an abstract philosophical reflection, from which most would rather excuse themselves. On a more practical level value conflicts are about which practices to contribute and with whom to associate, they are competing orientations for human action.

The Context of Values Are Orders of Worth We have suggested above that values are contextual. This is true in two senses, the values that an individual will seek to realize differ depending on their personal experiences and social context. Our case study below will delve deeper into this type of context. For now, we will focus on the fact that values are not free-floating ideals but are instead connected to each other and broader webs of meaning. These connections are not always visible because a lot of valuation is routine or embedded in existing institutions and patterns of interaction. But when individuals break out of routines, they engage in the activity

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of valuing both the means they use and the ends they pursue. Dewey calls such situations ‘problematic’, they lie at the heart of his process of judgment and valuation. ‘Problematic’, in the sense of unusual, situations require individuals to reassess, weigh, appraise, and evaluate, in short to value (Dewey 1939). In his pragmatist theory, value is not something which exists independent of the subjective perspective and the actions of humans, instead value is something which is the outcome of actions, it is the outcome of human action. Dewey asks us to ponder whether value is a noun, a property of artefacts, or a verb, an action. He decides, conclusively, for the latter. This is congruent with how economists since at least Carl Menger have conceived of value: a result of human action who attribute value to means which further their ends (Menger 1871). Valuation is not merely linked with action, but also inextricably bound up with uncertainty (Beckert 1996). It is when individuals break routines and try something new, something that is not yet tested or confirmed, and step into the unknown, that valuation happens. Many aspects of the cultural industries are routinized, not unlike industrial routines. But the valuation of ‘the new’ remains a key aspect in the cultural industries, which means that researchers of the arts have always emphasized the inherent uncertainty about value which characterizes the sector (Baumol 1986; Bielby and Bielby 1994; Caves 2000). The cultural industries are part of the experience economy, in which surprise, and critical evaluation, appraisal and valuation are fundamental characteristics (Pine and Gilmore 1999; Hutter 2011). The open-endedness of the experiences, and of cultural goods, is of course a matter of degree. In mass-markets it is common to see quite standardized versions of the new appear, such as in movies which are serialized. The more close-ended the product is, the less surprise and valuation are an inherent part of the experience, and the more likely it is that these products will be categorized as entertainment rather than art. Art might be said to explore the uncertain, and therefore valuation is an inherent part of the process of art. The pragmatic approach of Dewey has recently been enriched by what has been called French neo-pragmatism (Krüger and Reinhart 2017). A group of French economic sociologists, especially Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, have expanded the approach of Dewey in a more structural direction. They have suggested that valuation and the justification of value typically happens in relation to an order of worth. Orders of worth should be understood as a kind of classification scheme of action,

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which evaluates their value significance. Daydreaming at the job is unproductive and wasteful in the context of the industrial order of worth, but it makes sense and is potentially valuable because it leads to new ideas within the inspired world of Boltanski and Thévenot (2000, 2006). Orders of worth are not set in stone, but they do represent the structural part of the valuation process. Individuals make judgments, as the French neo-pragmatists and their interlocutor David Stark are keen to emphasize, in moments of choice and judgment, what Dewey called ‘problematic’ situations. But to a pragmatist these moral structures of values are significant and most importantly ‘real’. Hayek famously argued that the most important facts of the social sciences are what people think and believe, and since these intersubjective structures are guideposts for the valuations of individuals, they are some of the ‘realest’ material which social scientists can investigate (Hayek 1952). Orders of worth emerge as an unintended consequence of individual decisions, they are what Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek have called spontaneous orders (Jacobs 2000). The exemplary spontaneous order is language which emerges and evolves through repeated usage and will differ significantly between different communities. The structure of most language is deeply complex, there is a grammar which structures language usage, but, as any student of a second language knows, these grammar rules are anything but universal and come with many exceptions. We believe that orders of worth should be understood similarly, they have emerged and evolved through repeated usage, and it is possible to discern a kind of grammar in them, although there will be many exceptions and contextual judgments. Orders of worth will differ significantly between different communities, just like languages do. It is within these orders, or better in relation to them, that social practices acquire meaning. Diverse orders of worth allow us not merely to value goods, they also inform individuals about the values they might seek to realize. The inspired world identified by Boltanski and Thévenot connects most naturally to the arts, so it is relevant to see which values they associate with it. They do not speak directly of values, but they can be distilled from their account without much trouble, for instance beauty; originality; openness; spontaneity. These values are guideposts in the sense that they can be used to evaluate whether an activity is worthy of our pursuit, and why a social practice is meaningful.

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Although his theoretical framework is different, Arjo Klamer also arrives at the centrality of values, including the idea that values play an important role in creating competing and partially incompatible social orders. He distinguishes a market, organizational, social, and domestic order, which to a significant degree overlap with the worlds of Boltanski and Thévenot. In contrast to the French neo-pragmatists, Klamer is explicit about the values he associates with these different orders. He names personal values such as craftmanship or skill, autonomy, authenticity as well as pursuing one’s curiosity or creativity; social values such as loyalty, community, respect and responsibility; societal values such as justice, fairness, liberty, tolerance, and equality; and transcendental values such as beauty, peace, enlightenment, and sacredness (Klamer 2016, 59). His willingness to be explicit about spheres and the associated values might suggest that he holds a universalist conception of values. But Klamer (2020) recognizes in recent work that values are connected to broader cultural patterns which provide the context of meaning within which these spheres operate.

The Values of a Hip-Hop Artist The best way to understand how values shape choices in the arts is to see how artists make their decisions. We will analyze the career of singer and rapper Phonte to see which values he sought to realize and how values shaped both the means he used and the ends-in-view he pursued. It should highlight a number of key theoretical points we made above, including the multiple identities which individuals have and the way these put competing demands on an artist, as well as the way values are embedded in existing social practices, and finally the relation of values to broader orders of worth. Phonte enjoyed his breakthrough in the group Little Brother, around 2003. Their first single ‘Speed’ garnered local interest and they were able to sign a record deal with the independent label ABB. The group consisted of rappers Phonte, Big Pooh, and producer 9th Wonder. Little Brother’s sound was inspired by the jazzy hip-hop of the early ‘90s, from groups such as A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. The subject matter of their songs was down to earth and focused on the everyday problems of the members of the group ranging from personal relationships, to their start in the music industry, and their perspective on hip-hop music. They clearly rejected the commercial direction and tough-guy

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or gangster images which dominated hip-hop at the time. Their revival of a more conscious and jazzy sound on the first album The Listening received wide acclaim of the press and their peers. Phonte was particularly impressed when he got a call from one of his musical heroes, Pete Rock, with whom he would later record several songs. In the wake of this success, Little Brother was able to get extra exposure for various friends, who formed the collective Justus League. Some of these artists were able to release their own albums with some success, which was especially notable since Durham (North Carolina) had not been known as an important city for hip-hop music. The success of their independent first album landed the group a deal with the major label Atlantic. Initially the group members were over the moon because of this deal. On ‘The Becoming’, one of the first tracks of his second album, Phonte described how they went from nobodies to highly regarded artists, from upstarts with an album that had been poorly available to one which would be released and distributed by a major label. Their experience at the major label Atlantic was, however, mixed. During their stay at the indie label ABB, they were used to putting out music directly. The release at Atlantic involved a lot more ‘red-tape.’ Their new label kept asking for a single, which would be suitable for radio play. This single was found with ‘Lovin’ it’, a relatively straightforward hiphop party track. The role the song played on the album was, however, more controversial. Their second album was entitled The Minstrel Show (Fig. 2.1), a reference to an American form of entertainment from the late nineteenth century in which white people performed racial stereotypes in blackface. Phonte explained that he felt that a lot of contemporary hip-hop music, like minstrelsy, reinforced stereotypes about black people. Through skits and short interludes, the songs on the album are connected to form a modern-day Minstrel Show. In this context ‘Lovin’ it’ was the song that pandered to the (white) audience. Whereas the first album had presented an alternative aesthetic to mainstream hip-hop, their next one took a confrontational approach and sought to change the direction of the genre. The response to the album was also mixed. Most critics and old fans could appreciate both the concept and the music. But the album did not become a great commercial success. BET, the major tv-station for hip-hop videos, allegedly believed that the song ‘Lovin’ it’ was ‘too intelligent’ for their audience and decided to not include it in their day-time rotation. BET has always denied this claim, but it was widely reported in the media

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Fig. 2.1 Album covers of The Minstrel Show by Little Brother and Connected by Foreign Exchange

in 2005 and Phonte referenced the affair in the mixtape song ‘Boondock Saints’ from 2006. Meanwhile Atlantic, unsure of what to do with the concept-album, did little to promote it. The parody-song ‘Cheatin’’, in which Phonte mockingly sang in the then-dominant style of crooning R&B, meanwhile, generated a buzz. But to Phonte’s surprise not as a parody, rather as a serious R&B song. Phonte later claimed that the R. Kelly song ‘Trapped in the Closet’ released around the same time, outdid his parody. What had been intended as mockery was taken at face value. His attempt to create authentic music and critique the aesthetic of hiphop music did not have the intended effect. What Little Brother, furthermore, discovered was that the values they sought to realize were not shared by anyone at Atlantic. As the release date of their third album came closer, the relationship with Atlantic went sour, in the political speak of the music industry the parties parted because of ‘different philosophies’. In the meantime, the relationship with the third member of the group, producer 9th Wonder, had also become more difficult. What had started as a group of friends making music in their dorms had become a business, and it was hard to keep the values aligned, or even to remember that friendship and camaraderie were once the most important part of it. After another album Big Pooh and Phonte decided to split up, the former commented on the situation that: “As, Little Brother calls it quits, there are other groups to not necessarily take our place but

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to keep the tradition going…That’s what it’s all about – you don’t want your favorite group to force a relationship. Like, you don’t want Tribe Called Quest…If they don’t really want to be together, you don’t want them to make another album.” A Tribe Called Quest was one of the groups which had inspired them, but which also had grown apart during the recording of their later albums. It made Phonte reflect on his motives for making music in the song ‘Can’t Win for Losing’. He explains that he started out to get love from his fans, until that relationship became constraining, because they either idolized or hated artists. Then he wanted to do it for those close to him, to give them a voice, but his family and friends were uncomfortable with his more personal and critical reflections in his music. Then he wanted to do it to get respect for his art, until that too felt constraining because it created a restrictive pattern of expectation. To conclude the verse with: “Had a long hard talk with my nigga Jazzy Jeff/ He said, ‘Fuck ’em [Phon]’Te, do it for you!”. The different values he had attempted to realize are beautifully on display in the song. He had started wanting to give hip-hop fans a different sound and aesthetic, but these had received the music quite different from how it had been intended. His closest family did not recognize either what he was trying to accomplish, and he had estranged his mother through his lyrics. The smaller group of fans who did fully understand what the music was about, at the same time limited his freedom, because they desired more of the same, while Phonte wanted to expand. So Phonte returned to his own motivations and values, without knowing precisely what these were. His struggles with his family had already been the subject of other songs, in which he reflected on the strain that this musical career had put on his family. In ‘All for You’ he not only reflected on his relationship with his first wife, but also the relationship with his father: From the roots to the branches to the leaves

They say apples don’t fall far from the trees

(…)

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But I swear to God I tried to make that shit work ‘Til I came off tour to an empty house With all the dressers and the cabinets emptied out (…) That shit affected me, largely Because I know a lot of people want me To fail as a father, and the thought of that haunts me Especially when I check my rear-view mirror And don’t see him [his son] in his car seat

Phonte had started with hopes to shatter stereotypes about black music, black fathers as well as hip-hop groups which did not manage to stay together. But looking back he realized this had proven much harder than he hoped, as he concluded on the song ‘Dreams’: I still go the crib and see my niggaz on the corner Chilling with the pounds on they waist, getting old Getting round in the face and when I hang with them They ask me if The Minstrel Show means I’m ashamed of them Well – I can’t say that I’m proud, but only saying

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Can’t say I’m allowed to judge, I’m just glad to see you Cause truth be told, if my records never sold And I wasn’t raised this bold, nigga I would probably be you

The different values which Phonte attempted to realize were in tension with each other. This is most evident in the strained relationships with old friends and family. On the other hand, the relationship with some of his other friends grew closer. His friend and manager Big Do for example stayed with him through all label changes. In the meantime, next to his career as a rapper he has also been working on a different project called Foreign Exchange. It was a collaboration with the Dutch producer Nicolay, whom he met through a music forum on the internet. Their first album Connected (Fig. 2.1) was released in 2004, and in 2010 the third album Authenticity came out. The group allowed Phonte to develop a different side of himself. Foreign Exchange created modern soul, the subject matter was mostly romantic and Phonte did not rap but sang on the albums. It is characteristic that this other identity was pursued under a different name. In 2009 Foreign Exchange was nominated for a Grammy in the category of best urban/alternative performance, for their track ‘The Daykeeper’ of the second album. That is not the only success that Phonte and Nicolay had, for they also set up the Foreign Exchange label, which aimed to be an opportunity to provide a platform for others. So, while some relationships deteriorated new ones were formed, with new meanings. Phonte explored these new avenues on ‘Tigallo for Dolo’, in which he claimed to be done with the rap game: “no country for old men”. Phonte was now engaged in at least three clearly definable projects, which reflected his multiple identities, and the different values he sought to realize. The first of these was that of a successful singer as part of Foreign Exchange. The second as one half of the hip-hop group Little Brother, and third the relationship he had built over the years was with a significant core fan-base. They placed new demands on him, in part to keep making music in the same vein as he had done before. In the aforementioned song he addressed these expectations, my fans suggest that: We need LB [Little Brother] to come and save the rap game

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But, truthfully, I don’t think the shit needs saving

I think we got wives and sons that need raising

New dreams to fill and for that, we need patience

Twenty-one years old, I used to slang verses

But ten years later, I am not the same person

Whole new perspective, not the same purpose

The expectations of the Little Brother fans clashed with his own changed expectations, he no longer had ambitions or beliefs that he could change the direction of hip-hop. Phonte explored new goals, such as building a family. He felt he had become a different person, with different values. These values were discovered through the various projects he undertook and the relationships with others that resulted from it, or that were broken off because of it. He sought to express and realize his values through his music career, but at the same time realized that these values were incompatible with his other ambitions. He half-jokingly suggested in the intro to one of his solo songs: “And I do this all for hip-hop! I’m lying like shit, I do this shit for my goddamn mortgage.” A tension which remained mostly unresolved. Meanwhile fans and friends kept asking whether a reunion album would be possible, in a podcast with fellow artist Questlove they were asked how the reunion album May the Lord Watch (2019) came about to which they answered: “I think it was just us, becoming friends” (Questlove 2000, 1h21m). This process took time, several years, but when that happened Big Pooh and Phonte felt that they could create another album which came from the right place. An album which allowed to realize some of the values of which they had lost sight the first time around. The personal connection with their third group member 9th Wonder was never restored. The journey of Phonte illustrates how his artistic practices are valuesdriven. Initially, these were mostly social: respect and recognition from

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peers. With the ‘Minstrel Show’ album they also more explicitly than before sought to challenge existing aesthetic standards within hip-hop, so Phonte’s values shifted more into the societal and transcendental domain. When these efforts did not pan out as hoped and came at the detriment of many of his other values, including a growing estrangement from older friends and family, Phonte reoriented himself. He focused more on his singing career and the subject matter of the raps for Little Brother returned to everyday trials and tribulations and a bittersweet stance toward the broader direction in hip-hop, without any direct confrontation. This return to the personal was not only reflected in the growing importance he attached to building a family and overcoming stereotypes about black fathers, but also in the reunion with his partner in rhyme, Big Pooh. His choices illustrate how value-pluralism is not only a fact about modern society. It is also reflected, at the level of the individual, in the multiple practices in which artists engage, the various projects they undertake, and the different identities and associated values they seek to realize.

Value Discovery What the analysis of Phonte’s choice also makes clear is that the realization of values is not a linear process in which first the artist must be clear about their values and then they can think of ways to realize them. Initially he sought to contribute to an existing social practice of conscious hiphop music and realize the associated values. This developed into a more confrontational approach during the Minstrel Show album, which not only sought to realize certain values, but also contested other practices. When this project did not lead to the desired results, Phonte reoriented his endsin-view. In this sense, values are discovered in the process of realizing them. The process of value discovery has recently been put on the agenda by various authors, but most prominently by the philosopher Agnes Callard. She has written extensively on aspiration and value-acquisition. Callard (2018) makes clear that there is a significant difference between believing that something is valuable and valuing it. The latter requires active engagement, or better yet, the pursuit of this value, an attempt to make it real. If we follow her line of reasoning, we can only really discover what a particular value entails, and why it is valuable, in our attempt to realize it. This makes the pursuit of values a conceptually complex issue.

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For if we cannot know beforehand what a value is, then why would we choose it? Are we simply reaching the end of the domain of rationality and deliberate choices? Callard suggests this is not the case. We can, she suggests, reason toward values. We do this mostly by imitation and following the paths of others. Phonte and his group Little Brother initially sought to imitate their role models, groups such as a Tribe Called Quest. This imitation can already be an active process, Phonte was for instance aware that he wanted to avoid the same group dynamic which had caused other groups to split up. In an interview he recounted how the idea of also doing soloand side-projects was from the start designed to make the group more durable and he invoked the example of the group Gang Starr consisting of DJ Premier and Guru who successfully managed this (Questlove 2020, 1h19m). It can also build on negative examples. Phonte wanted to avoid following the example of his father, who had kids early, and did not stay around to raise them. Values are not merely embodied by role models but also in social practices, in genre conventions as well as in the way practitioners behave and talk about their art. Aspiration is to a significant degree the desire to be part of a certain social practice and to be respected by the other practitioners, to be recognized as artist. This consists of both recognition by peers as well as critical recognition and commercial success or fan support. In the case of Phonte this was evident in his pride of the recognition of his musical heroes, as well as the relationship with his fans. The desire for recognition is not limited to artists, but also a recurring desire for audiences. They frequently aspire to be the kind of person who can enjoy a certain type of art and be able to properly appreciate it. In practice this means being recognized by other consumers as a serious fan or connoisseur. In this sense, value aspiration is not an individual psychological process, but a social process, which consists in the desire and attempts to join certain practices. The practical side of realizing values is choosing which art communities to join. For some practices, the barriers to entry are low, but frequently they are significant. Howard Becker, in a classic paper (1953), described how individuals are socialized into being marihuana users in a process of socialization in which they first learn to smoke, then to learn to recognize being high and finally to enjoy the high and share the enjoyment with others. In an excellent study along the same lines, Claudio Benzecry (2009) has studied how one becomes an opera fan

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through a process of learning, in which newcomers first learn to know relevant opera’s then to recognize differences between them, as well as what to appreciate in opera, to finally be able to share this appreciation with others. Value aspiration can thus often be observed in how people choose to spend their time and which art communities they seek to join. Values in a fundamental sense always have an aspirational aspect, they might even tend toward the utopian in the form of not fully realizable dreams, such as Phonte’s hope to change the dominant aesthetic in hip-hop. Whereas the traditional theory of preference satisfaction in economics claims that individuals buy goods because they will satisfy their needs and wants, which are expressed in a preference function, our values-based theory suggests that the practice of arts as well as the consumption of arts frequently has an important aspirational element. It seeks to realize something beyond our preferences, beyond what we know. Michael Hutter (2011) has drawn attention to the fact that the traditional economic theory of so-called experience goods assumes that knowing more about the product beforehand is desirable. The more uncertainty there is about the characteristics and quality of the goods, the less likely consumers will buy them. Hutter, on the contrary, suggests that artistic goods cannot function without an element of surprise; we are interested in them because we hope to give us something we do not yet know or have not yet experienced. A similar recognition can be found at the basis of Tibor Scitovsky’s critical theory of consumption in The Joyless Economy (1976). He was worried about the rise of entertainment at the expense of art and suggested that entertainment gave consumers exactly what they wanted, instead of challenging them beyond what they knew. The maverick economist Frank Knight suggested that the purpose of life was not to satisfy our preferences, but to develop better ones. All these suggestions point in the same direction, aspiration moves beyond what we know and fully understand in the direction of who or what we like to be. It is our conviction that values should therefore not be understood as deep-seated desires or expressions of what people really want if they would reflect sufficiently deeply. This means that we are skeptical of methods which aim to uncover the values solely through a process of probing as Klamer at times suggests (see also Rekom et al. 2006). Realizing what one’s values are, the Socratic imperative to ‘know thyself’, should not be interpreted as merely a call for introspection. Nor are values abstract

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Platonic entities which are universal and ideal, instead values in the pragmatic approach are embodied in social practices and expressed in the identities articulated through these practices. Agnes Callard comes to a similar conclusion and does not look for an authentic self and their values; she instead suggests that we shape who we are through our actions. We are making ourselves through our practices, we are what we do as we put it earlier. This perspective also makes it clear that what we value, and which practices we seek to join does not reflect underlying preferences or who we truly are. Rather, values and identities are performed. The process of value-acquisition is a performative process in which we seek to perform those actions which would bring us closer to a certain value. Through this performance we in some sense make ourselves into the person who embodies certain values, captured in Phonte’s lines: “But ten years later, I am not the same person/ Whole new perspective, not the same purpose”. Identity is not only in flux over time, but at any moment in time the different social practices in which individuals are engaged, place different demands on people. The heterogeneity of values we find in society is reflected at the individual level in the multiple identities which nearly all individuals seek to realize. And therefore, the contestation between different social practices and the values they embody at the societal level is reflected in the internal conflicts that the individual artist faces, when deciding what practices to contribute to. As a result of these multiple identities, the individual and their surroundings might feel that they fail to realize it. Performances can be more and less successful, and performances can be more and less genuine. In a performance of values, it is even inevitable that we feel like an imposter, a feeling which might never quite go away. In the arts, as in science, the imposter syndrome is a much-discussed phenomenon, and reflects the ambiguity that individuals themselves feel about whether they are merely performing a certain value or expertise, or whether they are embodying it, realizing it. In the arts this ambiguity is reinforced by the fact that most practitioners of the arts are not professionals in the sense of holding a formal position or job which makes them an artist, instead their status as ‘artist’ is dependent on the success of their performance, and the perception of others. A final complicating factor is that since the arts have high social status there will be genuine imposters too, who seek to enhance how others see them through signaling that they like the arts. The economists Kevin

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Simler and Robin Hanson (2018) are convinced that the desire to signal our social status to others explains most of human behavior and they explicitly single out the arts as a domain where this type of behavior is highly visible. This perspective can in different forms also be found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1986) who has suggested that individuals with a high income will seek to convert their economic capital into cultural capital, because this will confer a higher status upon them. The critical French sociologist suggested that the development of ‘taste’, which is recognized by others, is crucial to the acquisition of social status. This perspective appears to be strongly at odds with the more idealistic discussion of value-acquisition we have presented. But in practice it might be hard to tell the difference. Robin Hanson recognized this and invited Agnes Callard to a conversation about signaling and value-acquisition, which was turned into the podcast series Minds almost meeting. Their perspectives do not fully converge, but there are several moments when both recognize that value-acquisition and status signaling might be two phenomena very hard to distinguish. Especially if we believe that values are embodied in social practices and performed, rather than in our minds and rationally pursued, the two perspectives are nearly impossible to separate. There might not be a way to tell the imposters from the true artists, because all of them are seeking to convincingly realize values, convincingly both to themselves and their peers. What starts out as ‘impersonation’, ‘imitation’, and ‘faking’ over time becomes the real thing and acquires meaning and significance. That is how we learn about values, and to what extent we truly value them, and whether they ‘fit’ us. Like in all good art, the difference between the real and the artificial is complicated.

References Abbing, H. 2002. Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Baumol, W.J. 1986. “Unnatural Value: Or Art Investment as Floating Crap Game.” The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 76 (2): 10–14. Baxandall, M. 1985. Patterns of Intention. New Haven: Yale University Press. Becker, H.S. 1953. “Becoming a Marihuana User.” American Journal of Sociology 59 (3): 235–42. Beckert, J. 1996. “What Is Sociological about Economic Sociology? Uncertainty and the Embeddedness of Economic Action.” Theory and Society 25 (6): 803– 40.

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Bénabou, R., and J. Tirole. 2016. “Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30 (3): 141–64. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.30.3.141. Benzecry, C.E. 2009. “Becoming a Fan: On the Seductions of Opera.” Qualitative Sociology 32 (2): 131–51. Bielby, W.T., and D.D. Bielby. 1994. “‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized Decision Making and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development.” American Journal of Sociology 99 (5): 1287. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Verso. Boltanski, L., and L. Thévenot. 2000. “The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgement.” Philosophical Explorations 3 (3): 208–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869790008523332. Boltanski, L., and L. Thévenot. 2006. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson, 241–58. Westport: Greenwood. Callard, A. 2018. Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. New York: Oxford University Press. Caves, R. 2000. Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Collewet, M., A. de Grip, and J. de Koning. 2017. “Conspicuous Work: Peer Working Time, Labour Supply, and Happiness.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 68 (June): 79–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec. 2017.04.002. Collins, R. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dekker, E., and P. Kuchaˇr. 2016. “Exemplary Goods: The Product as Economic Variable.” Schmollers Jahrbuch 136: 237–55. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn. 2841682. Dewey, John. 1939. Theory of Valuation. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Earl, P.E., and J. Potts. 2004. “The Market for Preferences.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 28 (4): 619–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/28.4.619. Frey, B.S., and R. Jegen. 2001. “Motivation Crowding Theory.” Journal of Economic Surveys 15: 589–623. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company.

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Hayek, F.A. 1952. The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Glencoe: Free Press. Hayek, Friedrich A. 2014. “Competition as a Discovery Procedure.” In The Market and Other Orders, 304–13. The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek Volume XV. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutter, M. 2011. “Infinite Surprises: On the Stabilization of Value in the Creative Industries.” In The Worth of Goods: Valuation & Pricing in the Economy, edited by Jens Beckert and Patrik Aspers, 201–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, S. 2000. “Spontaneous Order: Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3 (4): 49–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230008403329. Klamer, A. 2016. Doing the Right Thing: A Value Based Economy. London: Ubiquity Press. Klamer, Arjo. 2020. “The Economy in Context: A Value-Based Approach.” Journal of Contextual Economics—Schmollers Jahrbuch 140 (3–4): 287–300. https://doi.org/10.3790/schm.140.3-4.287. Krüger, A.K., and M. Reinhart. 2017. “Theories of Valuation—Building Blocks for Conceptualizing Valuation between Practice and Structure.” Historical Social Research 42 (1): 263–85. Menger, C. 1871. Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller. Noonan, D.S. 2003. “Contingent Valuation and Cultural Resources : A MetaAnalytic Review of the Literature.” Journal of Cultural Economics 27: 159– 76. Nussbaum, M.C. 2009. “Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach and Its Implementation.” Hypatia 24 (3): 211–15. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01053.x. Overton, J., and G. Banks. 2015. “Conspicuous Production: Wine, Capital and Status.” Capital & Class 39 (3): 473–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/030981 6815607022. Pine, B.J., and J.H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Cambridge: Harvard Business Press. Questlove Supreme podcast. 2020. The Little Brother Episode. May 2020. Rekom, V., C.B.M. Johan, V. Riel, and B. Wierenga. 2006. “A Methodology for Assessing Organizational Core Values*. Journal of Management Studies 43 (2): 175–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00587.x. Remic, Blaž. 2021. “Three Accounts of Intrinsic Motivation in Economics: A Pragmatic Choice?” Journal of Economic Methodology, 1–16. Roberts, R. 2022. Wild Problems. New York: Penguin. Scitovsky, T. 1976. The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Simler, K., and R. Hanson. 2018. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stigler, G., and G.S. Becker. 1977. “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.” American Economic Review 67 (2): 76–90. Tanguy, M., and V. Kumar. 2019. “Measuring the Extent to Which Londoners Are Willing to Pay for Public Art in Their City.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Understanding Smart Cities: Innovation Ecosystems, Technological Advancements, and Societal Challenges 142 (May): 301–11. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.11.016. Veblen, T. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan. Velthuis, O. 2004. “An Interpretive Approach to Meanings of Prices.” Review of Austrian Economics 17: 371–86.

CHAPTER 3

How Artists Imagine New Worlds

Abstract We develop a social theory of innovation which is contrasted with the model of the artist as a lone genius. The chapter demonstrates that most art is a result of team production, and that even the art forms which are produced by one individual depend on artistic circles where creativity and imagination are stimulated. We present such artistic circles as contribution goods; practices which seek to attract meaningful contributions from the most talented artists. The practices developed in these circles are the basis of the imagination and creativity of the individual. In a thriving cultural civil society, many of such circles exist next to each other and partially overlap, a dynamic which enables both knowledge transmission and competition. We then examine how this social model of innovation changes the way we think about imagination, and suggest that imagination typically takes the form of both social and aesthetic imagination. In the contemporary art world artists do not merely seek to create new works of art, but also prefigure alternative forms of social organization, in which alternative small-scale experiments in living can take place. We illustrate this process through an analysis of the projects of grassroots artistic organizations in Venice, who contest the way overtourism and the prestigious Biennale shape the art world in this Italian city.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_3

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Keywords Imagination · Creativity · Innovation commons · Venice · Cultural production

The improvement of society is the result of a vast multitude of cooperative efforts, in which one individual uses the results provided for him by a countless number of other individuals, and uses them so as to add to the common and public store. A survey of such facts brings home the actual social character of intelligence as it develops and makes its way. John Dewey, Renascent Liberalism (1935)

Artistic practices originate from the ideas of artists. They cultivate existing practices and imagine new ones, through which they seek to realize values. It is often believed that they do so in isolation, and that imagination is primarily a psychological or mental process. In this chapter we will demonstrate that creation and creativity are social activities which take place in communities and circles. These circles often exist next to and in opposition to each other, which enables both collaboration and competition between them. The cultivation of existing practices and the development of new ones can take on many forms. It can be historically oriented and seek to preserve or restore a previous order, or it can seek to radically transform existing societal structures and be utopian. We argue that many contemporary artists operate between these extremes, they imagine and seek to create alternative ‘worlds’ in conversation and interaction with citizens. We illustrate these local efforts through an analysis of artistic communities in Venice, which contest the dominance of tourists and the high art of the Biennale.

Forget the Solitary Genius, Artists Imagine Together One of the myths about artistic creation which does not seem to go away is that of the solitary genius: Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic wanderer, or the hermit creating on their own, inspired by a troubled soul and unique visionary qualities. Let us not claim that there never has been one. But if you find one, it is the exception which proves the rule that art is created in communities. Most art forms are nearly by definition collaborative endeavors, as for instance film, theater, or

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ballet. The production of these art forms relies on what Richard Caves (2000) has called a motley crew of producers. The early performances of the Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps brought together the talent of this Russian composer with that of choreographer and dancer Vatslav Nizhinsky and costume and stage designer Nicholas Roehrig. The famous composition and its theme were inspired by poems from Sergey Gorodetsky, while the opening melodies drew from Lithuanian folk songs. The conception of the work and its staging was a collaboration between Roehrig and Stravinsky and supported by their patron Princess Maria Tenisheva. During the process of composition Stravinsky sought feedback from his fellow composer Maurice Ravel. The conductor of the company which would premier the piece, Ballets Russe, provided further feedback based on the rehearsals in which certain instruments were inaudible, while the brass section tended to overpower the other sections. Stravinsky kept working on his composition for the next thirty years, and during this period many other choreographers, stage designers, conductors, musicians, and dancers performed the piece, providing new interpretations of it. Matters are not much different in art forms such as painting or writing, where final products are typically assigned to a single maker. The avant-garde movements starting with Impressionism in the late nineteenth century explicitly presented themselves as groups of artists, but long before that Rembrandt and Rubens managed workshops in which different artists worked together on the same piece of art, while the famous Italian Renaissance artists were maestri di bottega, masters of a workshop. Skills were transferred within guilds or families and artists were in intense contact with other artists and middlemen which significantly shaped their products. The first recognition that artists seek and receive occurs in small social circles, within their family in which artistic activities are stimulated, among their friends at art school, or by some of the more accomplished artists that the aspiring artist knows. These creative groups provide a place in which there is opportunity for feedback, collaboration, and inspiration. But more fundamentally they are the space where creation becomes meaningful, where it can be recognized by others. To acquire meaning artistic creations need a culture of appreciation, which consists of both the artists, the middlemen and admirers who not merely create and appreciate, but also develop a language and critical apparatus to interpret and value the works.

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This reality is radically at odds, with the mythology of the creative process as highly intimate and individual. Friedrich’s Wanderer above the sea of fog famously portrays a tormented, isolated genius, who is busy contemplating transcendental principles. Modern economic theories of the entrepreneur as the single-minded design genius exemplified by Steve Jobs have done little to alter that image (Dekker 2018). In the mythology around Jobs, the Apple CEO, he was the lone genius who pursued his solitary vision, despite all the internal and external opposition he faced. This image of the ‘lone genius’ is both persistent and misleading. Creativity and artistic production hardly ever happen as an isolated individual activity. Certainly, the outcome of the process of production is a signed or copyrighted product, often attributed to one individual. And, during the process of production, the maker might require extensive periods of isolation and concentration to come to the final product. But artists are not born, they are trained in schools and by personal mentors, they seek to become valued members of movements, collectives, or circles of other artists where they experiment and share their work with friends. The clearest counterevidence to the fact that creativity is an individualistic process is that creative output is clustered in space and time (Hellmanzik 2010; Borowiecki 2013). We think of highly creative periods such as the Italian Renaissance or the Enlightenment and artistic hotspots such as Paris around 1900, post-war New York, or Bollywood in the decades after Indian independence. Peter Hall has wonderfully illustrated how important cities and migration to cities have been for culture (Hall 1998). In the same manner, Randall Collins has demonstrated that all the great philosophers were part of lively social circles and movements (Collins 1998). Part of the reason for this concentration is explained by simple economics and has little to do with creativity itself. The artists during the Italian Renaissance in Florence and other rapidly developing cities benefitted from newly concentrated wealth which meant that they could find patrons, most famously the Medici family. This pattern continues into the twentieth century when Peggy Guggenheim was central to the artistic boom in New York in the post-war decades. The performing arts thrived at the royal courts and in major cities because they require a substantial audience to be profitable. But we contend that creativity itself also benefits from concentration, through two essential processes: collaboration and competition.

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Artists Operate in Circles, Which Are Sustained Through Contributions Jason Potts has analyzed the dynamics around creativity through an economic lens (Potts 2019). He argues that much innovation originates in social practices which are not directly aimed at the market or even a particular end. He describes social groups in technology who come together to exchange their experiences, experiments, and new developments not knowing precisely where their activities might go. They collaborate and share in what he calls the innovation commons, without an idea of private ownership and based on an ethic of sharing, although it is important for membership to such groups to have something interesting to contribute. At some point, the activities of the circle of enthusiasts can become more significant and something emerges from the experimentation which might potentially lead to a valuable good. Most within the commons will, however, consider it inappropriate to use the result of their joint experimentation to start a business venture. Potts, nevertheless, emphasizes the instability of such a successful innovation commons, which will make it likely that one of the participants will break out of the commons, because the lure of private gain is too great. They might start a private venture and attempt to market and sell something based on the knowledge assembled within the innovation commons. In the review of Potts’ book, one of us has suggested that these types of innovation commons are even more ‘common’ in the arts (Dekker 2020). Whether we call them salons, circles, scenes, clans, posses, crews, or clicks, art experimentation and practice tend to happen in social settings in which members share and experiment, membership is based on the ability to contribute to the conversation and practice. These collaborative practices can be analyzed with economic models as Potts suggested. But his notion of the innovation commons focused on explaining downstream innovation within firms, it does not capture sufficiently that most artistic creation remains within these circles. Klamer (2016) developed the notion of shared goods, which depends on contributions of the participants to sustain them. He contrasts the traditional notion of the willingness to pay with the willingness to contribute to make clear that this is not best understood as a system of production and consumption, but a process of co-creation. Kealey and Ricketts (2014) have developed a formal model along the same lines for knowledge goods, which they call contribution goods. Both concepts make clear that these practices are not public goods,

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in the sense of being fully open. Instead, newcomers are ‘screened’ to ensure that they have something meaningful to contribute and so enrich the practice. In The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVaux (1997) describes how this jazz form came about through the contributions of a dozen or so musicians who came together during World War II in bars on New York’s 52nd Street in Manhattan. Close to each other, there were several bars where jazz musicians found semi-regular employment. After their performances, they visited each other, sometimes merely to listen in, other times to join. In this atmosphere, the jam session, a practice which had first emerged some years earlier, became a regular practice. The jam sessions were much smaller in size, around five to seven musicians, than the more popular big swing jazz bands which dominated the charts. The New York jazz audience was drawn to what they felt was a more authentic form of jazz as it developed in these jam sessions. The bar owners on 52nd Street such as the owner of Minton saw an opportunity to turn the jam session into a viable commercial product and, over time, jam sessions emerged as standalone events with a price of admission, despite opposition from the music industry establishment. The jam sessions involved a shared repertoire of songs and melodies with which the jazz players experimented. But to turn it into a viable product these jam sessions had to be transformed: “The repertory would have to be converted into clearly defined economic units, preferably original compositions, for which authorship could be precisely established. The often-chaotic atmosphere of the jam session would need to be streamlined and subtly redirected toward paying audiences. Reputation among musicians would have to be translated into commercial reputation (…) The music would have to be given (…) something akin to a brand name for marketing purposes. Inevitably, something was lost and something was gained” (DeVeaux 1997, 298–299). That brand name would become bebop, and the recorded ‘jam sessions’ would become some of the most iconic jazz albums ever made. But for our purposes, it is more relevant that Devaux explains a dynamic nearly identical to the one Potts proposes: the community atmosphere in which things are developed in an environment of collaboration, until something has emerged that could be developed into a commercially viable product. Potts suggests that the commons will most likely be destroyed by it, because the norms of collaboration, sharing, and contribution which

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maintained it will have been seriously violated. This is an important observation about the institutional dynamics at the intersection between art communities and markets. That process is not always immediate, but the fact that individual participants now know that they might be able to turn their experiments within a small circle, into a viable product, will likely change the dynamics within the small circle. However, in the larger scheme of artistic practices, the dynamic which leads to the breakdown of the commons is the exception. Jam sessions in jazz persist to this day. In contrast, other social practices around the arts never lead to a viable economic product. That is not to say that nothing ever gets sold. The choir will have a few performances for which tickets are sold at a friendly price, but it will hardly cover the costs involved in weekly practices or even of renting the venue for the practices. The amateur band will have a few occasional gigs, perhaps even quite a few for certain periods, but even then, they will not cover much more than the costs of travel, drinks, and instruments. The amateur painter will have some local exhibitions and sell an occasional painting, typically to friends or other artists, but most of them will be gifted, and the meagre receipts will not (fully) compensate them for the time that was put in. The practices themselves are what is meaningful to the artist, and the fact that they are recognized in circles of fellow practitioners and fellow artists, is one of the most important achievements. As social scientists we should nonetheless, like Potts, ask the question what sustains practices. Kealey and Ricketts and Klamer provide a similar answer to that question, contributions. These contributions can come from existing members of the circle who feel that they can benefit from the appreciation, feedback, or critique of the others in the circle, or they can come from new individuals who seek to join the circle because they feel something interesting is developing there. Thus, contributions must be crowded in, and contributors are crowded in by both the quality and the number of other contributions to a circle or practice. As Kealey and Ricketts have argued, once a certain threshold or critical value of contributions is reached, a practice can be self-sustaining.

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Circles Benefit From the Proximity of Circles in Neighboring Disciplines So far, we have looked at the internal logic of an artistic circle of production; the collaboration within it. But the work by Collins on the sociology of philosophical schools and the work on creative circles by others demonstrates that the structure of artistic production is peculiar. It consists of integrated circles of creators working together, but in (fierce) competition with other circles. A good example of such a structure of internal collaboration and external competition are the Wiener Kreise of the interwar period. The most famous Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle, was a group of positivist philosophers inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (who, interestingly, personally never joined the circle). But in Edward Timms’ wonderful two-volume biography of the Viennese cultural critic Karl Kraus (2005), we find overviews of the cultural and intellectual scene in the first decades of the twentieth century with dozens of such Kreise, circles. Many existed in opposition with each other, but there was also an important overlap between the different circles, which facilitated the exchange of knowledge (Timms 2009). Vienna was indeed uniquely creative during this period: in the visual arts with Klimt and Kokoschka, in architecture with Adolf Loos, in music with Albarn Berg and Schoenberg, in psychology with Adler and Freud, in economics with Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Otto Neurath, and one could go on and on (Johnston 1972; Schorske 1980). The identity of these circles was developed and strengthened in relations of friendly, and not so friendly, opposition to each other. Within such circles, group identities were fostered through the development of rituals such as songs, and by frequenting the same café or coffeehouse (Dekker 2014). But these identities and the urgency with which they pursued their practices were reinforced by the fact that others were engaged in related but opposing practices. Key within this network of circles were the individuals who were (informal) members of a number of circles: they facilitated the spread of knowledge between the circles and enhanced competition between them, for example for the ear and contributions of the most talented individuals. The art world is best understood as a patchwork of partially overlapping circles, the cultural civil society (Fig. 3.1). Some of these circles are more prestigious, and the most prestigious ones together make up the inner circle of the art world. But the great majority of circles consist of

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amateurs and hobbyists who provide their own resources because they find something of value in the creation of art, with or without commercial success. From the perspective of individual aspiring artists, the circles will look like a somewhat chaotic sea of possibilities. They will be invited by a friend into one and will hear of another one which they might seek to try out. They might move to a city which is known for its lively scene, which is a different way of saying that in such a city there are many circles to choose from. The aspiring artist looks for a circle which fits both their skill level and values. The circles, on the other hand, will be looking for new (potential) contributors and seek to screen the newcomers when they drop by once or twice. In this sense, social scientists see an extensive matching process at work in which individuals with heterogenous values and a wide variety of skills seek to coalesce for some period of time into circles where they share, collaborate, experiment, or just hang out. It is

Fig. 3.1 Creative circles, colors indicate different values

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precisely the wide variety of such circles which secures that, within the network of circles as a whole, a great variety of values can be realized. One exception to the horizontal relationships within the circles is the mentor–pupil relationship, which continues to be important, especially in the traditional arts as well as in the crafts. Mentors occupy an important role because they signal excellence, in contrast to educational degrees which tend to signal competence instead (Fine 2017; Borowiecki 2022). But from the point of view of the social nature of artistic production and creativity, the relationship between student and mentor is, upon closer inspection, not that different from the circles we described above. Mentors seek to attract the most talented individuals, tend to have multiple students, and a major part of the attraction of working with a reputable mentor are the other students and former students within the circle around the mentor. Thus, coordination through both collaboration and competition is a crucial aspect of creativity and imagination. An example of a concentration of coordinated artistic circles is New York, whose cultural economy of the 1970s consisted of a collection of sustained circles which operated based on cross-pollination and cross-coordination which make the buzz collective and dynamic. In the sixties and seventies, Andy Warhol and his Factory constituted one prominent artistic circle in the city, probably the most famous, but far from the only one. Elizabeth CurridHalkett termed New York’s creative scene the Warhol Economy (2020) and showed that the strength of it were the social relations rooted in many overlapping communities. She contends that nightlife played a pivotal role in connecting all the participants of the artistic scene. During the bohemian period of the seventies, particular public places such as The Cedar Tavern and CBGB’s were catalyzers of creativity. Punk rockers, pop artists, gallerists, and fashion designers would all gather in the same places where artistic performance happened in a ‘fluid’ manner across styles and circles. The groups and individuals in this scene were in fierce competition to be the ‘coolest’. This economic perspective on creative circles dovetails well with the sociological notion of art worlds, as it was developed by Howard Becker (1984). He similarly paints a picture of creative production radically at odds with the idea of individual artistic geniuses. Becker’s art worlds are populated by a multitude of professionals of different backgrounds that cooperate through the division of labor: artists, critics, gallerists,

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patrons, impresarios, but also teachers and audiences. The actors, sometimes explicitly, but often implicitly, define what art is, and who counts as an artist, they form conventions about the canon and accepted styles. A stock of shared knowledge about each artistic discipline is kept alive and evolving across space and time by the artists and their motley crews. Conventions allow artists to collaborate quickly, as in the case of jazz jam sessions, based on popular musical structures, or burlesque, whose sketches belong to a limited repertoire, and in turn, they also allow audiences to participate smoothly and evaluate their relative success. In Becker’s theory, artistic work requires the joint contribution of various professionals that in some instances are borrowed from neighboring worlds, just like in the interaction between circles we described above.

Within Circles, Knowledge Is Generated, and Artists Imagine New Possibilities Now that we have established the centrality of artistic circles in the creative process, we can move beyond the idea of the lonely genius. According to that archetype, the source of knowledge and imagination is the individual mind of the elevated individual. To that idea John Dewey opposes a social individual who learns and generates knowledge in dialogue with others: “knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed, and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers” (Dewey 2016, 183). To Dewey, the artist is necessarily embedded in traditions and communities, which provide them with a language, a medium, a tradition, and frequently also with a purpose. It is within these traditions and the associated art communities that existing knowledge is captured, and in which values are embodied. In Dewey’s vision, the individual derives the ability to imagine and to add knowledge to this pre-existing body, from the engagement with traditions and with others, through ‘association and communication’. Moving away from the ideal lonely artistic genius means also moving away from the conception of art for art’s sake. This idea was underpinned by aestheticians who would stress the unrelatedness of art from function, utility, or moral purpose (Abbing 2019). It was meant to be a direct expression of individuality, uncorrupted by other concerns. In this

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perspective art is autonomous, and the ultimate goal of the artist is to pursue beauty or another transcendental value associated with art, such as truth or the sublime (e.g., Golding 2000). Even when artists did aspire to it, such ideals were of course hardly ever obtained. Artists almost by necessity have an audience in mind when creating, they are willingly or unwillingly in conversation with contemporary culture, the art world, and public discourse. In contrast with the dominant aesthetic of the twentieth century, art historian Hilde Hein contends that all art should be considered public: As a public phenomenon, art must entail the artist’s self-negation and deference to a collective community. It is interesting to observe that the recognized art of nearly all cultures, including that of the western European tradition prior to the late Renaissance, embraces just such a collective model, indulging the differences among individuals as variant manifestations of a common spirit. The celebrated treasures of Greece and Rome, as well as the Christian works of the Middle Ages (…) do not exalt the private vision of individual artists so much as they bespeak the shared values and convictions of cultural communities, and are accordingly to be found in those edifices and open places where people regularly gather to commemorate those same values and convictions. (Hein 1996, 1)

Hein draws attention to the fact that historically it was common to recognize artists were part of artistic traditions and collectives. Her emphasis on the ‘common spirit’ takes for granted too much homogeneity in a community, and pays too little attention to the critical potential of the art. But, her historical contrast helps us to see that art has historically been part of the public discourse and continues to be as our opening examples of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the controversy over public statues illustrate. The values expressed by art can be intimate and personal, but they also seek to contribute to a public discourse about intimate, social, as well as public relationships. This move has also been reflected in contemporary art. In recent decades new movements have thematized human relations, the role of the audience in creating the work of art, and they have reimagined the social and political role of the arts. We of course do not want to claim that these elements were absent in the past, but they have moved to the foreground again since the 1990s. Under headers such as interactive art, socially engaged practices, community art, ecological art, outsider art, the social turn, and new genre public art, artists have reimagined their own

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position in society, the relation to their audience, and the type of values which artistic practices can realize. Although we have been critical of the artist as lone genius, one feature of that image is still as relevant today as it was during the heyday of modernism. Artists are still occupied with the ‘new’, imagination still seeks to explore the unknown. In Agnes Callard account of aspiration, which we discussed before, aspiration is the process of value discovery, and forward looking in nature. That imagination leads to the creation of new artworks as well as new social practices around the arts. The imagination is ‘worlded’, made real, and encounters a broader environment. In Hein’s historical sketch this imaginative spirit is contrasted with the cultivation of existing traditions. Artistic practices reflect and help us make sense of the past, the present, and the future. This cultivation is an essential part of the creation of the new, but for some artists and audiences also a goal in itself. Jens Beckert has used the idea of imagined futures to think about the projection of plans through fictional expectations. Artists, and entrepreneurs more generally, do not merely seek to forecast the future. They seek to shape it, to give it direction. In discussing how fictional expectations shape markets, Beckert draws from literary fiction as the quintessential reference for expectations. The author and the readers play a game defined by a set of “socially shared conventions” (Beckert 2016, 66). Readers are led into a story that is imagined, and they know and accept that, but the fiction is a ‘prop’ that links the worlds of imagination with real compelling issues. Artists link the world of ideas and the mind, with the world of artefacts and the material. The way this has been done by artists has varied considerably over the past century.

Modernists Imagined Too Wildly, Postmodernists Too Ironically At the verge of the twentieth century, a revolutionary avant-garde of artists believed that their imagined futures could not merely transform the form and style of art itself, but also the broader world. Modernist movements such as Art Nouveau, Futurism, and Constructivism were interested in bringing modernist sensibilities to both everyday lives and political systems. These artists used their art as “revolutionary weapons of an artistic avant-garde that equated a transformation in ‘taste’ with a transformation of society itself” (Buck-Morss 2000, 10). The Italian

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Futurists dreamt of bulldozing over the old cities to replace them with the latest technology and architecture, a process which should repeat itself again and again. Piet Mondrian was dreaming of new human beings who could inhabit a radically different world. Le Corbusier created blueprints for completely new cities, while some of the modernist-inspired architects helped the Brazilian government realize the planning and construction of an entirely new capital, Brasilia (Scott 1998, Chapter 4). Modernism, as inspired by its avant-garde, depicts what have been called ‘dreamworlds’, imagined world which modern society aspired, be it a socialist, fascist, or capitalistic one (many of these dreamworlds led in fact to real worlds of dictatorship). These new worlds were conceived by means of images, an aesthetic ethos, new types of collectives, new business models, and perhaps most importantly a grandiose vision of what art could achieve in society. Both Susan Buck-Morss and James Scott have pointed to the dangers of this kind of utopian imagination, especially when it is coupled with an aura of prestige or authoritarian powers. We obviously run a risk of over-generalizing, but many modernists imagined too wildly, they explored the new, with disregard for tradition, the status quo and the diversity of voices and perspectives in any society. The grand narratives of modernism were challenged by the postmodernists, who undermined the grandiose ambitions of the modernists, through a frequently ironic stance (Lyotard 1984). They deconstructed the idea that radical newness was possible, through a pastiche of historical styles. This was combined with a suspicion of universal claims of truth, beauty, or other values, through a disenchanted perspective which highlighted pluralism of perspective, and the relativity of any viewpoint (Vattimo 1985). The global aspirations of modernism were contrasted with great local and historical variety and micro-perspectives. The engagement with society was primarily ironic, not only vis-à-vis the utopianism of the modernism, but also toward idealism and broader social aspirations. A retreat of the artists from society, which was already visible in the later decades of modernism continued. If the modernists imagined too wildly, the postmodernists might have erred in the opposite direction. The postmodern sense of irony, or even defeatism, is well captured in the video-art work Everything has been done by the Polish collective Azorro in which four friends propose artistic different ideas, only to conclude every time that: “that’s been done before”.

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A New Form of Imagination Is in the Making In 1994, artist Susan Lacy coined the term ‘new genre public art’ to describe artists who were engaged with social issues. She sought to create a new type of public art, one that reconnected the arts to broader issues in society, and which directly connected with citizens, rather than with the institutional art world. At the time, such engagement was suspect: How would one be able to prevent the mistakes of the modernists? And was this engagement not simply a naïve overestimation of the powers of art? The first worry was addressed by a new imagination of the relationship between art and the public, the new kind of public art was not supposed to send a unidirectional message from the artist to society, or to suggest the right direction forward, instead it was supposed to be relational. The curator Nicolas Bourriaud suggested that this new type of public art started from an awareness of its embeddedness in a social context and aimed to facilitate social relations. He writes: “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary or utopian realities” but, paraphrasing Lyotard, to learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” (Bourriaud 2002, 5). Discussing the role of experimental art institutions, curator Charles Esche emphasized the role of art centers as providers of possibilities: “Possibility is, in these terms, simply a condition that leads to thinking differently or imagining things otherwise than they are” (Esche 2004). As curator of the now closed contemporary art center Rooseum in Malmo, Sweden, Esche saw artists and institutions as facilitators of political imagination. The imagination was more humble, aware of its own artistic and epistemic limitations, but willing to recognize its social and political potential. In such a historical transition from “mimesis to poiesis, from representing to remaking and changing the world”, artistic practices become stages for “future scenarios” (De Cesari 2012, 85). In some extreme cases, in fact, we see art practices that imagine and prefigure institutional arrangements that are not there yet, as in the case of Palestinian artistic communities who enact ‘impossible institutions’ such as a National Museum and a Biennale for a nation that does not exist. Imagination is an act of relating with the future. The interactive art which has emerged since the 1990s recognizes that this requires more than just imagination, it requires experimentation, in which the imagined future is confronted with the present, in which its potentialities are not merely imagined, but locally realized.

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Part of the recognition of the epistemic limits of artistic imagination is that the audience is not merely invited into the artwork, but that they are also invited to co-create the work, to add or alter meanings, sometimes even to literally construct the work. Traditional cultural venues such as museums and concert halls still struggle to accommodate this engagement, and both formal rules and traditional norms help to sustain one-sided forms of engagement. But artists and art critics are thinking in this direction. Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator is a good example of this development. He criticizes the presumed passivity of the audience, including early forms of interaction such as the involvement of the audience in a play. Rancière is rightfully skeptical of this kind of engagement, because the spectator is joining on the artist’s terms. He suggests that this kind of model, while it appears bi-directional, retains a fundamental modernist tenet: the superiority of the artist. As an alternative he suggests an engagement in terms of the ‘equality of intelligence’ (Rancière 2009, 10). The great mistake of thinking about the viewer as passive it that it takes away the individuality, subjectivity, and knowledge that any viewer brings to a play. Viewers do not merely receive, but they perceive, reflect, connect, reject, associate, and dissociate: “Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity (…) We do not have to transform spectators into actors (…) Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story” (Rancière 2009, 17). For Rancière this should have important implications for how we think about imagination and ‘sensible materiality’. The artistic idea as presented by the artist is not complete, it is instead a contribution to an ongoing conversation, an attempt at persuasion to which audiences might respond in different ways. The work of art in his conceptualization is indeterminate. Upon completion of the painting, or better when the reader finishes the novel, they can ‘do something’ with the art, they can judge and discuss what it signifies, whether it is valuable, if it succeeds, and if so in what way. It is in this sense that the values of the arts are realized collectively, within artistic circles and in social practices to which both artists and audiences contribute. In many instances, artistic practices put forth imaginaries and alternatives, by means of a variety of modes of actions and mobilization. Cultural economy scholar Scott has argued that:

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As cities shift more and more into cognitive-cultural modes of economic activity, the search for meaningful forms of solidarity, sociability, and mutual aid in everyday work and life becomes increasingly urgent, not just because these attributes are important in their own right but also because they help to enlarge the sphere of creativity, learning, innovation, social experimentation, and cultural expression, and are hence essential to further economic and cultural flowering of contemporary cities. (Scott 2008, 83)

The implication here is that arts as creative industries do not merely create economic development in cities, but that the values of solidarity and mutualism in the art become central again. It is important to recognize that in these new socially engaged practices there is not merely a reimagination of aesthetic possibilities, but also an exploration of new forms of community and social relations. The critique of post-modernism by more recent artistic movements dovetails well with our critique of the artist as lone genius. They have organized themselves in collectives and explored new forms of tight and looser cooperation such as in creative workspaces. This transformation was nicely symbolized at the documenta 15 of 2022 in Kassel, in which artist collectives had nearly completely replaced the individual artist. It is also visible in the broader cultural sector, where groups of artists or cultural workers or activists campaign for cultural inclusion, accessibility, or more equitable working conditions, as in the case of occupations and squatting of endangered cultural institutions like theaters in Italy (Borchi 2018), collectives and independent spaces in Germany (Kirchberg and Kagan 2013), café and art galleries in South Korea (Lee and Han 2020). These are (more diffused) instances of prefigurative politics, in which the collectives create a micro-cosmos in the “here and now [of the] the ideal society they were striving for” (Cassegård 2014, 695).

Imaging and Living a Different Venice The city of Venice is famous for its canals and unique architecture, it is one of the original global tourist hot spots. It also hosts a Biennale, first organized in 1895, which displays some of the best art and architecture projects. The Biennale, contrary to what its name suggests, is currently organized every year in the city, and covers many different art forms. The Venice Biennale of 2022 was titled The Milk of Dreams after Leonora Carrington’s surrealist book in which she “describes a magical world

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where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else” (Alemani 2022). It is a somewhat modernist sounding theme, which celebrates the imaginative capacity of the arts and its ability to change the world. The 2022 theme does not stand alone in its ambition to use the arts to rethink our society. The architecture Biennale in 2021 posed the question How will we live together? and invited architects and planners to explore new perspectives for our collective future, to rewrite what was termed the ‘spatial contract’, of which we were in need because of the uncertainty, threats, and inequalities society faced (Sarkis 2020). Almost invisible between these high-art events and the mass tourism which floods the city, are the citizens of Venice, a group which rapidly declines in numbers (Rosin and Gombault 2021). The contrast between the Venice on display at the Biennale as experienced by the tourists, and the lived experience of the remaining Venetians is stark. But among the latter group there are in recent years many who are raising their voice against the Disneyfication of the city, and who warn about the unsustainability of the current economic model. The more visible signs of these civil protests have been the initiatives of various middle-brow cultural organizations from the Venetian cultural civil society. An analysis of this specific layer of the local cultural economy in Venice, by one of us, has revealed that there are around thirty grassroots cultural organizations which bring artists and residents of this endangered city together (Morea and Sabatini 2023). These organizations and loose collectives explore what a more just and more sustainable city could be. Sale Docks, for example, is a cultural space that since 2007 occupies—illegally until they reached an agreement with the municipality—a former salt warehouse. This organization objects to the exploitative economic model that taints today’s Venetian art system and cultural policy. They talk about culture as a commons and stand to fight the private encroachment thereof; they organize: “seminars, exhibitions, workshops, con-research and public actions that experiment with models of cultural production which counter the neoliberal logic” (Sale Docks 2022). In 2012, famous British architect David Chipperfield themed the Architecture Biennale Common Ground. Sale Docks, together with two other Venetian cultural organizations— Morion and Centro Sociale Rivolta—reacted to this appropriation of the language of the commons by the exclusive event of the Biennale. Therefore, they launched #occupybiennale, an initiative that involved a

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series of ancillary exhibitions and debates across the city to contrast the ‘commons-washing’ of the Biennale, in a city in which artists and architects struggle to find a space and opportunity, because they are crowded out by tourists and events for the global jet-set. In 2021, Sale Docks launched an exhibition about the cultural system of the city called L@ mostra della Laguna (in English, the monsters of the lagoon) in which a selection of artists displayed their ideal cultural system. The outcome of this exhibition was a manifesto for an alternative local cultural policy. This is how they described the project: What would happen if Venice’s art institutions were monstrously different? If art were freed from the logic of profit and tourism? If they were instead places inhabited by the local community and the idea of care? Sale Docks invites seven international artists to imagine a utopian geography of cultural spaces: seven places that reinvent themselves in a transfeminist and decolonial key, in the name of environmental justice and the defense of public space. Exhibitions are not just displays, but su/objects, monsters that disavow the normality of art as an object of consumption and speculation, as a product of the tourist industry and a vehicle of gentrification. (Sale Docks 2022)

One artwork imagined a series of infrastructural projects to strengthen Venice’s social life. It aimed at fostering open-air sociability through for instance a floating square, floating docks, a co-working space combined with a place for social gatherings, and a children-scape. Another artwork theorized an ideal cultural institution of the city based on real-life precedents of cultural commons in Italy and consisted of the production of an ‘alter-statuto’ (in English: alternative statute/bylaws) which understood culture as a commons and treated its associates as accomplices and communards. The purpose of such an ‘alter-institution’ was to ensure that intermittent workers in the cultural sector were granted recognition, dignity, and material recognition, and that civil society became an integral part of the Venetian cultural scene. In a more practical vein, Extragarbo, another grassroots cultural organization in Venice has set up an artistic walking tour that engages critically with the local art system and Venetian urban policies. Extragarbo is a collective of performing artists recently graduated from a local university. In their productions, they question the relationship between the city and its economy, the city and its art system, and suggest ways to reinvent how to be a Venetian through their art. In 2021, Extragarbo launched the

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initiative Wash your Art, Wash your City, a walking tour of the neighborhood Castello, led by one of the members who acts as a tour guide (Extragarbo 2021). One stop of the tour is the main square, recently polished for the filming of a Spiderman movie-shoot, another stop of the walk is at a souvenir shop, where one of the local artists has placed a postcard on the window which gives it the illusion of being broken (Fig. 3.2). The objective of this tour is to show a different side of the city, through the eyes of local artists, as well as to draw attention to the extent to which the city is ‘staged’ for tourists. Venice is host to several collectives of artists who, just like Extragarbo, carry out temporary joint productions or independent everyday creative work and who strive to affirm their role in a city through their own artistic language. In their activities, these groups engage with the local citizens, with the tourists, and with the other creatives in the city. For instance, a newly established platform of art collectives active in Venice, called Comecome.info, has the ambition to map and assemble all Venetian independent art spaces to reach a critical mass that could ultimately

Fig. 3.2 Stop on the alternative tour of Venice of Extragarbo. By permission of Giulia Zichella

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be recognized as a sector of importance and a policy interlocutor. As such, the reimagination does not only happen on an aesthetic level, but also at a social and governance level. This civil and sometimes ‘underground’ layer of cultural organizations is exploring alternative forms of cultural associations, collectives, spaces, and other institutional setups, to reclaim the city and to give voice and agency to the citizens of Venice who are in danger of being squeezed out by the tourism industry. They seek to cultivate a Venice of the Venetians. At the same time, the art they produce seeks to draw attention to the many ways in which the city has been transformed for tourists, and what a different—more sustainable and just—city might look like. Their informal and often ephemeral practices counter the grand scale of global tourism and the luxurious high-end art circuit with a micro scale of interpersonal, hyper-local relationships. The values which are realized in these practices inevitably deal with a plurality of voices, first because they respond to dominant imaginations of Venice, and second because they reflect the multiplicity of the experiences of Venetian citizens.

Contemporary Imagination Is About the Development of Social Practices Which Embody Values The case of the local artistic communities in Venice makes clear that artistic communities are often arenas of conflict and coordination. In the creative circles the artists find inspiration, feedback as well as an audience for their initial ideas, but as we have seen the circles also provide opportunities to develop communal projects and social spaces which lie beyond the realm of possibilities of the lone genius. Cultivation and imagination are crucial elements of the social practices around the arts. They are also elusive and easily escape the social scientist’s academic lens, since they are qualitative in nature. But without talking seriously about cultivation and imagination, it is impossible to understand which values individuals are seeking to realize. In the practice of ‘worlding’, artists transform relatively abstract ideas and ideals into artefacts and practices. One might narrowly suggest that the content of this cultivation and imagination is simply beyond the scope of social science. But even then, we must recognize that a direct consequence of the act of

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imagination is the fact that individuals form groups, collectives, demonstrations, cooperatives, firms, digital communities, etc. Their worlding is not merely aesthetic and cultural, but also social, economic, and political. In Venice, the cultural civil society contested both public policy and major private initiatives, through the development of alternative practices. Their imaginative efforts compete with and contest the superstar cultural institutions of the city, such as the Biennale, and the tourism industry. Even so, one might claim that it is paradoxical to study imagined communities. How and why would one study something which is only in the process of becoming, rather than that which is already solidified, institutionalized, and recognized? The reason is that it is a mistake to believe that some communities are natural and real while others are imagined. Communities are not natural entities defined by social bonds which can be studied purely naturalistically. As Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued, communities find their origins in narratives, social relationships, and shared practices which unite individuals through imagined relationships. These imagined communities can be small and local, but they can also be extensive and global as we will see in the next chapter. The great danger for social science is that it overlooks cultural civil society. In Venice, that danger is even more visible than in most other places. It is easy to mistake the Biennale as representative, or existing at the apex of the art world in Venice. It is tempting to think of heritage and architecture in economic terms in a city so popular among tourists. Just as it is tempting to think that in other cities art and culture happen primarily in theaters and museum, the modern cathedrals of the arts. The Venetian grassroots organizations we described are inevitably soft institutional setups, dominated by informal relationships. They are less directly visible and might actively seek the margins. But they are the lifeblood of cultural civil society, where individuals practice the arts, and where new practices emerge. In Deweyan terms, we can also suggest that it is here that artistic experiments fulfill their democratic role. The artist as citizens have been described as acting “through their art work, their social-political activism, or their status in society […] as socially obliged citizens who feel morally committed to helping shape alternatives to existing conditions, stressing social activism as essential in creating art” (Kaddar et al. 2022, 472). These practices are at the same time artistic and social, they cultivate

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existing and imagine new aesthetic and social forms alongside each other. They are a vital source of creativity and social experimentation, a realm where new worlds and ways of inhabiting them are created, and existing ones are sustained.

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Dekker, Erwin. 2014. “Vienna Circles: Cultivating Economic Knowledge Outside Academia.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7 (2): 30–53. ———. 2018. “Schumpeter: Theorist of the Avant-Garde: The Embrace of the New in Schumpeter’s Original Theory of Economic Development.” Review of Austrian Economics 31: 177–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-0170389-9. ———. 2020. “Review of ‘Innovation Commons: The Origin of Economic Growth’ by Jason Potts.” Journal of Cultural Economics 44: 661–64. DeVeaux, Scott. 1997. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dewey, John. 1935. Liberalism and Social Action. New York: Capricorn Books. ———. 2016. The Public and Its Problems. Edited by Melvin L. Rogers. Athens, OH: Swallow Press. Esche, Charles. 2004. What’s the Point of Art Centres Anyway? Possibility, Art and Democratic Deviance. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Extragarbo. 2021. “Habibi Kiosk in Venedig—Habibi Kiosk—MK Projects— Kammerspiele.” https://www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de/en/mk-forscht/ 1196-habibi-kiosk/6097-habibi-kiosk-in-venedig. Fine, Gary Alan. 2017. “A Matter of Degree: Negotiating Art and Commerce in MFA Education.” American Behavioral Scientist 61 (12): 1463–86. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0002764217734272. Golding, John. 2000. Paths to the Absolute. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691048963/ paths-to-the-absolute. Hall, Peter G. 1998. Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon Books. Hein, Hilde. 1996. “What Is Public Art? Time, Place, and Meaning.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1): 1–7. Hellmanzik, Christiane. 2010. “Location Matters: Estimating Cluster Premiums for Prominent Modern Artists.” European Economic Review 54 (2): 199–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2009.06.001. Johnston, William M. 1972. The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaddar, Merav, Volker Kirchberg, Nir Barak, Milena Seidl, Patricia Wedler, and Avner de Shalit. 2022. “Artistic City-Zenship: How Artists Perceive and Practice Political Agency in Their Cities.” Journal of Urban Affairs 44 (4–5): 471–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2020.1792312. Kealey, Terence, and Martin Ricketts. 2014. “Modelling Science as a Contribution Good.” Research Policy 43: 1014–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol. 2014.01.009.

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Kirchberg, Volker, and Sacha Kagan. 2013. “The Roles of Artists in the Emergence of Creative Sustainable Cities: Theoretical Clues and Empirical Illustrations.” City, Culture and Society 4 (3): 137–52. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.ccs.2013.04.001. Klamer, Arjo. 2016. Doing the Right Thing: A Value Based Economy. London: Ubiquity Press. Lee, Seon Young, and Yoonai Han. 2020. “When Art Meets Monsters: Mapping Art Activism and Anti-Gentrification Movements in Seoul.” City, Culture and Society 21 (June): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2019.100292. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morea, Valeria and Francesca Sabatini. 2023. “The Joint Contributions of Grassroots Artistic Practices to the Alternative and Vital City. The case of Bologna and Venice.” Cities. Potts, Jason. 2019. Innovation Commons: The Origin of Economic Growth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Rosin, Umberto, and Anne Gombault. 2021. “Venice in Crisis: The Brutal Marker of Covid-19.” International Journal of Arts Management 23 (2): 75–88. Sale Docks. 2022. “Sale Dockes: About.” https://www.saledocks.org/about. Sarkis, Hashim. 2020. “Biennale Architettura 2021 | Statement by Hashim Sarkis.” La Biennale Di Venezia. February 11. https://www.labiennale.org/ en/architecture/2021/statement-hashim-sarkis. Schorske, Carl E. 1980. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Alfred Knopf. Scott, Allen J. 2008. Social Economy of the Metropolis: Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism and the Global Resurgence of Cities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like A State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Timms, Edward. 2005. Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist. The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. “Cultural Parameters between the Wars: A Reassessment of the Vienna Circles.” In Interwar Vienna, edited by Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman, 21–30. Rochester: Camden House. Vattimo, Gianni. 1985. La fine della modernità. Milano: Garzanti.

CHAPTER 4

How Participants Make Values Real

Abstract In this chapter, we argue that consumers and audiences of cultural products are best understood as co-creative participants. The idea of co-creation is developed in contrast to that of the passive consumer, and we analyze how consumption or cultural capital contributes to the ability of individuals to contribute to the process of value realization. This process of co-creation is further enhanced by new technological possibilities which have lowered the costs of producing and transforming existing artistic creations, but also by artists who increasingly see art as a twoway street. In the remainder of the chapter, we analyze three cases to demonstrate how co-creation happens. In our case study of traditional and modern dance, we argue that the performing arts have historically deeply involved the audience and are perhaps best viewed as communal creations. A case study about the Trekkers shows how the fan communities and the fan fiction galaxy have sought to cultivate and expand the original Star Trek universe. Through the case of the Queer Museum in Brazil, we demonstrate the importance of institutional diversity and the potential of crowdfunding for self-organization of co-creative communities. In conjunction with the previous chapter, through our emphasis on the social nature of creativity and process of co-creation, we seek to undermine the traditional distinction between the production and the consumption of art. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_4

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Keywords Co-production · Queer museum · Star Trek · Valorization · Cultural consumption

Values of some sort or other are not traits of rare and festal occasions; they occur whenever any object is welcomed and lingered over; whenever it arouses aversion and protest; even though the lingering be but momentary and the aversion a passing glance toward something else. John Dewey, Nature and Experience, 1925

In the analysis of the grassroots cultural organizations in Venice we saw that their initiatives came about in conversation with, and through the engagement of the citizens of the Italian city. Our main focus was on the artists, but we already hinted at the fact that audiences co-create values. In this chapter, we will deepen our examination of the process of cocreation. This requires a rethinking of what an audience is, and what they seek, do, and contribute to the arts. Together with the previous chapter, this will upset any simple distinction between the consumption and the production of art, and instead draw our attention to the process of the realization of value(s). We will demonstrate that co-creation is constitutive of many traditional art forms such as dance and cultural festivals. But co-creation also flourishes in commercial settings in (online) fan communities and through, for instance, fan fiction. It enriches and expands the creation of artists and artistic collectives as we demonstrate through a study of the Star Trek universe. Such co-creation can be observed in many different institutional settings, but does require space, technological means, and institutional support which is best guaranteed in a heterogenous institutional environment as we demonstrate through an analysis of the Queer Museum in Brazil. So much of our idea of art is about what is solid, historical, or even eternal, an idea we hope to challenge with our focus on social practices which are more frequently in flux.

Audiences Do Not Undergo Art, They Co-create It John Dewey described art as an experience. This is true for the practice of the artist: “as we manipulate, we touch and feel, as we look, we see; as we listen, we hear. The hand moves with etching needle or with brush. The eye attends and reports the consequence of what is done. Because of this

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intimate connection, subsequent doing is cumulative and not a matter of caprice nor yet of routine” (Dewey 1980, 49–50). But like in Rancière’s vision of the emancipated spectator, the audience is equally active for Dewey. His favorite verb to describe the experience of art is ‘undergoing’, but he is aware that it risks bringing up mostly passive connotations. Wrongly so, Dewey argues, because experiencing art requires ‘activities that are comparable to those of the creator’: “to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience” (Dewey 1980, 54). Dewey suggests that the ‘human contribution’ to art does not merely consist of the creation of artefacts or the acts of performance, but just as much of the attention that is paid to art, the way that individuals and social groups attend to art. In our language, which social practices they develop around them. When confronted with the ‘new’ in art, the spectator must engage with it, must wonder actively about it, use imagination to see what it is, and rely on related meanings derived from previous experiences. What is known beforehand, either through personal experience, or learned from others, is essential to the spectator: “The materials of his thought and belief come to him from others with whom he lives. He would be poorer than a beast of the fields were it not for traditions that become a part of his mind, and for institutions that penetrate below his outward actions into his purposes and satisfactions” (Dewey 1980, 270). Economists have only partially incorporated the co-creative aspects of consumption. They recognize that artistic goods are ‘experience goods’ (Hutter 2011a), by which they mean that the consumer does not know beforehand how much they will enjoy them. Economists understand this as an information problem: consumers are more likely to buy a product if they know more about its quality. Michael Hutter has rightly noted that there is something paradoxical to the idea that consumers will attempt to minimize their lack of information, specifically for artistic goods. After all, most artistic goods depend on an element of surprise, say, the ending of a film. As consumers, we want to find out, feel for ourselves, or conversely, be able to join the conversation with others about the merits of the artistic good in question. To do this, we must experience the work ourselves. The idea of experience goods has not only been used by economists. Marketing scholars Pine and Gilmore have suggested that we live in an experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 1999). The subtitle of their bestselling book is interesting for it draws heavily on performance metaphors: ‘Work is theater, and every business is a stage.’ They are interested in the growing tourist economy in which travelers seek new experiences and take

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home something memorable—their book came out some years before everyone had a high-definition camera in their back pocket. They suggest that many other firms, from airline companies to bars, sports venues, and retail stores are seeking to create an experience for their ‘guests’, who should enjoy a personalized experience which is revealed over time, just as would happen in a theater. Pine and Gilmore realized that such an experience will only be successful if the consumer is willing to actively participate. In other words, the stagers and the active participants must co-create the experience. This means that the participants to the experience, a more appriopriate word than spectators, must bring something of their own to the event. To co-create an experience will require, first of all, attention and active perception. Perception is frequently a social activity, even though one might read a book or a poem alone. The perceptions of any individual are shaped by the judgments of others who have influenced how they perceive, what they pay attention to, and what they tend to neglect. In Dewey’s theory, the art critic plays an important role precisely because they have a broad experience and ‘a trained eye’. This cannot replace one’s own experiences, but it might aid the appraisal of art by new viewers. He describes this process of perception explicitly as work, to emphasize that participants do not (only) consume, but produce. This does not mean that the individual can simply rely on others. As with all work, perception is easier if one has access to capital goods. Cultural economists and sociologists alike have thus referred to the importance of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986; Throsby 1999). The meanings they attribute to this term differ somewhat. Economists refer to an ability to appreciate a particular good, which builds up through repeated consumption, something which has also been called ‘consumption capital’ (Stigler and Becker 1977). Sociologists think of cultural capital more as the familiarity with socially prestigious cultural goods and the ability to talk about them properly, something which confers social status on the owner of this cultural capital. From the pragmatist perspective of Dewey, these differences are not as relevant, if we recognize that language mediates our relationship to the world, including the arts, then it becomes quite clear that the active creation of an artistic experience requires both the internalization of previous experiences in consumption capital as well as the ability to capture one’s experiences and the qualities of art in the ‘right’ vocabulary through cultural capital.

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With this broader perspective in mind, we can recognize that art requires active inputs from the observer, which turns them from viewers or guests into participants. An alternative strand of institutional economists, led by Elinor Ostrom, has recognized the importance of coproduction in most services (Aligica and Tarko 2013). Ostrom and her team were initially interested in how public goods, such as safety in a neighborhood, were produced, and recognized that the creation of this good requires collaboration between the police and the citizens. This model of co-production was then extended more broadly to services such as education. The arts fit the model of co-creation well, it too requires the participation of the audience to function, to gain meaning, and to have an impact.

Co-creation Is Frequently Invited by Contemporary Artists and Technologies Co-creation is best understood on a scale, from products which require few additional inputs and are mostly created for enjoyment or entertainment, to open-ended products which might puzzle, challenge, or even alienate the audience. Within the cultural sector, one might think of pop singles or Hollywood blockbusters as occupying the close-ended side of this spectrum. These products are intended to ‘wow’ the audience and they provide a steady stream of smaller surprises, but they rely heavily on established and widely known conventions of their genre (Kealy 1982; Hutter 2011b). While it is true that such products come to market readymade without requiring much previous knowledge or effort from the side of the consumer, even these products are typically created in such a way that they invite engagement from the consumer. They will be accompanied by merchandise aimed at fans, actors might do meet and greets, and pop artists give concerts where the fans can more intensely enjoy the product. From the perspective of the realization of values, in the sense of business strategy and earning money, such practices are important. But these types of goods might be less interesting from the perspective of the realization of values, in the sense of illustrating the plurality of values and the variety of art communities which emerge around them. That is different for artistic products which are deliberately created to be open-ended, challenging, or alienating, or for pieces of art which unknowingly contest established conventions. They require active engagement and a willingness to invest time and effort in their enjoyment,

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although as we have seen this will be easier for experienced participants. Somewhat surprisingly the type of engagement that is allowed, or better, considered proper, for the high arts is frequently more restricted than that for popular arts. Modern museums are a good example of a highly structured form of presentation of the arts which essentially only allows for (semi-)silent individual contemplation of the works of art, which under no circumstance might be touched, moved, or let alone transformed. The same is true for classical music concerts, during which there are strong norms of absolute silence and complicated conventions about when the audience can applaud to demonstrate their appreciation. What such structured forms of appreciation inevitably do is restrict the set of social practices which might emerge around the art form, and therefore the types of values which can be realized with them. This was not always so. During the eighteenth century, plays in Continental Europe moved from the traditional small halls into large venues. Wagner in his design of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, which opened in 1876, insisted that all the seats would face in the direction of the stage, in contrast with the more social loges which tended to face each other. Some decades earlier, Viennese theaters introduced surveillance staff to prevent behaviors like clapping or eating. These are traces of the ‘inward’ turn of the arts and culture, which peaked in the middle of the twentieth century and relegated art consumption to white cubes and other sterile temples. Before these transformations, theater looked very differently. Reggiani, the former head of the Historical Archive of Opera di Roma, has compared opera theaters of the seventeenth century to contemporary pubs: people would eat, gather in circles, gamble, and “only when they recognized the beginning of a popular opera aria they would turn to the stage and listen to it in delight” (quoted in Sabatini 2020, 57). Traditionally, theaters had much more in common with festivals and carnivals than with lecture halls (Primavesi 2013). Most art forms are compatible with many different types of cultural experiences. But the way that social practices around the arts develop does impact what kind of values can be realized through an art form. The white cubes in modern museums with only one or a few paintings on each wall nudge viewers toward a contemplative, individual, and intellectual enjoyment of the works. But viewers are creative. During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a social-media challenge to create a photo of one’s favorite picture. Audiences, locked up in their homes,

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dressed up and changed their living room into the décor of an iconic image. In his book A Spectator is an Artist Too (2020), Johan Idema shows a whole array of mostly photography-based ways in which modern museum-visitors interact creatively with the paintings: they search for their painted doppelgänger, mimic the poses in the painting, or seek unexpected angles which upset the image. Although more limited, Idema also demonstrates that it can take the form of protest, such as the photos of ArtActivistBarbie which seek to shame misogynistic artworks, or the small revolt of visitors taking pictures of themselves secretly touching a work of art. Museums and artists adapt to these new forms of engagement and the creative urges of their audience. In many major tourist cities, there are now Instagram-museums which cater specifically to the desire to take artistic photos with a local flavor; the rooms in these museums are designed for photographic engagement and visitors can touch whatever they like. Contemporary artists have responded by creating more interactive installations which allow visitors to ‘enter’ the work of art. Museums have not always found it easy to adapt to these new forms. An early instance of a major artwork which allowed for play were Ai Weiwei’s ceramic sunflower seeds in 2010, which visitors could pick up, and walk over. But with the excuse that the dust from the damaged seeds could be harmful to the lungs, the Tate Modern decided to fence off the artwork. In a similar fashion some years later, again at Tate Modern, Superflex realized a playground for adults named One, Two, Three, Swing! An allwhite living room, The Obliteration Room, designed by Yayoi Kusama could recently be completed with colorful stickers by visitors. In the digital realm, such playful engagement with visual art is far more common. Memes draw on movie scenes or paintings, in a context in which there are few distinctions between high art and stock images. In some sense, these digital recreations, adaptations, and appropriations are the perfect heir to Duchamp’s moustache on the Mona Lisa. These developments are good examples of the development of new social practices around the visual arts, which change both who gets to engage with the work, as well as the values which are realized through them. It is important to see that traditional institutions like museums adapt their own practices in response to these new developments, so that the contestations and challenges in society also impact the way in which more traditional organizations exhibit their works. It also demonstrates that the values which are realized by the audience might be quite different from those

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that the artist or curator had in mind. Co-creation can mean that the audience, as participant, completes the realization of values as intended by the artist. But co-creation can also mean that the participants challenge and alter the intended meaning and use of an artwork. Economists sometimes speak of credence goods as an extreme case of experience goods (Dulleck and Kerschbamer 2006). Whereas experience goods must be ‘undergone’ to be evaluated or not, the quality of credence goods is still unclear after they are experienced. One of the exemplary credence goods is education: when we receive education, we are not yet sure whether it is beneficial, and we might not find out until much later, at which point it remains unsure whether it was the education that did it, or other factors. Economists have again focused on how the lack of information in such instances hampers the functioning of the market. But thinking about the arts as credence goods in light of co-creation suggests a rather different perspective. Artistic goods are open-ended in the sense of being unfinished, they require co-creation, not merely to make them ‘useful’ but to interpret them, or better to give them meaning. Any artist knows that a work of art goes through many drafts and that the point at which the artist decides to stop revising and perfecting is in many ways an arbitrary point. After this decision, the work is handed over to the audience, and then the work must be engaged with, talked about, performed, critiqued, contested, or simply liked and praised. It is our contention that this process should be understood as a process of value creation, not just of value discovery. From this perspective, credence goods are special because they are unfinished; the consumer must finalize them. The associated problem is not one of not knowing the true quality of the good, but one of (co-)creating the quality of the good. The audience, as participant, thus creates value through their own contributions to the final product or experience. Their attention, their interpretation, or appropriation, adds something to the work which was not yet known when the artist released the work. The participant brings previous personal experiences and a subjective perspective to the art, this is what social scientists call consumption capital. But the consequence of this perspective is that there can be different forms of complementarity between the work of art and the capital of the spectator (Lachmann 1947). The extent to which an individual connects, is able to appreciate, and the way they judge the work of art is just as much a result of what they bring to the work, as it is of the ‘work itself’. That is what the cocreation perspective entails. A special instance of such a participant is the

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art critic. They are not merely good perceivers, but their special knowledge and experience, and their writing skills, add something to the work. In this way, a new interpretation does not (only) uncover some underlying quality, but it enriches the work. The sociologists warn us, that things like consumption capital are not purely personal and subjective phenomena. The consumption capital of any individual is strongly dependent on collective knowledge and shared conventions. The shared consumption capital, the collective knowledge about the arts, when actively used, gives rise to what could be called a knowledge commons, or ‘culture of appreciation’ (Frischmann et al. 2014). Such a culture of appreciation consists of places where the works of art can be displayed, enjoyed, and performed, of venues such as magazines and websites where they are discussed, but most of all it depends on a set of genre-specific norms and conventions which structure how art is produced and perceived. We will now turn to three case studies which illustrate the process of co-creation and the associated cultures of appreciation.

It Is Impossible to Understand the Performing Arts Without Co-creation The performing arts can be found in nearly all cultures around the world and across time. In its traditional forms, sometimes called folk culture, we instantly recognize that dance and music are practices which depend, or rather, are constituted by co-creation. Most community members were expected to join in the dance rituals which accompanied important rituals. Even in earlier cultures, not every individual had the same role in the performance of religious and ritual dance, but everyone directly participated in the ritual. Something analogous can still be observed in Western church practices where the congregation is expected to sing along with certain parts of the service, often led by a choir. The Chorus Impact Study from 2019 suggests that as many as one in six American adults sings in a choir. Figures from advocacy organizations are often collected liberally, but it is striking that they note an upward trend (Grunwald Associates LLC and Chorus America 2019). Folk and community art practices are easy to overlook because they tend to be local, but they make up the bulk of artistic practices in all societies around the world. Dance and music have remained very prominent

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forms of communal art and recent technological advances have in important ways lowered entry barriers, just think of flash-mobs and Tik-Tok dance challenges. But other art forms such as poetry and literature can also be traced back to oral traditions and practices which were constituted by co-creation. Communal rituals and the performing arts are arguably the original forms that art practices took. Indigenous forms of dance have attracted the attention of cultural anthropologists, since the early work on that subject by Franziska Boas, the daughter of the two pioneering anthropologists Franz Boas and Alice Marie Krackowizer. In the opening essay of The Function of Dance in Human Society (Boas 1944), Franziska’s father explores the different social functions of dance among the Kwakiutl Indians on Vancouver Island. He distinguishes between dance as play among kids and dance among adults as it was practiced at social and religious ceremonies, dance as a preparation for war, and finally dance at funerals. In the seminal work of Judith Hanna, dance is treated as a general form of non-verbal communication, and the categories of communication she distinguishes are like those identified by Boas. She too draws attention to the social and communal functions and the role of dance: “At one level, moving together depends on solidarity; on another, it creates solidarity” (Hanna 1979, 99). An insight which resonates well with our earlier observations about the aspirational nature of values. To this, Hanna adds the socio-political role of dance: the way it can signify and reinforce social stratification in a society. The imaginative part is important. It would be mistaken to think of (traditional) dance as only cultivating or affirming what is already there, it is also a performance of what can or should be. Hanna demonstrates in her discussion that political dance might be a form of esoteric communication which can be used to mock or critique power, a prime reason why missionaries and colonizers sought to ban it. Among the Ubakala Igbo in Nigeria, she describes the emergence of deviant dance patterns which mimicked, through mime, the immoral and abhorrent forms of physical contact among men and women found among other tribes. This is done through the adaptation of an existing dance: “new patterns of social interaction are thus presented in the ‘traditional’ vehicle of the nkwa (…) The nkwa does not try to match reality, but to create a model for it, providing individuals with an opportunity to be aroused, amused, and develop a new consciousness for possibly accepting such patterns” (Hanna 1979, 169).

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It is a good example of how art as a collective experience can serve the function of exploring new values. The performing arts allow for the performance of values. Theater performances are still called ‘plays’ and the anthropologists draw our attention to the ambivalent nature of the dance rituals, at the same time serious and playful. Playful because they are exploratory and because they perform an idealized version of the values, and serious because they really do seek to realize the performed values. The collective nature of these rituals draws the others in and makes them part of the performance of these values. The sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that: “There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make [up] its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies, and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiment” (Durkheim 1995, 429). Although Durkheim does not mention the performing arts directly in this context, these are precisely the type of meetings or assemblies where society or communities affirm their values. Durkheim captured the shared nature of these experiences in his phrase ‘collective effervescence’, which brings individuals together and serves to unify the group. Contemporary music festivals and concerts are a good modern example of the collective experience of art. Even in the ‘staged’ performances of major pop bands, there is ample space for crowd participation and much effort is put into the lighting and décor to create an immersive experience in which ‘collective effervescence’ becomes possible. That collective experience is frequently enhanced, as it sometimes is in indigenous dance and music, through stimulants. In an interesting study, some of our colleagues in Rotterdam analyzed how dance concerts tried to recreate a ‘collective effervescence’ in an online setting, when real concerts became impossible during the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. They focused on a particular subset of electronic dance livestreams known as ‘raves’. Through an analysis of the comments sections, they demonstrate that participants sought to recreate the experience of the live setting through the posting of comments that mimicked the small phrases typically yelled into one’s friend’s ear: ‘let’s meet left of the stage’, ‘where are the bathrooms?’. Many of them referenced the associated drug use: ‘does someone have a popper for me?’, ‘where is the bag at?’, and ‘someone for a line?’

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(Vandenberg et al. 2021). The authors emphasize that dance concerts should be understood as what the sociologist Randall Collins called interaction rituals. Not without a hint of irony, the online ravers sought to recreate the familiar interaction rituals by referring to the pre-pandemic conventions. But they observe that there are also nascent conventions. Comments on the music played by the DJ are done through emojis, such as the fire or bomb emoji to signify appreciation. These comments are interspersed with remarks about the sense of loss that is experienced by the fact that the people cannot dance together and reunite. As such, the new conventions fail to turn into a real alternative, instead they refer to old rituals and the sense of loss that the ravers experience. Although the authors do not draw this conclusion one might say that the livestreamed concerts are both an attempt to recreate a ‘rave’ as well as a moment of collective mourning for the fact that the concert cannot take place. We should therefore probably not expect that livestreams become a long-term alternative to in-person raves. Collective effervescence is easier to achieve in physical proximity, when that is missing, strong new rituals would be required to achieve something similar. The authors of the study, rightly point to the balcony concerts which first emerged in Italy, during the early months of the lockdown, as a genuine alternative. At a set time, neighbors would come to their balcony to perform or sing together, or even just to exchange greetings. Fortunately, the lockdowns have not lasted so long in most places that such new rituals fully took hold. But the fact that they did in such a short time is good evidence of the importance of the collective creation and enjoyment of music and dance and the resilience of artistic practices. Modern sociologists have recognized that collective art experiences such as music festivals are also places of exploration and the performance of different values, just as the nkwa was for the Ubakala Igbo. Sociologists have therefore described festivals as ‘liminal spaces’ in which distance is created from everyday life and differences as well as social critiques can be expressed. Carnivals in Flanders, immortalized by the beautiful and estranging art of James Ensor are associated with a reversal of social roles, an opportunity to mock those in power, and a moment of empowerment for those who are different or deviant. Mikhail Bakhtin in his powerful study of medieval carnivals suggests that they had a counter-hegemonic function (Bakhtin 1984). To turn these events into liminal spaces there

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must be a genuine break with everyday life, which is accomplished by the fact that festivals are limited in time and space. There is, however, an important difference between the local medieval carnivals and modern contemporary festivals, which was already recognized by the early anthropologists of dance. Franziska Boas suggested that communal dance is dependent on a homogenous culture where the values are shared. But as values become more individualistic and heterogenous it is less likely that dance will be practiced and understood by all. More importantly, she suggests that as society grows more heterogenous so should the forms of dance. It is worth listening to how she expresses that: “I question, therefore, the wisdom of modern dancers in turning back to the ballet-form when they find themselves without a large following for the newer, less stylized forms. These dancers are giving up midstream. Instead of widening their communities of support by attracting more of the people whose new experiences and interests might help them understand new symbols in movement, they are turning back to mere artifices of movement” (Boas 1944, 5). What she essentially describes is how new cultures of appreciation for a wider variety of artistic practices form or may fail to form. Hanna in her study of dance concludes with a chapter about the modern city. In that chapter, she suggests that the heterogeneity of modern cities gives rise to a ‘mosaic of social practices’. In the modern city, artistic practices exist next to each other, and give expression to heterogeneous values, without leading to broader conflicts, because urban concentration leads to the “minimization of friction space” (Hanna 1979, 200). She explains how urban settings are more conducive to new forms of dance, offer more variety, and reflect and perform underlying social differences. But the fact that forms exist next to each does not rob them of their critical potential, although there are now multiple centers of critique which co-exist at any point in time. Hanna’s characterization of dance in urban settings dovetails well with how we think about artistic practices as co-existing practices in cultural civil society, with partial overlap, but with aspirations to realize the values they embody on a broader scale.

Even in Highly Commercial Settings, There Is Extensive Co-creation One might claim that dance is an easy case to demonstrate the importance of co-creation of art. But when we look more closely, it is not hard

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to find examples of co-creation in all kinds of settings. Commercial art forms are perhaps where we are least likely to find it, because the products are not designed to be open-ended as we argued above. But commercial products frequently seek to embody the values which consumers seek to realize. Scholarship about the ethical consumer has studied how the fashion industry has responded to the demand for sustainability, gender equality, and global trade justice (Stolle and Micheletti 2013). Through boycotts of certain companies and the deliberate purchase from green or fair-trade brands, consumers are seeking to direct the values which are realized by the industry. Whether one already calls that a form of cocreation is up for debate, but fashion like many other cultural goods is intimately tied up with identity, and it is through the creation of new lifestyle and styling patterns that consumers co-create a new sustainable fashion aesthetic and perform the values that different fashion brands seek to embody. A more elaborate form of co-creation by audiences are the fan communities which in recent decades have emerged around many popular culture products. A famous fan community is the universe that Star Trek fans have created around the original series (and later sequels). Although Star Trek fans have been frequently mocked by mainstream popular culture and media (hence the derogatory nickname ‘trekkies’), the world of Star Trek is exemplary for how incredibly rich and layered fan communities can become. What is more, it illustrates how imagination and realization function sequentially. The TV show Star Trek, which first aired in 1966, narrates the explorative voyages of the starship Enterprise and its crew in the twenty-third century. Written in 1964 and broadcasted in 1966, the series was progressive in depicting interracial relationships and adopting a diverse cast, including one of the first kisses between a black and white person on American television. Star Trek is about the exploration and discovery of new worlds, societies, and cultures across space, and this happens via the adventures of Starfleet, an organization devoted to interplanetary peacekeeping, diplomacy, defense, and research. In this regard, creator Gene Roddenberry was engaging with the politics of his day, the Cold War, and the related public discourses. Critics have suggested that Star Trek replicated important tensions within the social structure of contemporary American society, which was contrasted with a kind of socialist utopian space alternative. The show ended up failing its utopistic mission, resulting in the

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same ‘white history narrative’ that producer Roddenberry had set out to fight in the first place (Geraghty 2015, 73). That might have been the end of the story: good intentions, mediocre outcome. But the story did not stop there, although it of course did for a great deal of the audience. A smaller, but significant part of the audience was, however, frustrated with how the climax had turned out. They had been attracted to the utopian ideals with which the series had started. Lincoln Geraghty has studied the fan letters which were sent to magazines, and which expressed the disappointment of the fans. His research suggests that the imagined world of diversity and equality which the producers of Star Trek had set out to create, became an inspiration for the fans. The fans who identified with the utopian tenets of Star Trek started using this as a model in their everyday lives, and slowly but surely these fans no longer primarily appreciated the original series, but they started to appropriate it. The fans recreated and imagined what Star Trek would have been if it had lived up to its original intentions. In doing so they relied on what Henry Jenkins has called the ‘moral economy’ of the original series and the appropriate way to reuse and reimagine them. This is a set of informally agreed norms, which justifies the appropriation of Star Trek’s narrative and its characters and how these can be used as an input to new, alternative, and parallel productions typically referred to as paratexts. According to the idiosyncratic Vulcan philosophy of ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination’, trekkers encourage each other to actively explore possibilities of different and sometimes contradictory interpretations of the original material. Fans reread, rerun, and rewrite Star Trek through a variety of practices. They become ‘poachers’ that put Star Trek’s original materials into a variety of cultural productions such as toys for children and adult interaction games, they sewed costumes, programmed software, and created home-produced videos. Jenkins describes the process in more general terms: “This ability to transform personal reaction into social interaction, spectatorial culture into participatory culture, is one of the central characteristics of fandom. One becomes a fan, not by being a regular viewer of a particular program, but by translating that viewing into a cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a community of other fans who share common interests. For fans, consumption naturally sparks production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable” (Jenkins 2006, 41).

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A sense of belonging and desire to construct a better world as imagined by the original producers are key features of Star Trek fandom: “When talking about this [their values] in letters read by other fans, their affection for the series is passed on through a cohesive fibrous network that allows for intimate but positive exchanges” (Geraghty 2015, 84). The imagination of an alternative aesthetic and social world is combined with a search for new forms of community, just like we saw in Venice. What results from the contributions of many fans is an expansive Star Trek universe which exceeds the official series by orders of magnitude. Fans exchange their fan productions in communities, which have greatly benefitted from digital technologies which facilitate both the production and the sharing of fan productions. Such (online) fan communities are exemplary instances of what we have called a ‘culture of appreciation’ above. This culture of appreciation has “generate[d] their own norms, which work to ensure a reasonable degree of conformity among readings of the primary text” (Jenkins 2006, 54). The creator-fans imagine or reimagine the Star Trek universe, but at the same time they must remain faithful to the intentions of the creators of the original materials, or rather to how these intentions have come to be understood within the culture of appreciation. This set of norms and expectations also significantly shapes what the official sequels and Star Trek films could do as time progressed. An interesting aspect of fandom communities, which exist around many major science-fiction and fantasy franchises, is that the fan-created extended universe does not operate according to the commercial logic which first motivated the production company to produce the series. Instead, they operate according to the logic of the (cultural) commons (Hess 2012). We have already highlighted the shared norms which structure the creation of new additions to the universe. And just like one would expect in a knowledge or cultural commons, contributions are central to sustaining the practice, and fans move up in their social standing in the community if they are able to contribute more. The ethos in fandom communities is frequently anti-commercial, it is oriented toward sharing and community building. In the case of Star Wars, the perennial rival of Star Trek, fan fiction is exchanged on Storium, a bottom-up platform facilitated by a Kickstarter campaign, on which fans can share their fictional writings, using existing characters to explore uncharted lines of the grand narrative. On Storium, fans produce collaboratively written fan fiction and at the same time, they are involved in a system of prescriptions about what they can and cannot

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do with the original materials. The institutionalization of norms set the boundaries to fans’ manipulations of original material and is rooted in the loyalty of the fans toward the creators of the original material. Booth (2017) argues that environments like Storium provide fan fiction writers space to ‘play’ within a rigid set of rules. But such rules are also partly in place for legal reasons, to avoid the intellectual property complications that might arise from unauthorized paratexts. The extended fan-universe exists in tension with the commercial copyrighted material and the further protection of brand and character names. Whether such rights will be enforced is frequently unclear. Most producers have recognized the added value that fan creators bring to a franchise. Gene Roddenberry and some Star Trek cast members have even joined in the fan-creation practices (Jenkins 2006). It is not hard to imagine that things would soon become different when fan creators would commercially release their products (Clerc 2002). In an ironic twist, additional commercial releases from the owners of the brand grew enormously. The culture of appreciation created by fan communities is responsible for the continued interest in the franchises, and has enabled recent spin-off series from Star Wars which are clearly inspired by the fanfiction on platforms like Storium. The range of commercial products that the copyright owners sell is far wider, it for instance includes video games and board games. If we look through an economic lens at fandom as a (network) externality, we could say that these spin-off products developed to internalize these externalities. Jenkins has argued that the co-creating fans are part of a much broader movement in which the importance of participation is recognized: “Powerful institutions and practices (law, religion, education, advertising, and politics, among them) are being redefined by a growing recognition of what is to be gained through fostering—or at least tolerating— participatory cultures” (Jenkins 2006, 1). His claim is probably half description and half wishful thinking, but the broader point is indeed important. Participation might lead to the kind of niche communities around imagined worlds such as Star Trek or Star Wars. But they have broader societal relevance, and the ability to also influence or contest social, political, and legal institutions in society. On the one hand, the example of Star Trek illustrates that this will happen regardless. The desire for imagination, community, and co-creation is so widespread that it is unlikely that it will go away. But the brief discussion about copyrights, an issue which we cannot fully explore, illustrates that there is also a broader context which

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can either hinder or help the emergence of co-creation. Our next case study illustrates this in more detail.

The Queer Museum in Brazil Demonstrates the Importance of Institutional Diversity In August 2017, the exhibition ‘Queer Museum: Cartographies of Difference in the Arts’ opened in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. The exhibition was curated by Gaudêncio Fidelis, who had selected Latin American works since 1950 which portrayed sexual diversity and queer culture. The museum contained over 200 artworks by 85 different artists, including notable Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark and Alfredo Volpi. The exhibition was sponsored by the Banco Santander, which hosted the exhibition in the Santander Cultural Institute. Within a month, the exhibition was terminated after both politicians and conservative groups had protested the Queer Museum. The Christian League in Brazil claimed that the exhibition ‘promoted pedophilia, zoophilia, and blasphemy’. Our former colleague Carolina Dalla Chiesa (2021) has analyzed what happened after the sudden termination of the initial exhibition. The decision to close the Queer Museum was made by the Banco Santander who suggested that some artworks ‘disrespected symbols, beliefs, and people’. Although a public prosecutor ruled against the closing, the bank was undeterred, and the exhibition remained closed. In the meantime, protesters supporting the exhibition grew more vocal. The organizers, therefore, started looking for an alternative location, helped by international media attention in major outlets such as the Guardian. The Rio Art Museum seemed willing to host the exhibition, but the conservative mayor of the city prevented this. A decision which reflected a climate of political polarization, which was most visible in the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The organizers who had now failed to garner continued private support from the Banco Santander as well as support from relevant public officials, decided to seek direct support from the public through a crowdfunding campaign. The closure and the public debate afterward had brought a lot of attention, both positive and negative, to the Queer Museum, and the crowdfunding campaign was a success. About 1700 contributors gave on average 620 Brazilian Reais (about 170 USD). A relatively independent art school in Rio de Janeiro, the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, offered to host the exhibition, on the condition that the organizers

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raised sufficient funds to transform an older building of the school into a location where other exhibitions could be held after the queer museum. The crowdfunding campaign forced the protestors against the museum to adopt a new strategy. They could no longer appeal to the public authorities, now that there was no direct or indirect public support (the crowdfunding campaign did not rely on the Rouanet Law which provides tax deductions for donations to the arts). Dalla Chiesa in her analysis demonstrates how the message of the protesters became more moral and social, and less political. They now campaigned directly against the content of the exhibition and its possible moral and social effects. The organizers of the queer museum also changed their plans. The crowdfunding campaign had given their exhibition a broader and more open character, which they wanted to reflect in the new exhibition. Next to the regular exhibition, they organized round-tables, seminars, and musical events at which the position of the LGBTQIA+ community in Brazil was discussed. Dalla Chiesa uses the notion of a ‘dispersed museum’ to reflect that the museum was increasingly organized bottom-up and provided space for initiatives from supporters and audiences inspired by the original exhibition. She makes two further observations which are of importance to us here. The protesters were initially successful in shutting down the Queer Museum, but the broader dynamic that resulted was one of contestation in which the LGTBQIA+ community in Brazil became more vocal and more involved in the organization of the museum. This is an illustration of David Stark’s idea that values are most often realized, and differences in values most visible, when there is a friction and contestation of values. The works of art which made up the exhibition were of course important, and they embodied a recognition and validation for this type of art and queer artists. But in the subsequent contestation over the Queer Museum the question became bigger and touched a lot more people, as well as the broader social position of sexually ‘deviant’ groups in Brazilian society. One might still argue that all things considered the Queer Museum would have been better off without the controversy. After all, the initial exhibition was shut down and could not find a public institution willing to provide an alternative venue for the exhibition. The fact that the exhibition could not celebrate queer art in relative isolation, but became a public issue, after which the continued existence of the exhibition was at risk is itself not necessarily desirable. It might be argued that from the perspective of the protestors against the museum, it was desirable that

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the exhibition passed relatively unnoticed. The values which the Queer Museum sought to realize were at odds with the values of a significant part of the Brazilian population. Co-existence is frequently best achieved through an attitude of live and let live, in which not every private difference becomes a public dispute. But as Dalla Chiesa observes the institutional innovation of crowdfunding the museum and the search for an alternative venue independent from corporate sponsors and public institutions are likely to have a legacy beyond the Queer Museum. They secured a form of institutional pluralism which did not exist before. The use of crowdfunding provided an alternative financial infrastructure, which other marginalized communities can use to fund their initiatives. And the creation of the exhibition space at the Parque Lage School can be used as an alternative to public and private institutions. This institutional pluralism is important, precisely because contemporary societies are characterized by deep value disagreements. In such circumstances, it is vital that dominant identities can be contested, which is facilitated by institutional diversity. One of the problems with official, national, and more generally public organizations is that what they display is easily interpreted, and frequently rightly so, as a public statement about what is valuable, representative of the (national) identity, or artistically respectable. A variety of cultural institutions, on the other hand, allows for a broader diversity of voices to be heard in their own voice, rather than through the official channels, and it also ensures that the entire cultural field remains contestable, so that new and alternative voices can continue to be heard. If that is the case then the moral of the story of the Queer Museum is not the scandal which resulted from the initial closure of the museum, or the relative merits of the justifications provided by either side during the protests. It is instead that its re-opening and the institutional circumstances under which this happened underline the importance of institutional diversity in an open society, which allows groups with different values and different identities to exist next to each other. As one might expect that has important consequences for how we think about cultural policy, as we will explore in the next chapter.

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Informal Practices Are Not Always Long-Lasting and That Is Probably a Good Thing Across the chapters, we have examined different cases as constitutive examples of what we understand as the process of the realization of the values of art in social practices. Together they give a sense of what we mean by the idea of cultural civil society in which artists and participants co-create values in (frequently) informal settings. Our discussions of the cases have focused on one of the four stages of the process of the realization of values: orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation (Fig. 1.1). Each one demonstrated that artists were driven by values and imagined both aesthetically and socially to create new worlds, which were realized. That this process succeeds is of course not given, it can fail at any stage, an aspect which should be explored more in future work. Table 4.1 provides an overview of the different case studies. We suggest that most art communities have a dual aim. On the one hand, they aim to contribute and participate in the art world, for which they must innovate aesthetically. On the other hand, they aim to contribute and participate in social and political life, for which they must create communities around their art. The social innovation we have highlighted in the case of the Star Trek consists of an expansive community both online and offline which acts as an extension of the commercial product. Social practices and the associated communities around the art might indeed be a by-product of market exchange, of commercial culture. But even in the case of the trekkers the community they formed operated more along the lines of the commons than on a commercial basis. In the chapter on the creative circles and the informal artistic collectives in Venice, we saw that the logic of the commons dominates artistic production. In this chapter, we have illustrated that audiences, as participants, co-create art, which aligns well with the ideas of the cultural commons (as opposed to natural resource commons). Our analysis of the process of the realization of values, thus, upsets the clear distinction between the production and consumption of the arts, which dominates thinking about the arts in both economics and sociology. We have instead suggested that the realization of values is dependent on contributions from many individuals, both during the process of imagination as well as during the process of realization. Elinor Ostrom (1990, 2005) has done much to dispel the idea that the commons are only informal arrangements based on goodwill and

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Table 4.1 Overview of the case studies and their goals (Source authors) Aesthetic imagination

Social imagination

Phonte

The Minstrel Show as critique of the dominant hip-hop aesthetic

Art collectives

Critique of high-end art organizations and heritage-only tourism Playful affirmation and critique of communal values Reclaiming of, and expanding upon the original utopian Star Trek world Giving voice to LGBTQIA+ people and expressing alternative sexual and gender identities

Rethinking balance between family and friendship ties versus fame and political goals Reclaiming of civil space for the Venetians

Dance festivals Trekkers

Queer Museum

Contemporary festivals as liminal spaces Co-creation in (digital) communities rooted in fandom Creation of community through crowdfunding and the dispersed museum

cooperation, and has demonstrated that they operate because of the establishment of rules and their enforcement. Even so, one might worry that the informal collectives and the loose communities we have studied are vulnerable, hard to scale, and transitory in nature. This contrasts sharply with the traditional image of the arts, which traces its traditions back centuries, is very protective of its heritage, and in which the idealized artist does not produce for the present, but for eternity. Although the modern museum was only invented about two hundred years ago, there is a persistent tendency to associate real artistic success with the inclusion in a museum collection, in which one’s art would be immortalized. The practical impossibility of this idea has been pointed out repeatedly by cultural economists: most of the art that the major art museums around the world hold are locked away in more or less permanent storage (Frey 1994). According to reporting by the BBC from 2015: “the Louvre shows 8%, the Guggenheim a lowly 3% and the Berlinische Galerie – a Berlin museum whose mandate is to show, preserve, and collect art made in the city – 2% of its holdings” (Bradley 2015). It is safe to assume that this problem will not go away as museums continue to acquire new art. The question is whether inclusion and preservation within museums is the correct perspective on the arts. In the first chapter, we contrasted the stately statues erected to honor the heroes of the past with the temporary installations of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. The former are meant to

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be around forever, aimed at solidifying a national identity through the glorification of military masterminds, the latter temporary in nature, and meant to draw new participants to the arts and to challenge conventional understandings of familiar places. The former embody the idea of art as eternal and solid, the latter embody the idea of art as temporary and in flux. The contrast is important, because the cultural civil society which we place in the foreground in this book is much closer to the light fabrics used by the wrapping couple than to public art in the form of weighty bronze statues. In a dynamic and plural society forms of art which signify this change and heterogeneity are more appropriate, than forms of art which seek to derive solid truths from the past. At the same time, the contrast should not be overdrawn. The case of the Queer Museum in Brazil demonstrates that informal communities also need space to exhibit. The Star Trek fans need places to meet, both online and offline. Amateur practitioners need material and financial resources to sustain their practices. The commons need rules, and the innovation commons which we discussed in the previous chapter might have been informal, but they depended on sustained contributions over a longer period before they generated worthwhile innovations. All the artists and co-creative participants we have discussed build on artistic traditions, sometimes centuries long. The question before us, is then, how we can create an institutional environment which enables the cultural civil society we have characterized, and how it can co-exist with the more solid and commercial forms of art which have enjoyed so much attention in cultural policy and research of the past. That is also a question, as the case of the Queer Museum demonstrated so well, of the relative importance of the market, the state, and society. It is to that question that we now turn.

References Aligica, Paul Dragos, and Vlad Tarko. 2013. “Co-Production, Polycentricity, and Value Heterogeneity: The Ostroms’ Public Choice Institutionalism Revisited.” American Political Science Review 107 (4): 726–41. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0003055413000427. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikha˘ılovich. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Boas, Franziska. 1944. The Function of Dance in Human Society. New York: Dance Horizons.

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Booth, Paul. 2017. “Playing by the Rules: Storium, Star Wars and Ludic Fandom.” Journal of Fandom Studies 5 (3): 267–84. https://doi.org/10. 1386/jfs.5.3.267_1. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson, 241–58. Westport: Greenwood. Bradley, Kimberly. 2015. “Why Museums Hide Masterpieces Away,” January 23. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150123-7-masterpie ces-you-cant-see. Clerc, Susan J. 2002. Who Owns Our Culture? The Battle Over the Internet, Copyright, Media Fandom, and Everyday Uses of the Cultural Commons. Ohio: Bowling Green State University. https://www-proquest-com.eur.idm. oclc.org/docview/276342212/abstract/F39FB38447804EDCPQ/1. Dalla Chiesa, Carolina. 2021. “Crowdfunding the Queer Museum: A Polycentric Identity Quarrel.” In Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons, edited by Erwin Dekker and Pavel Kuchaˇr, 238-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John. 1980. Art as Experience. Wideview/Perigee. Dulleck, Uwe, and Rudolf Kerschbamer. 2006. “On Doctors, Mechanics, and Computer Specialists: The Economics of Credence Goods.” Journal of Economic Literature 44 (1): 5–42. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. http://library.lol/main/5DA98896021D82DD6B356B9F05F06574. Frey, Bruno S. 1994. “Cultural Economics and Museum Behaviour.” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 41 (3): 325–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1467-9485.1994.tb01131.x. Frischmann, Brett M., Michael J. Madison, and Katherine J. Strandburg. 2014. Governing Knowledge Commons. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Geraghty, Lincoln. 2015. “‘A Reason to Live’: Utopia and Social Change in Star Trek Fan Letters.” In Popular Media Cultures, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 73–87. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978113 7350374_4. Grunwald Associates LLC, and Chorus America. 2019. “The Chorus Impact Study: Singing for a Lifetime.” https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Res earch-Art-Works-ChorusAmerica.pdf. Hanna, Judith Lynne. 1979. To Dance Is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hess, Charlotte. 2012. “Constructing a New Research Agenda for Cultural Commons.” Cultural Commons, August. https://www-elgaronline-com.eur. idm.oclc.org/view/edcoll/9781781000052/9781781000052.00010.xml. Hutter, Michael. 2011a. “Experience Goods.” In A Handbook of Cultural Economics, Second Edition, edited by Ruth Towse, 211–15. Northhampton:

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Edward Elgar. http://www.elgaronline.com.eur.idm.oclc.org/view/edcoll/ 9781848448872/9781848448872.00035.xml. Hutter, Michael. 2011b. “Infinite Surprises: On the Stabilization of Value in the Creative Industries.” In The Worth of Goods: Valuation & Pricing in the Economy, edited by Jens Beckert and Patrik Aspers, 201–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Kealy, Edward R. 1982. “Conventions and the Production of the Popular Music Aesthetics.” Journal of Popular Culture 16 (2): 100. Lachmann, Ludwig M. 1947. “Complementarity and Substitution in the Theory of Capital.” Economica 14 (54): 108–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/254 9487. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-007-9157-x. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Cambridge: Harvard Business Press. Primavesi, Patrick. 2013. “Heterotopias of the Public Sphere: Theatre and Festival around 1800.” In Performance and the Politics of Space, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz, 176–91. London: Routledge. Sabatini, Francesca. 2020. “Commoning the Stage: The Complex Semantics of the Theatre Commons.” In Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Emanuela Macrì, Valeria Morea, and Michele Trimarchi, 53–78. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-54418-8_5. Stigler, George, and Gary S Becker. 1977. “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.” American Economic Review 67 (2): 76–90. Stolle, Dietlind, and Michele Micheletti. 2013. Political Consumerism: Global Responsibility in Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Throsby, David. 1999. “Cultural Capital.” Journal of Cultural Economics 23 (1): 3–12. Vandenberg, Femke, Michaël Berghman, and Julian Schaap. 2021. “The ‘Lonely Raver’: Music Livestreams during COVID-19 as a Hotline to Collective Consciousness?” European Societies 23: S141–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14616696.2020.1818271.

CHAPTER 5

Making Space for Cultural Civil Society

Abstract We propose an alternative perspective for the private, social, and public governance of the arts rooted in modus vivendi liberalism as opposed to political liberalism. In this perspective, the co-existence of a great diversity of social practices around the arts is the primary goal of cultural policy. We argue that to achieve this we should aim for a more complete separation between the art and state, analogous to the way that church and state are separated. This implies that the state should aim to create a stable legal framework in which practices can co-exist, minority voices are protected, and the government refrains from favoring certain art forms over others. We contrast the evolving social practices in cultural civil society with the backward looking and frequently static large organizations and monuments which are typically at the heart of cultural policy and argue that a heterogeneous cultural civil society is a better safeguard for pluralism in contemporary democratic society, and a better safeguard at attempts to essentialize (national) identities. Cultural civil society will depend to a large degree on private and social forms of governance and the chapter explores the legal forms which can enable communities to do so. Finally, we propose a few methods to measure the vibrancy of the more informal practices in cultural civil society.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_5

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Keywords Civil society · Co-Existence · Contestation · Cultural policy · Public values

Democracy is the belief that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation - which may include, as in sport, rivalry and competition - is itself a priceless addition to life. To take as far as possible every conflict which arises - and they are bound to arise - out of the atmosphere (…) of violence as a means of settlement, into that of discussion and of intelligence is to treat those who disagree - even profoundly - with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as friends. John Dewey, Creative Democracy (1939).

This book has argued that the values of the arts are realized in social practices. This follows from our theoretical analysis which has emphasized the identity-forming nature of the arts and the social nature of creativity and participation in the arts. We must now turn to the question of what this means for the governance of the arts in the broadest sense: private, social, and public governance. We have to explore how cultural civil society can flourish so that the values of the arts can be realized, and how community and public governance can contribute to it. To do so we first explore how we can get a better sense of the diversity of activities within cultural civil society and its vibrancy. We then turn to the way in which the arts typically function at the intersection of the private and the public sphere and why this matters for issues of governance. We argue that the great heterogeneity of social practices around the arts requires a framework which allows for the co-existence of many overlapping and conflicting practices. This entails a much deeper separation of the state and the arts than is currently practiced in most countries. We argue that cultural policy should be aimed at creating space for diversity and should ensure the contestability and access of as broad a variety of minority voices as possible and investigate what such a framework should look like.

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The Diversity of Social Practices Around the Arts Constitutes Cultural Civil Society Our claim that the values of the arts are primarily realized in social processes puts our perspective at odds with most discussions of cultural policy and the cultural sector. In these discussions, the framing is traditionally that of some combination of markets and governments who together seek to produce some optimal or equitable amount of art. For the more commercial arts, say pop music or mainstream films, it is assumed that market competition between producers will lead to both sufficient supply and meaningful innovation (Cowen 1998). Although even in these market-oriented sectors we might hear an occasional complaint that there is not enough variety or genuine innovation, typically blamed on major film companies or music labels’ unwillingness to take risks, or the unsophisticated tastes of the mass market. In the more traditional arts, such as ballet, the visual arts, sculpture, and classical music it is typically assumed that government support is required. The reasons for this are varied, but usually point to some kind of market failure (Frey 2003). We will skip over these arguments here, not because we believe they are all without merit, although some have certainly been employed opportunistically, but because we feel that it is more important to change perspectives. The most basic shift in perspective is that value is not well captured in consumption data, or the amount of public and private financial support, but that value is realized in cultural civil society, the associational life around the arts. To paraphrase the title of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize address (2010), our perspective seeks to move ‘beyond market and state’. This does not mean that market and state are of no importance, we have suggested repeatedly that many inputs for the social practices around art are produced and sold in commercial settings, and this chapter will discuss the merits and limits of public policy. Ostrom’s claim was not that the commons or civil society was always superior to market or state. She was famous for saying that there is no panacea, no one optimal form of organizing social and economic activity which trumps others. Instead, her intellectual research project was to call attention to the institutional diversity present in society. The artistic collectives, circles of artists, and co-creative communities which have been the focus of many of our examples indeed come in a great variety of flavors and sizes.

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One of the concepts which have been proposed to study the wide variety of artist organizations is that of artist-run-initiatives (ARIs). These include cooperatives, artist collectives, exhibition spaces, communes, union-like organizations, and gathering places (Coffield 2015). They are typically somewhat more formalized versions of the circles which we have described in Chapter 3, in which artists pool resources to run a bottom-up organization. At art schools and the communities which emerge around them, we find further examples of social governance. At the more formal end of the spectrum of this civil society, we will find industry organizations, large unions, and semi-public organizations. This variety of organizational forms allows for artists and supporting communities to come together in ways which are most appropriate for the type of art they produce, and which values they seek to realize. They operate primarily in the third sphere, next to markets and public organizations. In a moment, we will turn to the question of how such variety can be fostered and why it is valuable for society, but let us first make more tangible what we mean by cultural civil society.

Cultural Civil Society Often Flies Under the Radar, but it Can Be Mapped The idea that the artistic sector can be properly measured by looking at the market and the public sector is pervasive. In an ambitious effort, the European Commission has launched an evaluation toolkit for European cities. Their Cultural and Creative City Monitor aims to rank cities by means of a composite indicator regarding three dimensions across which the value of culture is realized: cultural vibrancy, the creative economy, and the enabling environment. The cultural vibrancy dimension measures the number of cultural venues and facilities, their visitor numbers, and customer satisfaction. The creative economy dimension focuses on patents, commercial design applications of the arts, and the number of jobs available in the fields of arts, culture and entertainment, media and communication, and other creative fields. The environment dimension is inspired by Richard Florida’s theory of the creative class and measures openness, tolerance, and trust, as well as the quality of the local governance, international and regional connections, and the availability of human capital. In the 2019 edition, the most creative cities per capita were Paris, Copenhagen, Florence, and Lund in Sweden.

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The EU monitor institutionalizes the economic instrumentalism which reduces the value of art to its economic contribution. A city scores high on this index when there are many visitors to the formal cultural organizations (which typically receive significant subsidies), or in other words when there are many (cultural) tourists. It also scores high when the arts generate many new economic opportunities in terms of innovation spill-overs or job opportunities resulting from commercial spin-offs of the more applied arts. The final environmental dimension is more interesting because it analyzes the institutional and political framework which enables the cultural sector to flourish. At least in theory, a good environment might contribute to both large organizations and informal communities around the arts. But in the Cultural and Creative City Monitor there is no attempt to measure the quantity or breadth and diversity of these communities, or the extent to which locals or other more (semi-)permanent dwellers of the cities develop new social practices around the arts. The first step in an ‘evaluation’ of the cultural sector should therefore involve the mapping of different artistic practices in a place. The danger in creating such a map is that it looks at recognized physical spaces in which arts are performed or exhibited. We have instead emphasized that it should capture the art communities in which people engage. This includes their participation at established venues, and also their attendance of art schools, use of rehearsal spaces and recording studios, as well as the use of many other informal private and social spaces, and public space (think of street performers). Rosa Won and Arjo Klamer (2021), both former colleagues in Rotterdam, developed an alternative methodology to arrive at such a mapping through a big-data analysis of the cultural and artistic conversations that individuals had on online platforms while visiting or living in an urban area (Won and Klamer 2021). They demonstrated that such an analysis can help elucidate the heterogenous nature of the artistic practices in a city, as well as the differences in these practices between different cities or neighborhoods. A similar mapping effort, although very different in methodology, is undertaken by one of us, in Venice. To understand informal cultural practices in relation to the local cultural economy, Valeria Morea has collected information regarding grassroots cultural organizations in Venice by means of observations and interviews. In this way, she managed to map the collectives, spaces, and groups of artists and art practitioners in the city. On a grander scale, the Italian organization Che Fare is creating a map of all collaborative cultural spaces in Italy. Frequently such mapping

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projects rely on the same bottom-up mechanisms as the artistic collectives which are being mapped: to improve the map, artists can report their own collectives or spaces. This might sound somewhat arbitrary, but such crowd-sourced maps are also frequently used in environmental science and biology, to map bird populations for instance (Silvertown 2009). A significant challenge in the mapping of artistic practices and the locations in which they take place is to capture their diversity. In Chapter 3, we presented an idealized image (Fig. 3.1) of cultural civil society inspired by the work on the many circles in interwar Vienna. The work of Timms (2005) on these circles demonstrates that it is possible to also capture the diversity of them, he for instance maps them onto a kind of ideological map by positioning the circles in relation to each other as well as the major political movements of the period. One might imagine a similar mapping which associates the different circles with the art disciplines to which they are closest, the neighborhoods in which they operate, or to which major art organizations in a city they are closely related. The latter would also give an insight into the extent to which cultural civil society operates independently from these organizations, and to what extent it is in fact dependent on the public infrastructure. But given our focus on values, the ideal map would contain a qualitative dimension which would allow the mapmaker to position the different communities in relation to the values they pursue. The methodology developed by Won, discussed above, is promising in this direction. Equally promising is the value-based approach which has recently been proposed to provide a: “reliable evaluation of qualitative achievements of cultural and creative endeavors” (Petrova et al. 2022, 112). This approach builds on Klamer’s conceptual work and distinguishes between four types of values: personal, social, societal, and transcendental. A mapping can demonstrate the breadth and diversity of cultural civil society and is probably essential to convince policymakers and other stakeholders of the importance of informal organizations and communities in the realization of the values of the arts. But it will not be enough for a genuine shift in perspective, for that we also must analyze the dynamics within cultural civil society.

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Cultural Civil Society Operates at the Intersection of the Private and the Public Sphere The idea of a cultural civil society consisting of many circles of artistic production as well as communities of co-creation makes clear that many artistic practices exist next to each other. They might work together for particular projects as we saw among the collectives in Venice, but in the bigger scheme of things they compete for members and talent. We have discussed the intra-group dynamics in Chapter 3. The intergroup dynamics are primarily driven by the mechanisms of exit, voice, and loyalty, so nicely summed up by Albert Hirschman (1970). Individuals will choose which artistic practices to join and devote both time and other resources to realize their desired values through this practice (loyalty). In case they fail to realize them, they might seek to alter the direction of the circle (voice), and if they do not succeed in changing the direction of the practice, decide to leave the circle (exit). There will be a degree of deliberate choice in this process, especially when it comes to the decision to leave a community, because it means giving up friends and acquaintances as well as some of the resources the individual has invested over time. In Chapter 2, we have, however, suggested that joining a (new) social practice is not simply a rational decision, but involves aspiration, a desire to discover and appreciate a new practice. This means that close friends, peers, and mentors, exert considerable influence on the choice of the circle. In society at large, there might also be trends which influence choices to join new practices, given the presence of genuine uncertainty about values. Joining a circle is a commitment. Most artistic practices, especially those in which creation is central, will have significant entry barriers. To become part of the community, as informal member or (ir)regular contributor, one typically must know someone who is already a member. Even so, the other contributors will seek to screen for quality or motivation and authenticity (matching values) to ensure that newcomers can genuinely add something to the circle. This means that entry is typically limited, especially for the more prestigious circles in which more experienced and talented members gather. In the broader ecosystem of artistic circles, this is counteracted by the fact that circles will also need contributors to sustain the practice and remain of interest to the existing community members.

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Cultural civil society functions as associational life does everywhere. When offline, it is locally organized, although cultural civil society is frequently urban. It generates diversity and difference and enables the formation of heterogenous identities by individuals. When online, it can span larger geographical areas and is typically organized around highly specific themes. Cultural civil society functions based on, and because of, different forms of exclusion. There is little which can be done about these entry barriers, they are part of the institutional rules which ensure the functioning of circles as (innovation) commons. Public policy can, however, concern itself with the overall openness and contestability of the cultural field. It is desirable that new circles can easily form, and that existing circles and communities do not enjoy unfair advantages which make it harder for new groups to compete with them. Below, we will delve into what this implies in more detail. In most instances, communities will realize values internally, without much direct concern for others. Although they are social in nature, in the sense of bringing different individuals together, the practices are essentially private, they do not have significant effects outside of the group. But this is not always the case. In the cases we have studied, we have seen that artistic practices frequently imagine alternative worlds. It is through this process that they also give expression to social critique, political imagination, or, in extreme cases, to the toppling of statues. What is more, the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is not fixed, but itself open to contestation. This is precisely what we have seen in many of the examples presented throughout the book. The protests against the public statues were explicitly public but were also a claim of previously marginalized groups for full recognition in this public space. The community-based art projects in Venice similarly entailed a reimagination of the public sphere, in which the locals sought to take back what had been captured by tourists and major art organizations. The Queer Museum in Brazil sought to draw public attention to the most private, sexual, acts, and gender identities. To someone involved in the exhibition, this was primarily meant to cultivate the values of the queer community itself. For others, this was also an attempt to generate more public recognition for their sexual orientation and gender identity. What they sought to do with their art and the associated practices was not limited to the private or the aesthetic, but part of a social process of contestation and negotiation over what should be considered private and public. This changes the way we use notions of private and public. They are no longer

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natural categories associated with the private exchange and associational life (private), on the one hand, and public support to the arts and government more generally (public), on the other. Instead, they become socially contested categories, which express differing beliefs over the nature of practices and the values they embody. We have taught economics in a cultural studies program for several years, and experienced year after year that our students were deeply convinced that museums were public goods. Our first instinct as economists was to tell them wrong. After all, museums are excludable goods, which means that it is relatively easy to exclude non-paying visitors. And when museums get crowded, as popular museums tend to do, they are rival, meaning that visitors enjoy a crowded museum less than one in which they can freely move around. This entails in technical economic terms that museums are private goods, and consequently that public support cannot be justified using the public goods argument. Yet, no matter how often, or creatively, we presented this bit of economic reasoning, most of our students would still confidently declare that museums were public goods at the end of the course. Over time, we have come to realize that the students had a point, or more precisely that they meant something else when they claimed that a museum was a public good. When we challenged them, the class discussion would quickly get heated. The students expressed a firm belief that museums should be publicly supported and be open to the public, preferably without charge, as they are in London. They believed this because they felt that museums represented the identity and memory of a society, a resource which should be available to as many people as possible (from which it followed for most that they were deserving of government support). They did not make a claim about the most efficient form of economic organization, but about what they believed was the nature of a museum: not private and relatively closed, but open and therefore public. We believe that it is along these lines, that recent critiques of public museums should be understood. The activists critique public museums for their colonial outlook, for their lack of representation of female artists, or for displaying misogynistic works. The response so far has been mostly defensive. Most museums have sought to incorporate more nonWestern and female artists, removed particularly problematic artworks, and museums dedicated to non-Western art have started to return wrongfully acquired (colonial) art. Unsurprisingly, this has led others to object

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to this kind of cancelation of art in the name of freedom of expression. These counter-critics have furthermore pointed at the a-historical nature of some of the critiques, which tend to judge the past by current moral standards. The many sides to this debate express different public values—freedom of expression, anti-colonialism, gender equality, openness, curatorial freedom of expression—which are in tension with each other. These different values can only be very incompletely reconciled and are likely to lead to more intense disagreements in the near future. That is, if we choose to stick to a policy of government owned or supported public museums which must represent one national or official view. Matters would be quite different if there was space for co-existence of organizations with different goals and agendas.

Public Values Might Converge, but Co-Existence and Tolerance Are Primary In Dewey’s theory of democracy, which values are important and which values should be public is discovered in the process of realizing them. This discovery process unfolds over time, but it is also contextual, shaped by the circumstances of time and place. As Barry Bozeman, who has done much to develop the Deweyian theory of public values, argues: “there will be many ‘publics’ just as there will be many public interests in various times and places. That is to say, the designated public interest on any given policy question cannot be stated in advance of the democratic appraisal of causes and consequences and the contextual, cooperative search for a wider shared interest in a specific problematic situation” (Bozeman 2007, 108). He draws attention to several important facts. First, in contemporary society it is misguided to think of one public, with a common interest. Second, the democratic process is not simply an expression of given preferences, but a process of experimentation in which consequences of different courses of action are learned, and the value of different means and ends discovered. Bozeman concludes that the goal is to search for a broader set of shared goals which itself is an admirable goal. But it should be recognized that not all value-pluralism can be reconciled; marginal and deep disagreements are likely to persist. The key for public policy in a democratic society is therefore not to seek to establish what art is important and worth supporting. It is to facilitate this discovery process, and to find modes of co-existence which can accommodate persistent disagreement.

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In their discussion of private and public values, Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter Boettke, and Vlad Tarko argue that precisely because of the incompatibility of public values, the goal of public policy should not be: “to look for the best way to aggregate values into a single coherent system but instead to seek the best way in which heterogenous, incommensurable, and incomparable values can coexist and if not enrich at least not undermine each other” (Aligica et al. 2019, 124). The solution for dealing with deep value heterogeneity that they derive from the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom is polycentricity, an institutional arrangement that involves a multiplicity of decision-making centers acting independently but under the constraints of an overarching set of norms and rules that help internalize externalities. This might at first sound like a rather minimalist, or even negative, solution. The political resolution of deep value-pluralism is not an attempt to resolve the conflict of values, but rather to recognize their incommensurability. The solution is sometimes known as ‘modus vivendi’ liberalism, as for instance theorized by John Gray (2000). He emphasizes the agonistic nature of heterogenous groups in many societies in which social groups are fundamentally at odds with each other. It is the kind of perspective, which is relevant in polarized times, when a limited form of mutual tolerance is perhaps all which might be hoped for. Gray contrasts this modus vivendi liberalism with the political liberalism of John Rawls and others. This latter view is inclined toward a mild paternalism in which there is a role for the state to support excellence in the arts and to defend national culture, as the free-marketoriented economist Lionel Robbins argued in his classic Art and the State (Robbins 1963; Balisciano and Medema 1999). The broad critique of the arts of the past decade has made clear that this political or mainstream liberalism has reinforced traditional imperial, patriarchal, hetero-normative, and Western narratives about art and history. Modus vivendi liberalism takes as its starting point a heterogenous society and seeks to avoid taking a moral stance. If we return to the philosopher who has guided our enquiry, John Dewey, we are able to recognize the positive and constructive aspects of such an arrangement: “A genuinely democratic faith in peace is faith in the possibility of conducting disputes, controversies and conflicts as cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself” (Dewey 1939, 15). The ability for groups to express themselves is the kind of tolerance which modus vivendi liberalism makes focal. Since Dewey tended to think in terms of processes and practices, we

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should understand his argument as implying that we should give different communities the chance to develop their own practices. The American pragmatist philosopher, however, makes clear that a democratic faith means that we should also hope that this might over time lead to convergence about what the most important public values are. The cultural civil society we have analyzed in this book is therefore a democratic testing ground, an essential feature of the free society. If two groups disagree over public values, Dewey suggests that they might over time converge. One way in which this might happen is through public discourse, a subject explored in the literature on public reason liberalism (Gaus 2010). Our focus on practices, however, suggests that rather than looking at public debate directly we should look at the way in which social practices around art, or more broadly around political values, grow and decline over time. If there is space in cultural civil society to explore radically divergent values without seeking direct convergence or overlap, we should expect to see new practices grow in times when underlying values in society are shifting. In this sense, the practices in cultural civil society reflect the underlying moral dynamics in society. When there is a moral change in society, we expect conflicts within circles which are likely to lead to divergence. The two or three factions which split off will develop divergent practices which might be antagonistic in nature. It is Dewey’s contention that over time convergence is more likely (see Fig. 5.1). Convergence of this type might happen. On the campus of George Mason University where we are finishing this book, the statue of founding father Mason is now contextualized through texts which highlight his role as slave-owner and additional statues which depict a young servant and list the names of the other slaves. But on its own, the faith that time will heal wounds, and convergence will naturally come about, should be written off as naïve optimism. How is one to expect that one group which seeks to topple public statues will find common ground with another group which not only seems determined to keep them in place, but which also seems to long back for the very social arrangements and values which embodied by the statues? Perhaps there are some instances in which the government must simply decide that one group is right. But, we believe, such cases are the exception. The answer lies, instead, in the more complex dynamics which follow from our description of cultural civil society. In Fig. 5.1, we depicted just two circles which either diverged or converged. The art world is more like the ‘mosaic of social

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Fig. 5.1 Convergence of previously disparate circles and divergence of previously overlapping circles

practices’ which dance scholar Hanna described, and which we depicted in Fig. 3.1. These many circles embody a genuine plurality of values with partial overlap between them, with more marginal and extremist groups and practices at the edges. When a particular conflict leads to divergence, between two circles which were previously close, we should expect that

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both circles will find new forms of overlap with previously existing circles and practices. This is precisely the strength of a heterogenous civil society. Rather than forcing people in a small number of competing camps who seek to win a dispute through a polarized political process, it allows for a wide variety of associations. These heterogenous associations will be reflected in multiple identities at the individual level as we demonstrated in Chapter 2. Consequently, individuals will be part of a variety of associations, some close to each other in terms of values, others further apart. This makes it less likely that any specific conflict will lead to a simple dichotomous sorting of individuals. Instead, we are likely to find a range of positions, which by itself weakens the extremes. This of course does not mean that individuals will not, occasionally, feel torn between rival allegiances. Throughout this book, we have argued that the realization of values around art has a distinctive ‘public’ element to it. This means that conflicts will arise, and that some degree of management of the externalities generated by art communities is necessary. This might vary from noise regulations to the management of the access of different communities to (semi-)public spaces. But this should not blind us to the primary benefit of allowing for a broad scope of cultural civil society: it allows for the realization of a wide variety of (partially public) values next to each other. Clearly, the greatest danger to a plural and free society is that cultural values and national identity are made uniform and become essentialized. The best safeguard against that threat is a vibrant cultural civil society in which different groups can explore and express their heterogenous identities and realize the values which are important to them. This cultural civil society should be open and contestable so that newcomers can enter, and alternative identities can be formed. Dewey makes us aware of one additional benefit of a diverse cultural civil society. In his perspective of democracy and social inquiry, Dewey lays out how a society might engage in learning. We have explored the process of aspiration and value learning in Chapter 2. Dewey argued for social experimentation along similar lines and believed that the kind of associational life which we have placed in the foreground of our analysis provides many epistemic benefits. This could occur in the type of contestation we have described above, but it happens primarily at the meso-level at which circles and co-creative communities shrink and grow. Many social experiments and practices will fail to sustain themselves because they do not crowd-in sufficient contributions from (potential) members.

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Others may prove to be highly successful, will be imitated, grow rapidly, or generate spin-offs. In economics, it is well established that the competitive market process enabled by the price system is essential to solving the enormously complex knowledge problem of what and to produce, as well as the even more complicated question of how to adjust the production to ever-changing circumstances (Hayek 1945). In society, there is no direct analogue to the price system, but as we have suggested above, the different communities do compete for the resources and contributions of individuals, and successful practices are likely to attract new members and inputs. In this manner, cultural civil society serves as a lab of experimentation as well as a testing ground for social practices which might become more widely adopted and occasionally even nearly universally shared. Understanding the social dynamics within cultural civil society, quite radically, shifts how we think of (policy) evaluation. A genuine explosion of attempts to measure the economic and social impact of the arts has occurred over the past two decades (see Belfiore 2021 for a critical discussion). Initially, they were mostly aimed at evaluating the social and economic impact of the arts, but more recently, they have also analyzed the cultural impact of the arts. The goal behind these evaluations is invariably to come up with a simple or comprehensive value scale against which the performance of cultural organizations can be measured, and thus fix and determine what impacts are important or in the public interest. By necessity, they reduce the plurality of values which are realized by cultural organizations, aside from having a strong tendency to ignore art communities which are not sufficiently institutionalized. They also strongly run the risk of instrumentalizing the arts for some specific policy priority, whether that is economic dynamism, social inclusivity, or cultural diversity. But our most important objection to these evaluation studies is that they ignore the most important form of knowledge which is generated within cultural civil society: the dynamics of adjustment, entry, and exit which happens within and between these groups. These dynamics reflect which practices individuals find valuable, and therefore join, which are being abandoned, and which new practices pop up. The responsiveness to changing values and the adaptiveness of cultural civil society is what gives it the strength, but it also generates knowledge about what is considered valuable. It is not only misguided to ignore this information, but also illustrates the dangers associated with external criteria drawn up by

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experts, which are given precedence over the choices made, and values pursued by artists and co-creative participants.

Making Space Means Fostering Diversity and Protecting Minorities A corollary of the idea that cultural policy should not attempt to settle which values are public is that it should not seek to establish what the identity of a particular society or community is through a system of ‘public art’. This idea is at once simple and radical because it questions the wisdom of both public statues which embody a national identity as well as the appropriateness of national or regional museums and similar organizations who claim to represent such identities. Do not take us the wrong way, we are not against art in public spaces or museums. But we believe that cultural policy should not be aimed at the content of national identity, rather, at creating a framework in which different values and identities are able to find a place next to each other, in co-existence. We believe that such a cultural policy framework should establish the preconditions for a cultural civil society in which dominant identities are contested, rather than cemented. To enable this co-existence, it is of prime importance to secure the freedom of association and to recognize the great heterogeneity in associational life. Our point is perhaps best illustrated by an analogy with the modern position of the state vis-à-vis religion. Liberal democratic theorists agree that the church and the state should be separated (Walzer 1984). Religious toleration was one of the first steps toward the liberal state. Initially, the state remained tied to one dominant religion but, over time, it came to recognize the importance of neutrality toward the different religions which people practiced (Kukathas 2003; Levy 2015; Johnson and Koyama 2019). One central implication of the idea of the separation of church and state is that the government should not grant privileges or directs its policies in favor of one or more (dominant) religious organizations. Another implication is that the state should ensure that religious minorities are free to associate and practice their beliefs. If the state is more activist in this regard, it might attempt to promote tolerant attitudes among its population. There are a few related implications such as that state power and religious positions of power should be separated, which are not as relevant for us here. It is believed that this separation does not only help secure religious freedom and freedom of conscience, but also fosters a diverse set

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of religious practices. Importantly, it limits the ability of powerful religious organizations to curb state policies in its favor. The analogy between art and religion makes little sense if we go along with the dominant understanding of the arts as the creative industries, recipient of public support to spur innovation, or the one that preceded it, as a sluggish economic sector in need of structural public support (Potts and Cunningham 1998). But if one accepts our understanding of the arts as essentially consisting of artistic communities organized within civil society, just like religious organizations, then the analogy is straightforward and logical. It is well recognized that civil society organizations are mostly self-sustaining (or at least they strive for self-sustenance), often idealistic in outlook, and a countervailing power to the state (Walzer 1991). We have demonstrated that the artistic practices are indeed driven by aesthetic as well as social and political ideals, that the circles in which creation and enjoyment of the arts happens are self-sustaining (although not every circle will sustain itself), and we have emphasized how their imagination frequently contests widely held or state-endorsed views. Most public policy aimed at the arts strongly privileges certain practices over others. It directly subsidizes prestigious art forms such as classical ballet, while it prosecutes others, for instance, graffiti or street art. It provides prestigious permanent places for some, such as the visual arts and classical monuments, while it ignores or marginalizes other forms of art. The state plays an important role in the choice of what is considered heritage and should therefore be preserved, and has frequently played a problematic role in the appropriation of heritage from outside the West. Traditionally, high art and art which glorified the national history has received the most support and attention from public policy, primarily in an effort to shape the perception of a national identity as part of a broader nation-building process (Aronsson and Elgenius 2014). Over time, this motivation was supplemented by the idea that the state had an important role to play in the artistic education of its citizens, the arts were socalled merit goods, which should be supported for the beneficial influence they would have on taste formation and aesthetic sensibility (Cwi 1980; Dekker 2017). This kind of policy has had the effect of strongly fortifying the position of high art and has contributed to sharp division especially in Europe between high and low art (Abbing 2019). The resulting privileges were financial support for some types of art, and an elevation of their status through inclusion in high prestige venues including state-funded or state-supported concert halls, theaters, city squares, and museums. Over

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time, it has also increased the dependence of high art on the state, which, to be clear, was fostered from both sides. Major art organizations developed strong ties with the state, and this probably also encouraged the strong anti-commercial attitude in these circles. More recently, the traditional high-art disciplines occupy a somewhat less prominent place. In the new perspective on the creative industries, the more applied forms of art such as design, digital art, architecture, and fashion have been considered a driver of economic growth, and jobs. They are believed to create spill-over effects which lead to more innovation in related sectors (Hesmondhalgh 2012). The reason to support these art forms has altered, it is now based on arguments about industrial policy and urban regeneration, and the resulting privileges are somewhat different. The primary way in which these art forms benefit is through public subsidies, access to research and innovation grants, and discounts or privileged access to prominent locations in major cities. The latter might be considered relatively benign compared to the social effect of the elevation in status of high art, but even former proponents of the promotion of the creative industries now recognize that it has exacerbated the process of gentrification (Florida 2017). The alternative is to ensure that cultural policy does not unduly privilege certain art forms and practices over others. It means ensuring that the state and the arts are separated, and that art is autonomous, or secular. Such a separation is often preached, and fortunately, most Western states have not engaged in extensive censorship of the arts in recent years. But on a practical level, these same governments have privileged certain forms of art over others, which has had significant crowding out effects. It crowds out the other art forms, because they are forced to compete with large, subsidized organizations. It pulls away artistic talent from other art forms. And significantly, it has also led to a situation in which private patronage of the arts has dwindled in most European States, whereas matters are somewhat different in the United States. Although it is impossible to know what the situation would have looked like without the extensive support of the past one hundred years, there is little historical evidence to suggest that the arts cannot thrive without state support. A discussion of crowding out effects leads naturally to the issue of the protection of minority rights. A significant part of the critique of major art organizations of the past two decades is that they have systematically, although not necessarily consciously, excluded minorities such as female artists and non-Western voices. The narratives they have told are alleged

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to have reinforced colonial attitudes and contributed to systematic racism. It is tempting to pick sides in this debate, like in the toppling of the statues which we discussed in Chapter 1. But it must be recognized that a major part of the problem has arisen because the institutional field in the arts has been dominated by large, subsidized organizations that, probably rightly so, are considered to tell the ‘official’ or ‘public’ narrative. This outsized role and official status is not just evident from the arguments of the critical activists, but also from the arguments by those who seek to defend traditional practices. These more conservative voices have claimed that when major organizations started making changes, or when governments founded grand alternative organizations such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, they caved into the pressure of relatively small groups of protestors. It is important to see that much of the problem arises from the very fact that the state is not merely providing a framework in which the arts can flourish, but that it is supporting specific organizations, which are then, justly or unjustly, considered to speak with the voice of the state, or ‘the public’. The alternative we propose is one of contestation in which different kinds of communities and organizations seek to realize diverse values, and in which they present rival, or complementary narratives about identity, history, aesthetics, and society. Frequently, this will practically mean that the government must get out of the way, but in other instances, it will also mean securing a framework in which a wide variety of practices has a chance to flourish. How extensive such a framework should be and to what extent it would require not merely the protection of minority rights, but also the support of minority voices is the subject to which we now turn.

Making Space: Marginal Improvements We started this book with a contrast between the interactive, temporary wrappings of the Christo’s and the stately colonial statues. The contrast illuminates well what making space means to us on a practical level. The project by the Jeanne-Claude and Christo was organized as a private undertaking, engaged many others, and created a temporary change in public space. Most of the public statues were erected, or at least maintained, by public authorities, sought to solidify a particular identity or narrative as the correct one, and had been around for decades, sometimes

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for more than a century. These examples represent two different ways of thinking about public space and co-existence. The contrast between the two is easily extended to different perspectives on a public square in the center of town. According to the traditional perspective, we would think of the square as the site of a prominent symbolic public sculpture, the entrance to an important historical landmark or museum and a name for the square which links it to the local or national history of the place. In the perspective we propose, we would think of the square as the potential site for diverse social practices around the arts throughout the year in a rotation system. We would emphasize the multiple social functions that the square would have at any moment in time. In the first image, the square would be picture perfect, ready to go on a postcard, in the second it would be closer to a canvas which would allow different artists and participants to draw on it. A square is a relevant space to imagine, precisely because cities are both an important site of artistic practices, as well as a place where the problem of co-existence is most pressing. Our case study of Venice showed how urgent the problem of the use of public space is, and how certain practices can be marginalized by dominant ones. In response, local communities of artists explored new forms of communities, and new forms of associational life. A good example of this desire and this type of imagination is that in recent years many in the art world have started using commons as a verb: commoning (Bollier and Helfrich 2015; Antonucci 2020). Scholars and artists use the verb to reimagine the management and use of both public and private spaces. They explore what difference it would make to the type of practices which would flourish if these places were organized as a commons and governed socially. It is an interesting transformation of the commons, which was used mostly to study the management of land and natural resources, and is now associated with urban social practices and knowledge-based activities (Hess and Ostrom 2006; Euler 2018). One reason why thinking of the square, and more broadly shared urban spaces as commons is illuminating, is that it draws attention to the need for rules to manage this resource. One only has to look at the steady rise of real estate prices in the major urban centers of the world, which reflected a steady growing demand to live there, to realize that cities and the social practices they enable have remained attractive, even in times of digitization and teleworking. But urban space is almost by definition shared space: in cities, there is more mixed use of space, people live much closer together, and roads and public transport are busy and lively or

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crowded. Economists are used to calling spill-over effects of exchanges or economic activities externalities, and cities are full of them. The positive externalities, the mosaic of art communities, attract many individuals, and tourists, to cities. But residents also experience negative externalities: noise, pollution, and congestion to name a few. Managing both positive and negative externalities is crucial but thinking only about externalities is easily limiting. An increasing number of scholars and activists have realized that city life has come to be dominated by the NIMBY-attitude, not in my backyard, which has stifled the ability of cities to remain dynamic and to welcome new residents. In response, they have started the counter-movement YIMBY, yes in my backyard, which imagines a city in which new developments and citizens are welcomed (Holleran 2022). The YIMBYs argue that (powerful) existing citizens frequently have obtained de-facto veto power about new development, frequently under the guise of preservation (heritage), sustainability, or zoning regulations (Swyngedouw 2005). They argue not merely for an overhaul of these regulations, but also for a more tolerant and open attitude which would return the former dynamism to the city and would allow a more diverse set of social practices to flourish. The goal of a more tolerant attitude of urban dwellers is essentially an appeal to them to focus on the positive and to ignore the negative externalities. The YIMBY movement is an exciting development which gives a practical meaning to the idea of creating space. It does so by thinking about better regulation, but also by thinking about new forms of transport and architecture which foster living together. But if we return to Venice, a city which now threatens to charge an entry fee to its historic center, we discover that openness alone cannot be the answer. Rules are necessary for the management of public space which many people would like to use at the same time. Our analysis of the civic, or underground, cultural civil society of Venice further illustrates the need for space. The artistrun-initiatives who felt they were crowded out of the heart of the city, reclaimed spaces, inspired by the ethic of the squatting movement. This is an interesting strategy in the short-run, and makes a powerful statement about the urgency of the problem, but it mostly demonstrates the need for a proper management of space, which cannot be only purely private or purely public in nature. Whether such places, aimed at artistic practices and communities, should be provided by the government is an open question to us.

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A study of some recent historical examples suggests that many thriving art scenes formed in places which were essentially neglected by government and private actors. Berlin after the fall of the wall is a good example. During this time, there were many abandoned spaces especially in former East Berlin, there was a lack of governance in certain neighborhoods, and new forms of interaction now that Berlin was reunited. These factors helped turn the city into a major hub of artistic activities (Denk and Thülen 2014). Another instance which comes readily to mind is New York in the 1970s and 80s which gave rise to hip-hop culture: rap, breakdance, graffiti, and dj-ing. These new art forms and practices emerged in neglected neighborhoods which suffered from high crime were partly abandoned, and therefore offered space for practices like major outdoor shows (Fricke and Ahearn 2002). At the same time, the circles in Berlin and New York overlapped sufficiently with, and were close enough to more established artistic practices and circles, which stimulated the further development of them (Chang 2007; Currid-Halkett 2020). It is questionable whether such conditions could be replicated through spatial planning. But the fact that these spaces were so successful demonstrates the resilience of social practices around the arts, which might not require much more than space and possibly some overlap with established organizations. It is tempting if one adopts our perspective of cultural civil society to think that public policy should support more marginal practices. In the current discourse, there is much attention to giving a voice to marginalized groups in society and to neglected artistic traditions. Some museums have organized exhibitions of outsider art, and artists operating outside of the traditional institutions. Our square metaphor above makes clear that providing space which can be used to practice the arts might fall within the scope of productive public policy. We could object on principled grounds that it would grant privileges to certain (marginalized) groups, and thus violates the separation of art and state we proposed. But there are also consequential reasons to be skeptical of such support. It is unclear whether public support and the associated institutionalization of the practice would not lead to a transformation of the practice itself, and the associated values. A good example of the dangers is visible in the way that many city governments have supported street artists to beautify the city. Many of the artists supported this way had their roots in graffiti and other forms of illicit artistic activity. The institutionalization and public support of such a practice is likely to

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transform the activity, a process recent research has termed ‘artwashing’ (Schacter 2014). It is likely to favor the contingent among the street artists whose work is less edgy or controversial or will motivate edgy artists to transform their work. Even when the risk of transformation of the artistic practice is limited, this policy approach risks ‘fixing in time and space’ what the art form is and which communities make it—and therefore who are entitled to support. The dynamism of cultural civil society we analyzed in this book precisely happens at areas of overlap and in the interaction between communities of artists, a process which will be undermined by this type of support. Not to mention that this type of public support is likely to lead to instrumentalization of the arts. Marginal communities might be better helped if they are enabled to self-organize, assisted by legal rules which help them to do so. Italy has made interesting steps in this direction by recognizing a wide variety of legal forms of civic organizations, such as volunteer organizations, associations for social promotion, philanthropic entities, social enterprises, associate networks, and mutual associations. These are different legal forms for NGOs, which provide a legal framework for different types of communities to govern themselves (Foster and Iaione 2015). This helps in the recognition of the diversity of civil society, and it offers opportunities for relatively informal communities such as artist-run initiatives to find appropriate legal forms. It might also help to level the playing field with larger cultural organizations which frequently benefit from attractive taxdeductible donations. It fosters social governance, through a supportive legal public framework. Since important parts of community life now take place online, a development further spurned on by the recent pandemic, it is also important to recognize new technological developments. There are many different initiatives to use digital financial tools and infrastructures which lower the costs of self-governance to form new communities online, as we saw in the crowdfunding campaign of the Brazilian Queer Museum. Lowering the costs of self-governance as well as resource-sharing is likely to lead to an even livelier community life online, and is comparable in its effects to lowering the legal costs of forming organizations. In a recent development, many of the Venetian collectives we discussed in the previous chapter converged on a newly established online platform, Come Come. They recognized that they shared crucial values regarding the transformation of their city, and hope that this platform helps them to be recognized

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by Venice’s urbanites and policymakers. At the same time, the digital platform allows for distinctions between the artistic agendas of the different collectives. Come Come is still in its infancy and whether it will be sustained and what it will become in the future is not yet clear. But it is important to point out that one motivation for civil society collectives to organize is to influence public policy in their favor. If that is done in the broad sense of critiquing existing privileges of the dominant commercial or public organizations, there is nothing wrong with it. But it might turn into a lobbying organization aimed at securing similar privileges for itself. Just like government policy has led to the instrumentalization of art, so cultural organizations can attempt to use the (local) government as an instrument to pursue their own gain. This is a significant danger, especially when done by prestigious and well-established cultural organizations. The government should be as unresponsive as possible to such lobbying attempts. The public choice literature has argued that this is best done through the creation of a framework consisting of general rules (Buchanan and Brennan 1985). It is to be hoped that a clear legal framework, a diversity of organizational forms, and the new digital possibilities do not merely inspire new attempts to lobby policymakers, but instead stimulate artists and other civil society actors to imagine new social worlds. A flourishing cultural civil society is ultimately dependent on the initiatives of artists and participants. Public policy can help create an environment in which circles and communities can flourish, but it cannot bring them into existence. Our pragmatic perspective, which starts from the values which artists and participants seek to realize, is interested in enabling social practices. This should not just be oriented toward changing public policies, but also toward finding new and better ways of social governance, which enables communities to govern themselves.

References Abbing, Hans. 2019. The Changing Social Economy of Art: Are the Arts Becoming Less Exclusive? Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-216 68-9. Aligica, Paul Dragos, Peter J. Boettke, and Vlad Tarko. 2019. Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Antonucci, Federica. 2020. “From Urban Commons to Commoning as Social Practice.” In Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Emanuela Macrì, Valeria Morea, and Michele Trimarchi, 189–203. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-54418-8_12. Aronsson, Peter, and Gabriella Elgenius. 2014. National Museums and NationBuilding in Europe 1750–2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change. London: Routledge. Balisciano, Marcia L., and Steven G. Medema. 1999. “Positive Science, Normative Man: Lionel Robbins and the Political Economy of Art.” History of Political Economy 31 (Supplement): 256–84. Belfiore, Eleonora. 2021. “Is It Really about the Evidence? Argument, Persuasion, and the Power of Ideas in Cultural Policy.” Cultural Trends, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2021.1991230. Bollier, David, and Silke Helfrich. 2015. Patterns of Commoning. Commons Strategy Group. Bozeman, Barry. 2007. Public Values and Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Buchanan, James M, and Geoffrey Brennan. 1985. The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Chang, Jeff. 2007. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St Martin’s Press. Coffield, Emma Jane. 2015. “Artist-Run Initiatives: A Study of Cultural Construction.” Newcastle: Newcastle University. http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/ jspui/handle/10443/3026. Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth. 2020. The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cwi, David. 1980. “Public Support of the Arts: Three Arguments Examined.” Journal of Cultural Economics 4 (2): 39–68. Dekker, Erwin. 2017. “The Economic De-Legitimization and Legitimization of Arts Policies.” In History of Economic Rationalities: Economic Reasoning as Knowledge and Practice Authority, edited by C. O. Christiansen and S. G. Jacobsen, 113-20. New York: Springer. Denk, Felix, and Sven von Thülen. 2014. Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall. Norderstedt: BoD – Books on Demand. Dewey, John. 1939. Creative Democracy: The Task before Us. Columbus, OH: American Education Press. Euler, Johannes. 2018. “Conceptualizing the Commons: Moving Beyond the Goods-Based Definition by Introducing the Social Practices of Commoning

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as Vital Determinant.” Ecological Economics 143 (January): 10–16. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.06.020. Florida, Richard. 2017. The New Urban Crisis. New York: Basic Books. Foster, Sheila R., and Christian Iaione. 2015. “The City as a Commons.” Yale Law & Policy Review 34 (2): 281–350. Frey, Bruno S. 2003. Arts & Economics: Analysis and Cultural Policy. Berlin: Springer. Fricke, Jim, and Charlie Ahearn. 2002. Yes, Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project-Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Gaus, Gerald. 2010. The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511780844. Gray, John. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: Polity Press. Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–30. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2012. The Cultural Industries, Third edition. London: Sage Publications. Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom. 2006. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons from Theory to Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi. org/10.1002/asi.20747. Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Holleran, Max. 2022. Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing. Yes to the City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9780691234717. Johnson, Noel D., and Mark Koyama. 2019. Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kukathas, Chandran. 2003. The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, Jacob T. 2015. Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ostrom, Elinor. 2010. “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” American Economic Review 100: 641–72. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.1. Petrova, Lyudmila, Susana Graça, and Arjo Klamer. 2022. “Evaluating Qualities of Cultural Production: A Value-Based Approach.” Media Practice and Education 23 (2): 112–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2022.205 6793. Potts, Jason, and Stuart Cunningham. 1998. Four Models of the Creative Industries. London: Routledge.

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Robbins, Lionel R. 1963. “Art and the State.” In Politics and Economics: Papers in Political Economy, 53–72. London: Macmillan. Schacter, Rafael. 2014. “The Ugly Truth: Street Art, Graffiti and the Creative City.” Art & the Public Sphere 3 (2): 161–76. https://doi.org/10.1386/aps. 3.2.161_1. Silvertown, Jonathan. 2009. “A New Dawn for Citizen Science.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24 (9): 467–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009. 03.017. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2005. “Governance Innovation and the Citizen: The Janus Face of Governance-beyond-the-State.” Urban Studies 42 (11): 1991–2006. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500279869. Timms, Edward. 2005. Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist. The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven: Yale University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1984. “Liberalism and the Art of Separation.” Political Theory 12 (3): 315–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591784012003001. ———. 1991. “The Civil Society Argument.” Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift 94: 1– 11. Won, Youn Sun, and Arjo Klamer. 2021. “Understanding Different Qualities of the Knowledge Commons in Contemporary Cities.” In Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons, edited by Erwin Dekker and Pavel Kuchaˇr, 256–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/978110 8692915.013.

CHAPTER 6

Epilogue: Imagining a Heterotopia

Abstract In this chapter we contrast marginal improvements in public policy with the radical alternative of a heterotopia based on the work of Michel Foucault and Robert Nozick. Artistic communities explore and imagine alternative social worlds which function as experiments in living and challenge the status quo, a process for which we believe there should be as much space as possible. This space can exist at the fringes of society and in largely neglected urban areas. But we argue that their function is not primarily as alternative space, rather as an integrated part of civil society in which they function as genuine and (semi-)permanent alternatives to established forms of living. This will require a sufficient degree of self-organization and self-governance for which it is important that public policy provides adequate legal forms which facilitate the formation of self-governing communities. We explore the challenges that such forms of self-governance within an urban setting face through an analysis of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen. Keywords Heterotopia · Christiania · Cultural civil society · Urban commons · Utopia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_6

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Public policy discussions are by their very nature about the realization of incremental change. They take the status quo into account and explore what can be changed at the margin. Since this book has relied on (neo-) pragmatism, it is fair to suggest we should do the same. John Dewey, however, showed some hints of radicalism, he was in favor of experimentation and explored what a ‘creative democracy’ could and should be. Moreover, imagination has been one of the major themes of this book. So, at the end of it, we think it is a good idea to put the pragmatic impulses to the side for a moment, and imagine what a world would look like in which cultural civil society had the space we suggest it should have. Western societies take pride in their individualism and their freedom of association but, paradoxically, they have produced relatively little actual difference and diversity. Critical theorists have often lamented bourgeois culture and its uniformity. Around the cultural revolution of 1968, radical philosophers on both the left and the right started to imagine what a society which was less uniform, less bourgeois would look like. They drew attention to the position and culture of marginalized groups in society, and they criticized existing hierarchies in the arts, especially the sharp distinction between high art and popular art. Their appreciation of popular art went hand in hand with a revaluation of folk art and amateur practices. They wanted to imagine a society which was more diverse and less hierarchical. But they did so with an awareness that the big utopian blueprints of the twentieth century had failed. On the left, Michel Foucault was one of the prominent voices, who explored what he called heterotopia, places which were different: “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia” (Foucault 1967/1986, 24). Foucault explored spaces such as cemeteries, prisons, saunas, boarding schools, motels, and colonies. One reason why such places were different was because they were different in function, but for Foucault they were primarily of interest because they functioned as an experimental or realized alternative to society. Because they provided an insight into different forms of living together. Although Foucault left the concept of heterotopia somewhat underdeveloped, it gained popularity among geographers and social scientists interested in the spatial elements of knowledge, power, and difference. While they do not all use the concept in the same way, heterotopia is meant as “a starting point for imagining, inventing and diversifying space” (Johnson 2013, 801). Foucault was concerned with the way that power, both explicit and implicit, shapes human behavior, and the idea behind

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a heterotopia is to design spaces, so that they make difference and a heterogeneity of practices possible. A few years after Foucault worked on the idea of heterotopia, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick published his landmark Anarchy, State and Utopia. The frequently neglected third part of that book explores a utopia, which is not imperialistic, in that it seeks to enforce its ideals with violence, nor missionary, in that it seeks to convince everyone of its superiority. Instead, Nozick argued for an: “existential utopianism, which hopes that a particular pattern of community will exist (will be viable), though not necessarily universally, so that those who wish to do so may live in accordance with it” (Nozick 1974, 290). His utopia is in an important sense empty, it consists of a minimal legal framework in which individuals can engage in their own experiments in living. Some experiments will succeed and attract new members; others will fail and disappear. These communities will enjoy a large degree of self-governance, can design their own rules, and may of course realize their own values. Both the vision of Foucault and Nozick contain a degree of realism, and a suspicion of comprehensive utopian visions. Experiments in living must work for Nozick, although he regards the initial situation as a blank slate. Spaces must allow for difference, which includes the ability to exclude others, for Foucault. They can be functionally differentiated, or along differences in values as we have proposed in this book. For Foucault, the difference almost seems a goal, while Nozick regards the search for the good community as a kind of competitive process between different experiments, although he appears convinced that no experiment will be universally superior. For Foucault, there is a degree of liminality to the heterotopia, they stand outside everyday life, while Nozick is interested in different forms of everyday living within mainstream society. Our current societies are already plural and heterogenous. Our case studies have demonstrated that even marginal communities manage to find organizational forms to develop practices around the art. Some artistic communities even derive their identity, in part, from operating at the margin, in opposition to a dominant or hegemonic power. Possibly that is the way it is always going to be. The contestation about values which we identified as central in the process of value discovery should not be imagined as only a rosy civil conversation between (near-) equals, but will involve competition, strive, power imbalances, and quite possibly deep conflict.

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But Foucault and Nozick make us reconsider, they ask us whether a good deal of the current power imbalance between cultural civil society and institutionalized and subsidized art, as well as the relative weakness of civil society vis-à-vis major commercial forces is a result of structural factors. Current organizations might systematically crowd-out and disadvantage bottom-up artistic initiatives and collectives, and continually favor the status quo over change. This has potentially blocked the ability of art to remain dynamic, and to be a constitutive element of civil society. The communities we have studied might be little more than pockets of creativity, which exist despite these hegemonic forces. If so, our current civil society is both underdeveloped and far less diverse than it could be. There are good reasons to believe this is the case, if we analyze the social developments since 1968. An increasing number of ethnic, gender, racial, and social minorities are making themselves heard, and have demanded more space for their own practices. A heterotopia would be an alternative world in which squares and piazzas are no longer occupied with publicly commissioned art, but with diverse social practices. In which the state would not seek to define what the national identity was, but one in which local, regional, national, and global identities would emerge from the heterogenous practices in cultural civil society. A place in which individuals would tolerate, and sometimes even welcome the contestation from rival practices around the arts. A world in which individuals engage in artistic practices of their choice and where they are able to develop identities of their choosing. A heterotopia would be a world in which there was ample space for individuals to associate freely and where creativity resulted from the interaction of many different personalities and voices. In which the arts are not an instrument toward some other social goal, but a constitutive element of civil society and the polity. To some, our call for a heterotopia might sound too radical, they might think that our call echoes a perpetual Burning Man festival, the infamous week-long event which occupies an otherwise desolate piece of desert in Nevada, where people gather and co-create, experiment, reimagine their world, and create their own festival from scratch, every year anew. It ends, as the name suggests, with an act of destruction, the burning of that which was constructed during the week. There are various reasons why that is a bad analogy. First, the Burning Man festival is a liminal event, detached from usual space and time, much like the contemporary dance festivals we discussed in Chapter 4. While

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interesting as a site of experimentation, it derives much of its attraction from being outside of society. Most of the artistic communities which make up cultural civil society are, to the contrary, constitutive of the identities of individuals and integrated in everyday life. In our perspective, cultural events are not so much interesting as leisure or consumption, but rather as sources of identity and community. Although with Foucault we have to recognize that they might exist at the fringes of society and not always in the mainstream. The idea of the destruction of the old was a prominent theme of the modernists, for instance, the Futurists who wanted to destroy the old, and erect new cities every decade. This is mirrored in the bonfires at Burning Man. Making space is important, but as we have argued in Chapter 3, it is just as important to realize that creativity is a social process which happens in constant conversation with traditions. The idea that the new can best be created on a blank slate is a variation on the theme of the lone genius creating in isolation. Heritage, both built heritage and lived heritage in the form of practices, is an important component of any cultural civil society. As we stressed, values are both cultivated and imagined. At the same time, it is important to realize that current policy almost invariably errs in the direction of overprotection of what is. It seeks to preserve the old and stifles change. The UNESCO World Heritage list is the embodiment of the idea that art and culture are something created in the past and best admired from afar, rather than something which should be practiced, and which should evolve. The opposite of this status is the dynamism of cultural civil society, which is always evolving, either at the fringes, or at the heart of society. It is in constant conversation with mainstream institutions and with challenges from within, therefore it needs to adapt, adjust, and improve to stay in place. A good example of this dynamism and the self-governance of cultural civil society is Freetown Christiania. This small community of less than a thousand residents in Copenhagen came about in 1971 after the occupation of a closed military area in the city center. For some time, it was regarded by the Danish government as a ‘social experiment’, and they did not interfere. The residents of Christiania experimented with self-governance, which included housing, waste collection, education, and business activities. Freetown Christiania became a magnet for artists and an important site of urban counterculture, where anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer networks converged to coordinate their activities aimed

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at social change and where marginalized individuals such as the homeless and addicts could find a place to live. The residents of the Freetown soon realized that it could not be a free for all, an issue which became more pressing when ten people died of drug overdose in 1979. The residents organized actions to combat the use and sale of hard drugs. Christiania has been described as the politics of open space, through a combination of “the occupation of a material public space and the formation of a counter-public sphere” (Thörn 2012, 157). This counter-public sphere was symbolized by a flag and national anthem, and there were attempts to develop an own language and currency. They also started transforming and adding to the buildings of the former military site. Their projects and practices of living and governing were driven by the values of solidarity, horizontality, and openness. These features make Christiania the case of an enacted utopia in the sense of Nozick’s experiments in living. But also a case of a Foucauldian heterotopia, a space of difference and exclusion of nonparticipants, yet connected with the outside, since it is located in central Copenhagen. Christiania’s connection with the outside is visible not just through its dependence on the external world for (some) public services, but also because tourism to Christiania has become a major source of revenue. The tourists are attracted by the diversity of the creative and artistic scene, in fact, this hippie enclave is listed in every guide as one of the must-see sites in Copenhagen, and the city organizes guided tours through the micronation. Today about five-hundred-thousand people visit Freetown each year. In this sense, it has become an integral part of the city, and not just an enclave of difference. The city as well as Christiania have struggled all the while with the question of governance. It took until 1989 before the parliament officially recognized the Freetown as legitimate, after Christiania had demonstrated a willingness to seriously govern its own space. But this in no way ended the struggle between self- and public governance. Over the years, there have been repeated attempts to interfere with the activities in Christiania by the police, frequently over drugs and the open cannabis trade on Pusher Street. In the past twenty years, there have also been legal struggles over who owns the land and the extent to which Danish law applies to Christiania. In 2011, an agreement between the Danish state and the Christiania Negotiating Group set off a process of the ‘normalization’ of Freetown. The land was bought by the newly established Christiania Foundation, which shifted the governance model considerably, from one

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based on communal land ownership to one based on private land ownership. The residents of Christiania reacted to this important change in the governance of their town in different ways. Some considered the agreement a victory after years of legal uncertainty. Others feared that the agreement would spur the process of gentrification, commodification, and Disneyfication of Christiania, and drive out the weakest members of the community (Coppola and Vanolo 2015; Jarvis 2017). The self-proclaimed, autonomous, and often illegal, community of Christiania sought to preserve their self-governance. But the nature of their community and the activities of the residents generated externalities. In the first decades, these were considered primarily negative, like the sale and use of drugs as well as the deviant lifestyles of the residents. In more recent years, positive externalities have been recognized, such as the tourism and business opportunities which emerged in the area, and Christiania got the attention of mainstream institutions. When selfgoverning communities are too successful, the local authorities will likely find ways to coopt the initiative and encroach upon the self-governance of the community. If the community, on the other hand, generates what are regarded as mostly negative externalities, its legitimacy and ability to self-govern will be limited. In this sense, there is currently little space for self-governance, and Christiania has adapted surprisingly well to the challenges it encountered over the past fifty years. It is a testament to the resilience of cultural civil society, as well as a demonstration of the need for creating space in our cultural policy frameworks for self-governance. Our argument for co-existence of multiple diverse and sometimes antagonistic social practices around the art, which should provide a counterbalance to the powerful, homogenizing mainstream institutions, must thread the narrow path between a lack of legitimacy and co-optation. Self-governance is not easy, and it is unlikely that public authorities will welcome it in all instances. It brings responsibilities to the communities seeking to do so. Even in less contested arenas than Christiania, it is ultimately up to social entrepreneurs and artists to make the most of the opportunities which exist to develop new initiatives in cultural civil society. What this will look like cannot be imagined beforehand. As John Dewey argued the question about the ideal society: “cannot be answered by argument. Experimental method means experiment, and the question can be answered only by trying, by organized effort” (Dewey 1935, 92). So, let us try.

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References Coppola, Alessandro, and Alberto Vanolo. 2015. “Normalising Autonomous Spaces: Ongoing Transformations in Christiania, Copenhagen.” Urban Studies 52 (6): 1152–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014532852. Dewey, John. 1935. Liberalism and Social Action. New York: Capricorn Books. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. Jarvis, Helen. 2017. “Christiania’s Place in the World of Travelling Ideas: Sharing Informal Liveability.” Nordisk Arkitekturforskning 29 (2): 113–36. Johnson, Peter. 2013. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7 (11): 790–803. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12079. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State & Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Thörn, Håkan. 2012. “In between Social Engineering and Gentrification: Urban Restructuring, Social Movements, and the Place Politics of Open Space.” Journal of Urban Affairs 34 (2): 153–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679906.2012.00608.x.

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Index

A Aesthetics, vii, 5, 117 Amateurs, viii, 53, 95, 128 Anderson, Benedict, 68 Arc de Triomphe, 2, 3 Artistic circles, 56, 57, 62, 105 Artist-run-initiatives, 102, 119 Audience, 4, 18, 22, 24, 25, 32, 50, 52, 58, 62, 67, 75, 77–80, 87

B Ballet, 49, 85, 101, 115 Baxandall, Michael, 5, 6, 17, 22 Becker, Gary, 24, 76 Becker, Howard, 24, 39, 56, 57 Beckert, Jens, 9, 29, 59 Berger, Peter, 15 Berlin, 2, 94, 120 Boas, Franziska, 82, 85 Boltanski, Luc, 15, 16, 27–31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27, 42, 76 Buck-Morss, Susan, 59, 60

Burning Man Festival, 130, 131

C Callard, Agnes, 38, 39, 41, 42, 59 Capital of Culture, 7 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2–6, 12, 58, 94, 117 Classical music, vi, 78, 101 Co-creation, viii, 9, 12, 17, 51, 74, 77, 80–82, 85, 86, 89, 90, 105 Co-creative communities, 75, 95, 101, 112, 114 Co-existence (peaceful), 9, 13, 100, 108, 114, 118 Collins, Randall, 24, 50, 54, 84 Colonialism, 10, 11, 107, 108, 117 Conflict of values, vi, 9, 25, 28, 41, 109, 110, 112 Consumption capital, 76, 80, 81 Contestability, 14, 92, 100, 106, 112 Contestation, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13–15, 41, 91, 106, 112, 117, 129, 130

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art, Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5

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148

INDEX

Contribution goods, 9, 51 Co-optation, vii, 7, 133 Creative class, v, 7, 102 Credence goods, 80 Cultural and Creative City Monitor (European), 102, 103 Cultural capital, 42, 76 Cultural civil society, vii, viii, 4, 9, 13, 18, 54, 64, 68, 85, 93, 95, 100–102, 104–106, 110, 112–114, 119–122, 128, 130, 131 Cultural economics, ix, 5 Cultural economy, 56, 64, 103 Culture of appreciation, 49, 81, 88, 89

D Dance, 74, 81–85, 111, 130 Dewey, John, 6, 14, 18, 23, 29, 30, 57, 74–76, 108–110, 112, 128 Dispersed museum, 91, 94 Durkheim, Emile, 83

E Economic impact, vi, vii, 7, 113 Ends-in-view, 23, 26, 27, 31, 38 Entrepreneurs (cultural), 50 Evaluation, 17, 29, 93, 102–104, 113 Experience goods, 40, 75, 80 Externalities, 89, 109, 112, 119, 133

F Fandom, 87–89, 94 Film, 48, 75, 101 Florence, 50, 102 Florida, Richard, 7, 102, 116 Floyd, George, 10 Foreign Exchange, 36 Foucault, Michel, 128–132

Freedom of association, 114, 128 Frey, Bruno, v, ix, 94, 101

G George Mason University, 110 Graffiti, 7, 115, 120 Gray, John, 109

H Hanna, Judith, 82, 85, 111 Hayek, Friedrich A., 24, 30, 54, 113 Heritage, viii, 25, 68, 94, 115, 119, 131 Heterogeneity, viii, 6, 28, 41, 85, 95, 109, 114 Heterotopia, 128–130 High art, vi, 48, 79, 115, 116, 128 Hip-hop, 31–38, 40, 94, 120 Hutter, Michael, ix, 9, 29, 40, 75, 77

I Identity, vii, 10, 14, 15, 25, 26, 36, 54, 86, 92, 95, 100, 106, 107, 112, 114, 115, 117, 129–131 Imagination, vii, 6, 14, 17, 48, 56, 57, 59–62, 64, 67, 68, 75, 86, 88, 89, 93, 106, 115, 118, 128 Imagined futures, 14, 59 Impact (of the arts), vi, vii, 113 Impact, measurement of, vi, viii, 18, 77–79, 113 Imposter syndrome, 41 Innovation commons, 51, 95, 106 Institutional diversity, 90, 92, 101 Instrumentalization of art, vii, 7, 8, 121, 122

J Jam sessions, 52, 57

INDEX

Jazz, 52, 53, 57 Justification, 15, 16, 25, 29

K Klamer, Arjo, 9, 23, 26, 31, 40, 51, 53, 103, 104 Kopytoff, Igor, 4

L Lavoie, Don, 16 Little Brother, 31–33, 36–39 London, v, 107

M Markets, 9, 22, 24, 25, 31, 51, 77, 80, 93, 95, 101, 102, 109, 113 McCloskey, Deirdre, 15 Medici family, 8, 50 Menger, Carl, 29 Merit goods, 115 Minorities (cultural), 114, 116, 130 Modern art, 8 Modernism, 59, 60 Modus vivendi liberalism, 109

N Neglect (as policy), 10, 120 New York, 2, 50, 52, 56, 120 Nozick, Robert, 129, 130, 132

O Opera, 39, 40, 78 Ostrom, Elinor, 15, 77, 93, 101, 109

P Paris, 2, 3, 50, 102

149

Participants (audience as), 9, 51, 53, 56, 74, 76–78, 80, 83, 93, 95, 114, 118, 122 Phonte, 22, 31–34, 36–41, 94 Plays. See Theater Post-modernism, vi, 60, 63 Potts, Jason, 26, 51–53, 115 Pragmatism, 6, 14–16, 18, 23, 25, 29, 41, 122, 128 Praxis, 26 Production (artistic), ix, 9, 24, 49–51, 54, 56, 64, 65, 74, 77, 87, 88, 93, 105, 113 Public good, 9, 25, 51, 77, 107 Public interest, 108, 113 Public space, 3, 4, 11, 14, 15, 65, 103, 106, 117–119 Public statues, 10 Public support, vii, 91, 107, 115, 120, 121 Public values, 5, 108–110, 112 Purpose, 4, 17, 37, 40, 41, 57, 65

Q Queer Museum in Brazil, 74, 90–92, 94, 95, 106, 121

R Rational choice theory, 23 Renaissance, 8, 49, 50, 58 Robbins, Lionel, 109

S Schütz, Alfred, 15 Scitovsky, Tibor, 40 Scott, James C., 60 Sense of belonging, 5, 88 Signaling, 15, 41, 42 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 16 Social impact, 7, 113

150

INDEX

Socialism, 8 Sociology, ix, 9, 15, 24, 54, 93 Solitary genius (myth of), 48 Spill-over effects, vii, 7, 116, 119 Square (public), 2, 14, 65, 66, 118, 120 Stark, David, 9, 14, 30, 91 Star Trek, 74, 86–89, 93–95 Star Wars, 88, 89 Stravinsky, Igor, 49

V Value learning, 22, 24, 40, 63, 112 Value orientation, 17, 22, 93, 106 Value realization, vii, viii, 4–6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 22, 28, 38, 74, 77, 80, 86, 93, 104, 112, 128 Veblen, Thorstein, 26 Venice, 48, 63–68, 74, 88, 93, 103, 105, 106, 118, 119, 121, 122 Visual arts, vi, 54, 79, 101, 115

T Theater, 48, 76, 78 Timms, Edward, 54, 104 Tourism, 64, 65, 67, 68, 94 Transcendental values, vii, 23, 31, 38, 50, 58, 104 Tribe Called Quest, A, 31, 34, 39 Tubman, Harriet, 11

W Work (artistic), 27, 75 Workshop (bottega), 49 Worlding, 67, 68

Z Zelizer, Viviana, 15