Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0003-2646-2804

Document Type

Conference Paper

Disciplines

5.6 POLITICAL SCIENCE, Philosophy,, 6.4 ART, Arts, 6.5 OTHER HUMANITIES

Publication Details

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.eurosa.org/volumes/7/ESA-Proc-7-2015-Aesthetics-Group.pdf

doi:10.21427/n48f-4c62

Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years aesthetic practice, theory and Arts policy in Europe and North America has been subject to three different yet interrelated and international “turns”: creative, social and ethical this has been exemplified by Arts funding policy in Ireland. Combined, these three turns produce a tone of cultural production that is pitched toward a more measurable and overtly instrumental direction. This paper explores the trends regarding the critical terms of instrumentality and autonomy and their relevance to arguments relating to criteria employed in current Irish Arts funding policy. We argue that that existing Arts funding criteria relegates the autonomy of the domain of the amateur by instrumentalising “professional” practice through criteria of “quality” and “excellence.” We outline the history of Arts policy in Ireland in its journey towards an explicit and totalising economisation of the Arts characteristic of “the creative turn.” Our analysis of this turn is informed by the two other turns. We highlight the debate between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester as representative of the discourse surrounding the autonomy of consumption advocated in “the social turn.” We also examine the notion of participation and the strict regulation of roles envisioned in “the ethical turn.” Here we employ Jacques Rancière’s conceptual resistance to the notion of autonomy in aesthetics as the basis of our critique of these turns which we see as promoting a contestable instrumentalisation of the Arts in Austerity Ireland.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/n48f-4c62

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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