Incipit
The first post of this blog describes the focus of the NAN event in France, The Artist As Social Entrepreneur. During the event, organised by NAN and Fabrica, Brighton, which involved 15 artists from all around the UK and several artists from France and Belgium, a discussion was made around these points:
On both sides of the Channel, the past twenty years have witnessed the emergence, consolidation and networking of more or less loosely knit associative structures in the field of the visual arts, opening up production, residency and exhibition spaces outside of the established museum and market circuit. The very proliferation of these artist-run spaces, their proximity to often experimental practices, and their hard-nosed determination to withstand the pressures of time and under-funding underscore the extent to which they have managed to offset a palpable deficiency in the institutional artworld. Yet, as they become in their own right full-fledged “social enterprises”, fostering new practices and activities in the creative economy, are these structures not at risk of falling prey to their own success? For better or for worse, have they not already acquired a “proto-institutional” status? Is it their role, their ambition, their fate to operate as “laboratories” and proving grounds for the market and the museums, participating in producing a value that ultimately eludes their capture? It is these questions regarding the paradoxes and the future of these associative structures which will be discussed. Above all, perhaps, in order to deploy these questions in the very place where the institutional market would be inclined to impose its solution.
On our return from France, I felt the urge to start a blog about the issues discussed. What are the political implications of the idea of artists as social entrepreneurs? Can this idea be parallel to the idea of capitalism and reappropriate the word to give it a less self-centred, more ideas-centred meaning?
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