PHILOSOPHY / ART

Nina Mihaljinac, Bojana Matejić, Milan Đorđević (eds.)

ANOTHER ARTWORLD:

PURSUING NEW ORGANISATIONAL MODES

Published in association with Atropos Press Balkans (APB), Belgrade, Serbia, 2023

Hardcovers |278 pages| ISBN 978-86-82604-01-3

The twelve chapters of Another Artworld: Pursuing New Organisational Modes embody a critical analysis of artistic creation and its public in the contemporary art world while exploring ways to overcome the de facto dictum of entrepreneurship in the global art markets. These essays, written by scholars with a variety of specializations in the artworld, question existing governance principles and decision-making models in the visual arts. They also question the humanist thesis that artistic labor is a non-utilitarian human activity, the opposite of work, in service only of self-fulfillment and personal, expressive needs (i.e., art for art’s sake).

“If you are participating in the (visual) art world(s), ask yourself the question: Who needs an (arts) organisation? This may be the book for you. Questioning the structures of art creation in capitalist realism as a context, the authors of the twelve chapters of this book are helping us with the interrogation of existing and the quest for new organisational models in the arts.
”
— Dr Aleksandar Brkić Programme Director MA Arts Administration and Cultural Policy Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (ICCE) Goldsmiths, University of London

MORE ABOUT ANOTHER ARTWORLD:

The neoliberal thesis of art-as-commodity masks the political economy obscuring the extraction of surplus value from contemporary participatory art and collaborative modes of working. In the present economic climate of financialized capitalism, the product of artistic work, individual or collaborative, is seen exclusively as a product to be valued within an asset class and traded in the marketplace (financialized). Many states which previously supported the productive art community in equitable proportion to its significant contribution to cultural wellbeing and development, now lean rather on the entrepreneurial potential in this global marketplace, whether it exists or not. Such policies and practices have led to a critical lack of support for artists as a consequence of the misapplication of dubious market principles to what is essentially an organic cultural endeavor embedded in society as a component of its meaningful and cohesive existence.

Rather than confronting the reality of the state’s lack of enrichment and development of artists and their community involvement in emerging economies such as we find in Serbia, the economic hardships in which artwork takes place have typically been discussed only as symptomatic of an underdeveloped art market. The anomalous social manipulation of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that both in neoliberal capitalist countries and on their geopolitical periphery, art has become the elite priviledge of materially secure individuals rather than the common heritage and birthright of all citizens.