Contemporary Views
Hashtag Art and the Immersive Artistic Turn
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Lee
I investigate the interface between social media and art through emphasis on the recent worldwide trend of experiential art: immersive art parks that transport viewers into an alternative visual universe. These spaces have attained prominence in large part because visitors take and post selfies from within them, reaching huge numbers of mainstream viewers as they bypass the art establishment and flout its staid sensibility. While museums have welcomed immersive art alongside more traditional programming, scholarship has been slow to analyze its unique aesthetic characteristics or interrogate it as a new form holding significance for art spectatorship and the role of art in society more broadly. I argue that these spectacle environments exemplify contemporary art’s convergence with popular visuality through their privileging of play and mobilization of the interactive structures that characterize technologized life. I introduce the concept of “hashtag art” to describe how lay viewers democratize art by incorporating it into quotidian life through the daily image acts of social media. I additionally extend Miriam Hansen’s conceptualization of cinema as a “play-form” of technology that articulated and negotiated modernity by adapting the viewer’s sensorium to the technologically-changed environment. I apply this aesthetic of play to the present to explore how spectacle art integrates marked visual experiences into technologized life through the proliferation of selfies across social media. In so doing, I point to the critical significance of play, which has been an underrepresented dimension of art spectatorship, as I also draw attention to art’s changing function as a popular form.
Art History as Heritage Discourse
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Carrasco
In this paper I advance the position that art history ought to be reframed as a heritage discourse. I contend that viewing art history through a critical cultural heritage studies lens erodes the naturalness of the discipline’s categories that developed during its global expansion and consolidation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its definition of “Art.” In doing so this paper elaborates a methodology for approaching culturally diverse aesthetic systems that have historically been relegated to the margins of the field and/or seen as existing in the past, and it highlights how such marginalized traditions—including those labeled as “traditional,” “primitive,” and non-western, among others, or placed into the genres of craft, folk, or tourist art—are intrinsically part of modernity and the contemporary moment. All too often, when these categories are discussed or brought into the art historical narrative they must conform to certain expectations or be recontextualized within dominant Euro-American conceptions of “Art.” A critical heritage perspective reveals this and the continued dominance of particular genres, representational formats, and viewing practices. It also sheds light on structural inequalities both in the public perception of art—what constitutes “Art”—and the academic discourse on “Art.” Thus, the primary goals of the proposed alternative approach are to: (1) identify traditional art history as historically-contingent “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006); (2) expand the academic and popular engagement with other aesthetic traditions; and (3) understand their position within the contemporary global art system.
Trust as Viability: How an Online Outcomes-focused Cultural Activity Planner Helped to Deepen Trust between a City-based Funder and a Regional Arts Producer
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nathan Stoneham
This paper explores a case study where adoption of an online outcomes focused cultural activity planning and evaluation platform unexpectedly contributed to a deepening of trust between a city-based corporate funder and a regional arts producer working in a suburban area of the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. Interviews with stakeholders revealed that the platform, together with the trust that it helped to cultivate, supported a creative, responsive, and flexible community arts and cultural development project that achieved cultural and social outcomes for local young people considered disadvantaged while working towards the funder’s global goal to enable social equity. The case study suggests that when funders are removed from the contexts where activities will be delivered, a trusting relationship spanning geographic and socio-cultural divides can encourage mutually beneficial collaboration, reduce rigidity to allow an emergent strategy, and achieve impactful community-determined arts and cultural activity.
