31.
Facing Art: New Ethnographic Approaches to Art Worlds
wolbert@mail.utexas.edu, wolbert@euv-frankfurt-o.de
Discussant:
Maruska Svasek, Queen’s University Belfast
Today,
artworks, technology, corporate sponsors, and general audiences are blended
into mega-events which have become significant features of national politics
and regional development. Art exhibitions and concerts have become a form of
minority politics. Artists’ activities foster local identity processes.
Art performances and installations play a mediating role in the
environmentalist movement.
Anthropologists
have investigated consumer culture, narrowed in on regions and cities, studied
economic strategies, and written about museums and identity. But, by and large,
they have avoided art. Art anthropologists, many of them still oriented towards
non-Western art and artifacts, have also been reluctant to face these connections.
Only recently have anthropologists begun to notice the power of art events, the
authority of art institutions, and the connectedness of the different contexts
of art production.
In this workshop,
we will not only examine the reasons for anthropologists’ uneasiness with
contemporary art, but will first and foremost discuss new approaches to art by
looking at it beyond the limits of art anthropology canons. We invite both
colleagues who have embarked on the ethnography of art worlds as a primary task
and scholars who have found it necessary to get into art as an unexpected
aspect of their fields. We welcome papers about the potential of an
anthropological gaze oscillating between the bigger picture and the details of
artistic production. We encourage contributions on the particular challenges of
art worlds for anthropologists.
Fieldwork and Artistic Practices: The Case for Collaborations
Pictures on the
Move: Avant-Garde Art, Contemporary Design, and the Scientific Aesthetic
Claiming Modernity through Aesthetics: A
comparative Look at Germany and
Turkey
Banu Karaca, City
University of New York
Contemporary Art
in a Renaissance Setting: The Local Art System in Florence, Italy
Making Art
Outside the Gallery: Toward an Ethnography of an East London Cummunity Arts
Organisation
Embodying
the political?