From starving artist to entrepreneur. Justificatory pluralism in visual artists' grant proposals

Abstract

Inspired by French pragmatism and using Bourdieu's notion of “refraction” as an indication of a field's autonomy, we explore in‐depth what kinds of justifications visual artists deploy to legitimate their requests for government money. Based on 494 government grant proposals from visual artists between 1965 and 2015 in Belgium, we find six such justifications. The reputational, esthetic, and romantic justifications are grounded in autonomous criteria of worth, such as artistic CVs, the work of art itself, and a compulsive desire to make art. Since the 90s, social, academic, and entrepreneurial justifications bring in heteronomous criteria, or refractions of field‐external values. Artistic practices become increasingly legitimized through engagement with social/political issues, academic methods and terminology, and an entrepreneurial spirit. We empirically show how the refraction of governmental logics is multi‐faceted, yet always related to or combined with artistic concerns, which we interpret as characteristic for the artistic field's persisting autonomy in the face of heteronomous pressures.

The Application of Modern Computer-Aided Technology in Fine Art Education

“…In the 21st century, the shift from visual culture to fine art education has brought about new educational trends, providing unlimited creativity and possibilities for fine art creation, which continue to permeate in the field of fine art, bringing about marked changes in the goals, fields, methods, and evaluation of education [9,10]. Facing the future social life, students in colleges and universities are required to continuously improve their own literacy, as well as their creative thinking, critical visual literacy, etc.…”

The Grant Proposal as a Genre. A Multiple Correspondence Analysis of Visual Artists and their Legitimations for Government Grants in Flanders, 1965–2015

“…In more recent times -particularly from 1996 onwards -applicants were far more likely to use heteronomous (academic, socially engaged and entrepreneurial) strategies and abandoned the suffering artist discourse. This shift was not only in line with changes such as the social (Bishop, 2006) and scientific turns (Peters and Roose, 2020;Laermans, 2018;Schinkel, 2010) in the art field at the time. It also coincided with a major change in Flemish cultural policy in the early 1990s, namely, its increased focus on heteronomous values such as entrepreneurialism and social impact, and banishment of its former reliance on social welfare considerations for the evaluation of artists' proposals.…”

“…In previous work, we found that justificatory discourse in grant proposals followed developments from the field of contemporary art and cultural policy (Peters and Roose, 2020) – that is, from the ‘space of possibles’. Before the 1990s, artists predominantly used ‘autonomous’ strategies to substantiate their claims for government money, focusing on reputational, aesthetic and romantic justifications in their proposals.…”

“…Using this list as a sampling frame, we randomly selected 10 proposals per year, resulting in a sample of 510 proposals. We then digitized the applicants' personal files for each of the sampled proposals, containing the application letters from which we determined the justifications through a qualitative content analysis of the previously selected proposals (Peters and Roose, 2020) and résumés to arrive at artists' reputations. Additionally, we kept track of the total amount of money applicants had received from the Flemish government until the moment of selection.…”

“…Six Justificatory Strategies in Grant Proposals. Each of the six justificatory strategies is made up of several codes (see Table 1; also see Peters and Roose, 2020, for an in-depth explanation of the coding process). While the codes within one justification are thematically associated, their individual meanings differ.…”