The Rules of Collective Art: Interpretation, Social Engagement and Authorship in Contemporary Community-based Art.

The dramatic development of the field of socially engaged art over recent decades demands that new critical methods are developed to evaluate the status of art produced in this way. This session will build a frame of reference around these artworks by calling for papers from art historians, art critics, theorists, artists and educationalists involved in this field. The session will seek to map out the shifting boundaries of classification and meaning which arise from contemporary art production in collaboration with communities. We are interested in papers which make reference to new approaches to critical evaluation in this area that may be influenced by, for example, social geography, cultural sociology and social anthropology, as well as by contemporary developments in art theory. At stake in socially engaged artistic processes is the ‘consecrated value’ of the art object (modernist and postmodernist) and the definition of the authorship of contemporary artworks produced through community collaboration. The work of Pierre Bourdieu, for example, specifically his examination of 19th Century literary modernism in The Rules of Art, 1996 , has led to challenges to traditional modernist notions of the work of art, its intention and its audience. The collective nature of the process of socially engaged artistic production lays down a challenge to the individualism inherent in institutionally verified processes of artistic production, both in art college education and in the art market. Wider debates about social value, state patronage and creative entrepreneurialism are also directly engaged by this form of artistic practice, so too deeper notions of art as labour.
Ultimately these artworks and the processes out of which they are made require a reappraisal of the concepts and methods available to art historians in assessing their impact and artistic value. With its cross-disciplinary approach, this session will help further that investigation.