Dr Harry Weeks (IASH Fellow): The Permitted Autonomy of Contemporary Art
'Having been concertedly challenged throughout the twentieth century, any belief in the supposed autonomy of art would seem to have been entirely discredited by numerous developments in the twenty-first century. From within the art world, artists turned towards increasingly socially-engaged practices which sought to actualise the twentieth-century drive towards the blurring of art and life. From outside, cultural policy rendered art an instrumentalised sector of the ‘creative industries’ with social and economic responsibility and answerability. This talk elaborates a theory of ‘permitted autonomy’ as a way of rethinking autonomy in fashion pertinent to the contemporary condition of art. It will be argued that art is required to perform certain social, political and economic functions, notably its role in processes of social inclusion and urban regeneration. In return for this, art is granted a relative freedom, not least to act as an arena for critical practice and dissent. While the intimacy of art and capital is often assumed to preclude criticality, ‘permitted autonomy’ offers a framework through which complicity and criticality may be seen to co-exist.'
The Permitted Autonomy of Contemporary Art