Saturday, March 15, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
After the collapse of the state-driven economies of Eastern Europe at the end of the 20th century, the role of art and artists changed profoundly. Under the new cultural politics, art was no longer perceived as a contribution to the social well-being of the nation-state and, consequently, artists lost their status as actors and providers of a social(ist) aesthetics. Art became an object of consumption and artists had to learn how to sell their works in an unknown context, that of a capitalist market. Incapable of coping with the new situation (e.g. economic crisis, end and/or drastic reduction of state support, pressure to develop new aesthetics), many artists left their home country and travelled abroad in search for new opportunities; yet, what many of them found was that western Europe was not as ready as they thought to open their markets. In this paper I will focus on those artists, mainly musicians, who have migrated to Western Europe with the hope of developing their career and found themselves either working in unrelated job or, as in the case of musicians, playing in the street, not recognizing their aesthetic qualities and often identifying them as beggars. This research is based upon ethnographic fieldwork with migrant artists and with local cultural managers and programmers. The main aim is to analyze how and to what extent cultural production reproduces the inequalities observed in other productive contexts between local and foreigners on the one hand, and immigrants on the other.
