CULTURAL ECONOMICS & THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

Realizing the
Values of Art
Making Space for Cultural
Civil Society
Erwin Dekker · Valeria Morea
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy

Series Editors
Erwin Dekker, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The
Netherlands
Andrej Srakar, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Michael Rushton, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
This series aims to provide original and societally relevant perspectives on
the modern creative economy from the perspective of cultural economics
broadly understood. In the past decades it is increasingly realized that
value in the economy is realized in the creative industries and the more
traditional cultural sectors. This series will aim to shed light on how value
is created and realized and how the creative economy shapes the broader
economy. We believe that trends in the creative economy are often a sign
of things to come in the broader economy, this is true for the way in
which work is organized, how innovation happens, how entrepreneurs
act and the relevance of cities in the modern economy.
The series will provide a collection of works of leading cultural
economists on theoretical and empirical topics. It will cover the field in its
most broad sense and focus on the current open problems and topics in
cultural economics, covering micro, macro end methodological aspects.
 Erwin Dekker · Valeria Morea

Realizing the Values

of Art
Making Space for Cultural Civil Society
Erwin Dekker Valeria Morea
Mercatus CENTER Department of Architecture
George Mason University and ARTS
Fairfax, USA Università Iuav di Venezia
Venice, Italy

ISSN 2662-4478 ISSN 2662-4486 (electronic)

Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy
ISBN 978-3-031-24597-8 ISBN 978-3-031-24598-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5

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 Preface

It took surprisingly long before economists started analyzing the arts as an

industry. When they started doing so, after William Baumol and William
Bowen had led the way with their study of the performing arts, they
envisioned the arts as a sluggish economic sector, in need of structural
help from wealthy patrons, or better, generous governments. When Mark
Blaug had the guts to propose a cost-benefit analysis of cultural subsi-
dies, he was rewarded with a ban from his beloved Royal Opera House
in Covent Garden, London. Since 2000, the perception of the arts as
industry has radically changed. Reinvented as creative industries, the arts
are now believed to be an engine of economic growth and a fountain of
positive innovation spill-overs for the knowledge economy.
Economists were not alone in their re-appreciation of the arts. Urban-
ists suggested that the arts could be a tool for the regeneration of
neighborhoods in decline and a magnet for cities seeking to attract the
creative class. More importantly, many urban hubs around the world
engaged in city marketing with the goal of attracting more and more
tourists. A dystopian bestselling novel in the Netherlands imagines the
future of Europe as a museum for the rising middle classes from China,
India, and the Middle East. The economist of the arts Bruno Frey has
proposed that the only way to seriously deal with overtourism are ‘revived
originals’, a euphemism of his invention for the building of replicas of the
most famous European inner-cities in Asia.

v
vi PREFACE

During this same period the arts have also become central in debates
about the future of Western societies. During the heights of multicultur-
alism in the 1990s it was believed that the arts could play a pioneering role
in the creation of social inclusion, and the alleviation of social conflicts.
More recently the arts have been claimed to foster inclusivity, diversity,
and provide a voice to marginalized groups.
Strikingly these shifts have been accompanied by a new social engage-
ment of artists. Art for art’s sake has become a marginalized, perhaps even
suspicious, pursuit. The art world has led the way in efforts to decolonize
museums, has partnered with environmentalists and engineers to imagine
a more sustainable future, was a prominent voice and target of the #metoo
movement, and so on. One does not have to have to fully embrace the
fashionable idea of artivism to realize that the days of post-modern irony
and dreams of full artistic autonomy have given way to serious attempts by
artists to imagine alternative futures and to bring about social, political,
and economic change.
These transformations have been accompanied by a widespread effort
to measure the social and economic impact of the arts. Academics,
non-profit organizations, and policy makers have sought to quantify the
‘impact’ of cultural festivals, investments in physical arts infrastructure,
community projects, and city-branding. A small pet-industry has emerged
for academics and consultants who offer tools to assess the social and
economic impact of the arts, boosted by major policy organizations such
as NESTA in Britain which has opened a Policy and Evidence Centre for
the Creative Industries in 2018.
The basic idea of the movement for evidence-based policy can hardly
be contested, it suggests that public policy should be based on the
best-available evidence. A similar development can be observed in the
non-profit sector where there is an increasing tendency to measure the
impact of projects which are undertaken to demonstrate the effectiveness
of programs to donors and other stakeholders. The general direction of
these developments should be welcomed. It is clear to nearly everyone
that the arts have impacts beyond the aesthetic domain.
It is also to be welcomed that there is an interest to look at the effec-
tiveness of both charitable donations and public subsidies toward the arts.
The social status of high art (classical music, visual arts, and theater, to
name a few) have enticed many donors to give generously to the arts,
frequently encouraged by attractive tax deductions. Politicians have loved
attaching their names to prestigious theaters, concert halls, and the stars
 PREFACE vii

which perform in them. Questioning whether these are efficient forms of

altruism or public support is only right. These developments are beautiful
extensions of Mark Blaug’s early attempts at a cost-benefit analysis of art
subsidies.
But these measurements and the attention to the social and economic
impact of the arts also risk reducing the arts to an instrument. Do
you want urban regeneration? Just send some artists as pioneers. A
more innovative economy? Just invest in the creative industries. A more
diverse society? You guessed it. This kind of instrumentalization is not a
new phenomenon, in the nineteenth century the arts were mobilized in
grandiose projects to create national identities, in the twentieth century
the avant-garde was co-opted to explore and promote the aesthetics and
social reality of totalitarian socialist and fascist dreamworlds.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging such broader impacts,
but it is mistaken to believe that the primary value of the arts lies in
what they contribute to non-artistic domains, in their spill-over effects.
The primary contribution of the arts lies in the cultural sphere, in the
aesthetic, contemplative, playful, reflective, and inspirational values which
are realized through them. This book is an exploration of the process
of the realization of values through the arts. For instance, transcendental
and aesthetic values for which the arts are traditionally known. But also,
social values related to (group) identity, friendship and community, and
economic values such as dynamism, meaningful work, and sustainability.
Sometimes the values which artists and their audiences seek to realize
reach beyond the private sphere, and reach in the public or political
sphere. Glorification, critique, and imagination are inherent features of
artistic practices. The renewed engagement of artists in recent years has
shown that this can lead to fundamental conflicts about values. In the
United States the arts and the neighboring humanities are involved in
what some have called the culture wars. The war metaphor suggests that
when one of the groups succeeds in realizing their values, the other
must by necessity lose. We disagree and will explore in this book how
social practices around the arts, even when they seek to realize antag-
onistic political values, can co-exist peacefully in what we call cultural
civil society. Cultural civil society is the collection of social practices in
which the arts are practiced, and values are realized, which exists next to
markets and public art organizations. Our focus on cultural civil society
viii PREFACE

and the aspirations and goals of the individuals who engage in these prac-
tices entails a rather different perspective on the role of cultural policy. In
the traditional perspective the state structurally supports particular artistic
activities, because they are economically unsustainable but socially desir-
able, or because they generate positive social and economic spill-overs.
We suggest, instead, that the state should restrict itself to establishing a
framework in which a diverse set of social practices around the arts can
co-exist, and in which minority rights of association and expression are
respected and protected.
But before we get there, we must understand what it means for artists
and their co-creating audiences to realize values. We demonstrate that
the realization of values can be understood as a multi-stage process which
takes place mostly in circles, communities, and the rich associational life
around the arts. This shifts the focus away from prestigious visual art
markets and official public organizations such as museums and heritage
sites in favor of (amateur) practices, of a wide variety of creators, art
enthusiasts, fans, and civic groups, who rely on the arts to realize their
goals. Which values are realized in this cultural civil society is dependent
on the intentions of different, partly overlapping, groups of individuals
and the diversity of social practices which they are able and allowed to
develop.
Our argument might be mistaken for a romantic denial that the value
or impact of the arts can be measured, or an excessive emphasis on
processes and vague, intangible, and qualitatively heterogenous values.
We hope to convince you that the opposite is true. A good measure-
ment of the value(s) of the arts should be based on the values, which
creators and contributors seek to realize, rather than some universal set
of standards against which performance is measured. The heterogeneity
of artistic forms and practices is precisely what makes the arts special. The
fact that artists and audiences seek to realize more than income or utility,
but seek to explore new values, embark on aesthetic and social experi-
ments, and imagine different futures, is precisely what makes the arts an
important element of a democratic and free society.

Fairfax, USA Erwin Dekker

Venice, Italy Valeria Morea
 Acknowledgments

Michael Hutter and Bruno Frey once discussed the ‘Rotterdam School’
of cultural economics, according to which cultural value is ‘realized’ in
the conversations about art that take place among spectators, collec-
tors, gallerists, critics, and other experts. We have both been part of
this Rotterdam School for a good number of years. Its beating heart is
the Econ & Culture seminar chaired by Arjo Klamer, which is currently
branching out with an annual Value Based Conference. We see this book
as an attempt to bring the Rotterdam approach, which might have been
somewhat inward-looking, in conversation with the broader literature on
the sociology and the economics of the arts, as well as academic and policy
conversations about the values of the arts.
As we argue in this book, creative production takes place in circles,
which rely on the contributions of many different individuals, artists,
and co-creating members. This project is no different, it would not have
been possible without the many contributors to the seminar over the
years, including Hans Abbing, Tazuko van Berkel, Peter Booth, Laura
Braden, Aldo do Carmo, Carolina Dalla Chiesa, Wilfred Dolfsma, Thora
Fjeldsted, Gjalt de Graaf, Christian Handke, Marleen Hofland, Lili Jiang,
Amin Khaskar, Priyateja Kotipalli, Pavel Kuchař, Cees Langeveld, Marian-
gela Lavanga, Ellen Loots, Ana Marques, Lénia Marques, Isidoro Mazza,
Deirdre McCloskey, Anna Mignosa, Trilce Navarrete, Sofia Patat, Lyud-
mila Petrova, Karthik Raghavan, Blaž Remic, Claire Stasiewicz, Lies De
Strooper, Ad van der Stok, Joke Tacoma, Paul Teule, Thomas Teekens,

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Marilena Vecco, Claudine de With, and Rosa Won. They together made
up the social practice which enabled this book. The good ideas in here are
in no small part due to them, but as authors we will accept full responsi-
bility for the faults which they, and our other discerning readers, will no
doubt find.
 Contents

1 A Pragmatic Approach to Art 1

Let’s Unwrap the Argument… 2
There Are Many Different Values, and New Ones Are
Discovered Irregularly 5
Values Can Clash with Each Other, Sometimes Violently 10
Measuring Values Requires Engagement with Artistic
Practices 14
Here Is How We Will Proceed 17
References 18
2 What Values Are, and How We Learn to Appreciate Them 21
Market Goods and Other People Are Essential 22
Values Are Embedded in Social Practices 26
The Context of Values Are Orders of Worth 28
The Values of a Hip-Hop Artist 31
Value Discovery 38
References 42
3 How Artists Imagine New Worlds 45
Forget the Solitary Genius, Artists Imagine Together 46
Artists Operate in Circles, Which Are Sustained Through
Contributions 49
Circles Benefit From the Proximity of Circles in Neighboring
Disciplines 52

xi
xii CONTENTS

Within Circles, Knowledge Is Generated, and Artists

Imagine New Possibilities 55
Modernists Imagined Too Wildly, Postmodernists Too Ironically 57
A New Form of Imagination Is in the Making 59
Imaging and Living a Different Venice 61
Contemporary Imagination Is About the Development
of Social Practices Which Embody Values 65
References 67
4 How Participants Make Values Real 71
Audiences Do Not Undergo Art, They Co-create It 72
Co-creation Is Frequently Invited by Contemporary Artists
and Technologies 75
It Is Impossible to Understand the Performing Arts Without
Co-creation 79
Even in Highly Commercial Settings, There Is Extensive
Co-creation 83
The Queer Museum in Brazil Demonstrates the Importance
of Institutional Diversity 88
Informal Practices Are Not Always Long-Lasting and That
Is Probably a Good Thing 91
References 93
5 Making Space for Cultural Civil Society 97
The Diversity of Social Practices Around the Arts Constitutes
Cultural Civil Society 99
Cultural Civil Society Often Flies Under the Radar, but it
Can Be Mapped 100
Cultural Civil Society Operates at the Intersection
of the Private and the Public Sphere 103
Public Values Might Converge, but Co-Existence
and Tolerance Are Primary 106
Making Space Means Fostering Diversity and Protecting
Minorities 112
Making Space: Marginal Improvements 115
References 120
6 Epilogue: Imagining a Heterotopia 125
References 132
 CONTENTS xiii

References 133
Index 145
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The Arc de Triomphe wrapped after the design

of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. By permission of Victor Tsu 2
Fig. 1.2 Protests and social activities at the statue of Confederate
General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. By permission
of Robert James 12
Fig. 1.3 The realization of values in four phases 17
Fig. 2.1 Album covers of The Minstrel Show by Little Brother
and Connected by Foreign Exchange 33
Fig. 3.1 Creative circles, colors indicate different values 55
Fig. 3.2 Stop on the alternative tour of Venice of Extragarbo. By
permission of Giulia Zichella 66
Fig. 5.1 Convergence of previously disparate circles and divergence
of previously overlapping circles 111

xv
 CHAPTER 1

A Pragmatic Approach to Art

Abstract We present a Dewey-inspired pragmatic approach to the arts

which starts from the values which artists and audiences seek to realize.
We argue that these values are realized in online and offline communities
in a process of four phases: value orientation, imagination, realization,
and evaluation. We contrast this approach to various recent approaches
to the arts which have explicitly or implicitly led to the instrumental-
ization of the arts. Various policies have supported the arts to boost
economic development, foster social inclusion, or affirm national iden-
tity, rather than for the values which artists and audiences pursue. We
develop the notion of cultural civil society to describe the heterogenous
practices around the arts and argue that they are a key feature of a liberal
democratic society. The challenge which arises from rival and sometimes
antagonistic practices around the arts is how they can co-exist peace-
fully. We illustrate this challenge through an examination of the recent
controversy over Confederate and colonial statues. Rather than resolving
whether such statues should remain or be removed, we suggest that public
space should welcome different practices and allow for contestation from
different minority voices in society.

Keywords Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Public statues · Pragmatism ·

Value of art · Contestation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_1
2 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Let’s Unwrap the Argument…

In 2021, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was wrapped in 25,000 square
meters of recyclable polypropylene silvery blue fabric and 3,000 meters of
red rope (Fig. 1.1). The project opened in September of that year, about
a year after the death of the artist Christo, who often worked together
with his partner Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009). Like the earlier wrappings
of the Pont-Neuf in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin, and a portion of the
Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well as The Gates project they realized
in Central Park in New York and the Running Fence on the shores of
northern California, it attracted great crowds and intense debates over
the beauty, grandiosity, and temporal nature of their art.
Christo’s work has always asked fundamental questions about the value
and nature of art. In 1966, he sent out a hundred wrapped boxes to
the members of the Walker Art Center’s Contemporary Arts Group.
Several of them, unwittingly, unwrapped the boxes and found a note
from Christo inside them, which read: “The package you destroyed was

Fig. 1.1 The Arc de Triomphe wrapped after the design of Jeanne-Claude and
Christo. By permission of Victor Tsu
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 3

wrapped according to my instructions in a limited edition of a hundred

copies”. Discovered, destroyed, used, unpacked, unveiled, what had the
members done? Christo’s work can be read as a commentary on and ques-
tioning of branding and packaging (Lanham 2006, 54–63). His works
make us think about the outside and inside of a product. What is that we
are valuing? Are we supposed to look through the wrapping and focus
on what is really there? Or is a product primarily what we ‘think it is’
and are the branding, the packaging, the wrapping, and the signature the
essential, or even the primary real thing?
Such questions take on more potency in the wrapping projects,
which are temporary; the Arc de Triomphe, like the previously wrapped
landmarks, was unwrapped again. Their public artworks used colorful
wrappings and fencing to alter urban and natural landscapes for a short
period of time, and afterward no visible sign of it was left. Unlike their
fellow artists Robert Smithson and Alan Sonfist, who changed outdoor
landscapes through permanent interventions, in what has been called land
art, the wrapping couple preferred short interventions and the public’s
engagement. The wrapping might be gone, but the memory and stories
about the experience live on, in a way that resembles an economy which
is increasingly focused on experiences rather than material stuff.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed their work into an events busi-
ness, where the next project was always financed and realized based on
the success of the previous ones. They were independent-minded and
financed their own projects. But to accomplish their wrappings they had
to convince mayors and other local governors for permission to intervene
in public space. The projects were also an event in the sense that they
attracted crowds, attention, and conversations, and then they were gone.
There is a boldness to the work in both the scale and the conviction that
they did not require permanence.
And yet, their wrapping practice turned into something which
outlasted them. The wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe was done after
both Christo and Jeanne-Claude had passed away. The wrappings have
become a practice tied to the name and the oeuvre of the couple. Christo
had first sketched the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in the early 1960s.
This was not uncommon, many of their artworks are marked with the
time it took to realize the project, such as The Gates 1979–2005. Jeanne-
Claude recounted how it took nine years to convince mayor Jacques
Chirac of Paris to wrap the Pont-Neuf, the preparations for the Reich-
stag started about twenty-five years before the project took place. The art
4 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

was literally public in the sense that it took over, or intervened in public
space, and so the realization of the projects was not merely an aesthetic
process, but just as much a civic one: a project of community organization
and political persuasion. The projects were only visible for a short period
of time, but the process of realizing the art and its values had taken much
longer. They worked with fabric, but their real medium, the core of their
art was persuasion, of political stakeholders, residents, and finally their
audience.
Just like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art, this book is about art as a
social practice: the process by which the values of art are realized. That
process extends in time, from the first sketch of the wrapping of the
Arc de Triomphe in 1962, to its realization in 2021, and most likely
beyond in reimaginations, extensions, copies, or perhaps simply in the
stories that people will keep talking about their visits to the wrapped Arc.
As Igor Kopytoff (1986) once observed, objects have a life of their own,
and art historians can write their biography. The work of Christo and
Jeanne-Claude illustrates better than other artworks that the artistic arte-
fact alone is not enough to realize the values of art. The wrapping of Arc
de Triomphe is one element of Christo’s work of art, the practice involves
others, from the governors to the ‘pilgrims’ who travel to the site, and
the nay-sayers. For these public projects this is directly visible, but we
believe it reveals a more general truth: the realization of the values of art
is a social activity in which artists and audience co-create values. Besides
the intimate relation between an artist and their material, the realization
of the values of art requires, by definition, the meaningful engagement of
others.
For artists this frequently starts with their peers. The first reception
and feedback tend to happen between artists, or between the artist and
their manager, gallery owner, or partner and their circles of fellow artists.
From there, if there is traction to the project, it moves outward to the
circles of other producers and the audiences which are required to realize
the project, to make it real. Here the purpose of the artist is confronted
with the values of others in what we call cultural civil society.
The art historian Michael Baxandall has drawn attention to the active
nature of the process of engagement and contestation around the artwork.
The audience member or artist can: “draw on, resort to, avail oneself
of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to,
pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from,
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 5

assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, para-
phrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape,
emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify”,
well you get the gist (Baxandall 1985, 59). With the advent of digital
technologies, accessible to the great majority, such possibilities have
grown significantly.
The books, websites, and documentaries around the projects of Christo
and Jeanne-Claude make this process visible. They are a testament of the
support and resistance, the contestation and appreciation, which accom-
panied the realization of their projects. The activity and heterogenous
nature of this process are why we refer to values, in the plural. The real-
ization of a work of art is both an attempt to understand its meaning
(what is its value?), and a contestation over its merit and meaning (what
does it contribute to or makes us aware of?). The projects of the art
couple Jeanne-Claude and Christo are inevitably public not because they
are unable to control the spectators’ reception and interpretation of their
work, but because they depend on the spectators’ appropriation of the
installations to work. The spectators must contribute and co-create; by
walking, running, queuing, admiring, photographing, remembering, and
critiquing the work. Afterward, Christo and Jeanne-Claude frequently
sold pieces of the used fabric or preliminary sketches of the installations,
the public could literally take the project home with them, and appro-
priate it and, thus, contribute to the next one. The values that are realized
in the practices around art by anyone engaged is what we seek to capture
in this book.

There Are Many Different Values,

and New Ones Are Discovered Irregularly
The question of the value of art has occupied thinkers of all ages, espe-
cially in the discipline of aesthetics. Aesthetics makes us think of the
artistic values associated with art, for example beauty or playfulness. We
both taught for several years in a program on cultural economics in which
the economic values of the art are emphasized, say innovation. There we
worked alongside sociologists of culture who drew attention to the social
values which are realized through art, such as a sense of belonging or
autonomy. To do full justice to each of these is impossible in the scope of
this book. Not only because we will argue that there is one more impor-
tant set of values associated with the arts, political or public values, such
6 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

as justice or tolerance. But primarily because of the wide diversity of art

practices which can be found in any society, and the equally numerous
practical values which are realized through them. Art, in all its different
manifestations, plays an important role in people’s lives. Sometimes we
seek beauty and its comfort, at other times we engage with the arts
because they allow us to be with like-minded others, or because it is an
occasion to spend time with our dear ones. The arts are often a vehicle
of political imagination; on many occasions the arts are also source of
economic liveliness and meaningful work.
Values in our pragmatic approach are not universal moral reference
points, or a mark of conservatism. They are instead the reasons why
individuals value the social practices they engage in. They reflect the
heterogenous goals which individuals pursue. Values are realized in a
process, they are embodied in practices, and it is through practices that
they are made ‘real’. Realizing values has another meaning in this book,
and that is that individuals will realize that they were mistaken, and that
other values are more important to them. This will make them change
their practices or abandon them altogether. Realizing values also means
realizing what is important to us. That is a process of exploration. As
John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher who we will use as a
guide throughout this book, argued about values, “they are as infinitely
numerous and varied as are the individual systems of action they delimit;
and that since there is only relative, not absolute, impermeability and
fixity of structure, new individuals with novel ends emerge in irregular
procession” (Dewey 1929, 395).
Change and heterogeneity are important, but that does not diminish
the significance of social practices. Individuals do not exist in a vacuum,
and like our analysis of the wrappings revealed, the realization of values
typically relies on the contributions and participations of others. These
practices have some stability, they are the relatively solid form which has
emerged to realize certain values and inspire others to contribute to the
activity. Christo has been wrapping since 1966 and it seems that we will
continue to wrap, even now that the artists are no longer with us. The
practice will most likely evolve, along one of the several pathways which
Baxandall suggested, by others who: ‘draw on, parody, remodel, etc.’.
One might wonder why it is important to emphasize the fairly obvious
point, that values are what artists and audiences seek to realize. There
is a simple reason for it. Many other approaches instrumentalize the arts,
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 7

they turn it into a tool to achieve something else (Pratt 2010). The conse-
quences of this approach are all around us. A lot of cultural policy today
is not primarily concerned with the values of art, but rather with the
social effects of arts and artists. Cities once ‘vandalized’ by graffiti writers
are now being transformed with the help of co-opted street artists to
make neighborhoods more appealing for prospective property owners and
tourists. Artists are sent out as ‘pioneers’ into declining neighborhoods in
order to revitalize them and facilitate processes of urban renewal. Euro-
pean cities compete to become the next Capital of Culture, because of
the economic spill-over effects the audiences will generate for the city. The
arts have also been put forward as a policy tool to attract the economically
productive ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002).
That we talk so often, and easily, about the instrumental role of the
arts in modern society is no coincidence. It fits into a way of thinking
in which it is believed that governments are responsible for a growing
economy with interesting jobs for everyone. If we assign the government
such a responsibility it can be expected that it will look at education, the
arts, and science as tools to realize those ends, rather than as practices
which embody values of their own. All the more so, because the role of
government support has historically been extensive in these sectors. But
despite what some critics believe, not nearly all the instrumentalization of
the arts happens for economic reasons, or the infamous ‘economic impact’
of the arts. Cultural policy aiming at social impact is just as common.
Diversity, social integration, tolerance, or access for disadvantaged groups
often drive social policy and have similar effects, they turn art and artists
into instruments of policymakers.
Historically, this instrumentalization was a counter-reaction to the
post-war decades in which the arts benefitted from generous state support
and private philanthropy. The arts were considered a semi-sacred pursuit,
in which artists had to have the freedom to work autonomously, that is
without regard for markets and society. In hindsight, critics have recog-
nized that this funding structure as well as the elevated status that the
arts enjoyed led to a turn inward, in which art was mostly produced for
an in-crowd (Abbing 2019). That development itself dovetailed with a
high modernist ethic, according to which art was supposed to free itself
from both internal conventions as well as external expectations. A lot of
modernist art sought a kind of purity and abstraction from the contin-
gency and dependencies of everyday life (Greenberg 1939). This ethic
8 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

was described by the often mis-used, yet inescapable, idea of art for art’s
sake.
That ethic itself also arose in reaction to attempts by governments
and social and economic elites to use art for their own purposes. The
institution of the museum is a nineteenth-century invention which fitted
the cultural agenda of (new) nation states to solidify their unity through
the construction of historical identities and traditions (Anderson 1991).
Contemporary artists and masters from the past were mobilized to repre-
sent the glory of the nation, and to function as symbols of national
unity, above partisan debates, even though they effectively functioned to
privilege one historical narrative or social group over others. Totalitarian
regimes in the twentieth-century mobilized artists of the time to work for
the nation, or higher ideological goals such as socialism or racial purity.
The historical parallel to the present should not be overdrawn, but it is
important to recognize that art often has been mobilized to further goals
of governments, local, national, and international. Occasionally these
goals were lofty, more often they were despicable.
That is not the only form of ‘capture’ of the arts that is possible. One
of the most famous periods in the arts, the Italian Renaissance, with high
points in sculpture, architecture, painting, and music cannot be divorced
from the patronage of the Medici family. This economically and politically
powerful family supported artists to show off its wealth, to further its
reputation, and to gain more political and social influence (Parks 2005).
Modern art, too, has frequently moved closely to the world of private
economic and political power.
An appreciation of the value of art, as well as the realization of the
values of art itself, requires some degree of autonomy. Yet it also requires
the rejection of the idea that this can be best achieved in some social
vacuum, or idealized state of perfect autonomy. The diverse values of the
art are realized through social practices, rather than through an esoteric
activity, where isolated individuals seek to realize some absolute goal of
beauty or perfection. Somewhere between the instrumentalization of art
and the absolutization of its autonomy lies the recognition that art is
a social practice with its own internal dynamic and values, as well as
a socially embedded ‘worldly’ practice entangled with the interests and
values of the different individuals and groups in society. The values real-
ized through art practices are partly internal and partly external to the
arts and should be so.
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 9

Recently a group of scholars working at the intersection between soci-

ology and economics have sought to do justice to this diversity of values
which are realized through the arts and other goods (Throsby and Hutter
2008; Beckert and Aspers 2011; Kjellberg and Mallard 2013; Antal et al.
2015). Their work has drawn attention to the social construction of value
and the practices which shape value, as well as the value of goods beyond
their market price. Their work is an important inspiration for us, but they
tend to study ‘valuation’ as a social phenomenon, rather than as a process
directed by the values which individuals seek to realize. Arjo Klamer in
his Doing the Right Thing (2016) does put the values of actors front and
center, and analyzes the realization of values as a process. But he mostly
shies away from the issues of contestation and conflicts between values,
which we will put front and center.
Social practices around the art can be analyzed with economic models.
Klamer uses the notion of shared goods which depend on contributions
of the participants to the practice to sustain them. He contrasts the tradi-
tional notion of the willingness to pay with the willingness to contribute
to make clear that this is not best understood as a system of produc-
tion and consumption, but a process of co-creation. Kealey and Ricketts
(2014, 2021) have developed a formal model along the same lines for
contribution goods. They both make clear that these practices are not
public goods, in the sense of being fully open. Instead, newcomers are
‘screened’ to ensure that they have something meaningful to contribute
and so enrich the practice.
We will demonstrate in this book that many such practices exist next
to each other, together they make up the rich and diverse cultural civil
society. They compete for the contributions of artists and audiences and
so there is rivalry and competition between them. Most of these practices
embody different values and exist in relative isolation from each other.
But any specific practice will likely overlap with a number of similar ones
and might be in direct conflict with several as well. From a public policy
point of view there are two fundamental issues which follow from our
perspective. First, how do we ensure the flourishing of a great diversity of
social practices around the arts, which reflect the plurality of values which
individuals seek to realize? Second, how do we ensure the peaceful co-
existence of these art communities next to each other? The latter question
might sound somewhat far-fetched, but recent history has proven how
important this is.
10 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Values Can Clash with Each

Other, Sometimes Violently
The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minnesota in the
early summer of 2020 led to a major public debate about systemic and
structural forms of racism. Public statues of historical figures who had
contributed to the institutions which fostered structural racism, such as
colonialism, were the target of many protests. Citizens around the world
questioned the legitimacy and meaning of statues like that of Edward
Colston in Bristol, King Leopold II in Belgium, Carolus Linnaeus in
Stockholm, and Indro Montanelli in Milan. The issue had been brewing
for a while, in the years before activists had already protested statues of
Columbus in Latin America and of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa.
Public art, more explicitly than other art forms, has been used to
convey political messages. Statues are erected as symbols of national
unity and the affirmation power, to beautify the city, and more recently
to regenerate neglected neighborhoods (Morea 2020). At the heart of
the protests, which included the toppling and vandalization of colonial
statues, was and still is, a cry for more participation in these cultural prac-
tices of (national) identity-making. A prominent claim of the protesters
was that they did not feel represented by these public symbols, or worse
that these symbols represented the (historical) oppression of their ethnic,
racial, or social group. The activists therefore urged public officials to
remove these statues. Critics of this proposed removal have suggested
that it would be foolish to attempt to erase history, one should instead
contextualize it. Others described the toppling of statues as an instance of
‘cancel culture’, which misguidedly seeks to evaluate historical individuals
by today’s moral standards.
The debate around colonial statues is part of a broader rethinking
of the less glorious episodes in the political history of the West. In the
United States, it is part of the discussion about the ongoing discrim-
ination against African Americans and the long legacy of slavery and
segregation. Those defending the colonial statues have suggested that
they are simply part of the history of the country, although they typi-
cally acknowledge that the stories which are told about the statues should
change. Critics have pointed out that many of the statues were erected
long after the colonial period, and in the United States after the abolition
of slavery, in order to reinforce racial inequalities (Cox 2021, chap. 1).
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 11

Central to the debate is what the statues symbolize, which groups and
what values they represent.
Statues of U.S. confederates or British officials are opposed because
of the ‘whitewashed’ narrative they convey. Historian Johnathan Beecher
Field (2020) claims that these statues are an example of ‘epistemic
violence’ and affirm racism and colonialism as heroic. To him they glorify
negative values such as (racial) supremacy, imperialism, and state power,
while obscuring the violence. President Trump spoke up against the
toppling of the statues, claiming that it was a ‘cruel campaign of censor-
ship and exclusion’. But also, among intellectuals there were doubts,
whether taking down the statues was the best strategy. The anthropologist
Lawrence Kuznar (2017) claimed that removing the statues constituted a
whitewashing of history, and that they should remain as reminders of the
‘inconvenient truths’ about our past. Rather than to further obscure the
dark sides of the past through removal, it might make more sense to seek
ways to make these dark sides visible. Others worried that toppling some
statues might be a slippery slope in which comparatively minor misdeeds
could come to overshadow great achievements and the moral progress
that had been made by some of the people cast in bronze or marble
(Walsh 2020).
Therefore, many argued that the statues should be properly contex-
tualized, for instance through plaques, or possibly by adding other
monuments next to the controversial ones. In Newark, New Jersey, for
instance, the divested statue of Columbus will be replaced by a monu-
ment to Harriet Tubman, a black woman who enabled the underground
railroad for slaves who sought to escape to the North. The new statue
aims to bring the passers-by in active relation with the site and through
the incorporation of tiles etched by local citizens (Hill 2022). The open
design which will allow visitors to walk through the statue is meant
to foster a different type of engagement than the grandiose statues of
outsized heroic men in triumphant poses on horseback.
What monuments or statues in public space enable is not fixed or
predetermined (Capdepón and Dornhof 2022). Thus, when memorial
sites convey a one-sided version of history, sooner or later people will
demand, as we have witnessed recently, to take part in the process of
shaping a better interpretation of the past transforming the public art
settings into places of contestation over societal values. The protests
themselves are a new form of activity at these memorial sites, an appro-
priation of public space which was often designed to enable public rituals.
12 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

In Fig. 1.2 we see that protesters of the statue of Confederate General

Robert E. Lee did not merely oppose the statue, they also attempted to
repurpose the site and turn it from a site of admiration and worship to
a place of socializing and everyday activities. They transformed the site
from a place of looking up toward a superior individual, to one of playful
interaction with others. Although the large historical statues on imposing
pedestals did not allow for it much, the protesters attempted to turn it
into a site of co-creation, as if Christo and Jeanne-Claude had invited
them to take part in the artwork. To understand this kind of appropriation
and the attempt to reshape social practices require qualitative engagement
with the practitioners, what do they seek to realize?
These new practices and proposed changes to the public art sites seek
to repurpose them as reminders of the dangers of state violence, oppres-
sion, and hierarchical belief systems about different groups of people.
Such solutions are not easy to realize. What the proper context is of
these statues, was part of the debate itself. John Daniel Davidson (2017),
writing for The Federalist, suggested that when most of the monuments

Fig. 1.2 Protests and social activities at the statue of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. By permission of Robert James
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 13

were erected, during the 1920s, they served as both a testament to the
sacrifices soldiers fighting for the Confederacy had made, as well as an
outpour of Lost Cause nostalgia in the South of the United States. In
other words, they embodied conflicting values from the start. They prob-
ably always meant and represented different things to different groups of
people.
But allowing such differences to exist, and to ensure they can co-exist
peacefully is important. Perhaps the best way forward is in some cases the
removal of certain statues, but the violent destruction of objects which
are meaningful to others is certainly not the way forward. It certainly
cannot serve as a model for a flourishing and diverse cultural civil society.
The case of the contested public statues is therefore not merely a good
example of what we mean by contestation, but also makes clear why the
co-existence of artistic practices is a social problem worthy of consid-
eration. We are living through an era of polarization, in which binary
thinking and a desire to win cultural issues appear to have marginalized
ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Many social differences are politicized
in such a way that it appears that they can only be decided for society
as a whole: one perspective must trump the others. Even scholars feel
frequently tempted to take sides in the cultural debates of our time.
But the reality of cultural civil society is that a great variety of cultural
practices co-exist, frequently with only the dimmest awareness of each
other. They allow individuals to realize radically different values every
day. These diverse practices are a form of decentralization, which allow
different individuals to come together, to realize some values which they
share, even though they might disagree on many other things. A large
attraction of major cities lies precisely in the diversity of social practices
in which individuals can engage. Because of their size, they even allow
for marginal practices to flourish. This variety reflects the value-pluralism
which characterizes modern society. After we have analyzed the process of
the realization of values in Chapters 2–4, we will lay out what our perspec-
tive entails for public policy in which the deep pluralism of modern society
is the starting point.
We are aware that art communities frequently have political aims,
and that they seek to challenge widely shared beliefs and identities. The
contestation over public statues is a good example, and we will return to
it in the final chapter. For now, we suggest that cultural policy should
be primarily aimed at creating space for social practices around the arts,
rather than the support of specific practices. Public spaces should not seek
14 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

to establish what the national identity is, but instead allow for contesta-
tions over public identity. In fact, we believe, our perspective has the
potential to change fundamentally how we think about cultural policy
and the neutrality of the state with respect to the arts.
For that reason, it is also worthwhile to take a step back from the
specifics in the public statue debate to make sure we understand why
contestation itself is vital. Dewey already called attention to what he called
‘troublesome’ situations. These occupy a special place in his pragmatic
perspective on values and society because trouble has the potential to be
productive. Inspired by this work, David Stark (2009) has suggested that
much of the active process of value realization and discovery happens
precisely where values are in conflict with each other, or where widely
accepted meanings are contested. These are moments of reconsidera-
tion and reorientation which might end up affirming existing practices
or sharpening our sense that something must change. This is even more
valuable in the public square, where there is an inevitable bias in favor of
the status quo. Without holding any illusions of a fully free public debate,
we can recognize with Jürgen Habermas the importance of an open and
contestable public space, where dissenting voices are heard, and have the
potential to achieve change. A key feature of the arts is the imagination
it requires and the alternative artistic and social worlds which artists and
their audiences seek to create. This imagination is the major theme of
Chapter 3, in which we will argue that one of the key features of artistic
practices is precisely that they generate alternative imagined futures. Many
of these alternatives, like all good experiments, will fail, but they have
great epistemic value. They generate practical knowledge about what is
feasible and possible in the arts, and in society more generally.

Measuring Values Requires

Engagement with Artistic Practices
Our pragmatic approach to the arts differs in important ways from
existing approaches. Most methods to analyze the value(s) of art regard
measurement as a process in which an outside observer brings in some
instrument, which can be used to determine the value of art, or the
spill-over effects to society or the local economy. The measurement tool
is typically not a precise instrument, but rather a theoretical framework
designed to capture the different types of value associated with the arts.
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 15

We believe that this perspective commits what may be considered a

common error in the social sciences, it presumes to be able to determine
theoretically, analytically, or through other external scientific means what
is of importance. To some extent this is inevitable, we too must rely on
certain analytical concepts such as values and practices to make sense of
the world of art. But which values should count is a normative question
which social science cannot settle a priori. An approach which seeks to
establish beforehand which values count, which effects appear on the plus
side, and which on the minus side of our social accounting, presumes to
have solved precisely the question that it seeks to answer. It has assumed
away the epistemic problem of what the values of art are.
This complicates matters at first. Or, rather, it forces us to engage
meaningfully with artistic practices. It puts the analyst on roughly the
same level as the practitioners, and that is a good thing (Boltanski 2012).
Rather than presuming to know what is valuable, we must discern how
value is created, what values different actors seek to realize, and which
values are actually realized in artistic practices. Practitioners, audiences,
and critics should not necessarily have the last word, but we should take
their words and actions seriously. They seek to justify the values of their
practices, even more so in moments of contestation. These practices are
not mere cheap talk, or forms of social signaling, although these are part
of the conversations around art. In the case of public statues, there is a
contestation about national identity, about the merits, or lack thereof, of
certain historical individuals, and of course which values should be, and
should not be, embodied by statues in public space.
In sociology, it is more usual to adopt the perspective of actors. In the
phenomenological approach rooted in the work of Alfred Schütz (1932)
and prominently represented by Peter Berger (1963) and Viviana Zelizer
(1985) we find a pragmatic approach to values and justification in line
with our goal. In economics, such an approach is not as widespread. But
in the work of Elinor Ostrom, the perspective of communities seeking
to collectively solve problems is the starting point (Ostrom 1990). In her
work, the evaluative criteria are not imposed from outside, but established
in conversation with the communities which are analyzed (McGinnis
2011). Another example can be found in the work of Deirdre McCloskey.
She has suggested that in her work on the rhetoric of economics that
“the economist looking at business is in the same position as the art critic
16 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

looking at the art world” (McCloskey 1994, 73). That means that in this
book we are in the position of critics looking at the ‘business of art’.
As we noted above, economists and sociologists of the arts have recog-
nized the fundamental uncertainty of the value of art. The conclusion they
typically draw from this insight, however, is that we are merely facing a
more difficult measurement problem. There is some underlying value to
the artistic artefact, but it might be very hard to establish. Instead, we
suggest that values are created, performed, and discovered in the social
practices around the art, they are not intrinsic to it. Artistic goods are
an input into the active process in which value is created. The literary
scholar Barbara Hernstein Smith has drawn attention to the contingen-
cies of values, which for her disqualified attempts to establish normative
‘criteria’ to arrive at “presumptively objective evaluative procedures”. She
suggests that the contingencies of value should make us take seriously that
the “fundamental character of literary value, is its mutability and diversity”
(Smith 1983, 10).
It is our conviction that this mutability and diversity can only be
captured when we analyze the practices themselves: to understand what
individuals are attempting to realize, and to what extent they succeed in
doing so. The social scientist as ‘critic’ might of course disagree with the
pursuit of particular values and can question whether a specific practice
realizes them. But even in this disagreement they do not have the only or
final word. Boltanski has suggested we should analyze the critical capacity
as it is found in everyday discourses: “this [critical] competence is not the
privilege of the philosopher or the sociologist. It is constantly put to work
by actors themselves” (Boltanski 2012, 27). This does not entail that the
analyst takes a purely passive stance in which the arguments and justifica-
tion by artists, audiences, and critics are accepted at face value. Few actors
will talk in the language of values or be able to name which values they
are seeking to realize directly. But the analyst should strive to arrive at
descriptions and values in which the actors can recognize themselves. The
pioneering economist Don Lavoie compared it to a translation process:
“like any real translation this has to be a bidirectional communicative
process in which economists may have as much to learn as business people
if they are to come to an understanding together” (Lavoie 1990, 180).
This book is such a translation effort between the social practices and
explications by actors in the art world, and the pragmatic approach to
values we have outlined above. Our goal is to learn from the ways in
 1 A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO ART 17

which artists realize values, while at the same time seeking to lay bare the
coherence and possible incoherence in their efforts, and explicate as far
as possible the generalizability of these conceptions of the values of art.
Therefore, artistic practices occupy an important place in this book, not as
ornaments, but as substantive parts of our argument. The art we discuss
is not a wrapping around our argument but constitutes the argument.

Here Is How We Will Proceed

To get a grip on the process of the realization of values, we have created a
heuristic tool which distinguishes between four phases of the process. The
phases are orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation (Fig. 1.3).
Value orientation is the analysis of the purpose that artists and audi-
ences have. Imagination is the process of exploring artistic means and
practices which embody these values. Realization is the engagement and
co-creation of audiences of the work through markets or social practices.
Evaluation covers both the personal reflection of the individuals involved
in the realization of values as well the evaluation by policymakers and
academics.
Through the various artistic projects we discuss in the book, it will
become clear that these phases are hardly sequential in the real world.
For instance imagination and realization—in Baxandall’s (1985) words—
‘interpenetrate’ each other, since the artist will typically go through
various drafts and experiments before finalizing a work of art. In the
second chapter, it will also become clear that the process of figuring
out which values are worthy of pursuit is directly tangled up with the

Fig. 1.3 The realization of values in four phases

18 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

process of (personal) reflection, which is phase four in our diagram, and

connected through the feedback loop.
To create some order, our chapters will nonetheless follow the four
phases. Chapter 2 looks more in depth at what values are, the way they
are embodied in social practices, and how individuals come to appreciate
them. Chapter 3 analyzes creativity as a social process which happens in
circles of artists, and which gives rise to both new artistic as well as social
forms. Chapter 4 demonstrates the diverse ways in which art communities
make values real, and the significant extent to which audience co-create
the art. Chapter 5 covers how we can map and measure the significance
of different social practices around the arts and explores how public and
private policy can foster an environment in which cultural civil society can
flourish.
If you are looking for the output, impact, and result of art, you might
have grown somewhat frustrated with our recurring invocation of ‘the
process’. In the final chapter we propose some alternative tools to measure
the vibrancy of cultural civil society. But for now, we can only say that the
future is open and, for the most part, unknowable. Exploring and imag-
ining what it can and should be is what artists, entrepreneurs, politicians,
and intellectuals seek to do. As our pragmatic guide Dewey has phrased
it: “Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more impor-
tant than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are
of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing
process” (Dewey 1939, 16).

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 CHAPTER 2

What Values Are, and How We Learn

to Appreciate Them

Abstract We analyze what values are, how they relate to more immediate
ends individuals pursue, and how they give direction to the practices of
artists and audiences. We start from the observation that goods bought
in the market are key inputs into social practices which are produced
through a combination of material inputs and the contributions of artists
and audiences. Many value-based approaches suggest that values can be
made explicit and listed, but we suggest that they are often embodied
in social practices and hard to fully explicate. These social practices gain
meaning against broader moral frameworks which exist in society, and
which other scholars have termed orders of worth. We suggest that values
are learned through an engagement with practices, and initially often have
an aspirational nature: values are both pursued and performed. Because
contemporary societies offer many heterogeneous social practices, individ-
uals can choose which to join and seek to develop their personal identities
through them. The incompatible nature of different practices is a source
of potential value conflict. We analyze the process of value learning and
the conflict between values through the career of the rapper and singer
Phonte, known from his work in the groups Little Brother and Foreign
Exchange.

Keywords Values · Value learning · Social practices · Phonte · Identity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_2
22 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Need and desire – out of which grow purpose and direction of energy—go
beyond what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They contin-
ually open the way into the unexplored and unattained future. John Dewey,
Creative Democracy 1939.

Human action is purposeful; it seeks to accomplish an end. But in the

process of pursuing ends, we also learn about the value of that goal. This
chapter is about the way that artists and art enthusiasts determine which
ends to pursue, and what values they seek to realize. This requires us to
be clear about what values are and how they relate to more immediate
ends and goals. We will demonstrate that values are frequently in conflict
with each other and impose competing and incompatible demands upon
the individual.
We explore the pursuit of values and the resulting tension through the
choices and reflections of rapper and singer Phonte. This case study will
demonstrate that figuring out intentions and values is a process. It is, as
art historian Baxandall has argued, ‘something progressively worked out
in the course of handling the medium’ (Baxandall 1985, 39). He expands
this to a ‘serial’ understanding of creation, in which subsequent works
are different attempts at solving a problem, iterative experiments to find
better ways to realize values. In that process, reflection on the relative
success and failure of previous attempts is crucial. Figuring out what is of
value, and what is worthy of an artist’s effort and time is a process of trial
and error, it involves both value orientation and value learning. The final
part of this chapter is therefore devoted to value learning and reflection.

Market Goods and Other People Are Essential

Human action is purposeful, this includes the actions of artists and audi-
ences. Some ends can be realized individually, but the realization of
artistic ends is a social process. After all, artists seek to communicate some-
thing, and a viewer will at the very least have to listen and attempt to
understand that message for the art to have any impact. Typically, neither
the artists nor the viewer is isolated either so that an analysis of art, why
it is made, and why it is appreciated means that we must analyze a social
process involving multiple individuals. It could theoretically be the case
that the intentions of artist and audience differ wildly. An artist might
seek to express some emotional message through a painting, while the
viewer might be looking for a decorative piece of art for the office. But
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 23

for patterns of interaction of this kind to persist over time, it is unlikely

that intentions can diverge this much. Instead, both makers and audiences
will be drawn to artistic practices in which the intentions are, if not iden-
tical, at least partially overlapping. Therefore, there will be many different
social practices around the arts, which embody different ends.
This brings us to an important conceptual question: what is the
relationship between ends and values? The simple answer is that these
concepts overlap a great deal. Our conception of values is pragmatic,
in the sense of the American pragmatism, of for example John Dewey.
In Dewey’s work we find a distinction between ‘ends-in-view’ and more
fundamental values. That is not to say that values have a transcendental
or ideal reality, but merely that they are underlying reasons for people to
pursue certain activities, or ends-in-view. As Arjo Klamer has suggested,
they are the answers to a repeated why question: ‘Why is that impor-
tant to you?’ After a few iterations of that question, he believes that we
arrive at the level of values: “Why are you buying groceries? Why do you
spend time preparing dinner? Why do you find it important to share time
and conversations with friends? Why is friendship important?” (Klamer
2016, 48–49). At that point the conversation might become uncomfort-
able, what is one supposed to answer to the question why friendship is
important? The interviewee might throw up their hands or become frus-
trated, because at some point we cannot dig deeper, at that point we have
arrived at the value itself.
It is to be expected that the number of ends-in-view—the imme-
diate goals which individuals pursue—is high, possibly infinite. The total
number of values is more limited, since several ends-in-view aim at more
ultimate ends, or values. There is an ongoing debate among theorists of
value and well-being whether these ultimate ends can be listed (Nuss-
baum 2009). As we illustrate below, we think values are contextual and
discovered in new practices so that attempts at creating universal lists
is misguided. This pragmatic approach to values is, however, somewhat
reductionistic; it analyzes underlying values but does not seek to reduce
all values to a single denominator such as utility, or price. Our approach
is nonetheless close to the economic rational choice approach, which
similarly starts from individual intentions.
In rational choice theory it is assumed that individuals seek to satisfy
their preferences. These preferences reflect the ranking of different
bundles of goods. We are not interested in the goods directly, but rather
in the values which can be realized with the help of goods. The economist
24 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Gary Becker suggested that we should think of goods bought on the

markets as inputs to the production of underlying more fundamental goals
or values (Stigler and Becker 1977). Individuals buy goods on the market,
with which they produce what they value with additional inputs such as
time, the help of others, and knowledge.
Gary Becker’s approach is closer to sociology than is frequently real-
ized. In the work of sociologists such as Howard Becker (1953) and
Randall Collins (2004) we also find an approach that treats goods as
inputs to social practices. When a person buys a violin, it might be merely
used to show off, or decorate a room. But to use it to produce pleasant
sounds will require many additional inputs, including extensive studying
informed by others. Artistic practices require market goods such as instru-
ments, ink, or paint which are then combined with knowledge, time, and
effort to produce something meaningful, and that which is meaningful is
typically, but not always, shared with others. This is equally true on the
consumption side, where tickets for a performance merely provide access.
To fully enjoy the performance typically requires attention, numerous
other engaged audience members, as well as previous knowledge. The
Beckerian approach blurs the sharp distinction between consumption and
production, and therefore also between the idea that consumption is
enjoyable but costly, while production is costly but productive. Amateurs
and professional artists often derive a lot of satisfaction from the process of
creation. Even if that creation is not shared, or experienced by others, they
might still claim to have realized a value, or several values. This approach
does not have to introduce some ad hoc idea of intrinsic motivation to
make clear that we are willing to engage in costly activities such as buying
goods, and exerting effort, to enjoy ourselves, and realize values.
One limitation of the Beckerian approach is that it equates value
with equilibrium prices. This view is rather static, but the significance
of prices should not be dismissed too easily. Good economics realizes
that the market itself is a process of learning, in which prices do not
simply reflect costs or equilibrium values (Hayek 2014). Markets enable
the mutual coordination between individuals with heterogenous prefer-
ences and suppliers with widely differentiated goods. Suppliers search for
new and innovative ways to improve their products and services, and
consumers learn the relevant differences through the choices they make.
In this way, market prices reflect the ongoing valuation process through
active engagement of consumers. The resulting price provides important
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 25

signals to new artists about what type of products and services might be
appreciated. In other words, markets coordinate.
Market prices and sales volumes captured in, for instance, charts or
best-seller lists, provide an interesting quantitative measure, which has
proven attractive for many empirical researchers. An important strand of
research even seeks to generate market prices for public goods or heritage
sites which are not traded on markets, through methods such as contin-
gent valuation (Noonan 2003). For example, an experiment conducted
in 2018 demonstrated that Londoners are, on average, willing to pay £5
for the public art in their city (Tanguy and Kumar 2019). Yet, market
outcomes capture very little of the qualitative differences in valuation,
and they provide only a first clue about the underlying justification for
valuation (Velthuis 2004). This is an important insight for social scientists
seeking to understand the values around art, but it is also a fact of life
for cultural organizations seeking to evaluate whether they did well. If a
museum exhibit or music festival attracts many customers this is an impor-
tant clue about the extent to which an event was successful, but it tells
little about the quality of the engagement of the audience, or whether
the event affected visitors, aspects which interest museum directors and
festival organizers just as much. Cultural entrepreneurs need to interpret
the engagement to be able to evaluate how well they did, and which
projects they should develop in the future (Dekker and Kuchař 2016).
Another reason to rely on the pragmatic concept of values, is that it
is much closer to the lived experience of individuals. First, an approach
which makes values central recognizes the fact that people seek to realize
incompatible things, competing values, which might be in deep conflict
with each other (Roberts 2022). The language of values provides concep-
tual tools for talking about the deep conflicts between these values,
instead of the abstract logic of preferences and trade-offs which domi-
nates economic thinking. Second, values have a moral connotation which
is reflected in the idealistic goals which many in the arts world (claim
to) pursue. We recognize that claims about the pursuit of lofty goals in
the arts are sometimes disingenuous, and in other instances strategic. But
to make sense of the art practices we discuss in this book, something
fundamental is ignored, when we do not consider the moral and idealistic
nature of the values which individuals seek to realize.
Another way of thinking about this moral dimension of values is that
the arts are a crucial part of identity formation and expression for many
individuals. It is often said that ‘we are what we eat’, which suggests
26 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

a tight link between consumption patterns and our identity. Since we

prefer to think of practices rather than goods, we should say ‘we are
what we do’. Identity has received increasing attention among sociolog-
ically oriented economists. The economists (Bénabou and Tirole 2016),
recognize that identities are to a large extent ‘performed’, something the
sociologist Goffmann (1959) has argued long ago. This means that by
engaging in artistic practices individuals perform who they are, both to
themselves and to others. Jason Potts and Peter Earl in groundbreaking
work have suggested that while individuals have a high degree of agency
over which identity to pursue, they have far less agency once they have
made this choice (Earl and Potts 2004). One way of thinking about this
difference is that we make conscious decisions over who we want to be,
but we rely on convention and the choices of others once we have decided
to join a certain social practice. We orient ourselves toward others, who
to befriend and who to stay away from, but largely accept social mores
once inside a relationship or social practice.

Values Are Embedded in Social Practices

Identity is expressed and performed through patterns of actions, just like
values are realized through the pursuit of interconnected ends-in-view.
This typically takes place in communities and groups. The coordination
between different individuals which make up such a community is easiest
when the different members seek to realize the same value or values.
Occasionally the social practice is nearly identical with the values that
members seek to realize, Klamer (2016) then speaks of a praxis: a practice
which constitutes its own end. That is an excellent way to make sense of
the elusive notion of intrinsic motivation, which posits that individuals do
something for their own sake. A theory of motivation frequently invoked
to explain the behavior of artists (Frey and Jegen 2001; Abbing 2002;
Remic 2021). This interpretation of intrinsic motivation does not have
to rely on some external psychological drive but explains that a particular
social activity is attractive to an individual because it embodies the values
that they seek to realize.
In the contemporary economy, this tight connection between
economic activity and who we are is nowhere more visible than in the type
of work people seek to do. Sociologists have observed how work has taken
over the role of consumption in the expression of our identity. Thorstein
Veblen (1899) studied ‘conspicuous consumption’ by which he referred
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 27

to the products which rich people bought and displayed to signal their
wealth. But as luxury consumption has become more widespread, due to
much greater material welfare in most Western countries, it became harder
to signal superiority through consumption. Pierre Bourdieu, the French
sociologist, suggested that ‘cultural taste’ replaced conspicuous consump-
tion as the marker of difference between the upper classes and the middle
classes. Bourdieu’s work Distinction (1984) makes clear that the cultural
sector occupies a special position in society. More than other sectors it
allows individuals to explore and express their values. This is especially
true for those who choose a career in the arts. Artists are often held up
as exemplars of those who choose meaning over money, and they are
represented as pioneers of ‘the new’. That is how Van Gogh’s sacrifices
to make his art are celebrated: he pursued his art despite never selling
a painting in his life. In the contemporary economy the idea that our
career choices are some of the most meaningful we make in our lives is
widespread (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005).
Work has come to occupy a unique place in contemporary life. This
is expressed in the amount of time that individuals spend on work, more
time signals that we enjoy our work and value it for its own sake (Collewet
et al. 2017). As well as in the type of professions young people aspire
to pursue, these should allow them to be creative and express them-
selves (Overton and Banks 2015). It is a good example of how values
are driving more and more decisions, not just in the cultural sector, but
in the economy broadly.
Next to work, individuals are typically part of various social groups
and engage in shared practices. Around arts and culture one can think of
such diverse activities as festival-attendance, choir practice, the creation
and sharing of (artistic) memes, jam sessions, watch-parties, or the cele-
bration of a national or religious holiday. These social practices aim at
realizing values or embody them. As such, these practices are a rich repos-
itory of options from which the individual can choose what best fits their
ends-in-view or deeper underlying values. The embodiment of values in
existing practices is an important insight for it moves us away from purely
rational (and individual) deliberation about which values are important.
Instead, individuals can observe values being realized and join different
art communities to figure out and learn what they find important.
In some instances, social practices will be pursued by individuals with
nearly identical goals and values. But this is not at all the most common
situation, in most instances individual values and purposes are not aligned
28 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

and an artistic practice provides sufficient overlap to allow different indi-

viduals to realize their own values. A music festival provides a good
example, for some it is an opportunity to enjoy their favorite music live,
for others a way to bond with friends, for some artists it is a way to
realize a new innovative project, while others might simply view it as a
profit opportunity to sell some food, merchandise, or drugs. The music
festival is the means for the realization of these different purposes and the
values associated with them (aesthetic enjoyment, friendship, creativity),
which are potentially at odds with each other.
Most artistic practices are, therefore, and we do not mean this in a
bad way, compromises, or hybrids. They are platforms for different indi-
viduals to realize their values, for others they are simply a means toward
something else. Boltanski and Thévenot devote much of their seminal On
Justification (2006) to the examination of compromises which seek to
satisfy multiple orders of worth at the same time. This is a result of the
deep value-pluralism and heterogeneity in contemporary societies. But we
believe it can equally be recognized at the individual level. Humans seek
to realize conflicting values and frequently juggle between different orders
of worth, not merely because their social roles demand this of them, but
also because our own moral schema and aspirations are complex. Conflicts
about values do not merely happen between people, but also within
our own minds. These conflicts are not merely about which values are
important, a question which could easily turn into an abstract philosoph-
ical reflection, from which most would rather excuse themselves. On a
more practical level value conflicts are about which practices to contribute
and with whom to associate, they are competing orientations for human
action.

The Context of Values Are Orders of Worth

We have suggested above that values are contextual. This is true in two
senses, the values that an individual will seek to realize differ depending
on their personal experiences and social context. Our case study below
will delve deeper into this type of context. For now, we will focus on the
fact that values are not free-floating ideals but are instead connected to
each other and broader webs of meaning.
These connections are not always visible because a lot of valuation is
routine or embedded in existing institutions and patterns of interaction.
But when individuals break out of routines, they engage in the activity
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 29

of valuing both the means they use and the ends they pursue. Dewey
calls such situations ‘problematic’, they lie at the heart of his process of
judgment and valuation. ‘Problematic’, in the sense of unusual, situations
require individuals to reassess, weigh, appraise, and evaluate, in short to
value (Dewey 1939). In his pragmatist theory, value is not something
which exists independent of the subjective perspective and the actions
of humans, instead value is something which is the outcome of actions,
it is the outcome of human action. Dewey asks us to ponder whether
value is a noun, a property of artefacts, or a verb, an action. He decides,
conclusively, for the latter. This is congruent with how economists since
at least Carl Menger have conceived of value: a result of human action
who attribute value to means which further their ends (Menger 1871).
Valuation is not merely linked with action, but also inextricably bound
up with uncertainty (Beckert 1996). It is when individuals break routines
and try something new, something that is not yet tested or confirmed,
and step into the unknown, that valuation happens.
Many aspects of the cultural industries are routinized, not unlike indus-
trial routines. But the valuation of ‘the new’ remains a key aspect in the
cultural industries, which means that researchers of the arts have always
emphasized the inherent uncertainty about value which characterizes the
sector (Baumol 1986; Bielby and Bielby 1994; Caves 2000). The cultural
industries are part of the experience economy, in which surprise, and
critical evaluation, appraisal and valuation are fundamental characteris-
tics (Pine and Gilmore 1999; Hutter 2011). The open-endedness of the
experiences, and of cultural goods, is of course a matter of degree. In
mass-markets it is common to see quite standardized versions of the new
appear, such as in movies which are serialized. The more close-ended the
product is, the less surprise and valuation are an inherent part of the expe-
rience, and the more likely it is that these products will be categorized as
entertainment rather than art. Art might be said to explore the uncertain,
and therefore valuation is an inherent part of the process of art.
The pragmatic approach of Dewey has recently been enriched by what
has been called French neo-pragmatism (Krüger and Reinhart 2017).
A group of French economic sociologists, especially Luc Boltanski and
Laurent Thévenot, have expanded the approach of Dewey in a more
structural direction. They have suggested that valuation and the justifi-
cation of value typically happens in relation to an order of worth. Orders
of worth should be understood as a kind of classification scheme of action,
30 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

which evaluates their value significance. Daydreaming at the job is unpro-

ductive and wasteful in the context of the industrial order of worth, but
it makes sense and is potentially valuable because it leads to new ideas
within the inspired world of Boltanski and Thévenot (2000, 2006).
Orders of worth are not set in stone, but they do represent the struc-
tural part of the valuation process. Individuals make judgments, as the
French neo-pragmatists and their interlocutor David Stark are keen to
emphasize, in moments of choice and judgment, what Dewey called
‘problematic’ situations. But to a pragmatist these moral structures of
values are significant and most importantly ‘real’. Hayek famously argued
that the most important facts of the social sciences are what people think
and believe, and since these intersubjective structures are guideposts for
the valuations of individuals, they are some of the ‘realest’ material which
social scientists can investigate (Hayek 1952).
Orders of worth emerge as an unintended consequence of individual
decisions, they are what Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek have called
spontaneous orders (Jacobs 2000). The exemplary spontaneous order is
language which emerges and evolves through repeated usage and will
differ significantly between different communities. The structure of most
language is deeply complex, there is a grammar which structures language
usage, but, as any student of a second language knows, these grammar
rules are anything but universal and come with many exceptions. We
believe that orders of worth should be understood similarly, they have
emerged and evolved through repeated usage, and it is possible to discern
a kind of grammar in them, although there will be many exceptions and
contextual judgments. Orders of worth will differ significantly between
different communities, just like languages do.
It is within these orders, or better in relation to them, that social prac-
tices acquire meaning. Diverse orders of worth allow us not merely to
value goods, they also inform individuals about the values they might
seek to realize. The inspired world identified by Boltanski and Thévenot
connects most naturally to the arts, so it is relevant to see which values
they associate with it. They do not speak directly of values, but they can
be distilled from their account without much trouble, for instance beauty;
originality; openness; spontaneity. These values are guideposts in the sense
that they can be used to evaluate whether an activity is worthy of our
pursuit, and why a social practice is meaningful.
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 31

Although his theoretical framework is different, Arjo Klamer also

arrives at the centrality of values, including the idea that values play an
important role in creating competing and partially incompatible social
orders. He distinguishes a market, organizational, social, and domestic
order, which to a significant degree overlap with the worlds of Boltanski
and Thévenot. In contrast to the French neo-pragmatists, Klamer is
explicit about the values he associates with these different orders. He
names personal values such as craftmanship or skill, autonomy, authen-
ticity as well as pursuing one’s curiosity or creativity; social values such
as loyalty, community, respect and responsibility; societal values such as
justice, fairness, liberty, tolerance, and equality; and transcendental values
such as beauty, peace, enlightenment, and sacredness (Klamer 2016, 59).
His willingness to be explicit about spheres and the associated values
might suggest that he holds a universalist conception of values. But
Klamer (2020) recognizes in recent work that values are connected to
broader cultural patterns which provide the context of meaning within
which these spheres operate.

The Values of a Hip-Hop Artist

The best way to understand how values shape choices in the arts is
to see how artists make their decisions. We will analyze the career of
singer and rapper Phonte to see which values he sought to realize and
how values shaped both the means he used and the ends-in-view he
pursued. It should highlight a number of key theoretical points we made
above, including the multiple identities which individuals have and the
way these put competing demands on an artist, as well as the way values
are embedded in existing social practices, and finally the relation of values
to broader orders of worth.
Phonte enjoyed his breakthrough in the group Little Brother, around
2003. Their first single ‘Speed’ garnered local interest and they were
able to sign a record deal with the independent label ABB. The group
consisted of rappers Phonte, Big Pooh, and producer 9th Wonder. Little
Brother’s sound was inspired by the jazzy hip-hop of the early ‘90s, from
groups such as A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. The subject matter
of their songs was down to earth and focused on the everyday prob-
lems of the members of the group ranging from personal relationships,
to their start in the music industry, and their perspective on hip-hop
music. They clearly rejected the commercial direction and tough-guy
32 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

or gangster images which dominated hip-hop at the time. Their revival

of a more conscious and jazzy sound on the first album The Listening
received wide acclaim of the press and their peers. Phonte was particu-
larly impressed when he got a call from one of his musical heroes, Pete
Rock, with whom he would later record several songs.
In the wake of this success, Little Brother was able to get extra expo-
sure for various friends, who formed the collective Justus League. Some
of these artists were able to release their own albums with some success,
which was especially notable since Durham (North Carolina) had not
been known as an important city for hip-hop music. The success of their
independent first album landed the group a deal with the major label
Atlantic. Initially the group members were over the moon because of this
deal. On ‘The Becoming’, one of the first tracks of his second album,
Phonte described how they went from nobodies to highly regarded artists,
from upstarts with an album that had been poorly available to one which
would be released and distributed by a major label.
Their experience at the major label Atlantic was, however, mixed.
During their stay at the indie label ABB, they were used to putting out
music directly. The release at Atlantic involved a lot more ‘red-tape.’ Their
new label kept asking for a single, which would be suitable for radio play.
This single was found with ‘Lovin’ it’, a relatively straightforward hip-
hop party track. The role the song played on the album was, however,
more controversial. Their second album was entitled The Minstrel Show
(Fig. 2.1), a reference to an American form of entertainment from the
late nineteenth century in which white people performed racial stereo-
types in blackface. Phonte explained that he felt that a lot of contemporary
hip-hop music, like minstrelsy, reinforced stereotypes about black people.
Through skits and short interludes, the songs on the album are connected
to form a modern-day Minstrel Show. In this context ‘Lovin’ it’ was the
song that pandered to the (white) audience. Whereas the first album had
presented an alternative aesthetic to mainstream hip-hop, their next one
took a confrontational approach and sought to change the direction of
the genre.
The response to the album was also mixed. Most critics and old fans
could appreciate both the concept and the music. But the album did not
become a great commercial success. BET, the major tv-station for hip-hop
videos, allegedly believed that the song ‘Lovin’ it’ was ‘too intelligent’ for
their audience and decided to not include it in their day-time rotation.
BET has always denied this claim, but it was widely reported in the media
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 33

Fig. 2.1 Album covers of The Minstrel Show by Little Brother and Connected
by Foreign Exchange

in 2005 and Phonte referenced the affair in the mixtape song ‘Boondock
Saints’ from 2006. Meanwhile Atlantic, unsure of what to do with the
concept-album, did little to promote it. The parody-song ‘Cheatin’’, in
which Phonte mockingly sang in the then-dominant style of crooning
R&B, meanwhile, generated a buzz. But to Phonte’s surprise not as a
parody, rather as a serious R&B song. Phonte later claimed that the R.
Kelly song ‘Trapped in the Closet’ released around the same time, outdid
his parody. What had been intended as mockery was taken at face value.
His attempt to create authentic music and critique the aesthetic of hip-
hop music did not have the intended effect.
What Little Brother, furthermore, discovered was that the values they
sought to realize were not shared by anyone at Atlantic. As the release
date of their third album came closer, the relationship with Atlantic went
sour, in the political speak of the music industry the parties parted because
of ‘different philosophies’. In the meantime, the relationship with the
third member of the group, producer 9th Wonder, had also become more
difficult. What had started as a group of friends making music in their
dorms had become a business, and it was hard to keep the values aligned,
or even to remember that friendship and camaraderie were once the most
important part of it. After another album Big Pooh and Phonte decided to
split up, the former commented on the situation that: “As, Little Brother
calls it quits, there are other groups to not necessarily take our place but
34 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

to keep the tradition going…That’s what it’s all about – you don’t want
your favorite group to force a relationship. Like, you don’t want Tribe
Called Quest…If they don’t really want to be together, you don’t want
them to make another album.”
A Tribe Called Quest was one of the groups which had inspired them,
but which also had grown apart during the recording of their later albums.
It made Phonte reflect on his motives for making music in the song ‘Can’t
Win for Losing’. He explains that he started out to get love from his fans,
until that relationship became constraining, because they either idolized
or hated artists. Then he wanted to do it for those close to him, to give
them a voice, but his family and friends were uncomfortable with his more
personal and critical reflections in his music. Then he wanted to do it to
get respect for his art, until that too felt constraining because it created
a restrictive pattern of expectation. To conclude the verse with: “Had a
long hard talk with my nigga Jazzy Jeff/ He said, ‘Fuck ’em [Phon]’Te, do
it for you!”.
The different values he had attempted to realize are beautifully on
display in the song. He had started wanting to give hip-hop fans a
different sound and aesthetic, but these had received the music quite
different from how it had been intended. His closest family did not recog-
nize either what he was trying to accomplish, and he had estranged his
mother through his lyrics. The smaller group of fans who did fully under-
stand what the music was about, at the same time limited his freedom,
because they desired more of the same, while Phonte wanted to expand.
So Phonte returned to his own motivations and values, without knowing
precisely what these were.
His struggles with his family had already been the subject of other
songs, in which he reflected on the strain that this musical career had put
on his family. In ‘All for You’ he not only reflected on his relationship
with his first wife, but also the relationship with his father:

From the roots to the branches to the leaves

They say apples don’t fall far from the trees

(…)
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 35

But I swear to God I tried to make that shit work

‘Til I came off tour to an empty house

With all the dressers and the cabinets emptied out

(…)

That shit affected me, largely

Because I know a lot of people want me

To fail as a father, and the thought of that haunts me

Especially when I check my rear-view mirror

And don’t see him [his son] in his car seat

Phonte had started with hopes to shatter stereotypes about black

music, black fathers as well as hip-hop groups which did not manage to
stay together. But looking back he realized this had proven much harder
than he hoped, as he concluded on the song ‘Dreams’:

I still go the crib and see my niggaz on the corner

Chilling with the pounds on they waist, getting old

Getting round in the face and when I hang with them

They ask me if The Minstrel Show means I’m ashamed of them

Well – I can’t say that I’m proud, but only saying

36 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Can’t say I’m allowed to judge, I’m just glad to see you

Cause truth be told, if my records never sold

And I wasn’t raised this bold, nigga I would probably be you

The different values which Phonte attempted to realize were in tension

with each other. This is most evident in the strained relationships with old
friends and family. On the other hand, the relationship with some of his
other friends grew closer. His friend and manager Big Do for example
stayed with him through all label changes. In the meantime, next to
his career as a rapper he has also been working on a different project
called Foreign Exchange. It was a collaboration with the Dutch producer
Nicolay, whom he met through a music forum on the internet. Their
first album Connected (Fig. 2.1) was released in 2004, and in 2010 the
third album Authenticity came out. The group allowed Phonte to develop
a different side of himself. Foreign Exchange created modern soul, the
subject matter was mostly romantic and Phonte did not rap but sang on
the albums. It is characteristic that this other identity was pursued under
a different name.
In 2009 Foreign Exchange was nominated for a Grammy in the
category of best urban/alternative performance, for their track ‘The
Daykeeper’ of the second album. That is not the only success that Phonte
and Nicolay had, for they also set up the Foreign Exchange label, which
aimed to be an opportunity to provide a platform for others. So, while
some relationships deteriorated new ones were formed, with new mean-
ings. Phonte explored these new avenues on ‘Tigallo for Dolo’, in which
he claimed to be done with the rap game: “no country for old men”.
Phonte was now engaged in at least three clearly definable projects, which
reflected his multiple identities, and the different values he sought to
realize. The first of these was that of a successful singer as part of Foreign
Exchange. The second as one half of the hip-hop group Little Brother,
and third the relationship he had built over the years was with a significant
core fan-base. They placed new demands on him, in part to keep making
music in the same vein as he had done before. In the aforementioned
song he addressed these expectations, my fans suggest that:

We need LB [Little Brother] to come and save the rap game

 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 37

But, truthfully, I don’t think the shit needs saving

I think we got wives and sons that need raising

New dreams to fill and for that, we need patience

Twenty-one years old, I used to slang verses

But ten years later, I am not the same person

Whole new perspective, not the same purpose

The expectations of the Little Brother fans clashed with his own changed
expectations, he no longer had ambitions or beliefs that he could change
the direction of hip-hop. Phonte explored new goals, such as building a
family. He felt he had become a different person, with different values.
These values were discovered through the various projects he undertook
and the relationships with others that resulted from it, or that were broken
off because of it.
He sought to express and realize his values through his music career,
but at the same time realized that these values were incompatible with
his other ambitions. He half-jokingly suggested in the intro to one of his
solo songs: “And I do this all for hip-hop! I’m lying like shit, I do this
shit for my goddamn mortgage.” A tension which remained mostly unre-
solved. Meanwhile fans and friends kept asking whether a reunion album
would be possible, in a podcast with fellow artist Questlove they were
asked how the reunion album May the Lord Watch (2019) came about to
which they answered: “I think it was just us, becoming friends” (Quest-
love 2000, 1h21m). This process took time, several years, but when that
happened Big Pooh and Phonte felt that they could create another album
which came from the right place. An album which allowed to realize
some of the values of which they had lost sight the first time around.
The personal connection with their third group member 9th Wonder was
never restored.
The journey of Phonte illustrates how his artistic practices are values-
driven. Initially, these were mostly social: respect and recognition from
38 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

peers. With the ‘Minstrel Show’ album they also more explicitly than
before sought to challenge existing aesthetic standards within hip-hop, so
Phonte’s values shifted more into the societal and transcendental domain.
When these efforts did not pan out as hoped and came at the detri-
ment of many of his other values, including a growing estrangement from
older friends and family, Phonte reoriented himself. He focused more on
his singing career and the subject matter of the raps for Little Brother
returned to everyday trials and tribulations and a bittersweet stance
toward the broader direction in hip-hop, without any direct confronta-
tion. This return to the personal was not only reflected in the growing
importance he attached to building a family and overcoming stereotypes
about black fathers, but also in the reunion with his partner in rhyme,
Big Pooh. His choices illustrate how value-pluralism is not only a fact
about modern society. It is also reflected, at the level of the individual, in
the multiple practices in which artists engage, the various projects they
undertake, and the different identities and associated values they seek to
realize.

Value Discovery
What the analysis of Phonte’s choice also makes clear is that the realization
of values is not a linear process in which first the artist must be clear about
their values and then they can think of ways to realize them. Initially
he sought to contribute to an existing social practice of conscious hip-
hop music and realize the associated values. This developed into a more
confrontational approach during the Minstrel Show album, which not only
sought to realize certain values, but also contested other practices. When
this project did not lead to the desired results, Phonte reoriented his ends-
in-view. In this sense, values are discovered in the process of realizing
them.
The process of value discovery has recently been put on the agenda
by various authors, but most prominently by the philosopher Agnes
Callard. She has written extensively on aspiration and value-acquisition.
Callard (2018) makes clear that there is a significant difference between
believing that something is valuable and valuing it. The latter requires
active engagement, or better yet, the pursuit of this value, an attempt to
make it real. If we follow her line of reasoning, we can only really discover
what a particular value entails, and why it is valuable, in our attempt to
realize it. This makes the pursuit of values a conceptually complex issue.
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 39

For if we cannot know beforehand what a value is, then why would we
choose it? Are we simply reaching the end of the domain of rationality
and deliberate choices?
Callard suggests this is not the case. We can, she suggests, reason
toward values. We do this mostly by imitation and following the paths
of others. Phonte and his group Little Brother initially sought to imitate
their role models, groups such as a Tribe Called Quest. This imitation
can already be an active process, Phonte was for instance aware that he
wanted to avoid the same group dynamic which had caused other groups
to split up. In an interview he recounted how the idea of also doing solo-
and side-projects was from the start designed to make the group more
durable and he invoked the example of the group Gang Starr consisting
of DJ Premier and Guru who successfully managed this (Questlove 2020,
1h19m). It can also build on negative examples. Phonte wanted to avoid
following the example of his father, who had kids early, and did not stay
around to raise them.
Values are not merely embodied by role models but also in social prac-
tices, in genre conventions as well as in the way practitioners behave
and talk about their art. Aspiration is to a significant degree the desire
to be part of a certain social practice and to be respected by the other
practitioners, to be recognized as artist. This consists of both recogni-
tion by peers as well as critical recognition and commercial success or fan
support. In the case of Phonte this was evident in his pride of the recog-
nition of his musical heroes, as well as the relationship with his fans. The
desire for recognition is not limited to artists, but also a recurring desire
for audiences. They frequently aspire to be the kind of person who can
enjoy a certain type of art and be able to properly appreciate it. In prac-
tice this means being recognized by other consumers as a serious fan or
connoisseur.
In this sense, value aspiration is not an individual psychological process,
but a social process, which consists in the desire and attempts to join
certain practices. The practical side of realizing values is choosing which
art communities to join. For some practices, the barriers to entry are
low, but frequently they are significant. Howard Becker, in a classic paper
(1953), described how individuals are socialized into being marihuana
users in a process of socialization in which they first learn to smoke, then
to learn to recognize being high and finally to enjoy the high and share
the enjoyment with others. In an excellent study along the same lines,
Claudio Benzecry (2009) has studied how one becomes an opera fan
40 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

through a process of learning, in which newcomers first learn to know

relevant opera’s then to recognize differences between them, as well as
what to appreciate in opera, to finally be able to share this appreciation
with others. Value aspiration can thus often be observed in how people
choose to spend their time and which art communities they seek to join.
Values in a fundamental sense always have an aspirational aspect, they
might even tend toward the utopian in the form of not fully realiz-
able dreams, such as Phonte’s hope to change the dominant aesthetic
in hip-hop. Whereas the traditional theory of preference satisfaction in
economics claims that individuals buy goods because they will satisfy
their needs and wants, which are expressed in a preference function,
our values-based theory suggests that the practice of arts as well as the
consumption of arts frequently has an important aspirational element. It
seeks to realize something beyond our preferences, beyond what we know.
Michael Hutter (2011) has drawn attention to the fact that the traditional
economic theory of so-called experience goods assumes that knowing
more about the product beforehand is desirable. The more uncertainty
there is about the characteristics and quality of the goods, the less likely
consumers will buy them. Hutter, on the contrary, suggests that artistic
goods cannot function without an element of surprise; we are interested
in them because we hope to give us something we do not yet know or
have not yet experienced.
A similar recognition can be found at the basis of Tibor Scitovsky’s crit-
ical theory of consumption in The Joyless Economy (1976). He was worried
about the rise of entertainment at the expense of art and suggested that
entertainment gave consumers exactly what they wanted, instead of chal-
lenging them beyond what they knew. The maverick economist Frank
Knight suggested that the purpose of life was not to satisfy our prefer-
ences, but to develop better ones. All these suggestions point in the same
direction, aspiration moves beyond what we know and fully understand
in the direction of who or what we like to be.
It is our conviction that values should therefore not be understood as
deep-seated desires or expressions of what people really want if they would
reflect sufficiently deeply. This means that we are skeptical of methods
which aim to uncover the values solely through a process of probing as
Klamer at times suggests (see also Rekom et al. 2006). Realizing what
one’s values are, the Socratic imperative to ‘know thyself’, should not
be interpreted as merely a call for introspection. Nor are values abstract
 2 WHAT VALUES ARE, AND HOW WE LEARN TO APPRECIATE … 41

Platonic entities which are universal and ideal, instead values in the prag-
matic approach are embodied in social practices and expressed in the
identities articulated through these practices.
Agnes Callard comes to a similar conclusion and does not look for an
authentic self and their values; she instead suggests that we shape who
we are through our actions. We are making ourselves through our prac-
tices, we are what we do as we put it earlier. This perspective also makes
it clear that what we value, and which practices we seek to join does not
reflect underlying preferences or who we truly are. Rather, values and
identities are performed. The process of value-acquisition is a performa-
tive process in which we seek to perform those actions which would bring
us closer to a certain value. Through this performance we in some sense
make ourselves into the person who embodies certain values, captured in
Phonte’s lines: “But ten years later, I am not the same person/ Whole
new perspective, not the same purpose”.
Identity is not only in flux over time, but at any moment in time the
different social practices in which individuals are engaged, place different
demands on people. The heterogeneity of values we find in society is
reflected at the individual level in the multiple identities which nearly
all individuals seek to realize. And therefore, the contestation between
different social practices and the values they embody at the societal level
is reflected in the internal conflicts that the individual artist faces, when
deciding what practices to contribute to.
As a result of these multiple identities, the individual and their
surroundings might feel that they fail to realize it. Performances can be
more and less successful, and performances can be more and less genuine.
In a performance of values, it is even inevitable that we feel like an
imposter, a feeling which might never quite go away. In the arts, as in
science, the imposter syndrome is a much-discussed phenomenon, and
reflects the ambiguity that individuals themselves feel about whether they
are merely performing a certain value or expertise, or whether they are
embodying it, realizing it. In the arts this ambiguity is reinforced by the
fact that most practitioners of the arts are not professionals in the sense
of holding a formal position or job which makes them an artist, instead
their status as ‘artist’ is dependent on the success of their performance,
and the perception of others.
A final complicating factor is that since the arts have high social status
there will be genuine imposters too, who seek to enhance how others
see them through signaling that they like the arts. The economists Kevin
42 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Simler and Robin Hanson (2018) are convinced that the desire to signal
our social status to others explains most of human behavior and they
explicitly single out the arts as a domain where this type of behavior is
highly visible. This perspective can in different forms also be found in the
work of Pierre Bourdieu (1986) who has suggested that individuals with
a high income will seek to convert their economic capital into cultural
capital, because this will confer a higher status upon them. The critical
French sociologist suggested that the development of ‘taste’, which is
recognized by others, is crucial to the acquisition of social status.
This perspective appears to be strongly at odds with the more idealistic
discussion of value-acquisition we have presented. But in practice it might
be hard to tell the difference. Robin Hanson recognized this and invited
Agnes Callard to a conversation about signaling and value-acquisition,
which was turned into the podcast series Minds almost meeting. Their
perspectives do not fully converge, but there are several moments when
both recognize that value-acquisition and status signaling might be two
phenomena very hard to distinguish. Especially if we believe that values
are embodied in social practices and performed, rather than in our minds
and rationally pursued, the two perspectives are nearly impossible to sepa-
rate. There might not be a way to tell the imposters from the true artists,
because all of them are seeking to convincingly realize values, convincingly
both to themselves and their peers. What starts out as ‘impersonation’,
‘imitation’, and ‘faking’ over time becomes the real thing and acquires
meaning and significance. That is how we learn about values, and to what
extent we truly value them, and whether they ‘fit’ us. Like in all good art,
the difference between the real and the artificial is complicated.

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 CHAPTER 3

How Artists Imagine New Worlds

Abstract We develop a social theory of innovation which is contrasted

with the model of the artist as a lone genius. The chapter demonstrates
that most art is a result of team production, and that even the art forms
which are produced by one individual depend on artistic circles where
creativity and imagination are stimulated. We present such artistic circles
as contribution goods; practices which seek to attract meaningful contri-
butions from the most talented artists. The practices developed in these
circles are the basis of the imagination and creativity of the individual. In
a thriving cultural civil society, many of such circles exist next to each
other and partially overlap, a dynamic which enables both knowledge
transmission and competition. We then examine how this social model of
innovation changes the way we think about imagination, and suggest that
imagination typically takes the form of both social and aesthetic imagina-
tion. In the contemporary art world artists do not merely seek to create
new works of art, but also prefigure alternative forms of social organiza-
tion, in which alternative small-scale experiments in living can take place.
We illustrate this process through an analysis of the projects of grassroots
artistic organizations in Venice, who contest the way overtourism and the
prestigious Biennale shape the art world in this Italian city.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 47

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_3
48 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Keywords Imagination · Creativity · Innovation commons · Venice ·

Cultural production

The improvement of society is the result of a vast multitude of cooperative

efforts, in which one individual uses the results provided for him by a countless
number of other individuals, and uses them so as to add to the common and
public store. A survey of such facts brings home the actual social character of
intelligence as it develops and makes its way.
John Dewey, Renascent Liberalism (1935)

Artistic practices originate from the ideas of artists. They cultivate existing
practices and imagine new ones, through which they seek to realize
values. It is often believed that they do so in isolation, and that imagi-
nation is primarily a psychological or mental process. In this chapter we
will demonstrate that creation and creativity are social activities which
take place in communities and circles. These circles often exist next to
and in opposition to each other, which enables both collaboration and
competition between them.
The cultivation of existing practices and the development of new ones
can take on many forms. It can be historically oriented and seek to
preserve or restore a previous order, or it can seek to radically transform
existing societal structures and be utopian. We argue that many contem-
porary artists operate between these extremes, they imagine and seek to
create alternative ‘worlds’ in conversation and interaction with citizens.
We illustrate these local efforts through an analysis of artistic communi-
ties in Venice, which contest the dominance of tourists and the high art
of the Biennale.

Forget the Solitary Genius,

Artists Imagine Together
One of the myths about artistic creation which does not seem to go
away is that of the solitary genius: Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic
wanderer, or the hermit creating on their own, inspired by a troubled
soul and unique visionary qualities. Let us not claim that there never
has been one. But if you find one, it is the exception which proves
the rule that art is created in communities. Most art forms are nearly
by definition collaborative endeavors, as for instance film, theater, or
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 49

ballet. The production of these art forms relies on what Richard Caves
(2000) has called a motley crew of producers. The early performances
of the Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps brought together the
talent of this Russian composer with that of choreographer and dancer
Vatslav Nizhinsky and costume and stage designer Nicholas Roehrig. The
famous composition and its theme were inspired by poems from Sergey
Gorodetsky, while the opening melodies drew from Lithuanian folk songs.
The conception of the work and its staging was a collaboration between
Roehrig and Stravinsky and supported by their patron Princess Maria
Tenisheva. During the process of composition Stravinsky sought feedback
from his fellow composer Maurice Ravel. The conductor of the company
which would premier the piece, Ballets Russe, provided further feedback
based on the rehearsals in which certain instruments were inaudible, while
the brass section tended to overpower the other sections. Stravinsky kept
working on his composition for the next thirty years, and during this
period many other choreographers, stage designers, conductors, musi-
cians, and dancers performed the piece, providing new interpretations of
it.
Matters are not much different in art forms such as painting or
writing, where final products are typically assigned to a single maker.
The avant-garde movements starting with Impressionism in the late nine-
teenth century explicitly presented themselves as groups of artists, but
long before that Rembrandt and Rubens managed workshops in which
different artists worked together on the same piece of art, while the
famous Italian Renaissance artists were maestri di bottega, masters of a
workshop. Skills were transferred within guilds or families and artists were
in intense contact with other artists and middlemen which significantly
shaped their products.
The first recognition that artists seek and receive occurs in small social
circles, within their family in which artistic activities are stimulated, among
their friends at art school, or by some of the more accomplished artists
that the aspiring artist knows. These creative groups provide a place in
which there is opportunity for feedback, collaboration, and inspiration.
But more fundamentally they are the space where creation becomes mean-
ingful, where it can be recognized by others. To acquire meaning artistic
creations need a culture of appreciation, which consists of both the artists,
the middlemen and admirers who not merely create and appreciate, but
also develop a language and critical apparatus to interpret and value the
works.
50 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

This reality is radically at odds, with the mythology of the creative

process as highly intimate and individual. Friedrich’s Wanderer above the
sea of fog famously portrays a tormented, isolated genius, who is busy
contemplating transcendental principles. Modern economic theories of
the entrepreneur as the single-minded design genius exemplified by Steve
Jobs have done little to alter that image (Dekker 2018). In the mythology
around Jobs, the Apple CEO, he was the lone genius who pursued his
solitary vision, despite all the internal and external opposition he faced.
This image of the ‘lone genius’ is both persistent and misleading.
Creativity and artistic production hardly ever happen as an isolated indi-
vidual activity. Certainly, the outcome of the process of production is a
signed or copyrighted product, often attributed to one individual. And,
during the process of production, the maker might require extensive
periods of isolation and concentration to come to the final product. But
artists are not born, they are trained in schools and by personal mentors,
they seek to become valued members of movements, collectives, or circles
of other artists where they experiment and share their work with friends.
The clearest counterevidence to the fact that creativity is an individualistic
process is that creative output is clustered in space and time (Hellmanzik
2010; Borowiecki 2013). We think of highly creative periods such as the
Italian Renaissance or the Enlightenment and artistic hotspots such as
Paris around 1900, post-war New York, or Bollywood in the decades after
Indian independence. Peter Hall has wonderfully illustrated how impor-
tant cities and migration to cities have been for culture (Hall 1998). In
the same manner, Randall Collins has demonstrated that all the great
philosophers were part of lively social circles and movements (Collins
1998).
Part of the reason for this concentration is explained by simple
economics and has little to do with creativity itself. The artists during the
Italian Renaissance in Florence and other rapidly developing cities bene-
fitted from newly concentrated wealth which meant that they could find
patrons, most famously the Medici family. This pattern continues into the
twentieth century when Peggy Guggenheim was central to the artistic
boom in New York in the post-war decades. The performing arts thrived
at the royal courts and in major cities because they require a substantial
audience to be profitable. But we contend that creativity itself also benefits
from concentration, through two essential processes: collaboration and
competition.
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 51

Artists Operate in Circles, Which Are

Sustained Through Contributions
Jason Potts has analyzed the dynamics around creativity through an
economic lens (Potts 2019). He argues that much innovation origi-
nates in social practices which are not directly aimed at the market or
even a particular end. He describes social groups in technology who
come together to exchange their experiences, experiments, and new
developments not knowing precisely where their activities might go.
They collaborate and share in what he calls the innovation commons,
without an idea of private ownership and based on an ethic of sharing,
although it is important for membership to such groups to have some-
thing interesting to contribute. At some point, the activities of the circle
of enthusiasts can become more significant and something emerges from
the experimentation which might potentially lead to a valuable good.
Most within the commons will, however, consider it inappropriate to use
the result of their joint experimentation to start a business venture. Potts,
nevertheless, emphasizes the instability of such a successful innovation
commons, which will make it likely that one of the participants will break
out of the commons, because the lure of private gain is too great. They
might start a private venture and attempt to market and sell something
based on the knowledge assembled within the innovation commons.
In the review of Potts’ book, one of us has suggested that these types of
innovation commons are even more ‘common’ in the arts (Dekker 2020).
Whether we call them salons, circles, scenes, clans, posses, crews, or clicks,
art experimentation and practice tend to happen in social settings in which
members share and experiment, membership is based on the ability to
contribute to the conversation and practice. These collaborative prac-
tices can be analyzed with economic models as Potts suggested. But his
notion of the innovation commons focused on explaining downstream
innovation within firms, it does not capture sufficiently that most artistic
creation remains within these circles. Klamer (2016) developed the notion
of shared goods, which depends on contributions of the participants to
sustain them. He contrasts the traditional notion of the willingness to
pay with the willingness to contribute to make clear that this is not best
understood as a system of production and consumption, but a process of
co-creation. Kealey and Ricketts (2014) have developed a formal model
along the same lines for knowledge goods, which they call contribution
goods. Both concepts make clear that these practices are not public goods,
52 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

in the sense of being fully open. Instead, newcomers are ‘screened’ to

ensure that they have something meaningful to contribute and so enrich
the practice.
In The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVaux (1997) describes how this jazz
form came about through the contributions of a dozen or so musicians
who came together during World War II in bars on New York’s 52nd
Street in Manhattan. Close to each other, there were several bars where
jazz musicians found semi-regular employment. After their performances,
they visited each other, sometimes merely to listen in, other times to join.
In this atmosphere, the jam session, a practice which had first emerged
some years earlier, became a regular practice. The jam sessions were much
smaller in size, around five to seven musicians, than the more popular
big swing jazz bands which dominated the charts. The New York jazz
audience was drawn to what they felt was a more authentic form of jazz
as it developed in these jam sessions. The bar owners on 52nd Street such
as the owner of Minton saw an opportunity to turn the jam session into a
viable commercial product and, over time, jam sessions emerged as stand-
alone events with a price of admission, despite opposition from the music
industry establishment.
The jam sessions involved a shared repertoire of songs and melodies
with which the jazz players experimented. But to turn it into a viable
product these jam sessions had to be transformed: “The repertory would
have to be converted into clearly defined economic units, preferably orig-
inal compositions, for which authorship could be precisely established.
The often-chaotic atmosphere of the jam session would need to be
streamlined and subtly redirected toward paying audiences. Reputation
among musicians would have to be translated into commercial reputa-
tion (…) The music would have to be given (…) something akin to a
brand name for marketing purposes. Inevitably, something was lost and
something was gained” (DeVeaux 1997, 298–299).
That brand name would become bebop, and the recorded ‘jam
sessions’ would become some of the most iconic jazz albums ever made.
But for our purposes, it is more relevant that Devaux explains a dynamic
nearly identical to the one Potts proposes: the community atmosphere
in which things are developed in an environment of collaboration, until
something has emerged that could be developed into a commercially viable
product. Potts suggests that the commons will most likely be destroyed
by it, because the norms of collaboration, sharing, and contribution which
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 53

maintained it will have been seriously violated. This is an important obser-

vation about the institutional dynamics at the intersection between art
communities and markets. That process is not always immediate, but the
fact that individual participants now know that they might be able to turn
their experiments within a small circle, into a viable product, will likely
change the dynamics within the small circle.
However, in the larger scheme of artistic practices, the dynamic which
leads to the breakdown of the commons is the exception. Jam sessions in
jazz persist to this day. In contrast, other social practices around the arts
never lead to a viable economic product. That is not to say that nothing
ever gets sold. The choir will have a few performances for which tickets
are sold at a friendly price, but it will hardly cover the costs involved
in weekly practices or even of renting the venue for the practices. The
amateur band will have a few occasional gigs, perhaps even quite a few
for certain periods, but even then, they will not cover much more than
the costs of travel, drinks, and instruments. The amateur painter will
have some local exhibitions and sell an occasional painting, typically to
friends or other artists, but most of them will be gifted, and the meagre
receipts will not (fully) compensate them for the time that was put in. The
practices themselves are what is meaningful to the artist, and the fact that
they are recognized in circles of fellow practitioners and fellow artists, is
one of the most important achievements.
As social scientists we should nonetheless, like Potts, ask the ques-
tion what sustains practices. Kealey and Ricketts and Klamer provide a
similar answer to that question, contributions. These contributions can
come from existing members of the circle who feel that they can benefit
from the appreciation, feedback, or critique of the others in the circle, or
they can come from new individuals who seek to join the circle because
they feel something interesting is developing there. Thus, contributions
must be crowded in, and contributors are crowded in by both the quality
and the number of other contributions to a circle or practice. As Kealey
and Ricketts have argued, once a certain threshold or critical value of
contributions is reached, a practice can be self-sustaining.
54 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Circles Benefit From the Proximity

of Circles in Neighboring Disciplines
So far, we have looked at the internal logic of an artistic circle of produc-
tion; the collaboration within it. But the work by Collins on the sociology
of philosophical schools and the work on creative circles by others demon-
strates that the structure of artistic production is peculiar. It consists of
integrated circles of creators working together, but in (fierce) competition
with other circles. A good example of such a structure of internal collab-
oration and external competition are the Wiener Kreise of the interwar
period. The most famous Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle, was a group
of positivist philosophers inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein
(who, interestingly, personally never joined the circle). But in Edward
Timms’ wonderful two-volume biography of the Viennese cultural critic
Karl Kraus (2005), we find overviews of the cultural and intellectual
scene in the first decades of the twentieth century with dozens of such
Kreise, circles. Many existed in opposition with each other, but there was
also an important overlap between the different circles, which facilitated
the exchange of knowledge (Timms 2009). Vienna was indeed uniquely
creative during this period: in the visual arts with Klimt and Kokoschka, in
architecture with Adolf Loos, in music with Albarn Berg and Schoenberg,
in psychology with Adler and Freud, in economics with Joseph Schum-
peter, Friedrich Hayek, and Otto Neurath, and one could go on and on
(Johnston 1972; Schorske 1980).
The identity of these circles was developed and strengthened in rela-
tions of friendly, and not so friendly, opposition to each other. Within
such circles, group identities were fostered through the development
of rituals such as songs, and by frequenting the same café or coffee-
house (Dekker 2014). But these identities and the urgency with which
they pursued their practices were reinforced by the fact that others were
engaged in related but opposing practices. Key within this network of
circles were the individuals who were (informal) members of a number
of circles: they facilitated the spread of knowledge between the circles
and enhanced competition between them, for example for the ear
and contributions of the most talented individuals.
The art world is best understood as a patchwork of partially overlap-
ping circles, the cultural civil society (Fig. 3.1). Some of these circles are
more prestigious, and the most prestigious ones together make up the
inner circle of the art world. But the great majority of circles consist of
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 55

amateurs and hobbyists who provide their own resources because they
find something of value in the creation of art, with or without commercial
success.
From the perspective of individual aspiring artists, the circles will look
like a somewhat chaotic sea of possibilities. They will be invited by a friend
into one and will hear of another one which they might seek to try out.
They might move to a city which is known for its lively scene, which
is a different way of saying that in such a city there are many circles to
choose from. The aspiring artist looks for a circle which fits both their
skill level and values. The circles, on the other hand, will be looking for
new (potential) contributors and seek to screen the newcomers when they
drop by once or twice. In this sense, social scientists see an extensive
matching process at work in which individuals with heterogenous values
and a wide variety of skills seek to coalesce for some period of time into
circles where they share, collaborate, experiment, or just hang out. It is

Fig. 3.1 Creative circles, colors indicate different values

56 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

precisely the wide variety of such circles which secures that, within the
network of circles as a whole, a great variety of values can be realized.
One exception to the horizontal relationships within the circles is the
mentor–pupil relationship, which continues to be important, especially
in the traditional arts as well as in the crafts. Mentors occupy an impor-
tant role because they signal excellence, in contrast to educational degrees
which tend to signal competence instead (Fine 2017; Borowiecki 2022).
But from the point of view of the social nature of artistic production
and creativity, the relationship between student and mentor is, upon
closer inspection, not that different from the circles we described above.
Mentors seek to attract the most talented individuals, tend to have
multiple students, and a major part of the attraction of working with a
reputable mentor are the other students and former students within the
circle around the mentor.
Thus, coordination through both collaboration and competition is a
crucial aspect of creativity and imagination. An example of a concentra-
tion of coordinated artistic circles is New York, whose cultural economy
of the 1970s consisted of a collection of sustained circles which oper-
ated based on cross-pollination and cross-coordination which make the
buzz collective and dynamic. In the sixties and seventies, Andy Warhol
and his Factory constituted one prominent artistic circle in the city,
probably the most famous, but far from the only one. Elizabeth Currid-
Halkett termed New York’s creative scene the Warhol Economy (2020)
and showed that the strength of it were the social relations rooted in many
overlapping communities. She contends that nightlife played a pivotal
role in connecting all the participants of the artistic scene. During the
bohemian period of the seventies, particular public places such as The
Cedar Tavern and CBGB’s were catalyzers of creativity. Punk rockers, pop
artists, gallerists, and fashion designers would all gather in the same places
where artistic performance happened in a ‘fluid’ manner across styles and
circles. The groups and individuals in this scene were in fierce competition
to be the ‘coolest’.
This economic perspective on creative circles dovetails well with the
sociological notion of art worlds, as it was developed by Howard Becker
(1984). He similarly paints a picture of creative production radically at
odds with the idea of individual artistic geniuses. Becker’s art worlds
are populated by a multitude of professionals of different backgrounds
that cooperate through the division of labor: artists, critics, gallerists,
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 57

patrons, impresarios, but also teachers and audiences. The actors, some-
times explicitly, but often implicitly, define what art is, and who counts
as an artist, they form conventions about the canon and accepted styles.
A stock of shared knowledge about each artistic discipline is kept alive
and evolving across space and time by the artists and their motley crews.
Conventions allow artists to collaborate quickly, as in the case of jazz
jam sessions, based on popular musical structures, or burlesque, whose
sketches belong to a limited repertoire, and in turn, they also allow
audiences to participate smoothly and evaluate their relative success. In
Becker’s theory, artistic work requires the joint contribution of various
professionals that in some instances are borrowed from neighboring
worlds, just like in the interaction between circles we described above.

Within Circles, Knowledge Is Generated,

and Artists Imagine New Possibilities
Now that we have established the centrality of artistic circles in the
creative process, we can move beyond the idea of the lonely genius.
According to that archetype, the source of knowledge and imagination
is the individual mind of the elevated individual. To that idea John
Dewey opposes a social individual who learns and generates knowledge in
dialogue with others: “knowledge is a function of association and commu-
nication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially
transmitted, developed, and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation,
reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture
and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers” (Dewey
2016, 183). To Dewey, the artist is necessarily embedded in traditions
and communities, which provide them with a language, a medium, a
tradition, and frequently also with a purpose. It is within these traditions
and the associated art communities that existing knowledge is captured,
and in which values are embodied. In Dewey’s vision, the individual
derives the ability to imagine and to add knowledge to this pre-existing
body, from the engagement with traditions and with others, through
‘association and communication’.
Moving away from the ideal lonely artistic genius means also moving
away from the conception of art for art’s sake. This idea was under-
pinned by aestheticians who would stress the unrelatedness of art from
function, utility, or moral purpose (Abbing 2019). It was meant to be a
direct expression of individuality, uncorrupted by other concerns. In this
58 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

perspective art is autonomous, and the ultimate goal of the artist is to

pursue beauty or another transcendental value associated with art, such as
truth or the sublime (e.g., Golding 2000). Even when artists did aspire
to it, such ideals were of course hardly ever obtained. Artists almost by
necessity have an audience in mind when creating, they are willingly or
unwillingly in conversation with contemporary culture, the art world, and
public discourse. In contrast with the dominant aesthetic of the twen-
tieth century, art historian Hilde Hein contends that all art should be
considered public:

As a public phenomenon, art must entail the artist’s self-negation and

deference to a collective community. It is interesting to observe that the
recognized art of nearly all cultures, including that of the western Euro-
pean tradition prior to the late Renaissance, embraces just such a collective
model, indulging the differences among individuals as variant manifesta-
tions of a common spirit. The celebrated treasures of Greece and Rome,
as well as the Christian works of the Middle Ages (…) do not exalt the
private vision of individual artists so much as they bespeak the shared
values and convictions of cultural communities, and are accordingly to be
found in those edifices and open places where people regularly gather to
commemorate those same values and convictions. (Hein 1996, 1)

Hein draws attention to the fact that historically it was common to recog-
nize artists were part of artistic traditions and collectives. Her emphasis
on the ‘common spirit’ takes for granted too much homogeneity in a
community, and pays too little attention to the critical potential of the art.
But, her historical contrast helps us to see that art has historically been
part of the public discourse and continues to be as our opening examples
of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the controversy over public statues
illustrate. The values expressed by art can be intimate and personal, but
they also seek to contribute to a public discourse about intimate, social,
as well as public relationships.
This move has also been reflected in contemporary art. In recent
decades new movements have thematized human relations, the role of
the audience in creating the work of art, and they have reimagined the
social and political role of the arts. We of course do not want to claim
that these elements were absent in the past, but they have moved to the
foreground again since the 1990s. Under headers such as interactive art,
socially engaged practices, community art, ecological art, outsider art, the
social turn, and new genre public art, artists have reimagined their own
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 59

position in society, the relation to their audience, and the type of values
which artistic practices can realize.
Although we have been critical of the artist as lone genius, one feature
of that image is still as relevant today as it was during the heyday of
modernism. Artists are still occupied with the ‘new’, imagination still
seeks to explore the unknown. In Agnes Callard account of aspiration,
which we discussed before, aspiration is the process of value discovery,
and forward looking in nature. That imagination leads to the creation of
new artworks as well as new social practices around the arts. The imagi-
nation is ‘worlded’, made real, and encounters a broader environment. In
Hein’s historical sketch this imaginative spirit is contrasted with the culti-
vation of existing traditions. Artistic practices reflect and help us make
sense of the past, the present, and the future. This cultivation is an essen-
tial part of the creation of the new, but for some artists and audiences also
a goal in itself.
Jens Beckert has used the idea of imagined futures to think about
the projection of plans through fictional expectations. Artists, and
entrepreneurs more generally, do not merely seek to forecast the future.
They seek to shape it, to give it direction. In discussing how fictional
expectations shape markets, Beckert draws from literary fiction as the
quintessential reference for expectations. The author and the readers play
a game defined by a set of “socially shared conventions” (Beckert 2016,
66). Readers are led into a story that is imagined, and they know and
accept that, but the fiction is a ‘prop’ that links the worlds of imagination
with real compelling issues. Artists link the world of ideas and the mind,
with the world of artefacts and the material. The way this has been done
by artists has varied considerably over the past century.

Modernists Imagined Too Wildly,

Postmodernists Too Ironically
At the verge of the twentieth century, a revolutionary avant-garde of
artists believed that their imagined futures could not merely transform
the form and style of art itself, but also the broader world. Modernist
movements such as Art Nouveau, Futurism, and Constructivism were
interested in bringing modernist sensibilities to both everyday lives and
political systems. These artists used their art as “revolutionary weapons
of an artistic avant-garde that equated a transformation in ‘taste’ with
a transformation of society itself” (Buck-Morss 2000, 10). The Italian
60 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Futurists dreamt of bulldozing over the old cities to replace them with
the latest technology and architecture, a process which should repeat itself
again and again. Piet Mondrian was dreaming of new human beings who
could inhabit a radically different world. Le Corbusier created blueprints
for completely new cities, while some of the modernist-inspired architects
helped the Brazilian government realize the planning and construction of
an entirely new capital, Brasilia (Scott 1998, Chapter 4).
Modernism, as inspired by its avant-garde, depicts what have been
called ‘dreamworlds’, imagined world which modern society aspired, be
it a socialist, fascist, or capitalistic one (many of these dreamworlds led in
fact to real worlds of dictatorship). These new worlds were conceived by
means of images, an aesthetic ethos, new types of collectives, new busi-
ness models, and perhaps most importantly a grandiose vision of what
art could achieve in society. Both Susan Buck-Morss and James Scott
have pointed to the dangers of this kind of utopian imagination, espe-
cially when it is coupled with an aura of prestige or authoritarian powers.
We obviously run a risk of over-generalizing, but many modernists imag-
ined too wildly, they explored the new, with disregard for tradition, the
status quo and the diversity of voices and perspectives in any society.
The grand narratives of modernism were challenged by the postmod-
ernists, who undermined the grandiose ambitions of the modernists,
through a frequently ironic stance (Lyotard 1984). They deconstructed
the idea that radical newness was possible, through a pastiche of histor-
ical styles. This was combined with a suspicion of universal claims of
truth, beauty, or other values, through a disenchanted perspective which
highlighted pluralism of perspective, and the relativity of any viewpoint
(Vattimo 1985). The global aspirations of modernism were contrasted
with great local and historical variety and micro-perspectives. The engage-
ment with society was primarily ironic, not only vis-à-vis the utopianism
of the modernism, but also toward idealism and broader social aspirations.
A retreat of the artists from society, which was already visible in the later
decades of modernism continued. If the modernists imagined too wildly,
the postmodernists might have erred in the opposite direction. The post-
modern sense of irony, or even defeatism, is well captured in the video-art
work Everything has been done by the Polish collective Azorro in which
four friends propose artistic different ideas, only to conclude every time
that: “that’s been done before”.
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 61

A New Form of Imagination Is in the Making

In 1994, artist Susan Lacy coined the term ‘new genre public art’ to
describe artists who were engaged with social issues. She sought to create
a new type of public art, one that reconnected the arts to broader issues in
society, and which directly connected with citizens, rather than with the
institutional art world. At the time, such engagement was suspect: How
would one be able to prevent the mistakes of the modernists? And was
this engagement not simply a naïve overestimation of the powers of art?
The first worry was addressed by a new imagination of the relationship
between art and the public, the new kind of public art was not supposed
to send a unidirectional message from the artist to society, or to suggest
the right direction forward, instead it was supposed to be relational. The
curator Nicolas Bourriaud suggested that this new type of public art
started from an awareness of its embeddedness in a social context and
aimed to facilitate social relations. He writes: “the role of artworks is no
longer to form imaginary or utopian realities” but, paraphrasing Lyotard,
to learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” (Bourriaud 2002, 5).
Discussing the role of experimental art institutions, curator Charles Esche
emphasized the role of art centers as providers of possibilities: “Possibility
is, in these terms, simply a condition that leads to thinking differently or
imagining things otherwise than they are” (Esche 2004). As curator of
the now closed contemporary art center Rooseum in Malmo, Sweden,
Esche saw artists and institutions as facilitators of political imagination.
The imagination was more humble, aware of its own artistic and epistemic
limitations, but willing to recognize its social and political potential.
In such a historical transition from “mimesis to poiesis, from repre-
senting to remaking and changing the world”, artistic practices become
stages for “future scenarios” (De Cesari 2012, 85). In some extreme
cases, in fact, we see art practices that imagine and prefigure institu-
tional arrangements that are not there yet, as in the case of Palestinian
artistic communities who enact ‘impossible institutions’ such as a National
Museum and a Biennale for a nation that does not exist. Imagination is
an act of relating with the future. The interactive art which has emerged
since the 1990s recognizes that this requires more than just imagination,
it requires experimentation, in which the imagined future is confronted
with the present, in which its potentialities are not merely imagined, but
locally realized.
62 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Part of the recognition of the epistemic limits of artistic imagination

is that the audience is not merely invited into the artwork, but that they
are also invited to co-create the work, to add or alter meanings, some-
times even to literally construct the work. Traditional cultural venues
such as museums and concert halls still struggle to accommodate this
engagement, and both formal rules and traditional norms help to sustain
one-sided forms of engagement.
But artists and art critics are thinking in this direction. Jacques
Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator is a good example of this devel-
opment. He criticizes the presumed passivity of the audience, including
early forms of interaction such as the involvement of the audience in a
play. Rancière is rightfully skeptical of this kind of engagement, because
the spectator is joining on the artist’s terms. He suggests that this kind
of model, while it appears bi-directional, retains a fundamental modernist
tenet: the superiority of the artist. As an alternative he suggests an engage-
ment in terms of the ‘equality of intelligence’ (Rancière 2009, 10). The
great mistake of thinking about the viewer as passive it that it takes away
the individuality, subjectivity, and knowledge that any viewer brings to a
play. Viewers do not merely receive, but they perceive, reflect, connect,
reject, associate, and dissociate: “Being a spectator is not some passive
condition that we should transform into activity (…) We do not have to
transform spectators into actors (…) Every spectator is already an actor in
her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same
story” (Rancière 2009, 17).
For Rancière this should have important implications for how we think
about imagination and ‘sensible materiality’. The artistic idea as presented
by the artist is not complete, it is instead a contribution to an ongoing
conversation, an attempt at persuasion to which audiences might respond
in different ways. The work of art in his conceptualization is indetermi-
nate. Upon completion of the painting, or better when the reader finishes
the novel, they can ‘do something’ with the art, they can judge and
discuss what it signifies, whether it is valuable, if it succeeds, and if so
in what way.
It is in this sense that the values of the arts are realized collectively,
within artistic circles and in social practices to which both artists and
audiences contribute. In many instances, artistic practices put forth imag-
inaries and alternatives, by means of a variety of modes of actions and
mobilization. Cultural economy scholar Scott has argued that:
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 63

As cities shift more and more into cognitive-cultural modes of economic

activity, the search for meaningful forms of solidarity, sociability, and
mutual aid in everyday work and life becomes increasingly urgent, not just
because these attributes are important in their own right but also because
they help to enlarge the sphere of creativity, learning, innovation, social
experimentation, and cultural expression, and are hence essential to further
economic and cultural flowering of contemporary cities. (Scott 2008, 83)

The implication here is that arts as creative industries do not merely

create economic development in cities, but that the values of solidarity
and mutualism in the art become central again.
It is important to recognize that in these new socially engaged practices
there is not merely a reimagination of aesthetic possibilities, but also an
exploration of new forms of community and social relations. The critique
of post-modernism by more recent artistic movements dovetails well with
our critique of the artist as lone genius. They have organized themselves
in collectives and explored new forms of tight and looser cooperation
such as in creative workspaces. This transformation was nicely symbol-
ized at the documenta 15 of 2022 in Kassel, in which artist collectives
had nearly completely replaced the individual artist. It is also visible in
the broader cultural sector, where groups of artists or cultural workers or
activists campaign for cultural inclusion, accessibility, or more equitable
working conditions, as in the case of occupations and squatting of endan-
gered cultural institutions like theaters in Italy (Borchi 2018), collectives
and independent spaces in Germany (Kirchberg and Kagan 2013), café
and art galleries in South Korea (Lee and Han 2020). These are (more
diffused) instances of prefigurative politics, in which the collectives create
a micro-cosmos in the “here and now [of the] the ideal society they were
striving for” (Cassegård 2014, 695).

Imaging and Living a Different Venice

The city of Venice is famous for its canals and unique architecture, it is
one of the original global tourist hot spots. It also hosts a Biennale, first
organized in 1895, which displays some of the best art and architecture
projects. The Biennale, contrary to what its name suggests, is currently
organized every year in the city, and covers many different art forms. The
Venice Biennale of 2022 was titled The Milk of Dreams after Leonora
Carrington’s surrealist book in which she “describes a magical world
64 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagi-

nation. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become
something or someone else” (Alemani 2022). It is a somewhat modernist
sounding theme, which celebrates the imaginative capacity of the arts and
its ability to change the world. The 2022 theme does not stand alone in its
ambition to use the arts to rethink our society. The architecture Biennale
in 2021 posed the question How will we live together? and invited archi-
tects and planners to explore new perspectives for our collective future, to
rewrite what was termed the ‘spatial contract’, of which we were in need
because of the uncertainty, threats, and inequalities society faced (Sarkis
2020).
Almost invisible between these high-art events and the mass tourism
which floods the city, are the citizens of Venice, a group which rapidly
declines in numbers (Rosin and Gombault 2021). The contrast between
the Venice on display at the Biennale as experienced by the tourists, and
the lived experience of the remaining Venetians is stark. But among the
latter group there are in recent years many who are raising their voice
against the Disneyfication of the city, and who warn about the unsustain-
ability of the current economic model. The more visible signs of these civil
protests have been the initiatives of various middle-brow cultural organi-
zations from the Venetian cultural civil society. An analysis of this specific
layer of the local cultural economy in Venice, by one of us, has revealed
that there are around thirty grassroots cultural organizations which bring
artists and residents of this endangered city together (Morea and Saba-
tini 2023). These organizations and loose collectives explore what a more
just and more sustainable city could be. Sale Docks, for example, is a
cultural space that since 2007 occupies—illegally until they reached an
agreement with the municipality—a former salt warehouse. This orga-
nization objects to the exploitative economic model that taints today’s
Venetian art system and cultural policy. They talk about culture as a
commons and stand to fight the private encroachment thereof; they orga-
nize: “seminars, exhibitions, workshops, con-research and public actions
that experiment with models of cultural production which counter the
neoliberal logic” (Sale Docks 2022). In 2012, famous British architect
David Chipperfield themed the Architecture Biennale Common Ground.
Sale Docks, together with two other Venetian cultural organizations—
Morion and Centro Sociale Rivolta—reacted to this appropriation of
the language of the commons by the exclusive event of the Biennale.
Therefore, they launched #occupybiennale, an initiative that involved a
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 65

series of ancillary exhibitions and debates across the city to contrast the
‘commons-washing’ of the Biennale, in a city in which artists and archi-
tects struggle to find a space and opportunity, because they are crowded
out by tourists and events for the global jet-set. In 2021, Sale Docks
launched an exhibition about the cultural system of the city called L@
mostra della Laguna (in English, the monsters of the lagoon) in which a
selection of artists displayed their ideal cultural system. The outcome of
this exhibition was a manifesto for an alternative local cultural policy. This
is how they described the project:

What would happen if Venice’s art institutions were monstrously different?

If art were freed from the logic of profit and tourism? If they were instead
places inhabited by the local community and the idea of care? Sale Docks
invites seven international artists to imagine a utopian geography of cultural
spaces: seven places that reinvent themselves in a transfeminist and decolo-
nial key, in the name of environmental justice and the defense of public
space. Exhibitions are not just displays, but su/objects, monsters that
disavow the normality of art as an object of consumption and specula-
tion, as a product of the tourist industry and a vehicle of gentrification.
(Sale Docks 2022)

One artwork imagined a series of infrastructural projects to strengthen

Venice’s social life. It aimed at fostering open-air sociability through for
instance a floating square, floating docks, a co-working space combined
with a place for social gatherings, and a children-scape. Another artwork
theorized an ideal cultural institution of the city based on real-life prece-
dents of cultural commons in Italy and consisted of the production of
an ‘alter-statuto’ (in English: alternative statute/bylaws) which under-
stood culture as a commons and treated its associates as accomplices and
communards. The purpose of such an ‘alter-institution’ was to ensure
that intermittent workers in the cultural sector were granted recognition,
dignity, and material recognition, and that civil society became an integral
part of the Venetian cultural scene.
In a more practical vein, Extragarbo, another grassroots cultural orga-
nization in Venice has set up an artistic walking tour that engages critically
with the local art system and Venetian urban policies. Extragarbo is a
collective of performing artists recently graduated from a local university.
In their productions, they question the relationship between the city and
its economy, the city and its art system, and suggest ways to reinvent how
to be a Venetian through their art. In 2021, Extragarbo launched the
66 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

initiative Wash your Art, Wash your City, a walking tour of the neigh-
borhood Castello, led by one of the members who acts as a tour guide
(Extragarbo 2021). One stop of the tour is the main square, recently
polished for the filming of a Spiderman movie-shoot, another stop of the
walk is at a souvenir shop, where one of the local artists has placed a post-
card on the window which gives it the illusion of being broken (Fig. 3.2).
The objective of this tour is to show a different side of the city, through
the eyes of local artists, as well as to draw attention to the extent to which
the city is ‘staged’ for tourists.
Venice is host to several collectives of artists who, just like Extragarbo,
carry out temporary joint productions or independent everyday creative
work and who strive to affirm their role in a city through their own
artistic language. In their activities, these groups engage with the local
citizens, with the tourists, and with the other creatives in the city. For
instance, a newly established platform of art collectives active in Venice,
called Comecome.info, has the ambition to map and assemble all Vene-
tian independent art spaces to reach a critical mass that could ultimately

Fig. 3.2 Stop on the alternative tour of Venice of Extragarbo. By permission

of Giulia Zichella
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 67

be recognized as a sector of importance and a policy interlocutor. As such,

the reimagination does not only happen on an aesthetic level, but also at
a social and governance level.
This civil and sometimes ‘underground’ layer of cultural organizations
is exploring alternative forms of cultural associations, collectives, spaces,
and other institutional setups, to reclaim the city and to give voice and
agency to the citizens of Venice who are in danger of being squeezed out
by the tourism industry. They seek to cultivate a Venice of the Venetians.
At the same time, the art they produce seeks to draw attention to the
many ways in which the city has been transformed for tourists, and what a
different—more sustainable and just—city might look like. Their informal
and often ephemeral practices counter the grand scale of global tourism
and the luxurious high-end art circuit with a micro scale of interpersonal,
hyper-local relationships. The values which are realized in these practices
inevitably deal with a plurality of voices, first because they respond to
dominant imaginations of Venice, and second because they reflect the
multiplicity of the experiences of Venetian citizens.

Contemporary Imagination Is
About the Development of Social
Practices Which Embody Values
The case of the local artistic communities in Venice makes clear that
artistic communities are often arenas of conflict and coordination. In the
creative circles the artists find inspiration, feedback as well as an audience
for their initial ideas, but as we have seen the circles also provide oppor-
tunities to develop communal projects and social spaces which lie beyond
the realm of possibilities of the lone genius.
Cultivation and imagination are crucial elements of the social practices
around the arts. They are also elusive and easily escape the social scientist’s
academic lens, since they are qualitative in nature. But without talking
seriously about cultivation and imagination, it is impossible to under-
stand which values individuals are seeking to realize. In the practice of
‘worlding’, artists transform relatively abstract ideas and ideals into arte-
facts and practices. One might narrowly suggest that the content of this
cultivation and imagination is simply beyond the scope of social science.
But even then, we must recognize that a direct consequence of the act of
68 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

imagination is the fact that individuals form groups, collectives, demon-

strations, cooperatives, firms, digital communities, etc. Their worlding is
not merely aesthetic and cultural, but also social, economic, and polit-
ical. In Venice, the cultural civil society contested both public policy and
major private initiatives, through the development of alternative practices.
Their imaginative efforts compete with and contest the superstar cultural
institutions of the city, such as the Biennale, and the tourism industry.
Even so, one might claim that it is paradoxical to study imagined
communities. How and why would one study something which is only
in the process of becoming, rather than that which is already solidified,
institutionalized, and recognized? The reason is that it is a mistake to
believe that some communities are natural and real while others are imag-
ined. Communities are not natural entities defined by social bonds which
can be studied purely naturalistically. As Benedict Anderson (1991) has
argued, communities find their origins in narratives, social relationships,
and shared practices which unite individuals through imagined relation-
ships. These imagined communities can be small and local, but they can
also be extensive and global as we will see in the next chapter.
The great danger for social science is that it overlooks cultural civil
society. In Venice, that danger is even more visible than in most other
places. It is easy to mistake the Biennale as representative, or existing at
the apex of the art world in Venice. It is tempting to think of heritage
and architecture in economic terms in a city so popular among tourists.
Just as it is tempting to think that in other cities art and culture happen
primarily in theaters and museum, the modern cathedrals of the arts. The
Venetian grassroots organizations we described are inevitably soft institu-
tional setups, dominated by informal relationships. They are less directly
visible and might actively seek the margins. But they are the lifeblood of
cultural civil society, where individuals practice the arts, and where new
practices emerge.
In Deweyan terms, we can also suggest that it is here that artistic
experiments fulfill their democratic role. The artist as citizens have been
described as acting “through their art work, their social-political activism,
or their status in society […] as socially obliged citizens who feel morally
committed to helping shape alternatives to existing conditions, stressing
social activism as essential in creating art” (Kaddar et al. 2022, 472).
These practices are at the same time artistic and social, they cultivate
 3 HOW ARTISTS IMAGINE NEW WORLDS 69

existing and imagine new aesthetic and social forms alongside each other.
They are a vital source of creativity and social experimentation, a realm
where new worlds and ways of inhabiting them are created, and existing
ones are sustained.

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 CHAPTER 4

How Participants Make Values Real

Abstract In this chapter, we argue that consumers and audiences of

cultural products are best understood as co-creative participants. The idea
of co-creation is developed in contrast to that of the passive consumer,
and we analyze how consumption or cultural capital contributes to the
ability of individuals to contribute to the process of value realization. This
process of co-creation is further enhanced by new technological possibili-
ties which have lowered the costs of producing and transforming existing
artistic creations, but also by artists who increasingly see art as a two-
way street. In the remainder of the chapter, we analyze three cases to
demonstrate how co-creation happens. In our case study of traditional
and modern dance, we argue that the performing arts have historically
deeply involved the audience and are perhaps best viewed as communal
creations. A case study about the Trekkers shows how the fan commu-
nities and the fan fiction galaxy have sought to cultivate and expand the
original Star Trek universe. Through the case of the Queer Museum in
Brazil, we demonstrate the importance of institutional diversity and the
potential of crowdfunding for self-organization of co-creative commu-
nities. In conjunction with the previous chapter, through our emphasis
on the social nature of creativity and process of co-creation, we seek to
undermine the traditional distinction between the production and the
consumption of art.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 73

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_4
74 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Keywords Co-production · Queer museum · Star Trek · Valorization ·

Cultural consumption

Values of some sort or other are not traits of rare and festal occasions; they
occur whenever any object is welcomed and lingered over; whenever it arouses
aversion and protest; even though the lingering be but momentary and the
aversion a passing glance toward something else.
John Dewey, Nature and Experience, 1925

In the analysis of the grassroots cultural organizations in Venice we saw

that their initiatives came about in conversation with, and through the
engagement of the citizens of the Italian city. Our main focus was on the
artists, but we already hinted at the fact that audiences co-create values.
In this chapter, we will deepen our examination of the process of co-
creation. This requires a rethinking of what an audience is, and what they
seek, do, and contribute to the arts. Together with the previous chapter,
this will upset any simple distinction between the consumption and the
production of art, and instead draw our attention to the process of the
realization of value(s).
We will demonstrate that co-creation is constitutive of many traditional
art forms such as dance and cultural festivals. But co-creation also flour-
ishes in commercial settings in (online) fan communities and through,
for instance, fan fiction. It enriches and expands the creation of artists
and artistic collectives as we demonstrate through a study of the Star Trek
universe. Such co-creation can be observed in many different institutional
settings, but does require space, technological means, and institutional
support which is best guaranteed in a heterogenous institutional envi-
ronment as we demonstrate through an analysis of the Queer Museum in
Brazil. So much of our idea of art is about what is solid, historical, or even
eternal, an idea we hope to challenge with our focus on social practices
which are more frequently in flux.

Audiences Do Not Undergo Art, They Co-create It

John Dewey described art as an experience. This is true for the practice of
the artist: “as we manipulate, we touch and feel, as we look, we see; as we
listen, we hear. The hand moves with etching needle or with brush. The
eye attends and reports the consequence of what is done. Because of this
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 75

intimate connection, subsequent doing is cumulative and not a matter of

caprice nor yet of routine” (Dewey 1980, 49–50). But like in Rancière’s
vision of the emancipated spectator, the audience is equally active for
Dewey. His favorite verb to describe the experience of art is ‘undergo-
ing’, but he is aware that it risks bringing up mostly passive connotations.
Wrongly so, Dewey argues, because experiencing art requires ‘activities
that are comparable to those of the creator’: “to perceive, a beholder
must create his own experience” (Dewey 1980, 54).
Dewey suggests that the ‘human contribution’ to art does not merely
consist of the creation of artefacts or the acts of performance, but just
as much of the attention that is paid to art, the way that individuals and
social groups attend to art. In our language, which social practices they
develop around them. When confronted with the ‘new’ in art, the spec-
tator must engage with it, must wonder actively about it, use imagination
to see what it is, and rely on related meanings derived from previous expe-
riences. What is known beforehand, either through personal experience,
or learned from others, is essential to the spectator: “The materials of
his thought and belief come to him from others with whom he lives. He
would be poorer than a beast of the fields were it not for traditions that
become a part of his mind, and for institutions that penetrate below his
outward actions into his purposes and satisfactions” (Dewey 1980, 270).
Economists have only partially incorporated the co-creative aspects of
consumption. They recognize that artistic goods are ‘experience goods’
(Hutter 2011a), by which they mean that the consumer does not know
beforehand how much they will enjoy them. Economists understand this
as an information problem: consumers are more likely to buy a product if
they know more about its quality. Michael Hutter has rightly noted that
there is something paradoxical to the idea that consumers will attempt to
minimize their lack of information, specifically for artistic goods. After all,
most artistic goods depend on an element of surprise, say, the ending of a
film. As consumers, we want to find out, feel for ourselves, or conversely,
be able to join the conversation with others about the merits of the artistic
good in question. To do this, we must experience the work ourselves.
The idea of experience goods has not only been used by economists.
Marketing scholars Pine and Gilmore have suggested that we live in an
experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 1999). The subtitle of their best-
selling book is interesting for it draws heavily on performance metaphors:
‘Work is theater, and every business is a stage.’ They are interested in the
growing tourist economy in which travelers seek new experiences and take
76 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

home something memorable—their book came out some years before

everyone had a high-definition camera in their back pocket. They suggest
that many other firms, from airline companies to bars, sports venues, and
retail stores are seeking to create an experience for their ‘guests’, who
should enjoy a personalized experience which is revealed over time, just
as would happen in a theater. Pine and Gilmore realized that such an
experience will only be successful if the consumer is willing to actively
participate. In other words, the stagers and the active participants must
co-create the experience.
This means that the participants to the experience, a more apprio-
priate word than spectators, must bring something of their own to the
event. To co-create an experience will require, first of all, attention and
active perception. Perception is frequently a social activity, even though
one might read a book or a poem alone. The perceptions of any indi-
vidual are shaped by the judgments of others who have influenced how
they perceive, what they pay attention to, and what they tend to neglect.
In Dewey’s theory, the art critic plays an important role precisely because
they have a broad experience and ‘a trained eye’. This cannot replace one’s
own experiences, but it might aid the appraisal of art by new viewers. He
describes this process of perception explicitly as work, to emphasize that
participants do not (only) consume, but produce.
This does not mean that the individual can simply rely on others. As
with all work, perception is easier if one has access to capital goods.
Cultural economists and sociologists alike have thus referred to the impor-
tance of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986; Throsby 1999). The meanings
they attribute to this term differ somewhat. Economists refer to an
ability to appreciate a particular good, which builds up through repeated
consumption, something which has also been called ‘consumption capital’
(Stigler and Becker 1977). Sociologists think of cultural capital more as
the familiarity with socially prestigious cultural goods and the ability to
talk about them properly, something which confers social status on the
owner of this cultural capital. From the pragmatist perspective of Dewey,
these differences are not as relevant, if we recognize that language medi-
ates our relationship to the world, including the arts, then it becomes
quite clear that the active creation of an artistic experience requires both
the internalization of previous experiences in consumption capital as well
as the ability to capture one’s experiences and the qualities of art in the
‘right’ vocabulary through cultural capital.
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 77

With this broader perspective in mind, we can recognize that art

requires active inputs from the observer, which turns them from
viewers or guests into participants. An alternative strand of institutional
economists, led by Elinor Ostrom, has recognized the importance of co-
production in most services (Aligica and Tarko 2013). Ostrom and her
team were initially interested in how public goods, such as safety in a
neighborhood, were produced, and recognized that the creation of this
good requires collaboration between the police and the citizens. This
model of co-production was then extended more broadly to services such
as education. The arts fit the model of co-creation well, it too requires the
participation of the audience to function, to gain meaning, and to have
an impact.

Co-creation Is Frequently Invited

by Contemporary Artists and Technologies
Co-creation is best understood on a scale, from products which require
few additional inputs and are mostly created for enjoyment or entertain-
ment, to open-ended products which might puzzle, challenge, or even
alienate the audience. Within the cultural sector, one might think of pop
singles or Hollywood blockbusters as occupying the close-ended side of
this spectrum. These products are intended to ‘wow’ the audience and
they provide a steady stream of smaller surprises, but they rely heavily
on established and widely known conventions of their genre (Kealy 1982;
Hutter 2011b). While it is true that such products come to market ready-
made without requiring much previous knowledge or effort from the side
of the consumer, even these products are typically created in such a way
that they invite engagement from the consumer. They will be accom-
panied by merchandise aimed at fans, actors might do meet and greets,
and pop artists give concerts where the fans can more intensely enjoy the
product. From the perspective of the realization of values, in the sense
of business strategy and earning money, such practices are important. But
these types of goods might be less interesting from the perspective of the
realization of values, in the sense of illustrating the plurality of values and
the variety of art communities which emerge around them.
That is different for artistic products which are deliberately created
to be open-ended, challenging, or alienating, or for pieces of art which
unknowingly contest established conventions. They require active engage-
ment and a willingness to invest time and effort in their enjoyment,
78 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

although as we have seen this will be easier for experienced participants.

Somewhat surprisingly the type of engagement that is allowed, or better,
considered proper, for the high arts is frequently more restricted than
that for popular arts. Modern museums are a good example of a highly
structured form of presentation of the arts which essentially only allows
for (semi-)silent individual contemplation of the works of art, which
under no circumstance might be touched, moved, or let alone trans-
formed. The same is true for classical music concerts, during which there
are strong norms of absolute silence and complicated conventions about
when the audience can applaud to demonstrate their appreciation. What
such structured forms of appreciation inevitably do is restrict the set of
social practices which might emerge around the art form, and therefore
the types of values which can be realized with them.
This was not always so. During the eighteenth century, plays in Conti-
nental Europe moved from the traditional small halls into large venues.
Wagner in his design of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, which opened in
1876, insisted that all the seats would face in the direction of the stage,
in contrast with the more social loges which tended to face each other.
Some decades earlier, Viennese theaters introduced surveillance staff to
prevent behaviors like clapping or eating. These are traces of the ‘inward’
turn of the arts and culture, which peaked in the middle of the twentieth
century and relegated art consumption to white cubes and other sterile
temples.
Before these transformations, theater looked very differently. Reggiani,
the former head of the Historical Archive of Opera di Roma, has
compared opera theaters of the seventeenth century to contemporary
pubs: people would eat, gather in circles, gamble, and “only when they
recognized the beginning of a popular opera aria they would turn to the
stage and listen to it in delight” (quoted in Sabatini 2020, 57). Tradi-
tionally, theaters had much more in common with festivals and carnivals
than with lecture halls (Primavesi 2013). Most art forms are compatible
with many different types of cultural experiences. But the way that social
practices around the arts develop does impact what kind of values can be
realized through an art form.
The white cubes in modern museums with only one or a few paint-
ings on each wall nudge viewers toward a contemplative, individual, and
intellectual enjoyment of the works. But viewers are creative. During
the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a social-media challenge to create a
photo of one’s favorite picture. Audiences, locked up in their homes,
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 79

dressed up and changed their living room into the décor of an iconic
image. In his book A Spectator is an Artist Too (2020), Johan Idema
shows a whole array of mostly photography-based ways in which modern
museum-visitors interact creatively with the paintings: they search for their
painted doppelgänger, mimic the poses in the painting, or seek unex-
pected angles which upset the image. Although more limited, Idema also
demonstrates that it can take the form of protest, such as the photos of
ArtActivistBarbie which seek to shame misogynistic artworks, or the small
revolt of visitors taking pictures of themselves secretly touching a work of
art.
Museums and artists adapt to these new forms of engagement and
the creative urges of their audience. In many major tourist cities, there
are now Instagram-museums which cater specifically to the desire to
take artistic photos with a local flavor; the rooms in these museums are
designed for photographic engagement and visitors can touch whatever
they like. Contemporary artists have responded by creating more interac-
tive installations which allow visitors to ‘enter’ the work of art. Museums
have not always found it easy to adapt to these new forms. An early
instance of a major artwork which allowed for play were Ai Weiwei’s
ceramic sunflower seeds in 2010, which visitors could pick up, and walk
over. But with the excuse that the dust from the damaged seeds could be
harmful to the lungs, the Tate Modern decided to fence off the artwork.
In a similar fashion some years later, again at Tate Modern, Superflex
realized a playground for adults named One, Two, Three, Swing! An all-
white living room, The Obliteration Room, designed by Yayoi Kusama
could recently be completed with colorful stickers by visitors.
In the digital realm, such playful engagement with visual art is far
more common. Memes draw on movie scenes or paintings, in a context
in which there are few distinctions between high art and stock images.
In some sense, these digital recreations, adaptations, and appropriations
are the perfect heir to Duchamp’s moustache on the Mona Lisa. These
developments are good examples of the development of new social prac-
tices around the visual arts, which change both who gets to engage with
the work, as well as the values which are realized through them. It is
important to see that traditional institutions like museums adapt their own
practices in response to these new developments, so that the contestations
and challenges in society also impact the way in which more traditional
organizations exhibit their works. It also demonstrates that the values
which are realized by the audience might be quite different from those
80 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

that the artist or curator had in mind. Co-creation can mean that the audi-
ence, as participant, completes the realization of values as intended by the
artist. But co-creation can also mean that the participants challenge and
alter the intended meaning and use of an artwork.
Economists sometimes speak of credence goods as an extreme case of
experience goods (Dulleck and Kerschbamer 2006). Whereas experience
goods must be ‘undergone’ to be evaluated or not, the quality of credence
goods is still unclear after they are experienced. One of the exemplary
credence goods is education: when we receive education, we are not yet
sure whether it is beneficial, and we might not find out until much later,
at which point it remains unsure whether it was the education that did
it, or other factors. Economists have again focused on how the lack of
information in such instances hampers the functioning of the market.
But thinking about the arts as credence goods in light of co-creation
suggests a rather different perspective. Artistic goods are open-ended in
the sense of being unfinished, they require co-creation, not merely to
make them ‘useful’ but to interpret them, or better to give them meaning.
Any artist knows that a work of art goes through many drafts and that
the point at which the artist decides to stop revising and perfecting is
in many ways an arbitrary point. After this decision, the work is handed
over to the audience, and then the work must be engaged with, talked
about, performed, critiqued, contested, or simply liked and praised. It
is our contention that this process should be understood as a process of
value creation, not just of value discovery. From this perspective, credence
goods are special because they are unfinished; the consumer must finalize
them. The associated problem is not one of not knowing the true quality
of the good, but one of (co-)creating the quality of the good.
The audience, as participant, thus creates value through their own
contributions to the final product or experience. Their attention, their
interpretation, or appropriation, adds something to the work which was
not yet known when the artist released the work. The participant brings
previous personal experiences and a subjective perspective to the art, this
is what social scientists call consumption capital. But the consequence
of this perspective is that there can be different forms of complemen-
tarity between the work of art and the capital of the spectator (Lachmann
1947). The extent to which an individual connects, is able to appreciate,
and the way they judge the work of art is just as much a result of what
they bring to the work, as it is of the ‘work itself’. That is what the co-
creation perspective entails. A special instance of such a participant is the
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 81

art critic. They are not merely good perceivers, but their special knowl-
edge and experience, and their writing skills, add something to the work.
In this way, a new interpretation does not (only) uncover some underlying
quality, but it enriches the work.
The sociologists warn us, that things like consumption capital are not
purely personal and subjective phenomena. The consumption capital of
any individual is strongly dependent on collective knowledge and shared
conventions. The shared consumption capital, the collective knowledge
about the arts, when actively used, gives rise to what could be called
a knowledge commons, or ‘culture of appreciation’ (Frischmann et al.
2014). Such a culture of appreciation consists of places where the works
of art can be displayed, enjoyed, and performed, of venues such as maga-
zines and websites where they are discussed, but most of all it depends
on a set of genre-specific norms and conventions which structure how
art is produced and perceived. We will now turn to three case studies
which illustrate the process of co-creation and the associated cultures of
appreciation.

It Is Impossible to Understand
the Performing Arts Without Co-creation
The performing arts can be found in nearly all cultures around the world
and across time. In its traditional forms, sometimes called folk culture,
we instantly recognize that dance and music are practices which depend,
or rather, are constituted by co-creation. Most community members were
expected to join in the dance rituals which accompanied important rituals.
Even in earlier cultures, not every individual had the same role in the
performance of religious and ritual dance, but everyone directly partici-
pated in the ritual. Something analogous can still be observed in Western
church practices where the congregation is expected to sing along with
certain parts of the service, often led by a choir. The Chorus Impact Study
from 2019 suggests that as many as one in six American adults sings in
a choir. Figures from advocacy organizations are often collected liberally,
but it is striking that they note an upward trend (Grunwald Associates
LLC and Chorus America 2019).
Folk and community art practices are easy to overlook because they
tend to be local, but they make up the bulk of artistic practices in all soci-
eties around the world. Dance and music have remained very prominent
82 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

forms of communal art and recent technological advances have in impor-

tant ways lowered entry barriers, just think of flash-mobs and Tik-Tok
dance challenges. But other art forms such as poetry and literature can
also be traced back to oral traditions and practices which were constituted
by co-creation. Communal rituals and the performing arts are arguably
the original forms that art practices took.
Indigenous forms of dance have attracted the attention of cultural
anthropologists, since the early work on that subject by Franziska Boas,
the daughter of the two pioneering anthropologists Franz Boas and Alice
Marie Krackowizer. In the opening essay of The Function of Dance in
Human Society (Boas 1944), Franziska’s father explores the different
social functions of dance among the Kwakiutl Indians on Vancouver
Island. He distinguishes between dance as play among kids and dance
among adults as it was practiced at social and religious ceremonies, dance
as a preparation for war, and finally dance at funerals. In the seminal
work of Judith Hanna, dance is treated as a general form of non-verbal
communication, and the categories of communication she distinguishes
are like those identified by Boas. She too draws attention to the social
and communal functions and the role of dance: “At one level, moving
together depends on solidarity; on another, it creates solidarity” (Hanna
1979, 99). An insight which resonates well with our earlier observa-
tions about the aspirational nature of values. To this, Hanna adds the
socio-political role of dance: the way it can signify and reinforce social
stratification in a society.
The imaginative part is important. It would be mistaken to think of
(traditional) dance as only cultivating or affirming what is already there,
it is also a performance of what can or should be. Hanna demonstrates in
her discussion that political dance might be a form of esoteric communi-
cation which can be used to mock or critique power, a prime reason why
missionaries and colonizers sought to ban it. Among the Ubakala Igbo
in Nigeria, she describes the emergence of deviant dance patterns which
mimicked, through mime, the immoral and abhorrent forms of physical
contact among men and women found among other tribes. This is done
through the adaptation of an existing dance: “new patterns of social inter-
action are thus presented in the ‘traditional’ vehicle of the nkwa (…) The
nkwa does not try to match reality, but to create a model for it, providing
individuals with an opportunity to be aroused, amused, and develop a new
consciousness for possibly accepting such patterns” (Hanna 1979, 169).
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 83

It is a good example of how art as a collective experience can serve the

function of exploring new values.
The performing arts allow for the performance of values. Theater
performances are still called ‘plays’ and the anthropologists draw our
attention to the ambivalent nature of the dance rituals, at the same time
serious and playful. Playful because they are exploratory and because they
perform an idealized version of the values, and serious because they really
do seek to realize the performed values. The collective nature of these
rituals draws the others in and makes them part of the performance of
these values.
The sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that: “There can be no society
which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular
intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make
[up] its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be
achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies, and meetings where
the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common
their common sentiment” (Durkheim 1995, 429). Although Durkheim
does not mention the performing arts directly in this context, these are
precisely the type of meetings or assemblies where society or communities
affirm their values. Durkheim captured the shared nature of these expe-
riences in his phrase ‘collective effervescence’, which brings individuals
together and serves to unify the group.
Contemporary music festivals and concerts are a good modern example
of the collective experience of art. Even in the ‘staged’ performances of
major pop bands, there is ample space for crowd participation and much
effort is put into the lighting and décor to create an immersive experience
in which ‘collective effervescence’ becomes possible. That collective expe-
rience is frequently enhanced, as it sometimes is in indigenous dance and
music, through stimulants. In an interesting study, some of our colleagues
in Rotterdam analyzed how dance concerts tried to recreate a ‘collective
effervescence’ in an online setting, when real concerts became impossible
during the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. They focused
on a particular subset of electronic dance livestreams known as ‘raves’.
Through an analysis of the comments sections, they demonstrate that
participants sought to recreate the experience of the live setting through
the posting of comments that mimicked the small phrases typically yelled
into one’s friend’s ear: ‘let’s meet left of the stage’, ‘where are the bath-
rooms?’. Many of them referenced the associated drug use: ‘does someone
have a popper for me?’, ‘where is the bag at?’, and ‘someone for a line?’
84 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

(Vandenberg et al. 2021). The authors emphasize that dance concerts

should be understood as what the sociologist Randall Collins called inter-
action rituals. Not without a hint of irony, the online ravers sought to
recreate the familiar interaction rituals by referring to the pre-pandemic
conventions.
But they observe that there are also nascent conventions. Comments
on the music played by the DJ are done through emojis, such as the fire
or bomb emoji to signify appreciation. These comments are interspersed
with remarks about the sense of loss that is experienced by the fact that the
people cannot dance together and reunite. As such, the new conventions
fail to turn into a real alternative, instead they refer to old rituals and the
sense of loss that the ravers experience. Although the authors do not draw
this conclusion one might say that the livestreamed concerts are both an
attempt to recreate a ‘rave’ as well as a moment of collective mourning
for the fact that the concert cannot take place.
We should therefore probably not expect that livestreams become a
long-term alternative to in-person raves. Collective effervescence is easier
to achieve in physical proximity, when that is missing, strong new rituals
would be required to achieve something similar. The authors of the study,
rightly point to the balcony concerts which first emerged in Italy, during
the early months of the lockdown, as a genuine alternative. At a set time,
neighbors would come to their balcony to perform or sing together, or
even just to exchange greetings. Fortunately, the lockdowns have not
lasted so long in most places that such new rituals fully took hold. But
the fact that they did in such a short time is good evidence of the impor-
tance of the collective creation and enjoyment of music and dance and
the resilience of artistic practices.
Modern sociologists have recognized that collective art experiences
such as music festivals are also places of exploration and the performance
of different values, just as the nkwa was for the Ubakala Igbo. Sociolo-
gists have therefore described festivals as ‘liminal spaces’ in which distance
is created from everyday life and differences as well as social critiques can
be expressed. Carnivals in Flanders, immortalized by the beautiful and
estranging art of James Ensor are associated with a reversal of social roles,
an opportunity to mock those in power, and a moment of empowerment
for those who are different or deviant. Mikhail Bakhtin in his powerful
study of medieval carnivals suggests that they had a counter-hegemonic
function (Bakhtin 1984). To turn these events into liminal spaces there
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 85

must be a genuine break with everyday life, which is accomplished by the

fact that festivals are limited in time and space.
There is, however, an important difference between the local medieval
carnivals and modern contemporary festivals, which was already recog-
nized by the early anthropologists of dance. Franziska Boas suggested that
communal dance is dependent on a homogenous culture where the values
are shared. But as values become more individualistic and heterogenous
it is less likely that dance will be practiced and understood by all. More
importantly, she suggests that as society grows more heterogenous so
should the forms of dance. It is worth listening to how she expresses that:
“I question, therefore, the wisdom of modern dancers in turning back to
the ballet-form when they find themselves without a large following for
the newer, less stylized forms. These dancers are giving up midstream.
Instead of widening their communities of support by attracting more of
the people whose new experiences and interests might help them under-
stand new symbols in movement, they are turning back to mere artifices
of movement” (Boas 1944, 5). What she essentially describes is how new
cultures of appreciation for a wider variety of artistic practices form or
may fail to form.
Hanna in her study of dance concludes with a chapter about the
modern city. In that chapter, she suggests that the heterogeneity of
modern cities gives rise to a ‘mosaic of social practices’. In the modern
city, artistic practices exist next to each other, and give expression to
heterogeneous values, without leading to broader conflicts, because urban
concentration leads to the “minimization of friction space” (Hanna 1979,
200). She explains how urban settings are more conducive to new forms
of dance, offer more variety, and reflect and perform underlying social
differences. But the fact that forms exist next to each does not rob them of
their critical potential, although there are now multiple centers of critique
which co-exist at any point in time. Hanna’s characterization of dance in
urban settings dovetails well with how we think about artistic practices as
co-existing practices in cultural civil society, with partial overlap, but with
aspirations to realize the values they embody on a broader scale.

Even in Highly Commercial Settings,

There Is Extensive Co-creation
One might claim that dance is an easy case to demonstrate the impor-
tance of co-creation of art. But when we look more closely, it is not hard
86 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

to find examples of co-creation in all kinds of settings. Commercial art

forms are perhaps where we are least likely to find it, because the products
are not designed to be open-ended as we argued above. But commer-
cial products frequently seek to embody the values which consumers seek
to realize. Scholarship about the ethical consumer has studied how the
fashion industry has responded to the demand for sustainability, gender
equality, and global trade justice (Stolle and Micheletti 2013). Through
boycotts of certain companies and the deliberate purchase from green or
fair-trade brands, consumers are seeking to direct the values which are
realized by the industry. Whether one already calls that a form of co-
creation is up for debate, but fashion like many other cultural goods is
intimately tied up with identity, and it is through the creation of new
lifestyle and styling patterns that consumers co-create a new sustainable
fashion aesthetic and perform the values that different fashion brands seek
to embody.
A more elaborate form of co-creation by audiences are the fan commu-
nities which in recent decades have emerged around many popular culture
products. A famous fan community is the universe that Star Trek fans
have created around the original series (and later sequels). Although Star
Trek fans have been frequently mocked by mainstream popular culture
and media (hence the derogatory nickname ‘trekkies’), the world of Star
Trek is exemplary for how incredibly rich and layered fan communities
can become. What is more, it illustrates how imagination and realization
function sequentially. The TV show Star Trek, which first aired in 1966,
narrates the explorative voyages of the starship Enterprise and its crew in
the twenty-third century. Written in 1964 and broadcasted in 1966, the
series was progressive in depicting interracial relationships and adopting
a diverse cast, including one of the first kisses between a black and white
person on American television.
Star Trek is about the exploration and discovery of new worlds, soci-
eties, and cultures across space, and this happens via the adventures
of Starfleet, an organization devoted to interplanetary peacekeeping,
diplomacy, defense, and research. In this regard, creator Gene Rodden-
berry was engaging with the politics of his day, the Cold War, and the
related public discourses. Critics have suggested that Star Trek replicated
important tensions within the social structure of contemporary American
society, which was contrasted with a kind of socialist utopian space alter-
native. The show ended up failing its utopistic mission, resulting in the
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 87

same ‘white history narrative’ that producer Roddenberry had set out to
fight in the first place (Geraghty 2015, 73).
That might have been the end of the story: good intentions, mediocre
outcome. But the story did not stop there, although it of course did
for a great deal of the audience. A smaller, but significant part of the
audience was, however, frustrated with how the climax had turned out.
They had been attracted to the utopian ideals with which the series had
started. Lincoln Geraghty has studied the fan letters which were sent
to magazines, and which expressed the disappointment of the fans. His
research suggests that the imagined world of diversity and equality which
the producers of Star Trek had set out to create, became an inspiration
for the fans. The fans who identified with the utopian tenets of Star Trek
started using this as a model in their everyday lives, and slowly but surely
these fans no longer primarily appreciated the original series, but they
started to appropriate it.
The fans recreated and imagined what Star Trek would have been
if it had lived up to its original intentions. In doing so they relied on
what Henry Jenkins has called the ‘moral economy’ of the original series
and the appropriate way to reuse and reimagine them. This is a set of
informally agreed norms, which justifies the appropriation of Star Trek’s
narrative and its characters and how these can be used as an input to
new, alternative, and parallel productions typically referred to as paratexts.
According to the idiosyncratic Vulcan philosophy of ‘Infinite Diversity in
Infinite Combination’, trekkers encourage each other to actively explore
possibilities of different and sometimes contradictory interpretations of
the original material. Fans reread, rerun, and rewrite Star Trek through a
variety of practices. They become ‘poachers’ that put Star Trek’s original
materials into a variety of cultural productions such as toys for children
and adult interaction games, they sewed costumes, programmed soft-
ware, and created home-produced videos. Jenkins describes the process
in more general terms: “This ability to transform personal reaction into
social interaction, spectatorial culture into participatory culture, is one
of the central characteristics of fandom. One becomes a fan, not by
being a regular viewer of a particular program, but by translating that
viewing into a cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the
program content with friends, by joining a community of other fans who
share common interests. For fans, consumption naturally sparks produc-
tion, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable”
(Jenkins 2006, 41).
88 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

A sense of belonging and desire to construct a better world as imagined

by the original producers are key features of Star Trek fandom: “When
talking about this [their values] in letters read by other fans, their affec-
tion for the series is passed on through a cohesive fibrous network that
allows for intimate but positive exchanges” (Geraghty 2015, 84). The
imagination of an alternative aesthetic and social world is combined with
a search for new forms of community, just like we saw in Venice.
What results from the contributions of many fans is an expansive Star
Trek universe which exceeds the official series by orders of magnitude.
Fans exchange their fan productions in communities, which have greatly
benefitted from digital technologies which facilitate both the production
and the sharing of fan productions. Such (online) fan communities are
exemplary instances of what we have called a ‘culture of appreciation’
above. This culture of appreciation has “generate[d] their own norms,
which work to ensure a reasonable degree of conformity among read-
ings of the primary text” (Jenkins 2006, 54). The creator-fans imagine or
reimagine the Star Trek universe, but at the same time they must remain
faithful to the intentions of the creators of the original materials, or rather
to how these intentions have come to be understood within the culture of
appreciation. This set of norms and expectations also significantly shapes
what the official sequels and Star Trek films could do as time progressed.
An interesting aspect of fandom communities, which exist around
many major science-fiction and fantasy franchises, is that the fan-created
extended universe does not operate according to the commercial logic
which first motivated the production company to produce the series.
Instead, they operate according to the logic of the (cultural) commons
(Hess 2012). We have already highlighted the shared norms which struc-
ture the creation of new additions to the universe. And just like one would
expect in a knowledge or cultural commons, contributions are central to
sustaining the practice, and fans move up in their social standing in the
community if they are able to contribute more. The ethos in fandom
communities is frequently anti-commercial, it is oriented toward sharing
and community building.
In the case of Star Wars, the perennial rival of Star Trek, fan fiction is
exchanged on Storium, a bottom-up platform facilitated by a Kickstarter
campaign, on which fans can share their fictional writings, using existing
characters to explore uncharted lines of the grand narrative. On Storium,
fans produce collaboratively written fan fiction and at the same time, they
are involved in a system of prescriptions about what they can and cannot
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 89

do with the original materials. The institutionalization of norms set the

boundaries to fans’ manipulations of original material and is rooted in
the loyalty of the fans toward the creators of the original material. Booth
(2017) argues that environments like Storium provide fan fiction writers
space to ‘play’ within a rigid set of rules.
But such rules are also partly in place for legal reasons, to avoid the
intellectual property complications that might arise from unauthorized
paratexts. The extended fan-universe exists in tension with the commercial
copyrighted material and the further protection of brand and character
names. Whether such rights will be enforced is frequently unclear. Most
producers have recognized the added value that fan creators bring to
a franchise. Gene Roddenberry and some Star Trek cast members have
even joined in the fan-creation practices (Jenkins 2006). It is not hard
to imagine that things would soon become different when fan creators
would commercially release their products (Clerc 2002).
In an ironic twist, additional commercial releases from the owners
of the brand grew enormously. The culture of appreciation created by
fan communities is responsible for the continued interest in the fran-
chises, and has enabled recent spin-off series from Star Wars which are
clearly inspired by the fanfiction on platforms like Storium. The range
of commercial products that the copyright owners sell is far wider, it for
instance includes video games and board games. If we look through an
economic lens at fandom as a (network) externality, we could say that
these spin-off products developed to internalize these externalities.
Jenkins has argued that the co-creating fans are part of a much broader
movement in which the importance of participation is recognized: “Pow-
erful institutions and practices (law, religion, education, advertising, and
politics, among them) are being redefined by a growing recognition of
what is to be gained through fostering—or at least tolerating— participa-
tory cultures” (Jenkins 2006, 1). His claim is probably half description
and half wishful thinking, but the broader point is indeed important.
Participation might lead to the kind of niche communities around imag-
ined worlds such as Star Trek or Star Wars. But they have broader societal
relevance, and the ability to also influence or contest social, political, and
legal institutions in society. On the one hand, the example of Star Trek
illustrates that this will happen regardless. The desire for imagination,
community, and co-creation is so widespread that it is unlikely that it
will go away. But the brief discussion about copyrights, an issue which we
cannot fully explore, illustrates that there is also a broader context which
90 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

can either hinder or help the emergence of co-creation. Our next case
study illustrates this in more detail.

The Queer Museum in Brazil Demonstrates

the Importance of Institutional Diversity
In August 2017, the exhibition ‘Queer Museum: Cartographies of Differ-
ence in the Arts’ opened in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. The
exhibition was curated by Gaudêncio Fidelis, who had selected Latin
American works since 1950 which portrayed sexual diversity and queer
culture. The museum contained over 200 artworks by 85 different artists,
including notable Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark and Alfredo Volpi.
The exhibition was sponsored by the Banco Santander, which hosted the
exhibition in the Santander Cultural Institute. Within a month, the exhi-
bition was terminated after both politicians and conservative groups had
protested the Queer Museum. The Christian League in Brazil claimed
that the exhibition ‘promoted pedophilia, zoophilia, and blasphemy’.
Our former colleague Carolina Dalla Chiesa (2021) has analyzed what
happened after the sudden termination of the initial exhibition. The deci-
sion to close the Queer Museum was made by the Banco Santander
who suggested that some artworks ‘disrespected symbols, beliefs, and
people’. Although a public prosecutor ruled against the closing, the bank
was undeterred, and the exhibition remained closed. In the meantime,
protesters supporting the exhibition grew more vocal. The organizers,
therefore, started looking for an alternative location, helped by interna-
tional media attention in major outlets such as the Guardian. The Rio
Art Museum seemed willing to host the exhibition, but the conservative
mayor of the city prevented this. A decision which reflected a climate
of political polarization, which was most visible in the election of Jair
Bolsonaro in 2018.
The organizers who had now failed to garner continued private support
from the Banco Santander as well as support from relevant public officials,
decided to seek direct support from the public through a crowdfunding
campaign. The closure and the public debate afterward had brought a
lot of attention, both positive and negative, to the Queer Museum, and
the crowdfunding campaign was a success. About 1700 contributors gave
on average 620 Brazilian Reais (about 170 USD). A relatively indepen-
dent art school in Rio de Janeiro, the Parque Lage School of Visual
Arts, offered to host the exhibition, on the condition that the organizers
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 91

raised sufficient funds to transform an older building of the school into a

location where other exhibitions could be held after the queer museum.
The crowdfunding campaign forced the protestors against the museum
to adopt a new strategy. They could no longer appeal to the public
authorities, now that there was no direct or indirect public support (the
crowdfunding campaign did not rely on the Rouanet Law which provides
tax deductions for donations to the arts). Dalla Chiesa in her analysis
demonstrates how the message of the protesters became more moral
and social, and less political. They now campaigned directly against the
content of the exhibition and its possible moral and social effects.
The organizers of the queer museum also changed their plans. The
crowdfunding campaign had given their exhibition a broader and more
open character, which they wanted to reflect in the new exhibition. Next
to the regular exhibition, they organized round-tables, seminars, and
musical events at which the position of the LGBTQIA+ community in
Brazil was discussed. Dalla Chiesa uses the notion of a ‘dispersed museum’
to reflect that the museum was increasingly organized bottom-up and
provided space for initiatives from supporters and audiences inspired by
the original exhibition.
She makes two further observations which are of importance to us
here. The protesters were initially successful in shutting down the Queer
Museum, but the broader dynamic that resulted was one of contestation
in which the LGTBQIA+ community in Brazil became more vocal and
more involved in the organization of the museum. This is an illustration
of David Stark’s idea that values are most often realized, and differences
in values most visible, when there is a friction and contestation of values.
The works of art which made up the exhibition were of course important,
and they embodied a recognition and validation for this type of art and
queer artists. But in the subsequent contestation over the Queer Museum
the question became bigger and touched a lot more people, as well as the
broader social position of sexually ‘deviant’ groups in Brazilian society.
One might still argue that all things considered the Queer Museum
would have been better off without the controversy. After all, the initial
exhibition was shut down and could not find a public institution willing
to provide an alternative venue for the exhibition. The fact that the exhi-
bition could not celebrate queer art in relative isolation, but became a
public issue, after which the continued existence of the exhibition was at
risk is itself not necessarily desirable. It might be argued that from the
perspective of the protestors against the museum, it was desirable that
92 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

the exhibition passed relatively unnoticed. The values which the Queer
Museum sought to realize were at odds with the values of a signif-
icant part of the Brazilian population. Co-existence is frequently best
achieved through an attitude of live and let live, in which not every private
difference becomes a public dispute.
But as Dalla Chiesa observes the institutional innovation of crowd-
funding the museum and the search for an alternative venue independent
from corporate sponsors and public institutions are likely to have a
legacy beyond the Queer Museum. They secured a form of institutional
pluralism which did not exist before. The use of crowdfunding provided
an alternative financial infrastructure, which other marginalized commu-
nities can use to fund their initiatives. And the creation of the exhibition
space at the Parque Lage School can be used as an alternative to public
and private institutions. This institutional pluralism is important, precisely
because contemporary societies are characterized by deep value disagree-
ments. In such circumstances, it is vital that dominant identities can be
contested, which is facilitated by institutional diversity.
One of the problems with official, national, and more generally public
organizations is that what they display is easily interpreted, and frequently
rightly so, as a public statement about what is valuable, representative of
the (national) identity, or artistically respectable. A variety of cultural insti-
tutions, on the other hand, allows for a broader diversity of voices to be
heard in their own voice, rather than through the official channels, and it
also ensures that the entire cultural field remains contestable, so that new
and alternative voices can continue to be heard. If that is the case then
the moral of the story of the Queer Museum is not the scandal which
resulted from the initial closure of the museum, or the relative merits of
the justifications provided by either side during the protests. It is instead
that its re-opening and the institutional circumstances under which this
happened underline the importance of institutional diversity in an open
society, which allows groups with different values and different identities
to exist next to each other. As one might expect that has important conse-
quences for how we think about cultural policy, as we will explore in the
next chapter.
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 93

Informal Practices Are Not Always Long-Lasting

and That Is Probably a Good Thing
Across the chapters, we have examined different cases as constitutive
examples of what we understand as the process of the realization of the
values of art in social practices. Together they give a sense of what we
mean by the idea of cultural civil society in which artists and partici-
pants co-create values in (frequently) informal settings. Our discussions
of the cases have focused on one of the four stages of the process of the
realization of values: orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation
(Fig. 1.1). Each one demonstrated that artists were driven by values and
imagined both aesthetically and socially to create new worlds, which were
realized. That this process succeeds is of course not given, it can fail at
any stage, an aspect which should be explored more in future work.
Table 4.1 provides an overview of the different case studies. We suggest
that most art communities have a dual aim. On the one hand, they aim to
contribute and participate in the art world, for which they must innovate
aesthetically. On the other hand, they aim to contribute and participate in
social and political life, for which they must create communities around
their art. The social innovation we have highlighted in the case of the
Star Trek consists of an expansive community both online and offline
which acts as an extension of the commercial product. Social practices and
the associated communities around the art might indeed be a by-product
of market exchange, of commercial culture. But even in the case of the
trekkers the community they formed operated more along the lines of
the commons than on a commercial basis. In the chapter on the creative
circles and the informal artistic collectives in Venice, we saw that the logic
of the commons dominates artistic production. In this chapter, we have
illustrated that audiences, as participants, co-create art, which aligns well
with the ideas of the cultural commons (as opposed to natural resource
commons).
Our analysis of the process of the realization of values, thus, upsets
the clear distinction between the production and consumption of the
arts, which dominates thinking about the arts in both economics and
sociology. We have instead suggested that the realization of values is
dependent on contributions from many individuals, both during the
process of imagination as well as during the process of realization.
Elinor Ostrom (1990, 2005) has done much to dispel the idea that
the commons are only informal arrangements based on goodwill and
94 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Table 4.1 Overview of the case studies and their goals (Source authors)

Aesthetic imagination Social imagination

Phonte The Minstrel Show as critique of Rethinking balance between

the dominant hip-hop aesthetic family and friendship ties versus
fame and political goals
Art collectives Critique of high-end art Reclaiming of civil space for
organizations and heritage-only the Venetians
tourism
Dance festivals Playful affirmation and critique of Contemporary festivals as
communal values liminal spaces
Trekkers Reclaiming of, and expanding Co-creation in (digital)
upon the original utopian Star communities rooted in fandom
Trek world
Queer Museum Giving voice to LGBTQIA+ Creation of community
people and expressing alternative through crowdfunding and the
sexual and gender identities dispersed museum

cooperation, and has demonstrated that they operate because of the estab-
lishment of rules and their enforcement. Even so, one might worry that
the informal collectives and the loose communities we have studied are
vulnerable, hard to scale, and transitory in nature. This contrasts sharply
with the traditional image of the arts, which traces its traditions back
centuries, is very protective of its heritage, and in which the idealized
artist does not produce for the present, but for eternity. Although the
modern museum was only invented about two hundred years ago, there
is a persistent tendency to associate real artistic success with the inclu-
sion in a museum collection, in which one’s art would be immortalized.
The practical impossibility of this idea has been pointed out repeatedly by
cultural economists: most of the art that the major art museums around
the world hold are locked away in more or less permanent storage (Frey
1994). According to reporting by the BBC from 2015: “the Louvre
shows 8%, the Guggenheim a lowly 3% and the Berlinische Galerie – a
Berlin museum whose mandate is to show, preserve, and collect art made
in the city – 2% of its holdings” (Bradley 2015). It is safe to assume that
this problem will not go away as museums continue to acquire new art.
The question is whether inclusion and preservation within museums is
the correct perspective on the arts. In the first chapter, we contrasted the
stately statues erected to honor the heroes of the past with the tempo-
rary installations of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. The former are meant to
 4 HOW PARTICIPANTS MAKE VALUES REAL 95

be around forever, aimed at solidifying a national identity through the

glorification of military masterminds, the latter temporary in nature, and
meant to draw new participants to the arts and to challenge conventional
understandings of familiar places. The former embody the idea of art as
eternal and solid, the latter embody the idea of art as temporary and in
flux. The contrast is important, because the cultural civil society which
we place in the foreground in this book is much closer to the light fabrics
used by the wrapping couple than to public art in the form of weighty
bronze statues. In a dynamic and plural society forms of art which signify
this change and heterogeneity are more appropriate, than forms of art
which seek to derive solid truths from the past.
At the same time, the contrast should not be overdrawn. The case
of the Queer Museum in Brazil demonstrates that informal communi-
ties also need space to exhibit. The Star Trek fans need places to meet,
both online and offline. Amateur practitioners need material and finan-
cial resources to sustain their practices. The commons need rules, and the
innovation commons which we discussed in the previous chapter might
have been informal, but they depended on sustained contributions over
a longer period before they generated worthwhile innovations. All the
artists and co-creative participants we have discussed build on artistic
traditions, sometimes centuries long. The question before us, is then, how
we can create an institutional environment which enables the cultural civil
society we have characterized, and how it can co-exist with the more solid
and commercial forms of art which have enjoyed so much attention in
cultural policy and research of the past. That is also a question, as the
case of the Queer Museum demonstrated so well, of the relative impor-
tance of the market, the state, and society. It is to that question that we
now turn.

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 CHAPTER 5

Making Space for Cultural Civil Society

Abstract We propose an alternative perspective for the private, social,

and public governance of the arts rooted in modus vivendi liberalism as
opposed to political liberalism. In this perspective, the co-existence of
a great diversity of social practices around the arts is the primary goal
of cultural policy. We argue that to achieve this we should aim for a more
complete separation between the art and state, analogous to the way that
church and state are separated. This implies that the state should aim to
create a stable legal framework in which practices can co-exist, minority
voices are protected, and the government refrains from favoring certain
art forms over others. We contrast the evolving social practices in cultural
civil society with the backward looking and frequently static large organi-
zations and monuments which are typically at the heart of cultural policy
and argue that a heterogeneous cultural civil society is a better safeguard
for pluralism in contemporary democratic society, and a better safeguard
at attempts to essentialize (national) identities. Cultural civil society will
depend to a large degree on private and social forms of governance and
the chapter explores the legal forms which can enable communities to
do so. Finally, we propose a few methods to measure the vibrancy of the
more informal practices in cultural civil society.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 99

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_5
100 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Keywords Civil society · Co-Existence · Contestation · Cultural policy ·

Public values

Democracy is the belief that even when needs and ends or consequences are
different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation - which may
include, as in sport, rivalry and competition - is itself a priceless addition to
life. To take as far as possible every conflict which arises - and they are bound
to arise - out of the atmosphere (…) of violence as a means of settlement,
into that of discussion and of intelligence is to treat those who disagree - even
profoundly - with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as
friends.
John Dewey, Creative Democracy (1939).

This book has argued that the values of the arts are realized in social prac-
tices. This follows from our theoretical analysis which has emphasized the
identity-forming nature of the arts and the social nature of creativity and
participation in the arts. We must now turn to the question of what this
means for the governance of the arts in the broadest sense: private, social,
and public governance. We have to explore how cultural civil society can
flourish so that the values of the arts can be realized, and how community
and public governance can contribute to it.
To do so we first explore how we can get a better sense of the diver-
sity of activities within cultural civil society and its vibrancy. We then turn
to the way in which the arts typically function at the intersection of the
private and the public sphere and why this matters for issues of gover-
nance. We argue that the great heterogeneity of social practices around
the arts requires a framework which allows for the co-existence of many
overlapping and conflicting practices. This entails a much deeper separa-
tion of the state and the arts than is currently practiced in most countries.
We argue that cultural policy should be aimed at creating space for diver-
sity and should ensure the contestability and access of as broad a variety of
minority voices as possible and investigate what such a framework should
look like.
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 101

The Diversity of Social Practices Around

the Arts Constitutes Cultural Civil Society
Our claim that the values of the arts are primarily realized in social
processes puts our perspective at odds with most discussions of cultural
policy and the cultural sector. In these discussions, the framing is tradi-
tionally that of some combination of markets and governments who
together seek to produce some optimal or equitable amount of art.
For the more commercial arts, say pop music or mainstream films, it is
assumed that market competition between producers will lead to both
sufficient supply and meaningful innovation (Cowen 1998). Although
even in these market-oriented sectors we might hear an occasional
complaint that there is not enough variety or genuine innovation, typi-
cally blamed on major film companies or music labels’ unwillingness to
take risks, or the unsophisticated tastes of the mass market. In the more
traditional arts, such as ballet, the visual arts, sculpture, and classical music
it is typically assumed that government support is required. The reasons
for this are varied, but usually point to some kind of market failure (Frey
2003). We will skip over these arguments here, not because we believe
they are all without merit, although some have certainly been employed
opportunistically, but because we feel that it is more important to change
perspectives.
The most basic shift in perspective is that value is not well captured in
consumption data, or the amount of public and private financial support,
but that value is realized in cultural civil society, the associational life
around the arts. To paraphrase the title of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize
address (2010), our perspective seeks to move ‘beyond market and state’.
This does not mean that market and state are of no importance, we have
suggested repeatedly that many inputs for the social practices around art
are produced and sold in commercial settings, and this chapter will discuss
the merits and limits of public policy.
Ostrom’s claim was not that the commons or civil society was always
superior to market or state. She was famous for saying that there is no
panacea, no one optimal form of organizing social and economic activity
which trumps others. Instead, her intellectual research project was to
call attention to the institutional diversity present in society. The artistic
collectives, circles of artists, and co-creative communities which have been
the focus of many of our examples indeed come in a great variety of flavors
and sizes.
102 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

One of the concepts which have been proposed to study the wide
variety of artist organizations is that of artist-run-initiatives (ARIs). These
include cooperatives, artist collectives, exhibition spaces, communes,
union-like organizations, and gathering places (Coffield 2015). They are
typically somewhat more formalized versions of the circles which we have
described in Chapter 3, in which artists pool resources to run a bottom-up
organization. At art schools and the communities which emerge around
them, we find further examples of social governance. At the more formal
end of the spectrum of this civil society, we will find industry orga-
nizations, large unions, and semi-public organizations. This variety of
organizational forms allows for artists and supporting communities to
come together in ways which are most appropriate for the type of art they
produce, and which values they seek to realize. They operate primarily in
the third sphere, next to markets and public organizations. In a moment,
we will turn to the question of how such variety can be fostered and why
it is valuable for society, but let us first make more tangible what we mean
by cultural civil society.

Cultural Civil Society Often Flies

Under the Radar, but it Can Be Mapped
The idea that the artistic sector can be properly measured by looking
at the market and the public sector is pervasive. In an ambitious effort,
the European Commission has launched an evaluation toolkit for Euro-
pean cities. Their Cultural and Creative City Monitor aims to rank cities
by means of a composite indicator regarding three dimensions across
which the value of culture is realized: cultural vibrancy, the creative
economy, and the enabling environment. The cultural vibrancy dimen-
sion measures the number of cultural venues and facilities, their visitor
numbers, and customer satisfaction. The creative economy dimension
focuses on patents, commercial design applications of the arts, and the
number of jobs available in the fields of arts, culture and entertainment,
media and communication, and other creative fields. The environment
dimension is inspired by Richard Florida’s theory of the creative class and
measures openness, tolerance, and trust, as well as the quality of the local
governance, international and regional connections, and the availability
of human capital. In the 2019 edition, the most creative cities per capita
were Paris, Copenhagen, Florence, and Lund in Sweden.
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 103

The EU monitor institutionalizes the economic instrumentalism which

reduces the value of art to its economic contribution. A city scores high
on this index when there are many visitors to the formal cultural organi-
zations (which typically receive significant subsidies), or in other words
when there are many (cultural) tourists. It also scores high when the
arts generate many new economic opportunities in terms of innovation
spill-overs or job opportunities resulting from commercial spin-offs of the
more applied arts. The final environmental dimension is more interesting
because it analyzes the institutional and political framework which enables
the cultural sector to flourish. At least in theory, a good environment
might contribute to both large organizations and informal communities
around the arts. But in the Cultural and Creative City Monitor there is no
attempt to measure the quantity or breadth and diversity of these commu-
nities, or the extent to which locals or other more (semi-)permanent
dwellers of the cities develop new social practices around the arts.
The first step in an ‘evaluation’ of the cultural sector should therefore
involve the mapping of different artistic practices in a place. The danger
in creating such a map is that it looks at recognized physical spaces in
which arts are performed or exhibited. We have instead emphasized that it
should capture the art communities in which people engage. This includes
their participation at established venues, and also their attendance of art
schools, use of rehearsal spaces and recording studios, as well as the use
of many other informal private and social spaces, and public space (think
of street performers). Rosa Won and Arjo Klamer (2021), both former
colleagues in Rotterdam, developed an alternative methodology to arrive
at such a mapping through a big-data analysis of the cultural and artistic
conversations that individuals had on online platforms while visiting or
living in an urban area (Won and Klamer 2021). They demonstrated that
such an analysis can help elucidate the heterogenous nature of the artistic
practices in a city, as well as the differences in these practices between
different cities or neighborhoods.
A similar mapping effort, although very different in methodology, is
undertaken by one of us, in Venice. To understand informal cultural prac-
tices in relation to the local cultural economy, Valeria Morea has collected
information regarding grassroots cultural organizations in Venice by
means of observations and interviews. In this way, she managed to map
the collectives, spaces, and groups of artists and art practitioners in the
city. On a grander scale, the Italian organization Che Fare is creating a
map of all collaborative cultural spaces in Italy. Frequently such mapping
104 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

projects rely on the same bottom-up mechanisms as the artistic collectives

which are being mapped: to improve the map, artists can report their
own collectives or spaces. This might sound somewhat arbitrary, but such
crowd-sourced maps are also frequently used in environmental science
and biology, to map bird populations for instance (Silvertown 2009).
A significant challenge in the mapping of artistic practices and the loca-
tions in which they take place is to capture their diversity. In Chapter 3,
we presented an idealized image (Fig. 3.1) of cultural civil society inspired
by the work on the many circles in interwar Vienna. The work of Timms
(2005) on these circles demonstrates that it is possible to also capture
the diversity of them, he for instance maps them onto a kind of ideolog-
ical map by positioning the circles in relation to each other as well as the
major political movements of the period. One might imagine a similar
mapping which associates the different circles with the art disciplines to
which they are closest, the neighborhoods in which they operate, or to
which major art organizations in a city they are closely related. The latter
would also give an insight into the extent to which cultural civil society
operates independently from these organizations, and to what extent it is
in fact dependent on the public infrastructure.
But given our focus on values, the ideal map would contain a qualita-
tive dimension which would allow the mapmaker to position the different
communities in relation to the values they pursue. The methodology
developed by Won, discussed above, is promising in this direction. Equally
promising is the value-based approach which has recently been proposed
to provide a: “reliable evaluation of qualitative achievements of cultural
and creative endeavors” (Petrova et al. 2022, 112). This approach builds
on Klamer’s conceptual work and distinguishes between four types of
values: personal, social, societal, and transcendental.
A mapping can demonstrate the breadth and diversity of cultural civil
society and is probably essential to convince policymakers and other stake-
holders of the importance of informal organizations and communities in
the realization of the values of the arts. But it will not be enough for a
genuine shift in perspective, for that we also must analyze the dynamics
within cultural civil society.
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 105

Cultural Civil Society Operates

at the Intersection of the Private
and the Public Sphere
The idea of a cultural civil society consisting of many circles of artistic
production as well as communities of co-creation makes clear that many
artistic practices exist next to each other. They might work together
for particular projects as we saw among the collectives in Venice, but
in the bigger scheme of things they compete for members and talent.
We have discussed the intra-group dynamics in Chapter 3. The inter-
group dynamics are primarily driven by the mechanisms of exit, voice,
and loyalty, so nicely summed up by Albert Hirschman (1970). Indi-
viduals will choose which artistic practices to join and devote both time
and other resources to realize their desired values through this practice
(loyalty). In case they fail to realize them, they might seek to alter the
direction of the circle (voice), and if they do not succeed in changing the
direction of the practice, decide to leave the circle (exit).
There will be a degree of deliberate choice in this process, especially
when it comes to the decision to leave a community, because it means
giving up friends and acquaintances as well as some of the resources
the individual has invested over time. In Chapter 2, we have, however,
suggested that joining a (new) social practice is not simply a rational deci-
sion, but involves aspiration, a desire to discover and appreciate a new
practice. This means that close friends, peers, and mentors, exert consid-
erable influence on the choice of the circle. In society at large, there might
also be trends which influence choices to join new practices, given the
presence of genuine uncertainty about values.
Joining a circle is a commitment. Most artistic practices, especially
those in which creation is central, will have significant entry barriers.
To become part of the community, as informal member or (ir)regular
contributor, one typically must know someone who is already a member.
Even so, the other contributors will seek to screen for quality or motiva-
tion and authenticity (matching values) to ensure that newcomers can
genuinely add something to the circle. This means that entry is typi-
cally limited, especially for the more prestigious circles in which more
experienced and talented members gather. In the broader ecosystem of
artistic circles, this is counteracted by the fact that circles will also need
contributors to sustain the practice and remain of interest to the existing
community members.
106 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Cultural civil society functions as associational life does everywhere.

When offline, it is locally organized, although cultural civil society is
frequently urban. It generates diversity and difference and enables the
formation of heterogenous identities by individuals. When online, it can
span larger geographical areas and is typically organized around highly
specific themes. Cultural civil society functions based on, and because
of, different forms of exclusion. There is little which can be done about
these entry barriers, they are part of the institutional rules which ensure
the functioning of circles as (innovation) commons. Public policy can,
however, concern itself with the overall openness and contestability of
the cultural field. It is desirable that new circles can easily form, and that
existing circles and communities do not enjoy unfair advantages which
make it harder for new groups to compete with them. Below, we will
delve into what this implies in more detail.
In most instances, communities will realize values internally, without
much direct concern for others. Although they are social in nature, in the
sense of bringing different individuals together, the practices are essen-
tially private, they do not have significant effects outside of the group.
But this is not always the case. In the cases we have studied, we have seen
that artistic practices frequently imagine alternative worlds. It is through
this process that they also give expression to social critique, political
imagination, or, in extreme cases, to the toppling of statues.
What is more, the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is not
fixed, but itself open to contestation. This is precisely what we have seen
in many of the examples presented throughout the book. The protests
against the public statues were explicitly public but were also a claim of
previously marginalized groups for full recognition in this public space.
The community-based art projects in Venice similarly entailed a reimagi-
nation of the public sphere, in which the locals sought to take back what
had been captured by tourists and major art organizations. The Queer
Museum in Brazil sought to draw public attention to the most private,
sexual, acts, and gender identities. To someone involved in the exhibition,
this was primarily meant to cultivate the values of the queer commu-
nity itself. For others, this was also an attempt to generate more public
recognition for their sexual orientation and gender identity. What they
sought to do with their art and the associated practices was not limited
to the private or the aesthetic, but part of a social process of contestation
and negotiation over what should be considered private and public. This
changes the way we use notions of private and public. They are no longer
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 107

natural categories associated with the private exchange and associational

life (private), on the one hand, and public support to the arts and govern-
ment more generally (public), on the other. Instead, they become socially
contested categories, which express differing beliefs over the nature of
practices and the values they embody.
We have taught economics in a cultural studies program for several
years, and experienced year after year that our students were deeply
convinced that museums were public goods. Our first instinct as
economists was to tell them wrong. After all, museums are excludable
goods, which means that it is relatively easy to exclude non-paying visi-
tors. And when museums get crowded, as popular museums tend to
do, they are rival, meaning that visitors enjoy a crowded museum less
than one in which they can freely move around. This entails in tech-
nical economic terms that museums are private goods, and consequently
that public support cannot be justified using the public goods argu-
ment. Yet, no matter how often, or creatively, we presented this bit of
economic reasoning, most of our students would still confidently declare
that museums were public goods at the end of the course.
Over time, we have come to realize that the students had a point,
or more precisely that they meant something else when they claimed
that a museum was a public good. When we challenged them, the class
discussion would quickly get heated. The students expressed a firm belief
that museums should be publicly supported and be open to the public,
preferably without charge, as they are in London. They believed this
because they felt that museums represented the identity and memory of a
society, a resource which should be available to as many people as possible
(from which it followed for most that they were deserving of government
support). They did not make a claim about the most efficient form of
economic organization, but about what they believed was the nature of a
museum: not private and relatively closed, but open and therefore public.
We believe that it is along these lines, that recent critiques of public
museums should be understood. The activists critique public museums
for their colonial outlook, for their lack of representation of female
artists, or for displaying misogynistic works. The response so far has been
mostly defensive. Most museums have sought to incorporate more non-
Western and female artists, removed particularly problematic artworks,
and museums dedicated to non-Western art have started to return wrong-
fully acquired (colonial) art. Unsurprisingly, this has led others to object
108 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

to this kind of cancelation of art in the name of freedom of expres-

sion. These counter-critics have furthermore pointed at the a-historical
nature of some of the critiques, which tend to judge the past by current
moral standards. The many sides to this debate express different public
values—freedom of expression, anti-colonialism, gender equality, open-
ness, curatorial freedom of expression—which are in tension with each
other. These different values can only be very incompletely reconciled
and are likely to lead to more intense disagreements in the near future.
That is, if we choose to stick to a policy of government owned or
supported public museums which must represent one national or official
view. Matters would be quite different if there was space for co-existence
of organizations with different goals and agendas.

Public Values Might Converge,

but Co-Existence and Tolerance Are Primary
In Dewey’s theory of democracy, which values are important and which
values should be public is discovered in the process of realizing them.
This discovery process unfolds over time, but it is also contextual, shaped
by the circumstances of time and place. As Barry Bozeman, who has
done much to develop the Deweyian theory of public values, argues:
“there will be many ‘publics’ just as there will be many public inter-
ests in various times and places. That is to say, the designated public
interest on any given policy question cannot be stated in advance of
the democratic appraisal of causes and consequences and the contextual,
cooperative search for a wider shared interest in a specific problematic
situation” (Bozeman 2007, 108). He draws attention to several impor-
tant facts. First, in contemporary society it is misguided to think of one
public, with a common interest. Second, the democratic process is not
simply an expression of given preferences, but a process of experimen-
tation in which consequences of different courses of action are learned,
and the value of different means and ends discovered. Bozeman concludes
that the goal is to search for a broader set of shared goals which itself is an
admirable goal. But it should be recognized that not all value-pluralism
can be reconciled; marginal and deep disagreements are likely to persist.
The key for public policy in a democratic society is therefore not to seek
to establish what art is important and worth supporting. It is to facili-
tate this discovery process, and to find modes of co-existence which can
accommodate persistent disagreement.
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 109

In their discussion of private and public values, Paul Dragos Aligica,

Peter Boettke, and Vlad Tarko argue that precisely because of the incom-
patibility of public values, the goal of public policy should not be: “to
look for the best way to aggregate values into a single coherent system
but instead to seek the best way in which heterogenous, incommen-
surable, and incomparable values can coexist and if not enrich at least
not undermine each other” (Aligica et al. 2019, 124). The solution for
dealing with deep value heterogeneity that they derive from the work of
Elinor and Vincent Ostrom is polycentricity, an institutional arrangement
that involves a multiplicity of decision-making centers acting indepen-
dently but under the constraints of an overarching set of norms and
rules that help internalize externalities. This might at first sound like a
rather minimalist, or even negative, solution. The political resolution of
deep value-pluralism is not an attempt to resolve the conflict of values,
but rather to recognize their incommensurability. The solution is some-
times known as ‘modus vivendi’ liberalism, as for instance theorized by
John Gray (2000). He emphasizes the agonistic nature of heterogenous
groups in many societies in which social groups are fundamentally at odds
with each other. It is the kind of perspective, which is relevant in polar-
ized times, when a limited form of mutual tolerance is perhaps all which
might be hoped for. Gray contrasts this modus vivendi liberalism with the
political liberalism of John Rawls and others. This latter view is inclined
toward a mild paternalism in which there is a role for the state to support
excellence in the arts and to defend national culture, as the free-market-
oriented economist Lionel Robbins argued in his classic Art and the State
(Robbins 1963; Balisciano and Medema 1999).
The broad critique of the arts of the past decade has made clear that
this political or mainstream liberalism has reinforced traditional impe-
rial, patriarchal, hetero-normative, and Western narratives about art and
history. Modus vivendi liberalism takes as its starting point a heteroge-
nous society and seeks to avoid taking a moral stance. If we return to
the philosopher who has guided our enquiry, John Dewey, we are able
to recognize the positive and constructive aspects of such an arrange-
ment: “A genuinely democratic faith in peace is faith in the possibility of
conducting disputes, controversies and conflicts as cooperative undertak-
ings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express
itself” (Dewey 1939, 15). The ability for groups to express themselves
is the kind of tolerance which modus vivendi liberalism makes focal.
Since Dewey tended to think in terms of processes and practices, we
110 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

should understand his argument as implying that we should give different

communities the chance to develop their own practices. The American
pragmatist philosopher, however, makes clear that a democratic faith
means that we should also hope that this might over time lead to conver-
gence about what the most important public values are. The cultural civil
society we have analyzed in this book is therefore a democratic testing
ground, an essential feature of the free society.
If two groups disagree over public values, Dewey suggests that they
might over time converge. One way in which this might happen is
through public discourse, a subject explored in the literature on public
reason liberalism (Gaus 2010). Our focus on practices, however, suggests
that rather than looking at public debate directly we should look at the
way in which social practices around art, or more broadly around polit-
ical values, grow and decline over time. If there is space in cultural civil
society to explore radically divergent values without seeking direct conver-
gence or overlap, we should expect to see new practices grow in times
when underlying values in society are shifting. In this sense, the practices
in cultural civil society reflect the underlying moral dynamics in society.
When there is a moral change in society, we expect conflicts within circles
which are likely to lead to divergence. The two or three factions which
split off will develop divergent practices which might be antagonistic in
nature. It is Dewey’s contention that over time convergence is more likely
(see Fig. 5.1).
Convergence of this type might happen. On the campus of George
Mason University where we are finishing this book, the statue of founding
father Mason is now contextualized through texts which highlight his role
as slave-owner and additional statues which depict a young servant and list
the names of the other slaves. But on its own, the faith that time will heal
wounds, and convergence will naturally come about, should be written off
as naïve optimism. How is one to expect that one group which seeks to
topple public statues will find common ground with another group which
not only seems determined to keep them in place, but which also seems
to long back for the very social arrangements and values which embodied
by the statues? Perhaps there are some instances in which the government
must simply decide that one group is right.
But, we believe, such cases are the exception. The answer lies, instead,
in the more complex dynamics which follow from our description of
cultural civil society. In Fig. 5.1, we depicted just two circles which either
diverged or converged. The art world is more like the ‘mosaic of social
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 111

Fig. 5.1 Convergence of previously disparate circles and divergence of previ-

ously overlapping circles

practices’ which dance scholar Hanna described, and which we depicted

in Fig. 3.1. These many circles embody a genuine plurality of values with
partial overlap between them, with more marginal and extremist groups
and practices at the edges. When a particular conflict leads to divergence,
between two circles which were previously close, we should expect that
112 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

both circles will find new forms of overlap with previously existing circles
and practices.
This is precisely the strength of a heterogenous civil society. Rather
than forcing people in a small number of competing camps who seek
to win a dispute through a polarized political process, it allows for a wide
variety of associations. These heterogenous associations will be reflected in
multiple identities at the individual level as we demonstrated in Chapter 2.
Consequently, individuals will be part of a variety of associations, some
close to each other in terms of values, others further apart. This makes
it less likely that any specific conflict will lead to a simple dichotomous
sorting of individuals. Instead, we are likely to find a range of positions,
which by itself weakens the extremes. This of course does not mean that
individuals will not, occasionally, feel torn between rival allegiances.
Throughout this book, we have argued that the realization of values
around art has a distinctive ‘public’ element to it. This means that
conflicts will arise, and that some degree of management of the exter-
nalities generated by art communities is necessary. This might vary from
noise regulations to the management of the access of different communi-
ties to (semi-)public spaces. But this should not blind us to the primary
benefit of allowing for a broad scope of cultural civil society: it allows
for the realization of a wide variety of (partially public) values next to
each other. Clearly, the greatest danger to a plural and free society is that
cultural values and national identity are made uniform and become essen-
tialized. The best safeguard against that threat is a vibrant cultural civil
society in which different groups can explore and express their heteroge-
nous identities and realize the values which are important to them. This
cultural civil society should be open and contestable so that newcomers
can enter, and alternative identities can be formed.
Dewey makes us aware of one additional benefit of a diverse cultural
civil society. In his perspective of democracy and social inquiry, Dewey
lays out how a society might engage in learning. We have explored the
process of aspiration and value learning in Chapter 2. Dewey argued for
social experimentation along similar lines and believed that the kind of
associational life which we have placed in the foreground of our analysis
provides many epistemic benefits. This could occur in the type of contes-
tation we have described above, but it happens primarily at the meso-level
at which circles and co-creative communities shrink and grow. Many
social experiments and practices will fail to sustain themselves because
they do not crowd-in sufficient contributions from (potential) members.
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 113

Others may prove to be highly successful, will be imitated, grow rapidly,

or generate spin-offs.
In economics, it is well established that the competitive market process
enabled by the price system is essential to solving the enormously complex
knowledge problem of what and to produce, as well as the even more
complicated question of how to adjust the production to ever-changing
circumstances (Hayek 1945). In society, there is no direct analogue to
the price system, but as we have suggested above, the different commu-
nities do compete for the resources and contributions of individuals, and
successful practices are likely to attract new members and inputs. In this
manner, cultural civil society serves as a lab of experimentation as well as
a testing ground for social practices which might become more widely
adopted and occasionally even nearly universally shared.
Understanding the social dynamics within cultural civil society, quite
radically, shifts how we think of (policy) evaluation. A genuine explo-
sion of attempts to measure the economic and social impact of the arts
has occurred over the past two decades (see Belfiore 2021 for a critical
discussion). Initially, they were mostly aimed at evaluating the social and
economic impact of the arts, but more recently, they have also analyzed
the cultural impact of the arts. The goal behind these evaluations is invari-
ably to come up with a simple or comprehensive value scale against which
the performance of cultural organizations can be measured, and thus fix
and determine what impacts are important or in the public interest. By
necessity, they reduce the plurality of values which are realized by cultural
organizations, aside from having a strong tendency to ignore art commu-
nities which are not sufficiently institutionalized. They also strongly run
the risk of instrumentalizing the arts for some specific policy priority,
whether that is economic dynamism, social inclusivity, or cultural diversity.
But our most important objection to these evaluation studies is that
they ignore the most important form of knowledge which is generated
within cultural civil society: the dynamics of adjustment, entry, and exit
which happens within and between these groups. These dynamics reflect
which practices individuals find valuable, and therefore join, which are
being abandoned, and which new practices pop up. The responsiveness to
changing values and the adaptiveness of cultural civil society is what gives
it the strength, but it also generates knowledge about what is consid-
ered valuable. It is not only misguided to ignore this information, but
also illustrates the dangers associated with external criteria drawn up by
114 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

experts, which are given precedence over the choices made, and values
pursued by artists and co-creative participants.

Making Space Means Fostering

Diversity and Protecting Minorities
A corollary of the idea that cultural policy should not attempt to settle
which values are public is that it should not seek to establish what the
identity of a particular society or community is through a system of
‘public art’. This idea is at once simple and radical because it questions the
wisdom of both public statues which embody a national identity as well as
the appropriateness of national or regional museums and similar organi-
zations who claim to represent such identities. Do not take us the wrong
way, we are not against art in public spaces or museums. But we believe
that cultural policy should not be aimed at the content of national iden-
tity, rather, at creating a framework in which different values and identities
are able to find a place next to each other, in co-existence. We believe
that such a cultural policy framework should establish the preconditions
for a cultural civil society in which dominant identities are contested,
rather than cemented. To enable this co-existence, it is of prime impor-
tance to secure the freedom of association and to recognize the great
heterogeneity in associational life.
Our point is perhaps best illustrated by an analogy with the modern
position of the state vis-à-vis religion. Liberal democratic theorists agree
that the church and the state should be separated (Walzer 1984). Reli-
gious toleration was one of the first steps toward the liberal state. Initially,
the state remained tied to one dominant religion but, over time, it came
to recognize the importance of neutrality toward the different religions
which people practiced (Kukathas 2003; Levy 2015; Johnson and Koyama
2019). One central implication of the idea of the separation of church and
state is that the government should not grant privileges or directs its poli-
cies in favor of one or more (dominant) religious organizations. Another
implication is that the state should ensure that religious minorities are free
to associate and practice their beliefs. If the state is more activist in this
regard, it might attempt to promote tolerant attitudes among its popu-
lation. There are a few related implications such as that state power and
religious positions of power should be separated, which are not as relevant
for us here. It is believed that this separation does not only help secure
religious freedom and freedom of conscience, but also fosters a diverse set
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 115

of religious practices. Importantly, it limits the ability of powerful religious

organizations to curb state policies in its favor.
The analogy between art and religion makes little sense if we go along
with the dominant understanding of the arts as the creative industries,
recipient of public support to spur innovation, or the one that preceded it,
as a sluggish economic sector in need of structural public support (Potts
and Cunningham 1998). But if one accepts our understanding of the
arts as essentially consisting of artistic communities organized within civil
society, just like religious organizations, then the analogy is straightfor-
ward and logical. It is well recognized that civil society organizations are
mostly self-sustaining (or at least they strive for self-sustenance), often
idealistic in outlook, and a countervailing power to the state (Walzer
1991). We have demonstrated that the artistic practices are indeed driven
by aesthetic as well as social and political ideals, that the circles in which
creation and enjoyment of the arts happens are self-sustaining (although
not every circle will sustain itself), and we have emphasized how their
imagination frequently contests widely held or state-endorsed views.
Most public policy aimed at the arts strongly privileges certain practices
over others. It directly subsidizes prestigious art forms such as classical
ballet, while it prosecutes others, for instance, graffiti or street art. It
provides prestigious permanent places for some, such as the visual arts
and classical monuments, while it ignores or marginalizes other forms of
art. The state plays an important role in the choice of what is considered
heritage and should therefore be preserved, and has frequently played a
problematic role in the appropriation of heritage from outside the West.
Traditionally, high art and art which glorified the national history has
received the most support and attention from public policy, primarily in
an effort to shape the perception of a national identity as part of a broader
nation-building process (Aronsson and Elgenius 2014). Over time, this
motivation was supplemented by the idea that the state had an important
role to play in the artistic education of its citizens, the arts were so-
called merit goods, which should be supported for the beneficial influence
they would have on taste formation and aesthetic sensibility (Cwi 1980;
Dekker 2017). This kind of policy has had the effect of strongly fortifying
the position of high art and has contributed to sharp division especially
in Europe between high and low art (Abbing 2019). The resulting privi-
leges were financial support for some types of art, and an elevation of their
status through inclusion in high prestige venues including state-funded or
state-supported concert halls, theaters, city squares, and museums. Over
116 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

time, it has also increased the dependence of high art on the state, which,
to be clear, was fostered from both sides. Major art organizations devel-
oped strong ties with the state, and this probably also encouraged the
strong anti-commercial attitude in these circles.
More recently, the traditional high-art disciplines occupy a somewhat
less prominent place. In the new perspective on the creative industries,
the more applied forms of art such as design, digital art, architecture,
and fashion have been considered a driver of economic growth, and jobs.
They are believed to create spill-over effects which lead to more inno-
vation in related sectors (Hesmondhalgh 2012). The reason to support
these art forms has altered, it is now based on arguments about industrial
policy and urban regeneration, and the resulting privileges are somewhat
different. The primary way in which these art forms benefit is through
public subsidies, access to research and innovation grants, and discounts
or privileged access to prominent locations in major cities. The latter
might be considered relatively benign compared to the social effect of the
elevation in status of high art, but even former proponents of the promo-
tion of the creative industries now recognize that it has exacerbated the
process of gentrification (Florida 2017).
The alternative is to ensure that cultural policy does not unduly priv-
ilege certain art forms and practices over others. It means ensuring that
the state and the arts are separated, and that art is autonomous, or secular.
Such a separation is often preached, and fortunately, most Western states
have not engaged in extensive censorship of the arts in recent years. But
on a practical level, these same governments have privileged certain forms
of art over others, which has had significant crowding out effects. It
crowds out the other art forms, because they are forced to compete with
large, subsidized organizations. It pulls away artistic talent from other art
forms. And significantly, it has also led to a situation in which private
patronage of the arts has dwindled in most European States, whereas
matters are somewhat different in the United States. Although it is impos-
sible to know what the situation would have looked like without the
extensive support of the past one hundred years, there is little historical
evidence to suggest that the arts cannot thrive without state support.
A discussion of crowding out effects leads naturally to the issue of the
protection of minority rights. A significant part of the critique of major
art organizations of the past two decades is that they have systematically,
although not necessarily consciously, excluded minorities such as female
artists and non-Western voices. The narratives they have told are alleged
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 117

to have reinforced colonial attitudes and contributed to systematic racism.

It is tempting to pick sides in this debate, like in the toppling of the statues
which we discussed in Chapter 1. But it must be recognized that a major
part of the problem has arisen because the institutional field in the arts has
been dominated by large, subsidized organizations that, probably rightly
so, are considered to tell the ‘official’ or ‘public’ narrative. This outsized
role and official status is not just evident from the arguments of the crit-
ical activists, but also from the arguments by those who seek to defend
traditional practices. These more conservative voices have claimed that
when major organizations started making changes, or when governments
founded grand alternative organizations such as the National Museum of
African American History and Culture, they caved into the pressure of
relatively small groups of protestors.
It is important to see that much of the problem arises from the very
fact that the state is not merely providing a framework in which the arts
can flourish, but that it is supporting specific organizations, which are
then, justly or unjustly, considered to speak with the voice of the state, or
‘the public’. The alternative we propose is one of contestation in which
different kinds of communities and organizations seek to realize diverse
values, and in which they present rival, or complementary narratives about
identity, history, aesthetics, and society. Frequently, this will practically
mean that the government must get out of the way, but in other instances,
it will also mean securing a framework in which a wide variety of practices
has a chance to flourish. How extensive such a framework should be and
to what extent it would require not merely the protection of minority
rights, but also the support of minority voices is the subject to which we
now turn.

Making Space: Marginal Improvements

We started this book with a contrast between the interactive, temporary
wrappings of the Christo’s and the stately colonial statues. The contrast
illuminates well what making space means to us on a practical level. The
project by the Jeanne-Claude and Christo was organized as a private
undertaking, engaged many others, and created a temporary change in
public space. Most of the public statues were erected, or at least main-
tained, by public authorities, sought to solidify a particular identity or
narrative as the correct one, and had been around for decades, sometimes
118 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

for more than a century. These examples represent two different ways of
thinking about public space and co-existence.
The contrast between the two is easily extended to different perspec-
tives on a public square in the center of town. According to the traditional
perspective, we would think of the square as the site of a prominent
symbolic public sculpture, the entrance to an important historical land-
mark or museum and a name for the square which links it to the local
or national history of the place. In the perspective we propose, we would
think of the square as the potential site for diverse social practices around
the arts throughout the year in a rotation system. We would emphasize
the multiple social functions that the square would have at any moment in
time. In the first image, the square would be picture perfect, ready to go
on a postcard, in the second it would be closer to a canvas which would
allow different artists and participants to draw on it.
A square is a relevant space to imagine, precisely because cities are both
an important site of artistic practices, as well as a place where the problem
of co-existence is most pressing. Our case study of Venice showed how
urgent the problem of the use of public space is, and how certain practices
can be marginalized by dominant ones. In response, local communities of
artists explored new forms of communities, and new forms of associational
life. A good example of this desire and this type of imagination is that in
recent years many in the art world have started using commons as a verb:
commoning (Bollier and Helfrich 2015; Antonucci 2020). Scholars and
artists use the verb to reimagine the management and use of both public
and private spaces. They explore what difference it would make to the
type of practices which would flourish if these places were organized as a
commons and governed socially. It is an interesting transformation of the
commons, which was used mostly to study the management of land and
natural resources, and is now associated with urban social practices and
knowledge-based activities (Hess and Ostrom 2006; Euler 2018).
One reason why thinking of the square, and more broadly shared urban
spaces as commons is illuminating, is that it draws attention to the need
for rules to manage this resource. One only has to look at the steady
rise of real estate prices in the major urban centers of the world, which
reflected a steady growing demand to live there, to realize that cities and
the social practices they enable have remained attractive, even in times
of digitization and teleworking. But urban space is almost by definition
shared space: in cities, there is more mixed use of space, people live much
closer together, and roads and public transport are busy and lively or
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 119

crowded. Economists are used to calling spill-over effects of exchanges

or economic activities externalities, and cities are full of them. The posi-
tive externalities, the mosaic of art communities, attract many individuals,
and tourists, to cities. But residents also experience negative externalities:
noise, pollution, and congestion to name a few.
Managing both positive and negative externalities is crucial but
thinking only about externalities is easily limiting. An increasing number
of scholars and activists have realized that city life has come to be domi-
nated by the NIMBY-attitude, not in my backyard, which has stifled the
ability of cities to remain dynamic and to welcome new residents. In
response, they have started the counter-movement YIMBY, yes in my
backyard, which imagines a city in which new developments and citi-
zens are welcomed (Holleran 2022). The YIMBYs argue that (powerful)
existing citizens frequently have obtained de-facto veto power about
new development, frequently under the guise of preservation (heritage),
sustainability, or zoning regulations (Swyngedouw 2005). They argue not
merely for an overhaul of these regulations, but also for a more tolerant
and open attitude which would return the former dynamism to the city
and would allow a more diverse set of social practices to flourish. The
goal of a more tolerant attitude of urban dwellers is essentially an appeal
to them to focus on the positive and to ignore the negative externalities.
The YIMBY movement is an exciting development which gives a prac-
tical meaning to the idea of creating space. It does so by thinking about
better regulation, but also by thinking about new forms of transport and
architecture which foster living together. But if we return to Venice, a
city which now threatens to charge an entry fee to its historic center, we
discover that openness alone cannot be the answer. Rules are necessary
for the management of public space which many people would like to
use at the same time. Our analysis of the civic, or underground, cultural
civil society of Venice further illustrates the need for space. The artist-
run-initiatives who felt they were crowded out of the heart of the city,
reclaimed spaces, inspired by the ethic of the squatting movement. This
is an interesting strategy in the short-run, and makes a powerful statement
about the urgency of the problem, but it mostly demonstrates the need
for a proper management of space, which cannot be only purely private
or purely public in nature. Whether such places, aimed at artistic prac-
tices and communities, should be provided by the government is an open
question to us.
120 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

A study of some recent historical examples suggests that many thriving

art scenes formed in places which were essentially neglected by govern-
ment and private actors. Berlin after the fall of the wall is a good
example. During this time, there were many abandoned spaces especially
in former East Berlin, there was a lack of governance in certain neigh-
borhoods, and new forms of interaction now that Berlin was reunited.
These factors helped turn the city into a major hub of artistic activ-
ities (Denk and Thülen 2014). Another instance which comes readily
to mind is New York in the 1970s and 80s which gave rise to hip-hop
culture: rap, breakdance, graffiti, and dj-ing. These new art forms and
practices emerged in neglected neighborhoods which suffered from high
crime were partly abandoned, and therefore offered space for practices like
major outdoor shows (Fricke and Ahearn 2002). At the same time, the
circles in Berlin and New York overlapped sufficiently with, and were close
enough to more established artistic practices and circles, which stimulated
the further development of them (Chang 2007; Currid-Halkett 2020).
It is questionable whether such conditions could be replicated through
spatial planning. But the fact that these spaces were so successful demon-
strates the resilience of social practices around the arts, which might not
require much more than space and possibly some overlap with established
organizations.
It is tempting if one adopts our perspective of cultural civil society to
think that public policy should support more marginal practices. In the
current discourse, there is much attention to giving a voice to marginal-
ized groups in society and to neglected artistic traditions. Some museums
have organized exhibitions of outsider art, and artists operating outside of
the traditional institutions. Our square metaphor above makes clear that
providing space which can be used to practice the arts might fall within
the scope of productive public policy.
We could object on principled grounds that it would grant privileges
to certain (marginalized) groups, and thus violates the separation of art
and state we proposed. But there are also consequential reasons to be
skeptical of such support. It is unclear whether public support and the
associated institutionalization of the practice would not lead to a transfor-
mation of the practice itself, and the associated values. A good example
of the dangers is visible in the way that many city governments have
supported street artists to beautify the city. Many of the artists supported
this way had their roots in graffiti and other forms of illicit artistic activity.
The institutionalization and public support of such a practice is likely to
 5 MAKING SPACE FOR CULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY 121

transform the activity, a process recent research has termed ‘artwashing’

(Schacter 2014). It is likely to favor the contingent among the street
artists whose work is less edgy or controversial or will motivate edgy
artists to transform their work. Even when the risk of transformation of
the artistic practice is limited, this policy approach risks ‘fixing in time and
space’ what the art form is and which communities make it—and there-
fore who are entitled to support. The dynamism of cultural civil society
we analyzed in this book precisely happens at areas of overlap and in the
interaction between communities of artists, a process which will be under-
mined by this type of support. Not to mention that this type of public
support is likely to lead to instrumentalization of the arts.
Marginal communities might be better helped if they are enabled to
self-organize, assisted by legal rules which help them to do so. Italy has
made interesting steps in this direction by recognizing a wide variety of
legal forms of civic organizations, such as volunteer organizations, asso-
ciations for social promotion, philanthropic entities, social enterprises,
associate networks, and mutual associations. These are different legal
forms for NGOs, which provide a legal framework for different types of
communities to govern themselves (Foster and Iaione 2015). This helps
in the recognition of the diversity of civil society, and it offers opportuni-
ties for relatively informal communities such as artist-run initiatives to find
appropriate legal forms. It might also help to level the playing field with
larger cultural organizations which frequently benefit from attractive tax-
deductible donations. It fosters social governance, through a supportive
legal public framework.
Since important parts of community life now take place online, a devel-
opment further spurned on by the recent pandemic, it is also important
to recognize new technological developments. There are many different
initiatives to use digital financial tools and infrastructures which lower the
costs of self-governance to form new communities online, as we saw in
the crowdfunding campaign of the Brazilian Queer Museum. Lowering
the costs of self-governance as well as resource-sharing is likely to lead
to an even livelier community life online, and is comparable in its effects
to lowering the legal costs of forming organizations. In a recent devel-
opment, many of the Venetian collectives we discussed in the previous
chapter converged on a newly established online platform, Come Come.
They recognized that they shared crucial values regarding the transforma-
tion of their city, and hope that this platform helps them to be recognized
122 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

by Venice’s urbanites and policymakers. At the same time, the digital plat-
form allows for distinctions between the artistic agendas of the different
collectives.
Come Come is still in its infancy and whether it will be sustained and
what it will become in the future is not yet clear. But it is important
to point out that one motivation for civil society collectives to orga-
nize is to influence public policy in their favor. If that is done in the
broad sense of critiquing existing privileges of the dominant commer-
cial or public organizations, there is nothing wrong with it. But it might
turn into a lobbying organization aimed at securing similar privileges for
itself. Just like government policy has led to the instrumentalization of
art, so cultural organizations can attempt to use the (local) government
as an instrument to pursue their own gain. This is a significant danger,
especially when done by prestigious and well-established cultural organi-
zations. The government should be as unresponsive as possible to such
lobbying attempts. The public choice literature has argued that this is
best done through the creation of a framework consisting of general
rules (Buchanan and Brennan 1985). It is to be hoped that a clear legal
framework, a diversity of organizational forms, and the new digital possi-
bilities do not merely inspire new attempts to lobby policymakers, but
instead stimulate artists and other civil society actors to imagine new social
worlds.
A flourishing cultural civil society is ultimately dependent on the
initiatives of artists and participants. Public policy can help create an envi-
ronment in which circles and communities can flourish, but it cannot
bring them into existence. Our pragmatic perspective, which starts from
the values which artists and participants seek to realize, is interested
in enabling social practices. This should not just be oriented toward
changing public policies, but also toward finding new and better ways
of social governance, which enables communities to govern themselves.

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 CHAPTER 6

Epilogue: Imagining a Heterotopia

Abstract In this chapter we contrast marginal improvements in public

policy with the radical alternative of a heterotopia based on the work of
Michel Foucault and Robert Nozick. Artistic communities explore and
imagine alternative social worlds which function as experiments in living
and challenge the status quo, a process for which we believe there should
be as much space as possible. This space can exist at the fringes of society
and in largely neglected urban areas. But we argue that their function
is not primarily as alternative space, rather as an integrated part of civil
society in which they function as genuine and (semi-)permanent alterna-
tives to established forms of living. This will require a sufficient degree
of self-organization and self-governance for which it is important that
public policy provides adequate legal forms which facilitate the forma-
tion of self-governing communities. We explore the challenges that such
forms of self-governance within an urban setting face through an analysis
of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen.

Keywords Heterotopia · Christiania · Cultural civil society · Urban

commons · Utopia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 127

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5_6
128 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

Public policy discussions are by their very nature about the realization of
incremental change. They take the status quo into account and explore
what can be changed at the margin. Since this book has relied on (neo-)
pragmatism, it is fair to suggest we should do the same. John Dewey,
however, showed some hints of radicalism, he was in favor of experimen-
tation and explored what a ‘creative democracy’ could and should be.
Moreover, imagination has been one of the major themes of this book.
So, at the end of it, we think it is a good idea to put the pragmatic
impulses to the side for a moment, and imagine what a world would look
like in which cultural civil society had the space we suggest it should have.
Western societies take pride in their individualism and their freedom of
association but, paradoxically, they have produced relatively little actual
difference and diversity. Critical theorists have often lamented bourgeois
culture and its uniformity. Around the cultural revolution of 1968, radical
philosophers on both the left and the right started to imagine what a
society which was less uniform, less bourgeois would look like. They
drew attention to the position and culture of marginalized groups in
society, and they criticized existing hierarchies in the arts, especially the
sharp distinction between high art and popular art. Their appreciation of
popular art went hand in hand with a revaluation of folk art and amateur
practices. They wanted to imagine a society which was more diverse and
less hierarchical. But they did so with an awareness that the big utopian
blueprints of the twentieth century had failed.
On the left, Michel Foucault was one of the prominent voices, who
explored what he called heterotopia, places which were different: “some-
thing like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia” (Foucault
1967/1986, 24). Foucault explored spaces such as cemeteries, prisons,
saunas, boarding schools, motels, and colonies. One reason why such
places were different was because they were different in function, but
for Foucault they were primarily of interest because they functioned as an
experimental or realized alternative to society. Because they provided an
insight into different forms of living together.
Although Foucault left the concept of heterotopia somewhat under-
developed, it gained popularity among geographers and social scientists
interested in the spatial elements of knowledge, power, and difference.
While they do not all use the concept in the same way, heterotopia is
meant as “a starting point for imagining, inventing and diversifying space”
(Johnson 2013, 801). Foucault was concerned with the way that power,
both explicit and implicit, shapes human behavior, and the idea behind
 6 EPILOGUE: IMAGINING A HETEROTOPIA 129

a heterotopia is to design spaces, so that they make difference and a

heterogeneity of practices possible.
A few years after Foucault worked on the idea of heterotopia, the liber-
tarian philosopher Robert Nozick published his landmark Anarchy, State
and Utopia. The frequently neglected third part of that book explores a
utopia, which is not imperialistic, in that it seeks to enforce its ideals with
violence, nor missionary, in that it seeks to convince everyone of its superi-
ority. Instead, Nozick argued for an: “existential utopianism, which hopes
that a particular pattern of community will exist (will be viable), though
not necessarily universally, so that those who wish to do so may live in
accordance with it” (Nozick 1974, 290). His utopia is in an important
sense empty, it consists of a minimal legal framework in which individuals
can engage in their own experiments in living. Some experiments will
succeed and attract new members; others will fail and disappear.
These communities will enjoy a large degree of self-governance, can
design their own rules, and may of course realize their own values. Both
the vision of Foucault and Nozick contain a degree of realism, and a
suspicion of comprehensive utopian visions. Experiments in living must
work for Nozick, although he regards the initial situation as a blank slate.
Spaces must allow for difference, which includes the ability to exclude
others, for Foucault. They can be functionally differentiated, or along
differences in values as we have proposed in this book. For Foucault,
the difference almost seems a goal, while Nozick regards the search for
the good community as a kind of competitive process between different
experiments, although he appears convinced that no experiment will be
universally superior. For Foucault, there is a degree of liminality to the
heterotopia, they stand outside everyday life, while Nozick is interested
in different forms of everyday living within mainstream society.
Our current societies are already plural and heterogenous. Our case
studies have demonstrated that even marginal communities manage to
find organizational forms to develop practices around the art. Some
artistic communities even derive their identity, in part, from operating
at the margin, in opposition to a dominant or hegemonic power. Possibly
that is the way it is always going to be. The contestation about values
which we identified as central in the process of value discovery should
not be imagined as only a rosy civil conversation between (near-) equals,
but will involve competition, strive, power imbalances, and quite possibly
deep conflict.
130 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

But Foucault and Nozick make us reconsider, they ask us whether a

good deal of the current power imbalance between cultural civil society
and institutionalized and subsidized art, as well as the relative weakness
of civil society vis-à-vis major commercial forces is a result of structural
factors. Current organizations might systematically crowd-out and disad-
vantage bottom-up artistic initiatives and collectives, and continually favor
the status quo over change. This has potentially blocked the ability of
art to remain dynamic, and to be a constitutive element of civil society.
The communities we have studied might be little more than pockets of
creativity, which exist despite these hegemonic forces. If so, our current
civil society is both underdeveloped and far less diverse than it could be.
There are good reasons to believe this is the case, if we analyze the social
developments since 1968. An increasing number of ethnic, gender, racial,
and social minorities are making themselves heard, and have demanded
more space for their own practices.
A heterotopia would be an alternative world in which squares and
piazzas are no longer occupied with publicly commissioned art, but with
diverse social practices. In which the state would not seek to define what
the national identity was, but one in which local, regional, national,
and global identities would emerge from the heterogenous practices in
cultural civil society. A place in which individuals would tolerate, and
sometimes even welcome the contestation from rival practices around
the arts. A world in which individuals engage in artistic practices of their
choice and where they are able to develop identities of their choosing. A
heterotopia would be a world in which there was ample space for individ-
uals to associate freely and where creativity resulted from the interaction
of many different personalities and voices. In which the arts are not an
instrument toward some other social goal, but a constitutive element of
civil society and the polity.
To some, our call for a heterotopia might sound too radical, they might
think that our call echoes a perpetual Burning Man festival, the infamous
week-long event which occupies an otherwise desolate piece of desert in
Nevada, where people gather and co-create, experiment, reimagine their
world, and create their own festival from scratch, every year anew. It ends,
as the name suggests, with an act of destruction, the burning of that
which was constructed during the week.
There are various reasons why that is a bad analogy. First, the Burning
Man festival is a liminal event, detached from usual space and time, much
like the contemporary dance festivals we discussed in Chapter 4. While
 6 EPILOGUE: IMAGINING A HETEROTOPIA 131

interesting as a site of experimentation, it derives much of its attraction

from being outside of society. Most of the artistic communities which
make up cultural civil society are, to the contrary, constitutive of the iden-
tities of individuals and integrated in everyday life. In our perspective,
cultural events are not so much interesting as leisure or consumption, but
rather as sources of identity and community. Although with Foucault we
have to recognize that they might exist at the fringes of society and not
always in the mainstream.
The idea of the destruction of the old was a prominent theme of the
modernists, for instance, the Futurists who wanted to destroy the old, and
erect new cities every decade. This is mirrored in the bonfires at Burning
Man. Making space is important, but as we have argued in Chapter 3, it is
just as important to realize that creativity is a social process which happens
in constant conversation with traditions. The idea that the new can best
be created on a blank slate is a variation on the theme of the lone genius
creating in isolation. Heritage, both built heritage and lived heritage in
the form of practices, is an important component of any cultural civil
society. As we stressed, values are both cultivated and imagined. At the
same time, it is important to realize that current policy almost invariably
errs in the direction of overprotection of what is. It seeks to preserve the
old and stifles change. The UNESCO World Heritage list is the embodi-
ment of the idea that art and culture are something created in the past and
best admired from afar, rather than something which should be practiced,
and which should evolve.
The opposite of this status is the dynamism of cultural civil society,
which is always evolving, either at the fringes, or at the heart of society.
It is in constant conversation with mainstream institutions and with chal-
lenges from within, therefore it needs to adapt, adjust, and improve to
stay in place. A good example of this dynamism and the self-governance
of cultural civil society is Freetown Christiania. This small community
of less than a thousand residents in Copenhagen came about in 1971
after the occupation of a closed military area in the city center. For some
time, it was regarded by the Danish government as a ‘social experiment’,
and they did not interfere. The residents of Christiania experimented with
self-governance, which included housing, waste collection, education, and
business activities. Freetown Christiania became a magnet for artists and
an important site of urban counterculture, where anti-capitalist, femi-
nist, and queer networks converged to coordinate their activities aimed
132 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

at social change and where marginalized individuals such as the homeless

and addicts could find a place to live.
The residents of the Freetown soon realized that it could not be a free
for all, an issue which became more pressing when ten people died of
drug overdose in 1979. The residents organized actions to combat the
use and sale of hard drugs. Christiania has been described as the politics
of open space, through a combination of “the occupation of a mate-
rial public space and the formation of a counter-public sphere” (Thörn
2012, 157). This counter-public sphere was symbolized by a flag and
national anthem, and there were attempts to develop an own language
and currency. They also started transforming and adding to the build-
ings of the former military site. Their projects and practices of living and
governing were driven by the values of solidarity, horizontality, and open-
ness. These features make Christiania the case of an enacted utopia in the
sense of Nozick’s experiments in living. But also a case of a Foucauldian
heterotopia, a space of difference and exclusion of nonparticipants, yet
connected with the outside, since it is located in central Copenhagen.
Christiania’s connection with the outside is visible not just through
its dependence on the external world for (some) public services, but also
because tourism to Christiania has become a major source of revenue. The
tourists are attracted by the diversity of the creative and artistic scene, in
fact, this hippie enclave is listed in every guide as one of the must-see sites
in Copenhagen, and the city organizes guided tours through the micro-
nation. Today about five-hundred-thousand people visit Freetown each
year. In this sense, it has become an integral part of the city, and not just
an enclave of difference.
The city as well as Christiania have struggled all the while with the
question of governance. It took until 1989 before the parliament officially
recognized the Freetown as legitimate, after Christiania had demonstrated
a willingness to seriously govern its own space. But this in no way ended
the struggle between self- and public governance. Over the years, there
have been repeated attempts to interfere with the activities in Christiania
by the police, frequently over drugs and the open cannabis trade on
Pusher Street. In the past twenty years, there have also been legal strug-
gles over who owns the land and the extent to which Danish law applies
to Christiania. In 2011, an agreement between the Danish state and the
Christiania Negotiating Group set off a process of the ‘normalization’
of Freetown. The land was bought by the newly established Christiania
Foundation, which shifted the governance model considerably, from one
 6 EPILOGUE: IMAGINING A HETEROTOPIA 133

based on communal land ownership to one based on private land owner-

ship. The residents of Christiania reacted to this important change in the
governance of their town in different ways. Some considered the agree-
ment a victory after years of legal uncertainty. Others feared that the
agreement would spur the process of gentrification, commodification, and
Disneyfication of Christiania, and drive out the weakest members of the
community (Coppola and Vanolo 2015; Jarvis 2017).
The self-proclaimed, autonomous, and often illegal, community of
Christiania sought to preserve their self-governance. But the nature of
their community and the activities of the residents generated externali-
ties. In the first decades, these were considered primarily negative, like
the sale and use of drugs as well as the deviant lifestyles of the residents.
In more recent years, positive externalities have been recognized, such
as the tourism and business opportunities which emerged in the area,
and Christiania got the attention of mainstream institutions. When self-
governing communities are too successful, the local authorities will likely
find ways to coopt the initiative and encroach upon the self-governance
of the community. If the community, on the other hand, generates what
are regarded as mostly negative externalities, its legitimacy and ability to
self-govern will be limited. In this sense, there is currently little space
for self-governance, and Christiania has adapted surprisingly well to the
challenges it encountered over the past fifty years. It is a testament to the
resilience of cultural civil society, as well as a demonstration of the need for
creating space in our cultural policy frameworks for self-governance. Our
argument for co-existence of multiple diverse and sometimes antagonistic
social practices around the art, which should provide a counterbalance
to the powerful, homogenizing mainstream institutions, must thread the
narrow path between a lack of legitimacy and co-optation.
Self-governance is not easy, and it is unlikely that public authorities
will welcome it in all instances. It brings responsibilities to the commu-
nities seeking to do so. Even in less contested arenas than Christiania, it
is ultimately up to social entrepreneurs and artists to make the most of
the opportunities which exist to develop new initiatives in cultural civil
society. What this will look like cannot be imagined beforehand. As John
Dewey argued the question about the ideal society: “cannot be answered
by argument. Experimental method means experiment, and the question
can be answered only by trying, by organized effort” (Dewey 1935, 92).
So, let us try.
134 E. DEKKER AND V. MOREA

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 Index

A Burning Man Festival, 130, 131

Aesthetics, vii, 5, 117
Amateurs, viii, 53, 95, 128
Anderson, Benedict, 68 C
Arc de Triomphe, 2, 3 Callard, Agnes, 38, 39, 41, 42, 59
Artistic circles, 56, 57, 62, 105 Capital of Culture, 7
Artist-run-initiatives, 102, 119 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2–6, 12,
Audience, 4, 18, 22, 24, 25, 32, 50, 58, 94, 117
52, 58, 62, 67, 75, 77–80, 87 Classical music, vi, 78, 101
Co-creation, viii, 9, 12, 17, 51, 74,
77, 80–82, 85, 86, 89, 90, 105
B Co-creative communities, 75, 95,
Ballet, 49, 85, 101, 115 101, 112, 114
Baxandall, Michael, 5, 6, 17, 22 Co-existence (peaceful), 9, 13, 100,
Becker, Gary, 24, 76 108, 114, 118
Becker, Howard, 24, 39, 56, 57 Collins, Randall, 24, 50, 54, 84
Beckert, Jens, 9, 29, 59 Colonialism, 10, 11, 107, 108, 117
Berger, Peter, 15 Conflict of values, vi, 9, 25, 28, 41,
Berlin, 2, 94, 120 109, 110, 112
Boas, Franziska, 82, 85 Consumption capital, 76, 80, 81
Boltanski, Luc, 15, 16, 27–31 Contestability, 14, 92, 100, 106, 112
Bourdieu, Pierre, 27, 42, 76 Contestation, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13–15, 41,
Buck-Morss, Susan, 59, 60 91, 106, 112, 117, 129, 130

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 147

Switzerland AG 2023
E. Dekker and V. Morea, Realizing the Values of Art,
Cultural Economics & the Creative Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5
148 INDEX

Contribution goods, 9, 51 Freedom of association, 114, 128

Co-optation, vii, 7, 133 Frey, Bruno, v, ix, 94, 101
Creative class, v, 7, 102
Credence goods, 80
Cultural and Creative City Monitor G
(European), 102, 103 George Mason University, 110
Cultural capital, 42, 76 Graffiti, 7, 115, 120
Cultural civil society, vii, viii, 4, 9, 13, Gray, John, 109
18, 54, 64, 68, 85, 93, 95,
100–102, 104–106, 110,
112–114, 119–122, 128, 130, H
131 Hanna, Judith, 82, 85, 111
Cultural economics, ix, 5 Hayek, Friedrich A., 24, 30, 54, 113
Cultural economy, 56, 64, 103 Heritage, viii, 25, 68, 94, 115, 119,
Culture of appreciation, 49, 81, 88, 131
89 Heterogeneity, viii, 6, 28, 41, 85, 95,
109, 114
Heterotopia, 128–130
D High art, vi, 48, 79, 115, 116, 128
Dance, 74, 81–85, 111, 130 Hip-hop, 31–38, 40, 94, 120
Dewey, John, 6, 14, 18, 23, 29, 30, Hutter, Michael, ix, 9, 29, 40, 75, 77
57, 74–76, 108–110, 112, 128
Dispersed museum, 91, 94
Durkheim, Emile, 83 I
Identity, vii, 10, 14, 15, 25, 26, 36,
54, 86, 92, 95, 100, 106, 107,
E 112, 114, 115, 117, 129–131
Economic impact, vi, vii, 7, 113 Imagination, vii, 6, 14, 17, 48, 56,
Ends-in-view, 23, 26, 27, 31, 38 57, 59–62, 64, 67, 68, 75, 86,
Entrepreneurs (cultural), 50 88, 89, 93, 106, 115, 118, 128
Evaluation, 17, 29, 93, 102–104, 113 Imagined futures, 14, 59
Experience goods, 40, 75, 80 Impact (of the arts), vi, vii, 113
Externalities, 89, 109, 112, 119, 133 Impact, measurement of, vi, viii, 18,
77–79, 113
Imposter syndrome, 41
F Innovation commons, 51, 95, 106
Fandom, 87–89, 94 Institutional diversity, 90, 92, 101
Film, 48, 75, 101 Instrumentalization of art, vii, 7, 8,
Florence, 50, 102 121, 122
Florida, Richard, 7, 102, 116
Floyd, George, 10
Foreign Exchange, 36 J
Foucault, Michel, 128–132 Jam sessions, 52, 57
 INDEX 149

Jazz, 52, 53, 57 Participants (audience as), 9, 51, 53,

Justification, 15, 16, 25, 29 56, 74, 76–78, 80, 83, 93, 95,
114, 118, 122
Phonte, 22, 31–34, 36–41, 94
K Plays. See Theater
Klamer, Arjo, 9, 23, 26, 31, 40, 51, Post-modernism, vi, 60, 63
53, 103, 104 Potts, Jason, 26, 51–53, 115
Kopytoff, Igor, 4 Pragmatism, 6, 14–16, 18, 23, 25,
29, 41, 122, 128
Praxis, 26
L Production (artistic), ix, 9, 24, 49–51,
Lavoie, Don, 16 54, 56, 64, 65, 74, 77, 87, 88,
Little Brother, 31–33, 36–39 93, 105, 113
London, v, 107 Public good, 9, 25, 51, 77, 107
Public interest, 108, 113
Public space, 3, 4, 11, 14, 15, 65,
M 103, 106, 117–119
Markets, 9, 22, 24, 25, 31, 51, 77, Public statues, 10
80, 93, 95, 101, 102, 109, 113 Public support, vii, 91, 107, 115,
McCloskey, Deirdre, 15 120, 121
Medici family, 8, 50 Public values, 5, 108–110, 112
Menger, Carl, 29 Purpose, 4, 17, 37, 40, 41, 57, 65
Merit goods, 115
Minorities (cultural), 114, 116, 130
Q
Modern art, 8
Queer Museum in Brazil, 74, 90–92,
Modernism, 59, 60
94, 95, 106, 121
Modus vivendi liberalism, 109

R
N Rational choice theory, 23
Neglect (as policy), 10, 120 Renaissance, 8, 49, 50, 58
New York, 2, 50, 52, 56, 120 Robbins, Lionel, 109
Nozick, Robert, 129, 130, 132

S
O Schütz, Alfred, 15
Opera, 39, 40, 78 Scitovsky, Tibor, 40
Ostrom, Elinor, 15, 77, 93, 101, 109 Scott, James C., 60
Sense of belonging, 5, 88
Signaling, 15, 41, 42
P Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 16
Paris, 2, 3, 50, 102 Social impact, 7, 113
150 INDEX

Socialism, 8 V
Sociology, ix, 9, 15, 24, 54, 93 Value learning, 22, 24, 40, 63, 112
Solitary genius (myth of), 48 Value orientation, 17, 22, 93, 106
Spill-over effects, vii, 7, 116, 119 Value realization, vii, viii, 4–6, 8, 9,
Square (public), 2, 14, 65, 66, 118, 13, 14, 17, 22, 28, 38, 74, 77,
120 80, 86, 93, 104, 112, 128
Stark, David, 9, 14, 30, 91 Veblen, Thorstein, 26
Star Trek, 74, 86–89, 93–95 Venice, 48, 63–68, 74, 88, 93, 103,
Star Wars, 88, 89 105, 106, 118, 119, 121, 122
Stravinsky, Igor, 49 Visual arts, vi, 54, 79, 101, 115

T W
Theater, 48, 76, 78 Work (artistic), 27, 75
Timms, Edward, 54, 104 Workshop (bottega), 49
Tourism, 64, 65, 67, 68, 94 Worlding, 67, 68
Transcendental values, vii, 23, 31, 38,
50, 58, 104
Tribe Called Quest, A, 31, 34, 39 Z
Tubman, Harriet, 11 Zelizer, Viviana, 15