Hannah Newell

Major Project: Valuing the Arts: Precarity, Punks and the Ploughshare

Valuing the Arts: Precarity, Punks and the Ploughshare explores variant organisational models within the diversity of the contemporary art world. Each protects, projects and affirms the importance of the arts, but according to very different ideas of what is at stake in championing their social, political or aesthetic value. Through written interviews, conversations and visits to contemporary arts organisations this project brings together disparate voices that concurrently articulate the value of arts as a specialised sphere patronised by the market; as cultural capital; as self-originating labour; conversely as an opposition to work – something done for love, not money; a revolutionary crack within the pervasiveness of capitalism; as a civic institution; and as radically ‘useful’ – merged with the social and working lives of communities.

Since the recession of the late 2000s, a political campaign of public austerity has stressed the question of art's value, aggravating a so-called crisis of legitimacy in the arts. This current debate underlines a larger ideological trend in which economic value has come to dominate and impoverish a richer spectrum of meaning, worth and purpose. Referring to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s theory of a state of 'Empire', Valuing the Arts: Precarity, Punks and the Ploughshare, presents a body of research that investigates the ways in which we value the arts as suggestive of viable alternatives within a ‘flattened’ system of value.