forum The Creative Imperative: Commodification & “Entkunstung” 8 Oct 2015 With speakers Martha Buskirk and Kerstin Stakemeier For the second installment of the three-part lecture series The Creative Imperative,the Stedelijk Museum and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam are extremely delighted to welcome Martha Buskirk, professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, and Kerstin Stakemeier, assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. While Buskirk has an outstanding reputation for her analysis of the changing status and nature of art in contemporary society, Stakemeier’s critical investigations on the boundary of political science and art history open up intriguing perspectives on the complex interrelations between art and mass media. THE CREATIVE IMPERATIVE Some five years after the peak of the global financial crisis and the budgetary cutbacks by the Dutch government in the cultural field, it is now time to critically examine the consequences for creative practice and artistic production. These financial limitations have not just narrowed the space for autonomous work. In addition to cutting funding for both cultural institutions and universities, the government developed a program to stimulate research and innovation by identifying nine “top sectors.” When the arts find themselves represented in one of these sectors, if at all, it is usually under the label “creative industries,” which, according to the government, is “the most dynamic sector of the Dutch economy,” and also includes the fields of design, media, entertainment, fashion, gaming, and architecture. While this high valorization of creativity within society might sound encouraging at first sight, its economic motivations are both obvious and debatable. To provide better insight into the diverging expectations and apprehensions connected to concepts and practices of creativity and artistic production, this lecture series aims to scrutinize what such practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries actually entail. OCTOBER 8, 2015: COMMODIFICATION & “ENTKUNSTUNG” The second evening will delve deeper into the institutional, legal, and societal paradigms which inform contemporary artistic practice. It will ask how artistic production is influenced by frameworks set not only by political and societal expectations, but also by the increasingly global economy and the proliferation of mass media. Martha Buskirk will explore the paradoxes of contemporary artistic production. Although the exhibited art in museums and galleries is generally presumed to fulfill different goals than the larger realm of commercially oriented creative work, the art world is deeply interwoven with the art market, and professional practices are an increasing focus of artistic training. There are also close parallels between artistic significance, celebrity, and branding. Against this backdrop, Buskirk will discuss the role of artists’ personal right, or droit moral, which always remains with the creator of the work and is founded on the assumption that works of art carry a cultural value that extends beyond the basic property interests of the art buyer. Not only the owner of the artwork, also the artist her- or himself continues to have a say on the presentation and conservation of the work. Both artists and the public at large would seem to benefit when works of art are protected from destruction or physical mutilation. Yet a certain degree of creative latitude is imperative, not only for artistic practices that are based on appropriation, but also in relation to meanings that works of art accrue as they move through innumerable historical and cultural contexts. Kerstin Stakemeier will investigate the complex relation of contemporary artistic creativity to mass culture. She will present her theories on the actuality of the notion of Entkunstung (de-artification), a term coined by philosopher Theodor W. Adorno to describe the disintegrating influences of mass culture on the production and reception of modern art. Stakemeier understands de-artification not so much as a fate, but rather as an enabling principle of artistic production in the beginning of the twentieth century. It remains debatable how the recurrence of de-artification in postmodern art and in the contemporary art of the early twenty-first century has fundamentally challenged our understanding the relations of art and mass culture. Stakemeier will contrast different temporalities of de-artification contained in various media to discuss de-artification’s ambiguous relationship to the present-day economization of artistic production. MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Martha Buskirk is Professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art. She is author of Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace (Continuum, 2012) and The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2003), and she is co-editor of The Duchamp Effect (with Mignon Nixon, MIT Press, 1996) and The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (with Clara Weyergraf-Serra, MIT Press, 1990). She is also author of numerous essays and articles that have appeared in Artforum, October, Art in America, and other venues. Kerstin Stakemeier studied political science and art history in Berlin and London. In 2009/2010 she was researcher at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, and since 2012 she has been an Assistant Professor at the cx centrum für interdisziplinäre studien at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Stakemeier writes for Texte zur Kunst, Afterall, Artforum, and May. Her forthcoming book, (De)Artification as Dramatization of Art, will be published by PoLYpeN, b_books in 2016. CREDITS The Creative Imperative lecture series is a collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Britte Sloothaak, Assistant Curator) and Vrije University Amsterdam (Katja Kwastek / Sven Lütticken), within the research cluster “Paradigms of Creativity” of CLUE+, VU’s Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, History, and Heritage.

• Trefwoorden
  Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam [Activiteiten/Lezingen/Muziekuitvoeringen], beeld- en/of geluidsdrager