When politics becomes unavoidable: from community art to communing art.

Abstract

In this article two parallel shifts are signalized and analysed. One is called the transition from community art to so-called commoning art, the other the transition from cultural policy to a politics of culture. While community art, since the 1990’s, was regulated, legitimized and sometimes highly stimulated by the official cultural policies of several European countries, commoning art - which started to boom after the financial crises which started at the end of 2007 – is mostly not. The former is supported by governments because it ‘compensates’ structural gaps in the welfare state and particularly concentrates on social improvement, cohesion and resilience. The highly activist and sometimes radical political character of the latter, makes that commoning artists need to organize themselves in an often not regulated, civil zone between the market and the state. In this article the authors analyse the characteristics of this tendency towards commoning art and they articulate a hypothesis about what kind of politics could be supportive for this rising art praxis.