“Contemporary aesthetic production is integrated into the production of a circuit of merchandise. The artistic practices generated in the Spanish State at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, as well as the cultural policies promoted by the institutions, should be analyzed taking into account the transformations produced in the relationship between economy and culture and the new role assigned to the so-called creative industries. “
The effects of the transformations of culture in relation to the economy are quite evident in Andalusia, where the public administration seems to have opted for knowledge and creativity as the cornerstone of economic policies. It is within this framework that ” the celebration of biennials, the creation of new art centers, spaces, programs, organization of congresses and meetings on cultural industries or some of the recent administrative restructurings“, initiatives that, “presented as support and promotion of artistic innovation, hide the application of commodification and fetishism recipes to the field of cultural production: stimulus of the company-form and private investment, the strengthening of the figure of the cultural entrepreneur, the outsourcing of public functions and the extraction of real estate income through plans applied to the so-called “creative districts”.
The main interest of the project lies, in our opinion, in its horizontality, that is, in reflection and experimentation from the collectives themselves that carry out their work in this scenario, although from critical positions and directed towards experimentation with new cultural models, more concerned with the common than with the production of private capital. It is also intended that this collective work favor processes of cooperation, mutual knowledge and creation of networks, a work that would be in line with what
Ricardo Antón of
Amasté
defined in
this article as “
a place in which to reproduce ourselves” in the face of the “
generalization of uncritical and spectacularized production” and, it should be added, of the new forms of commodification and fetishization of culture to which the previously cited text referred.
Among the actions carried out or launched within the general framework of
REU08 is the
Call for papers Who is behind culture? which closes on
April 12, 2010 and the homonymous publication
REU08
that collects the first phases of meeting and co-investigation and that you can download for free from the UNIA arte y pensamiento website (ah! and where we appear in the section
Related formed by “Extracts of texts, images and links to other projects that have been discussed during the creation process of REU08, which constitute their affections and sustain it conceptually“, something that, said with candor, makes us excited :D)
