Limits to Culture

Malcolm Miles

Description

How can we unmask the vested interests behind capital's 'cultural' urban agenda? Limits to Culture pits grass-roots cultural dissent against capital's continuing project of control via urban planning.



In the 1980s, notions of the 'creative class' were expressed though a cultural turn in urban policy towards the 'creative city'. De-industrialisation created a shift away from how people understood and used urban space, and consequently, gentrification spread. With it came the elimination of diversity and urban dynamism - new art museums and cultural or heritage quarters lent a creative mask to urban redevelopment.



This book examines this process from the 1960s to the present day, revealing how the notion of 'creativity' been neutered in order to quell dissent. In the 1960s, creativity was identified with revolt, yet from the 1980s onwards it was subsumed in consumerism, which continued in the 1990s through cool Britannia culture and its international reflections. Today, austerity and the scarcity of public money reveal how the illusory creative city has given way to reveal its hollow interior, through urban clearances and underdevelopment.
List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Cultural Turns: A De-Industrialised Estate

2. Creative Classes: Aesthetics and Gentrification

3. Colliding Values: Civic Hope and Capital’s Bind

4. New Cool: England’s New Art Museums

5. New Codes: Culture as Social Ordering

6. New Air: Urban Spaces and Democratic Deficits

7. Dissent: Antagonistic Art in a Period of Neoliberal Containment

8. Limits to Culture: Art after Occupy

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Human Geography
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• urban planning
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Settlement
• General officer
• General
• Urban
• Gentrification

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783713097
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Limits to Culture
 
Limits to Culture
Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art
Malcolm Miles
 
 
First published 2015 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Malcolm Miles 2015
The right of Malcolm Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN  978 0 7453 3435 6  Hardback
ISBN  978 0 7453 3434 9  Paperback
ISBN  978 1 7837 1308 0  PDF eBook
ISBN  978 1 7837 1310 3  Kindle eBook
ISBN  978 1 7837 1309 7  EPUB eBook
 
 
 
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
 
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
 
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Text design by Melanie Patrick
Simultaneously printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
 
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1.
Cultural Turns: A De-industrialised Estate
2.
Creative Classes: Aesthetics and Gentrification
3.
Colliding Values: Civic Hope and Capital’s Bind
4.
New Cool: England’s New Art Museums
5.
New Codes: Culture as Social Ordering
6.
New Air: Urban Spaces and Democratic Deficits
7.
Dissent: Antagonistic Art in a Period of Neoliberal Containment
8.
Limits to Culture: Art after Occupy
Notes
Index
 
List of Illustrations
All images are the author’s unless otherwise stated
1.1
Billboard for Gdańsk, Kraków, Poland
1.2
National Theatre and Ziggurat, Budapest, Maria Siklos
1.3
Kiasma museum for contemporary art, Helsinki, Steven Holl
3.1
The beach at the Southbank Centre, 2011
3.2
The Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf
4.1
Baltic, Gateshead
4.2
The Millennium Bridge, Newcastle-Gateshead
4.3
The New Art Gallery, Walsall, interior
4.4
The Hepworth, Wakefield
4.5
The Turner Contemporary, Margate
4.6
The Jerwood Gallery, Hastings
4.7
Fishermen’s stores on the Stade, Hastings
4.8
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
4.9
Middlesbrough: Bohouse
6.1
A section of the Berlin Wall, Manhattan
6.2
The Heygate Estate, London, 2012
6.3
Boarded-up houses in Anfield, Liverpool
6.4
Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue , Joanna Rajkowska, 2002 (continuing), Warsaw (photo: K. Nawratek)
6.5
Res Publica , Washington, DC, Wolfgang Weileder 2012 (photo by permission of the artist)
6.6
Stilt House , Singapore, Wolfgang Weileder, 2013 (photo by permission of the artist)
7.1
SEFT-1 at Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park, London, June, 2014
7.2
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, joining the march for Gaza, August 2014 (photo by permission of IAPDH)
7.3
Cornford & Cross, New Holland , 1997 (photo by permission of the artists)
7.4
Cornford & Cross, installing The Abolition of Work , 2007, The Exchange Gallery, Penzance (photo by permission of the artists)
7.5
HeHe, Fracking Futures , FACT, Liverpool, 2013 (photo by permission of the artists)
7.6
Freee Art Collective, How to be Hospitable , Edinburgh, 2008 (photo by permission of the artists)
7.7
Freee Art Collective, Protest Drives History , 2008, Bayston Hill (photo by permission of the artists)
7.8
Freee Art Collective, Protest Drives History , 2014, Stockholm (photo by permission of the artists)
8.1
Tallinn street musician
8.2
Fly-posting, George W. Bush, terrorist, Lisbon
8.3
Street-writing, Jail the Bankers, Coimbra
8.4
Opposition to Tesco, Stokes Croft, Bristol
8.5
Fly-posting, Plaça dels Angels, Barcelona
 
Introduction
This is a book about how culture has become a mask of social ordering under neoliberalism, and about some of the dissenting practices that have emerged in the past few years against that trend or as alternatives to it.
Despite claims to the contrary, culturally led urban redevelopment does not bring the social or economic regeneration of communities, and is not a means to social inclusion so much as a relatively low-cost way to address failures in other policy areas. New art museums are said to generate employment and attract cultural tourism or investment, and a few spectacular cases – Barcelona and Bilbao – are quoted; but conditions differ from one place to another, so that a model is unlikely to be replicated (while the benefits are disputed in supposedly successful cases). I have nothing against public investment in cultural resources, which is preferable to spending on military adventures, bailing out private-sector banks, or building new roads; but I ask more from spending on the arts than support for property redevelopment, and am not persuaded that the arts drive urban renewal (in the sense of regenerating local economies and communities). In some cases there might be benefits but these tend to be unevenly distributed and often the impact is gentrification. Anyway, the game is up.
After the 2007–08 crisis in global financial services, and austerity, money for the arts has decreased while governments have become out-sourced providers of governmental services to transnational corporations. If the project of capital is the total containment of all elements of life in profit mechanisms, culture is part of its soft policing. If that seems bleak or cynical, culture’s co-option to the regime of globalisation follows its function in liberal improvement in the nineteenth century, when new art museums opened access to high culture to the lower classes as a means to greater productivity and social stability. In the past few decades, public art, cultural quarters and flagship cultural institutions have become further means of ordering, now in service of property development.
In brief, culture has been co-opted to redevelopment in service, not of local needs, but of the symbolic economies by which cities compete globally. Within the new, immaterial economy, art fits well enough with rebranding. In London in the 2000s, the Millennium Dome and Tate Modern were flagships of the rebranding of Britain as Cool Britannia, although contrasting in their capacity to deliver the smoke-and-mirrors effect. Since the crash, what has emerged as a distinct redevelopment sector has allowed the cultural mask to slip; schemes are overtly seen as urban clearances designed to move the poor and unproductive to the geographical as well as the social and economic margins. In place of inner cities, now, urban villages cater for the dwelling and consumption needs of young professionals in the new economy, defined, in one rather dubious analysis, as a ‘creative class’.
A number of tendencies and trajectories merge, collide or slip into entropy. The civic values which were a modern outcome of nineteenth-century liberal reformism gave way in the 1980s to managerialism, which transmuted into an imperative to consume, and a totalitarian denial of alternatives. Against this, dissident art has a role of resisting the erasure of the alternative imaginaries which might one day be realised as a better world. The work of art collectives is discussed in the book’s later chapters, and gives me hope for change of some kind, although real political change (at least through representational systems) is unlikely at present.
Occupy showed, in the winter of 2011–12, that direct democracy is possible if ephemeral. If another kind of politics has emerged then there might at some point be another kind of cultural work as antidote to affirmative culture and the affluent society. Nonetheless, the book ends on an ambivalent note, reflecting on an incidental occurrence outside art, but no less cultural. Well, I do not work in the Answers Department at the university: my job is more reframing the questions.
Two sources
The title, Limits to Culture , echoes Limits to Medicine by Ivan Illich. With Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, Illich was a contributor to the radical Left in the 1960s and 1970s, looking beyond the affluent society towards a liberation of consciousness. In De-schooling Society , 1 Illich argued that formal education restricts a potential for experiential learning while the institutionalisation of learning signifies a general institutionalisation of life. This could be compared to the radical, vernacular, living-based pedagogy proposed by Paolo Freire; 2 and prefigures an emphasis on direct democracy in radical movements. In Limits to Medicine , Illich argued that society had become medicalised to the detriment of health but in service of productivity: ‘The medicalisation of industrial society brings its imperialistic character to ultimate fruition.’ 3 Illich also observed that an excessive fear of mortality characteristic of society’s medicalisation occurred when, ‘megadeath came upon the scene’ in the form of nuclear weapons. 4 Like Marcuse and Gorz, Illich aligned each issue to a world order – which Marcuse called the affluent society 5 – which restricts a human urge to liberation not merely by default but instrumentally. Culture might then be a means to freedom, able to evade the dominant state of self-coercion and political repression: ‘Body-sense is experienced as an ever-renewed gift of culture.… Cultured health is bounded by each society’s style in the art of living.’ 6
I want to juxtapose Illich’s writing from the era of protest and intentional communities with Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital . If Marcuse and Illich pointed to a new totalitarianism of capital which was as oppressive as the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, I think Sloterdijk deepens the argument historically by locating the beginning of globalisation literally in the invention of the globe and the voyages of colonisation of th