Panos Kompatsiaris (2019) “Biennial art and its rituals: value, political economy and artfulness”

Panos Kompatsiaris (2019) “Biennial art and its rituals: value, political economy and artfulness”– Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

This week’s reading suggestion, Panos Kompatsiaris (2019) “Biennial art and its rituals: value, political economy and artfulness” published in in Journal of Aesthetics & Culture brings us back to the academic context close to the “New sociology of art” tradition. The paper focuses on the structures and rituals surrounding biennials as a case to describe a wider phenomenon in contemporary art practices for which the context and the conceptual elements are of greater value than the alteration of what we perceive per se, or said in other words, the gesture of the artist lies less with the production of a specific object “in an artistic way” but in the way certain gestures are presented and relate to the social and political context.

In a well-argued manner Kompatsiaris renders some of the dilemmas faced by biennials in a relation between the aesthetic and the political, as sites of cultural as well as political production and awareness, as institutions nested within neoliberal economic structures and sites of increasing criticisms towards these.

Some passages of the article appear to open up fundamental questions we face daily when planning large scale events especially in terms of translation or mediation of the works to publics which might not be acquainted with new forms of artistic production. A subject in which the ethnographic approach proposed by the researcher proves a successful choice.

We were also happy to see our first General Assembly quoted with a reference to Maria Hlavajova’s keynote speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVO7T2_Bf3o) as an example of the complexities of biennials especially when they embrace an openly political stance.

We leave you with two quotes taken from the article in the hope to stimulate your curiosity.

“To both question and expand on the idea of art as alteration found in Rancière then, we can argue that within a post- conceptual and post-digital universe, the production of artfulness becomes an almost urgent matter as uniqueness becomes less and less evident as a direct visual experience, as an experience of the immediacy of the eye”

“The term “context” is key as the constant blending of highbrow aesthetics with popular culture taking place in these events has to be understood in its contemporariness, within temporal and spatial frameworks. The capacity to contextualize and make sense of this blending, to make sense of the “concept”, is then a principal sign of distinction.”

The full article instead can be freely accessed at the following link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2019.1627847