Abstract
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss findings from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research project into the heritage culture of British folk tales. The project investigated how such archival source material might be made relevant to contemporary audience via processes of artistic remediation. The research considered artists as “cultural intermediaries”, i.e. as actors occupying the conceptual space between production and consumption in an artistic process.Design/methodology/approachInterview data is drawn from a range of 1‐2‐1 and group interviews with the artists. These interviews took place throughout the duration of the project.FindingsWhen artists are engaged in a process of remediation which has a distinct arts marketing/audience development focus, they begin to intermediate between themselves and the audience/consumer. Artist perceptions of their role as “professionals of qualification” is determined by the subjective disposition required by the market context in operation at the time (in the case of this project, as commissioned artists working to a brief). Artists’ ability (and indeed willingness) to engage in this process is to a great extent proscribed by their “sense-of-self-as-artist” and an engagement with Romantic ideas of artistic autonomy.Originality/valueA consideration of the relationship between cultural intermediation and both cultural policy and arts marketing. The artist-as-intermediary role, undertaking creative processes to mediate how goods are perceived by others, enables value-adding processes to be undertaken at the point of remediation, rather than at the stage of intermediation.
Highlights
This paper discusses findings from a research project into the heritage culture of British folk tales, which questioned how such source material might be made relevant to contemporary audience via processes of artistic remediation (Hadley et al, 2021)
The discussion presented here considers whether the artists involved in the project might be viewed as “cultural intermediaries” (Bourdieu, 1984) in an artistic process which mediated between professional(ised) and everyday cultural consumption and whether the process of artistic remediation might be considered a process of intermediation
In selecting and reflecting upon archival material, and remediating the material within contemporary idioms, the artists worked as cultural intermediaries, undertaking the role of developing the audience’s interpretive capabilities via insights into work-in-progress and by providing direct online access to the creative process
Summary
This paper discusses findings from a research project into the heritage culture of British folk tales, which questioned how such source material might be made relevant to contemporary audience via processes of artistic remediation (Hadley et al, 2021). The Modern Fairies research project, both via its aims as per the original funding application and the briefings given to artists, sought to engage the artists in both debate and praxis as regards remediating original folkloric source material in such a way as to make it “relevant to modern audiences” (Modern Fairies, 2020) Such an approach brought the artists into negotiation both with their sense-of-self-as-artist in the context of market economics, and as “Artists” who aspired to varying degrees to retain a degree of emancipation (both moral and financial) from the messy business of late-stage capitalism and the transitioning of business models within the recorded, published and live performance cultural industries
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