Abstract
In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting professor at City University, London, and associate at the think-tank Demos, to write a report on culture as part of its Cultural Value Project. The claim within the report was to redirect culture away from economic prescriptions and to focus on ecological approaches to ‘value’. Holden considers the application and use of ecological tropes to re-situate culture as ‘non-hierarchical’ and as part of symbiotic social processes. By embracing metaphors of ‘emergence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘convergence,’ he suggests we can “gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy information and implementation”. This article addresses the role of ‘cultural critique’ in the live environments and ecologies of place-making. It will consider, with examples, how cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms generate mixed ecologies of relations between aesthetic, psychic, economic, political, and ethical materialisms. With reference to a body of situated knowledges, derived from place studies to eco-regionalisms, urban to art criticisms, we will consider ecological thinking as a new mode of cultural critique for initiating arts and cultural policy change. Primarily, the operant concept of ‘environing’ will be considered as the condition of possibility for the space of critique. This includes necessary and strategic actions, where mixed ecologies of cultural activity work against the disciplinary policing of space with new assemblages of distributed power
Highlights
The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman, and first published in2007, emerged out of The Art Seminar series; a collection of seven books featuring scholars engaged in open-ended conversations on a range of topics, including art history vs. aesthetics, photography theory, global art history, renaissance theory, landscape theory, and re-enchantment
Example 4: Temporary Contemporary and Concluding Observations. This final example serves to situate our intentions for using the term ‘environing’ as a conceptual tool for thinking about the pairing of ‘cultural ecology’ and ‘cultural critique’
With the first example we explored how environing technologies are present in the activities of MACAO
Summary
The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman, and first published in. These meaning-making activities helped to problematize the ways in which values and norms are produced and established in our daily lives. Cultural analysis and its modes of critique are focused on how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power; how cultural forms are manifestations of and responses to different social and societal structures In this respect, it serves as an important tool for thinking about ‘cultural ecology’. The purpose of which is to show, with the aid of several distinct and specific examples, how value judgments, and the conditions for critiquing value-determinants, may be critically negotiated in and through acts of environing and as part of an ecological approach to culture for our times
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