Pascal Gielen Creative or Common City? Civic or Civil Society?

Art, Politics and Public Life in the City of the 21st Century. Pascal Gielen will discuss the relationship between art, politics and civil space in the creative city, and how activists and creative workers respond to policy via alternative ways of self-organisation.

Since the financial crisis started at the end of 2007, a lot of governments have cut cultural and artistic budgets. Inspired by the critical social theory of Herbert Marcuse (1964), these policy decisions are understood within an ideological framework as ‘repressive liberalism’. That is a (cultural) politics that on the one hand proclaims individual freedom, stimulates cultural entrepreneurship and embraces the creative city and active citizenship, but on the other hand develops a large-scale decentralised control apparatus that strongly restricts individual, artistic freedom and activist citizenship. Within this cultural policy, creative labour itself is ‘instrumentalised’ as a repressive tool.

In his lecture Pascal Gielen analyses the relationship between art, politics and the civil space in the creative city. He also looks how activists and creative workers respond to this policy by organising themselves in alternative ways. The lecture is based on a pilot research project Gielen undertook for the European Cultural Foundation in 2016.