Art as Aesthetics, Culture and Economy

Abstract

This chapter assesses the ways in which art is defined and imbued with value. Art’s historical definitions as aesthetics and culture complicate the democratising agenda of community art. These tensions are exacerbated by the contemporary art world’s recent interest in community, its tendency to reinstate existing hierarchies of power and its links to economic rationalisations for the arts. Recent governmental interest in the value of ‘creativity’ also means that community art is drawn into potentially exclusionary processes of urban regeneration. It is argued that today art in community is embedded within global flows of culture, economics and practices of belonging, which present community art with conflicting possibilities — art in community can disrupt exclusionary hierarchies, at the same time as it risks perpetuating them.