The Status of the Artist, Cultural Rights and the 2005 Convention: a tribute to Professor Milena Dragicevic Sesic'.

• Author: Vickery, Jonathan

Introduction

The numerous publications of Professor Milena Dragicevic Sesic, her public speaking, commitment to teaching and students, her institutional leadership--in Europe and for development in Cambodia, and her work for UNESCO--were consistently characterised by an appeal for cultural freedom; and her research was consistently concerned with the political and policy conditions of cultural freedom (Dragicevic Sesic, 2006; 2014). However, this article is not simply a celebration of this dimension of her work, but, in the spirit of her express intellectual motivations, I will attempt to amplify what we mean, and what can be meant, by the concept of cultural freedom today. (1)

We need to be careful contextualising 'freedom' in the light of its recent co-option by neoliberal or free-market policies along with more recent Right populists in their defence of the individual against any form of collective responsibility, welfare economics or redistribution (Dragicevic Sesic and Vickery, 2018). 'Freedom' is also problematic for the international Left insofar as it has been largely supplanted by 'equality' as the primary aim of progressive politics and virtuous government. Indeed, given the rising globalisation of digital media surveillance and our pandemic-era normalisation of mass social control, re-asserting the normative content of human freedom is an urgent task. In this article, in honour of Professor Milena's example, I am going to identify the current conditions of artistic freedom in a way that amplifies its intellectual complexity along with its cultural policy significance. I focus on cultural policy's historical interconnection with artistic individuality and aesthetic autonomy in the face of both Right and Left failure to full manage what I see as a central impact of globalisation--the condition of cultural diversity through the increasing expresssion of human rights and concommitant demand for group and individual self-determination (cf. Dragicevic Sesic et.al. eds., 2017). I will do this with reference to a discourse in which we both share intellectual interests, albeit one that is neglected by cultural scholarship--this is the UNESCO discourse on culture, development and human rights. It is a hybrid discourse, where policy, international law and development strategy, intersect; nonetheless it is arguably a cohesive discourse and requires a more consistent attention by scholars from across the arts and humanities.

Section 1: The state of the Artist

The historical traditions of the 'fine arts' in Europe have obviously played a major role in the formation of our policy concept of 'culture' more broadly (and regrettably why many in the Global South still see UNESCO as a 'European' cultural institution). One significant dimension of culture as a policy concept is its enduring interconnection with individual subjectivity (culture as the free expression of innate human propensities for invention). European Romanticism's enduring impact is such that collective or social-based art movements (from Russian or Czech Constructivism to the German Bauhaus) did not endure in influence for subsequent generations of art students. For the primacy of the individual artist, the singularity of the artistic vision and the priviledged status of the individual 'work of art', remained and remains paradigmatic. Furthermore, the American co-option of European modernism after World War Two (Gilbaut, 1983) somewhat preserved this principal focus for art history and theory scholarship (and so the pedagogic and philosophical conditions for artistic practice). An emphatic regard for creative individuality as prime mediator of historical cultural change was inextricably tied to assumptions on freedom of expression--of which 'stylistic innovation' more than the art movements (i.e. social formations) that generated it, remained the central signifier of art's cultural value. What Robert Hughes famously called 'the shock of the new' (Hughes, 1991) was indicative of a vague social psychology at the heart of all European art history scholarship (i.e. art's history is recounted in terms of a series of individual responses to individual works of art, which in turn is generally assumed to represent a symptomatology of profound social change). Yet, however significant art was as register of such contemporary sensibility, and however pivotal was the role of the artist (as exemplar of their own culture's ingenuity and fecundity alike), the modes of such individuality and their social function was rarely the object of study at all--i.e. among the panoply of theories and philosophies of art there are few theories and philosophies of the artist. In fact, creative individuality, (unprotected by philosophical defences and their institutional supports) was easily co-opted by national ideologies of all sorts (from American individualism to European models of citizenship). While it seemed obvious that artistic freedom continued to celebrate non-conformist expressions of individuality--continuing to create extraordinary expressions of meaning, emotion and communication (contemporary art since the 1960s has remained prodigious)--the intellectual life and modes of artistic community of successive generations of individual contemporary artists since the 1950s have failed to secure real material conditions for social change. Art, in the West, has remained dominated by powerful individuals, who, for the most part, have not been invested in community-building or even art 'movement'-forming.

Our concept of artistic freedom, I therefore argue, remains in a contradictory state of being irrevocably tied to individual social agency yet rejecting collective social agency--specifically, the philosophical grounding in historical senses of artistic 'autonomy' that might have furnished it with a collective conception of freedom (of an interconnnected sense of art's value, meaning and creative community and therefore socially-oriented policy aims). Postmodernism's critical engagement with 'the social' or mass culture and everyday life (from Pop art to Jeff Koons) arguably did not generate any form of significant policy discourse (or agenda for social change). It is true, that aesthetic autonomy is all too often associated with post-Kantian modernism, which, as a matter of doctrine resisted any form of deep social engagement (on account of preserving a quasi-ethical sphere of enlightened sensibility, or whatever its rationale was at any given place and time). The postmodernist attacks on modernism in the 1980s (when 'autonomy' was ineluctably associated with American abstract art and the 'formalism' of dominant New York art critic Clement Greenberg and so an anachronistic feature of Germano-English philosophical romanticism) was in many ways a valid political indictment of a perceived passivity and social indifference. The much publicised intellectual battle that was played out in New York between critics, art historians and 'theorists' (ironically across the private, not public, gallery circuit) led to a decisive rejection of art's 'autonomy' across the influential art institutions of the English speaking world. The rationale was that the separation of art from social life more broadly (even the perceived economic functionalism of 'mass' culture or world of consumer pleasures) would come at the cost of political engagement, or the ability of art to generate forms of social critique, resistance and change. A disdain for the perceived romanticism of aesthetic autonomy in all its forms (however vaguely conceived) pervaded most European as well as American art schools since. But this came at the unseen cost of a contradiction that remains to this day (at least, in the 'undecolonised' West)--the enduring dominance of singular artistic subjectivity (cultural individualism) but with no emphatic concept of art's social autonomy or experiential power to underpin it, and from which to argue policy aims. A policy concept of artistic autonomy is still needed if we are to construct policy frameworks facilitating the aesthetic agency of art in relation to the social collective of citizens, public sphere, political power and new emerging social relations (actual and potential, that in a time of aggressive economic globalisation are finding no space for exploration or expression).

However pervasive this contradictory state of affairs, there remains another, global, sphere of cultural discourse not so determined. From the Post-World War Two era a new form of institutional agency inserted itself between the realm of artists (and arts academies) and the mass market (or realm of private interests): it questioned the the meaning of 'culture' and the central role of culture in the carnage of the War; and importantly for us, it forged a new ethico-political discursive space that was not entangled in the fate of Western artistic subjectivity.

The Constitution of UNESCO, signed in London on the 16th of November 1945, begins, "That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed" (UNESCO, 1945, Preamble). And responsibility for this state of affairs is "ignorance of each other's ways and lives". The Constitution was essentially a new framework of international cultural relations, where culture became a non-politically partisan means of cross-border allegiance and transnational collaboration. But UNESCO's formative vision was more than this: 'the cultural' was both inscribed in the social, economic and political spheres of life, yey set apart as the 'human' substrate of a life we all shared, whatever culture or country we belonged to. This concept of culture was general and philosophical and yet specific enough to be operationalised as radical cultural policies in all countries, rich or poor. A new conception of intellectual subjectivity emerged ("the minds of men", gender politics notwithstanding) and whose corollary...