Cultural Production

This paper examines the use of online, three-dimensional, immersive virtual worlds, such as Second Life®, as an interesting platform and tool for cultural management, artistic development, knowledge exchange and cultural business. These contemporary computer technologies provide a new showcase for cultural promotion
and creative production, as they connect artists and producers with an audience around the world, who, in turn, can access in real time a great variety of cultural content through just a few clicks. The various features of this emerging phenomenon all help to democratize culture, the arts and education, as they bring creations closer to consumers, thus reducing the need for intermediaries and breaking down social, economic and political barriers; this offers benefits to cultural industries, non-profit organizations, governments, collective and individual creators and artists. However, the numerous possibilities ushered in over the last few years not only bring benefits but also pose new challenges in terms of regulation. Indeed, this new stage for cultural and artistic expression and management may require new paradigms of control with a different focus, ones which can provide an alternative understanding of online cultural exchange in real time. Virtual worlds make culture more democratic, as it can be reached for free by a wider range of people in real time; furthermore, artists and creators are provided with an accessible showcase in which they can become better known and where they can interact more directly, immediately and closely with their audience. The possibility and ease with which anyone can create original content in the metaverse is an incentive for creativity, because it allows people to express themselves in original ways that enhance the contents of virtual life. Art thus finds new and different formats, and cultural management
discovers new spaces to break into. At the same time, anonymity, privacy and intellectual property are all issues that need to be addressed. The regulation of virtual worlds may require different ways of thinking and the adoption of new paradigms which consider exchange, democratization, cooperation and sharing as essential
ingredients of these new sets; as such, any rules must control but not restrict, thus avoiding anarchy at the same time as keeping interaction levels high. In the European Year of Creativity and Innovation it is important to consider the opportunities being opened up by these new technologies in the world of culture and education, as well as the possibilities that are emerging and which remain to be researched.

Keywords: Virtual worlds, cultural management, virtual art, creativity, regulation, fair use

Viewing revolutionary political change as a multi-influential, multi-scaled, long-term process allows for the analysis of (in)visible transformations of identities and social realities. The main problem with this approach, however, is that it considers change only in terms of rupture, shift, and transition, or in terms of modernity versus tradition. While many studies focus on the dynamics and indicators of change, they have not adequately considered the role of culture in forming the basis of revolution or in determining how it unfolds. This article couples the theoretical work on culture and society by two pioneering cultural critics, Matthew Arnold and Antonio Gramsci, to make sense of how Arab cultural production can be viewed as a motor for revolutionary change during the Arab Spring.

‫مدخل‬ ‫ات‬ ّ ‫لفعالي‬ ‫حاضنة‬ ‫مساحة‬ ‫إىل‬ ‫حيفا‬ ‫ل‬ ّ ‫تتحو‬ ‫األسبوع،‬ ‫هناية‬ ‫ام‬ ّ ‫سي‬ ‫ول‬ ‫املساء،‬ ‫ساعات‬ ‫يف‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫الفلسطيني‬ ‫احلانات‬ ‫أو‬ ‫املقاهي‬ ‫أحد‬ ‫يف‬ ‫املساء‬ ‫يبدأ‬ ‫قد‬ ‫عة.‬ ّ ‫متنو‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫فلسطيني‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫وترفيهي‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫ثقافي‬ ‫مع‬ ‫السهرة‬ ّ ‫تستمر‬ ّ ‫ثم‬ ‫ة،‬ ّ ‫الثقافي‬ ‫والندوات‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫ّي‬ ‫الفن‬ ‫املعارض‬ ‫م‬ ّ ‫ُنظ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ما‬ ‫ا‬ ً ‫غالب‬ ‫حيث‬ ‫العديدة،‬ ‫أحد‬ ‫يف‬ ّ ‫كوميدي‬ ‫عرض‬ ‫أو‬ ‫رقص،‬ ‫أداء‬ ‫أو‬ ، ّ ‫حي‬ ّ ‫موسيقي‬ ‫عرض‬ ‫أو‬ ‫فيلم،‬ ‫أو‬ ‫ة،‬ ّ ‫مرسحي‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫حي‬ ‫عروض‬ ‫ُتاح‬ ‫ت‬ ‫رة،‬ ‫املتأخّ‬ ‫الليل‬ ‫ساعات‬ ‫يف‬ ‫للرتفيه‬ ‫املزاج‬ ‫طاب‬ ‫حال‬ ‫يف‬ ‫املدينة.‬ ‫مساحات‬ ‫هذه‬ ‫من‬ ‫العديد‬ ‫التحتى.‬ ‫البلد‬ ‫يف‬ ‫الرقص‬ ‫حانات‬ ‫يف‬ ‫الداكنة‬ ‫التكنو‬ ‫وحفالت‬ ‫الروك‬ ‫ملوسيقى‬ ‫نفسها‬ ‫م‬ ‫تقدّ‬ ‫فمعظمها‬ ، ًّ ‫مستقال‬ ‫ا‬ ًّ ‫ثقافي‬ ‫ا‬ ‫مشهدً‬ ‫ل‬ ّ ‫لتشك‬ ‫املايض،‬ ‫العقد‬ ‫خالل‬ ‫ُتح‬ ‫افت‬ ‫األماكن‬ . ّ ‫اإلرسائييل‬ ‫التمويل‬ ‫من‬ ‫رة‬ ّ ‫متحر‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫فلسطيني‬ ٍ ‫مساحات‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫الفلسطيني‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫والثقافي‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫الجتامعي‬ ‫احلياة‬ ‫أنّ‬ ً ‫علام‬ ‫ًا،‬ ‫ضمن‬ ‫مفهومة‬ ‫مسألة‬ ‫ر‬ ّ ‫التطو‬ ‫هذا‬ ‫ليس‬ ‫سات‬ ّ ‫املؤس‬ ‫متويل‬ ‫رشوط‬ ‫عرب‬ ‫والرقابة‬ ‫الحتواء‬ ‫حماولت‬ ‫ت‬ ّ ‫أد‬ ‫النكبة.‬ ‫إثر‬ ‫اهنارت‬ ‫حيفا‬ ‫يف‬ ‫س،‬ ّ ‫املسي‬ ّ ‫األصالين‬ ّ ‫الفلسطيني‬ ّ ‫الثقايف‬ ‫اإلنتاج‬ ‫يف‬ ‫اخلفيف‬ ‫ق‬ ّ ‫التدف‬ ‫من‬ ‫عقود‬ ‫إىل‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫اإلرسائيلي‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫احلزبي‬ ‫ات‬ ّ ‫الفعالي‬ ‫خالل‬ ‫من‬ ‫وذلك‬ ‫املايض،‬ ‫القرن‬ ‫تسعينات‬ ‫ّى‬ ‫حت‬ ‫احلال‬ ‫هذه‬ ‫ت‬ ّ ‫استمر‬ ‫وقد‬ ‫حتاكيه‬ ‫تي‬ ّ ‫ال‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫ي‬ ّ ‫املحل‬ ‫لإلبداعات‬ ‫ش‬ ّ ‫متعط‬ ‫جلمهور‬ ‫ة‬ ّ ‫املستقل‬ ‫املبادرات‬ ‫من‬ ‫القليل‬ ‫مع‬ ‫باألساس،‬ ‫واقعه.‬ ‫وتعكس‬

"Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the 'centri sociali', in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of 'field of cultural production' and 'cultural capital', together with their evolutions into the notion of 'subcultural capital'. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.
Keywords: popular culture; independent music; symbolic capital; field of cultural production; subcultural capital"

Creating racially just campuses requires dismantling the cultural imperialism of Whiteness—how
Whiteness becomes the norm to which all else is measured, compared, and excluded. Little is
known about how Whiteness shapes the most prevalent athletic cultures: non-revenue teams. Using
critical Whiteness studies and life-history interviews with 47 rowers and track and field college
athletes, I propose three components of athletic cultures: isolation, compliance, and competition.
Athletes learn these elements are neutral and necessary for athletics; however, they normalize
White persons’ overrepresentation in sport, require loyalty to one (White) cultural form, and
position social outcomes as individually and fairly won.

The fashion modeling industry has long been criticized for using excessively thin and exclusively Anglolooking models in advertising and runway shows. How do fashion producers make decisions to hire models, and why is the fashion model aesthetic defined so narrowly? Based on participant observation and interviews with modeling agents and clients in New York and London, the current study explains how producers in the modeling industry weigh their decisions on two publicly polemical issues: slenderness and racial exclusion. As workers in cultural production, agents and clients face intense market uncertainty when selecting models. In the absence of objective standards, they rely on conventions, imitation, and stereotypes to guide their decisions. Producers hire fashion models to articulate market-specific versions of femininity. In the commercial market, they emphasize demographics, racial inclusion, sex appeal and attainable beauty; in the high-end editorial market, they seek distinction, sexual unavailability and rarefied beauty. As cultural producers, agents and clients ultimately reproduce culture by fashioning femininity along race and class lines. #

The Frankfurt School has been very influential in our understanding of the production and reception of modern mass media. Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay “The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” outlined how technological change in modern times fundamentally altered the relationship of artist-audience and art-politics. A decade later, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued more pointedly that the economic capabilities of modern capitalism had harnessed the technology of cultural production so completely as to allow for almost no freedom of artistic production outside its framework. For Benjamin and Horkheimer & Adorno, film, in particular, and its expressions in Nazi Germany and Hollywood in particular was the new medium that illustrated their theories, although they also considered others such as radio, architecture, and mass market magazines as well. In this paper, I will show how their ideas can also be applied successfully to the new medium of our day, the Internet, to shed light on one of the most important issues in contemporary media and politics in the US: net neutrality.

Despite extensive literature on content creators’ identities, strategies, and activities, there remains a gap in understanding how the constantly changing platform environment impacts their brand subjectivities. Against this backdrop, our article explores how evolutions in platforms—including constant updates to their affordances—shape the activities and interpretive processes of content creators. Drawing on interviews with 35 Chilean content creators in the field of fashion and lifestyle, along with an analysis of their Instagram images (N = 165) and stories (N = 150), we show how creators feel compelled to enact different versions of their brand subjectivities. Our findings show how creators experience platform changes based on three interrelated levels: in the form of communicative styles, as a sense of temporal acceleration, and as a constant negotiation with other actors in the social network through which commercial activities are configured. Thus, when platforms tend to make changes to improve their commercial viability, content creators have to adapt their brand subjectivities and practices across platforms and affordances. In addition to shedding light on the new routines and intensified economic pressures demanded of today’s digital workers, we also reveal how the ideal of creation has been supplanted with intensified competition amid constantly changing technological, social, and commercial ecologies.

The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people’s everyday lives has in recent years triggered a growing interest towards algorithmic imaginaries, intended as worlds of experience users make of the algorithmic media, thereby building up their own awareness of the platform and in turn moulding the algorithm itself through their performativity. Today, part of the construction of individual cultures takes place on streaming platforms, media environments where subjects access cultural materials and cultural exchanges occur. Platforms, such as Netflix or Spotify, have become privileged sites for studying the platformization of cultural production and the construction of algorithmic imaginaries by users and developers. Despite this, to date little has been discussed about cultural creators’ algorithmic imaginaries. This paper intends to discuss how to include algorithmic imaginaries in research regarding platforms and cultural production, by focusing on the case of music plat...

Indonesia boasts a thriving underground music scene that has become an important element in the identity practices of many urban youth. For dedicated ‘scenesters’, the underground is more than a personal expression of style; it is a way of life, and often a way to make a living. I draw on the concept of ‘precarity’ to examine the underground value of independence (kemandirian) in the context of the precarious position of urban youth in neoliberal Indonesia. The identities and practices of the underground scene are both a reaction against and a reflection of this experience. Scenesters draw on their underground identities, and the autonomous community networks they have established, in order to assert their independence from the demands of capital. However, they also mobilise this independence as the basis for their own entrepreneurial activities, resulting in a nascent tendency towards capital accumulation and class polarisation within the scene.

The term ‘neomelodic’ defines a pop-folk music genre featuring
the mediascape of Naples, Southern Italy, since the late 1980s.
Neomelodic songs depict the experiences of lower-class
Neapolitan subjects with a preference for those engaging with
the Camorra, a powerful criminal organisation that is also a
major investor in the local media industries. This article constitutes
an exploration of the Camorra-mediated neomelodic milieu of
cultural production vis-à-vis the political landscape of the current
Neapolitan social peripheries. In so doing, it ethnographically
shows how the neomelodic modalities of cultural production
mediate and reify local forms of organised crime hegemony visà-
vis the discursive power of the state. Accordingly, it also demonstrates
how such modalities turn the neomelodic industry into a
relational infrastructure of subaltern publicity, which engenders
political dynamics of personal mobility and social identity construction
amid its sponsors, performers, and publics.

Advancement in the arts and sciences is a primary driver of economic production and social policy in post-industrial societies. Imagination steps back and asks what advances the arts and sciences? This book explores the collective, social and global dimension of human imagining and the ambivalent relationship of social institutions, including universities, schools, economies, media and culture industries, to the collective imagination. Basic discovery requires high levels of creative thinking: Imagination looks at the social conditions that make path-breaking thought possible on a large scale. It examines the role of aesthetic, pictorial, digital, paradoxical and other imaginative styles of thinking, and the times and places in which such styles become socially prominent and a significant force in economic and cultural production. It looks at successful societies as they are approaching their peak, when new ideas are driving them forward.

Cette approche a, à partir des années 1970, mis en évidence les relations entre l'économie de la communication et les phénomènes de pouvoir. Depuis, elle a coopéré avec d'autres approches, pour analyser les rapports entre politique et culture, élaborer la théorie des industries culturelles, étudier les politiques publiques, analyser les discours sociaux. Elle joue un rôle décisif dans la critique de la société de l'information, l'étude des groupes de communication ou de la supposée « fracture numérique ».Since the 70's, this investigative approach has brought to light the relationships between the economy of communication and power phenomena. After, the approach was used along with other approaches to analyse the links between politics and culture, to work out a theory on the cultural industries, to study public policies and to research into social discourses. It plays an essential role in critiques of the information society and the study of global media or the so-called "digital divide"

Influencers are highly visible tastemakers who professionally publish content on social media platforms. In their work, influencers are tasked with reconciling their contradictory positioning they are both promoters of consumption, and marshals of 'authentic' sociality and community. Influencers thus organize their social world in ways that enable them to justify moving between two contradictory poles of commerciality and authenticity. In this paper, we argue that these navigations necessitate "influencer imaginaries". This concept was drawn from, first, in-depth interviews with 35 Chilean social media influencers, and second, from participant observation with advertising agencies who hire them. The influencer "imaginary" sheds light on how individuals experience and justify the commodification of the self and forms of knowledge as subject to valuation in markets when they communicate their brands. Thus, the imaginary was shown to emerge from three intertwined narratives: to resolve information asymmetries in markets; differentiate influencers from celebrities and advertisers as average people; and negotiate self definition with regard to agencies, audiences, and themselves.

This introduction to the second special collection of articles on the platformization of the cultural industries foregrounds research methods and practices. Drawing from the 12 articles included in this collection, as well as the 14 articles published in the first collection, we identify commonalities in approaches, consistencies in traditions, and uniform modes of analysis. We argue that approaches that have been deployed in media industry studies for decades—semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, content analysis, and participant observation—remain productive. At the same time, transformations in the temporalities and curation of cultural production require updated modes of investigation and analysis. As such, we spotlight contributors’ novel methods and innovative theoretical approaches, such as the walkthrough method and multi-sided market theory.

we argue that there are four ways we both understand and misunderstand fake news as a research concept. This includes seeing fake news as text rather than visual content; as either “true” or “false” information rather than as facts embedded within narratives; as surface level content rather than being produced within institutional processes; and from a “Western-centric” lens rather than from a comparative context. As we will argue in our conclusion, these foci make connecting empirical work on fake news to larger media theories of visibility and surveillance more difficult. In particular, they make it harder to connect questions of fake news to sociologies of scandal and the public sphere. In the second section, we attempt to address each of these critiques by outlining elements of our research on fake news production in the Philippines, which was selected insofar as it provides a non-European case of a phenomenon the discussion of which is usually confined to the industrialized West and which serves as a launching pad for engaging in larger meta-theoretical reflection. In the third and final section, the chapter returns to the initial conversation about the media and scandal and discusses how these different frameworks for considering fake news shed light on the relationship between scandal and the media.

“China Too Cool: Vernacular Innovations and Aesthetic Discontinuity of China”, examines the cultural phenomenon and aesthetic style of "Too Cool": the unoriginal, tacky-cool styles of cultural productions "Made in China." I argued that there is a different kind of creativity involved in making low quality rip-offs, resulting in intriguing aesthetic outcomes. The birth of “Too Cool” is a two-fold phenomenon—a naive layer and a second layer of conscious remaking—and is a result of economic and generational differences in China. By examining aspects of fashion, popular culture, interior and graphic design in the Too Cool style, we gain a more nuanced understanding of Chinese cultural productions.

This paper was written in 2018 and was my graduating thesis from BA Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute. I also discuss this topic in a podcast here: https://www.chimera-magazine.com/posts/podcast-on-the-aesthetics-of-tu-wei

Photography scholars have long acknowledged that photography is the progeny of industrial society. However, despite the increase in historical studies of the medium’s industrial-commercial dimensions, and a smaller number of contemporary sociological and cultural investigations, no attempt has been made to produce an overall account of photography as a cultural industry. This chapter aims to help fill that gap. Moving across public and private photographic contexts, and popular and elite genres, it elaborates photography’s relation to four core problematics: the historical phases of industrial cultural production; cultural labor and economic and cultural capital; the tension between standardization and innovation; and dominant production logics of digital culture. In the process it draws upon traditions of analyzing cultural industries in media studies, the political economy of communication and the sociology of culture to rethink photography’s long-term trajectories as a modern cultural endeavor.

Draft version of chapter published in The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global (edited by M. Dines, A. Gordon and P. Guerra, 2017, PSN Press and UPorto).

The city of Bandung, Indonesia is home to a substantial hardcore punk scene; within this scene, a small but assertive DIY hardcore current strives to build a creative community that operates according to anti-capitalist DIY principles. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Bandung scene, I explore the value practices and social organisation of this community, focusing especially on three specific DIY projects: the Kolektif Balai Kota (City Hall Collective), an open, consensus-based collective that organises non-profit hardcore shows; the Endless DIY Store, a local independent distributor of DIY records, zines, and other products; and Inkoherent DIY Nutritionist, a record label that releases localised, affordable versions of albums by international DIY bands. Through such projects, and the social relations in which they are embedded, the ‘DIY kids’ (anak DIY) are building a cultural commons of shared means, knowledge and value as an alternative to the alienating logic of the capitalist market. While the autonomy of this DIY community remains partial, precarious and contested, the values they express and realise point towards alternative ways of organising cultural production and social life. Such practices of radical social creativity are an important part of the continuing political significance of punk in Indonesia and elsewhere.

This thesis explores the efforts by a group within the hardcore punk scene in Bandung, Indonesia, to establish an autonomous community based on participatory 'Do It Yourself' cultural production. I examine the ways in which the DIY values of autonomy and community are expressed through their social organisation, musical performances, and DIY practices of production and exchange. The autonomous community of DIY hardcore is an attempt to realise a positive alternative to capitalist alienation, though it remains contained within a restricted sphere of cultural activity and may still generate some value for capital.

This dissertation discusses three popular YouTube video bloggers (vloggers), Mr. Chi-City, Shaycarl, and iJustine, and their relationship to the site as a vehicle for cultural production. It employs a framework for studying cultural production on YouTube that focuses on its key components: authorship, performance, and narrative. It discusses the significance of the interaction between the YouTube space (conceptualized as a platform) and its users, both of which are imbued with their own agency to negotiate the dynamics of the space. The dissertation contends that vloggers, using the tools made available by the platform as a site of cultural possibility, produce work that is sophisticated and variable, all while being constantly engaged with feedback solicited from and offered by other users. It uses the language of participatory culture and produsage to draw out this relationship and suggests ways in which the elements of cultural practice on the platform play themselves out on the increasingly influential space.

Gemeinsam herausgegeben mit: Anita Moser & Elke Zobl; unter Mitarbeit von Dilara Akarçeşme

Die Ausgabe Nr. 9 des eJournals p/art/icipate mit dem Titel "Open Up!" befasst sich mit den Ein- und Ausschlüssen im Rahmen kultureller Teilhabe. Es ist die erste von drei Ausgaben, die das vom Land Salzburg geförderte Forschungsprojekt "Kulturelle Teilhabe in Salzburg" begleiten und Einblick in dessen Zugänge, Fragestellungen sowie Diskussionen geben. In diesem Projekt erforschen wir in einer transdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe Grundlagen, Möglichkeiten, Herausforderungen und Strategien kultureller Teilhabe allgemein und in Stadt und Land Salzburg im Besonderen. Dabei interessiert uns, welche Ausschlüsse im Kulturbereich stattfinden, wir eruieren, wo Handlungsbedarf besteht, und geben Impulse für Veränderungen. Wichtig ist uns ein kritischer Zugang zu Kunst und Kultur, der Aspekte der Kunst, der Kulturarbeit und der Wissenschaft verbindet, also Theorie und Praxis zusammendenkt.

Unter anderem mit Beiträgen von/mit: Max Fuchs, Elisabeth Magdlener, Vina Yun, Eva Egermann, Andrea Folie, Martin Hochleitner, simon INOU, Can Gülcü, Studierende der Kommunikationswissenschaft, Studierende der Studienergänzung Kulturmanagement & kulturelle Produktion

Women artists are systematically disadvantaged across cultural fields. Although some of these disadvantages resemble gender inequalities in non-artistic work, such as lower pay, underrepresentation, work–family conflict, and symbolic devaluation, others are unique to artistic careers. In this essay, I extend Acker's work on the implicit gendering of the ideal-typical worker to show how gender implicitly organizes social expectations around artists and artistic work. I highlight themes emerging from past research on gender relations in artistic careers, which suggest that the ideal-typical artist builds on a masculine model in at least three ways. First, collective understandings of creative genius center a masculine subject. Second, bias in aesthetic evaluations systematically favors men over women. Third, the structure of artistic careers, particularly the need for entrepreneurial labor and self-promotion, requires artists to engage in behaviors that are more socially acceptable in men than in women.

Gemeinsam mit Dilara Akarçeşme und Anita Moser.

Die vorliegende Ausgabe des eJournals beschäftigt sich mit dem Feld der kulturellen Teilhabe und erkundet aktuelle Bestrebungen sowie Kritikfelder ihrer Umsetzung. Dabei stehen zeitgenössische Praktiken und Beispiele aus Österreich – vor allem aus Salzburg – im Fokus. In den Texten wird thematisiert, wie durch den Einsatz von verschiedenen Materialien und Tools demokratische Handlungsräume eröffnet werden können. Wie wird kulturelle Teilhabe in einzelnen Projekten konkret umgesetzt? Welche digitalen Möglichkeiten etwa gibt es in Bezug auf kulturelle Teilhabe und wie werden diese genutzt? Wo finden sich Beispiele gelungener und gescheiterter Versuche kultureller Teilhabe? Welche Forderungen bestehen in Bezug auf eine gerechtere Kultur- bzw. Förderpolitik? Und wie zeigt sich in Salzburg das sogenannte Stadt-Land-Gefälle?

Die Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Fragen findet im aktuellen eJournal noch stärker als in der letzten Ausgabe in Gesprächen mit Expert_innen und Perspektiven aus der Praxis der Kulturarbeit statt. Einen besonderen Schwerpunkt bilden außerdem kulturelle Teilhabe und Spezifika von Kunst- und Kulturprojekten in ländlichen Regionen.

Unter anderem mit Beiträgen von/mit: Rebekah Buchanan, Studierenden der Studienergänzung Kulturmanagement & kulturelle Produktion, Ivana Pilić, Sonja Prlić, Marissa Lôbo und Catrin Seefranz, EsRap, Tiefe Kümmernis, Onur Bakış, Monika Schmerold,  AG trans*arts ...

This colloquium aims to shed light on the phenomenon of the diffusion of Asian culture in the European context, in particular on four axes of interrogation: the production of cultural goods; the political competition in the global arena for cultural hegemony; glocalization, i.e., the adaptation of production to local contexts; and reception by consumers.

https://euroasie.sciencesconf.org/

Proposals should be no more than 250 words in length and should indicate the theoretical framework, the data used, and the axis(es) in which the proposal fits.

Calendar
-March 1, 2022: submission of the proposals
-May 2, 2022: selection of the proposals and feedback to the attendees
-December 14-16, 2022: conference in Paris

The overall goal of the present study is to examine how cultural intermediaries find their occupational position in the field of cultural production. Two essential dimensions are laid out: the dimension of working for the sake of art or profit, and the dimension of serving the artist or the client. This paper refers to a longer study undertaken between 2003 and 2009 in Finland. The material for the research was collected from 78 informants working as cultural intermediaries in the domestic field of cultural production. Most of the
informants were production managers in cultural event production. The material consist of 13 in-depth interviews, a 2.5-hour group interview with
eight participants, questionnaire replies from 49 informants, sixteen of whom were also interviewed afterwards as a second contact point in addition to the
thirteen cultural managers who had already been interviewed. The materia also includes the curricula of universities of applied science providing cultural
management training and a production database of art projects. Five types of cultural intermediaries were identified: artists’ assistants (serving artists for
art’s sake), production assistants (serving clients for profit-oriented aims), mediators (using art as a tool to promote wealth), independent producers
(balancing between the artist and the client with their aims) and double agents (serving clients for profit-oriented aims). Numerous informants worked
simultaneously in several positions, gaining professional experience while generating a diverse portfolio. A multifaceted portfolio allows cultural managers to represent the type of cultural intermediary that is most beneficial and useful in each situation. Cultural intermediaries are a heterogeneous
occupational group that can relate to art, business, artists and clients in multiple ways. They often share a culturally embedded and self-consciously noneconomic
commitment to reaffirming their membership in the artistic community. This can take various forms. One might underline the sociocultural aims of the work, while others emphasize motivation to assist artists to
create art for its own sake.

Unraveling the entanglements of fetish and secrecy bound up in the graffiti on the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall, this article analyzes the proliferation of defacements of the Australian street artist LushSux’s meme-graffiti on that wall in Bethlehem. In visually tracing and analyzing these successive moments of defacement, this article ethnographically captures a popular performance of collect- ive Palestinian sovereignty within the borderlands of the Israeli Separation Wall. Celebrating defacement’s generative power to create a new face, this article dem- onstrates how defacement was an assertive act of unmasking the raw power of Israel’s colonial project.

Small scale cultural production has been largely ignored in academic debates regarding the production of popular culture. Despite this, there have been a select number of theorists who have suggested that the study of cultural production on this scale may provide valuable insight for larger debates, including those concerning cultural diversity. Underlying this position is the idea that small scale cultural producers share a distinct ideology which motivates or legitimises their decision to remain on the fringes. For the music industry, this was crystallised by the 1970s punk movement, and its use of independent record labels in its attempt to democratise the music industry. While this and subsequent movements have dissipated, they pioneered an ethos of independent music production that has re-shaped the industry. Through qualitative interviews with members of the independent record label sector of Victoria, this study illustrates the continuing presence of this ethos among independent cultural producers. Furthermore, I argue that the continual development of this ethos has helped independent record labels acquire a position of increased influence in the larger industry.

The aim of the article is to offer a critical review of the scientific literature regarding the use of crowdfunding for the financing of cultural projects. More specifically, it will examine what has been noticed about the various interpretations and uses of crowdfunding, the relationship between promoters and backers, the opportunities and the criticalities it presents to different types of promoters and different types of projects, as well as about the factors that affect such aspects. The article is subdivided into three sections The first section considers the motivations of different kind of promoters, the different rhetoric they use to promote the campaigns, the skills and resources need to effectively design and manage the campaigns. In this regard, research shows the extreme relevance of the promoter's social capital for the campaign results. The second section is therefore devoted to the analysis of the different types of social capital mobilized in crowdfunding, of the mobilization strategies implemented by the promoters, of the factors that influence such mobilization and-more generally-that affect the composition of the backers networks. The analysis of these dynamics directs the attention to the skill and resources needed by promoters, to their relationship with funders, and to the ways in which the latter are involved and invited to participate in the projects, besides its funding. The last section is therefore devoted to the critical analysis of crowdfunding, which highlights both the limits of the actual participation of funders, and hence the distance of the prevailing forms of crowdfunding from potentially more innovative models, as well as the asymmetries between different kind of promoters, that is different possibilities to maximize the potential benefits of crowdfunding by various promoters. The conclusions will point to further directions of research, useful to improve the understanding of crowdfunding by deepening the analysis of relevant but less investigated aspects.

Il termine crowdfunding viene utilizzato per designare attività di raccolta fondi in forma di campagne rivolte al pubblico, temporalmente circoscritte e gestite mediante piattaforme web che chiunque può utilizzare in modo relativamente semplice. Quest'ultimo aspetto implica altri elementi di originalità, rispetto a metodi più convenzionali di fundraising: in primo luogo, la possibilità che qualunque individuo o organizzazione possa esporre in rete un progetto al fine di raccogliere le risorse economiche per realizzarlo, aggregando contributi anche minimi, secondo una logica di valorizzazione della 'coda lunga' dei potenziali interessati (Anderson 2006); in secondo luogo, le modalità dirette di contatto e interazione fra progettisti e diversi tipi di finanziatori, potenziali ed effettivi, rendono possibili nuove articolazioni dei rapporti fra le parti.

In this research the production process of news pictures at Thomson Reuters international multimedia news agency is examined along its local and international key moments and sites, and the career of Reuters photographs-from the moment they are conceived as ideas to their purchase-is followed and explored at the ways that at every stage they are used, chosen, sold and processed as 'Reuters' products. Based on an extensive fieldwork that includes participant observations in the field, the Jerusalem bureau and the global pictures desk in Israel, Singapore and the UK, indepth interviews with significant Reuters pictures professionals and observations conducted at the Guardian s pictures desk in London, the findings in this project point to a wide cultural production infrastructure hidden from-and yet also nurtured by-the consumer's eye. From the camera's lens to the daily work of the photographer, the editor, the producer, the chief of the department, administrators, graphic designers, sales and marketing, the international news agency, the different news outlets, different media and other organizations and their audiences, who are all responsible for the representation of one reality and the production of another. Focusing an ethnographic eye on the production processes of news pictures at Thomson Reuters, and drawing from cultural studies and approaches of the political economy of communication, this is an attempt to uncover what news is in its photographic form, and the ways that such unique process of production illustrates the overall production of newsworthiness. To Lee and Danielle Contents List of pictures and appendices vi Acknowledgements viii Declaration of authorship xi List of abbreviations xii

Nowadays, new media generate new models of cultural production. In order to determine their potential and effectiveness, the issues of its innovation need to be taken into account. The aim of this article has been to look at the culture management through the prism of a cultural product, namely to capture the essence of innovation management
of a new media product. It is assumed that the cultural development results partly from the development of specific products. Culture exhibits commercial aspects, hence it is reasonable to consider the problems of its innovation. The problematic nature of the indicated permanent creativity of the cultural sector (especially the media sector), and
implicitly its innovation, shall be suspended on the assumption that innovation takes place when invention is being commercialised.
In the first place, based on the critical analysis of the existing findings, the specific nature of a cultural product and its specific example - media product - will be determined.
Then, product innovation, which stresses the so far overlooked product's performative  aspect, will be defined. Thanks to the analysis that assumes a gradual transition from the most general to the more and more detailed issues, the emphasis will be put on the complexity of the phenomenon and the numerous contexts that should be included in the research, in order to capture the innovative cultural mechanism. The
above-mentioned findings will allow the elements of the media product innovation model to be determined, which has been our methodological goal. As a result of metatheoretical analyses of the current interdisciplinary research achievements, located at the crossroads of various disciplines and areas of cultural practice, media product innovation matrix will be created.
New media will constitute the subject of our detailed research and simultaneously will serve as a test for the developed tool. For the pilot analysis, Kontakt24.pl and innovations introduced to the website during its redesign in 2014 were selected. The analysis was carried out in the context of the hybrid, technological and content nature of media
product.

Discussions about the concept of fan culture reunite various positions, in serted in different contexts. Chronologically, its concept was being modified, and the studies were expanding. Fans, initially considered as people with some patho logy, gradually gained an optimistic point of view from academy. This happened mainly due to everyday research. Thinking over on their practices and relationships throu gh consumption, and in view of the importance of cultural identity in relat ion with subcultural youth groups, this work aims to analyze the impact of the film "T he fault in our stars", based on a book written by John Green, within the community of h is fans, the nerdfighters, and criticizing the cultural industry. In addition, the objective to be achieved is trying to understand if there was some sort of resistance from these admirers. The research takes place within a community, the Nerdfighteria, Facebook group that gathers nerdfighters worldwide, through questionnaires, analysis of posts and comments and interviews.

Keywords: fan culture, fans, consumption, cultural industry, Nerdfighters.

The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher Alejandro Jodorowsky's film, The Holy Mountain (1973), is often referred to as a 'surrealistic' exploration of Western Esotericism, and was a pivotal cinematic moment for what Christopher Partridge (2004, 2005) has termed 'occulture'. It is often claimed in secondary literature and informally online that the film is based on the unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952) by René Daumal, French writer and follower of the esotericist G.I. Gurdjieff. The Holy Mountain is thus a clear candidate for testing theories about the cultural production of 'Gurdjieffian' film adaptations. A closer reading, however, shows that the two texts share few ideological or even structural elements. In the wake of the film's reception and Jodorowsky's growing cultural importance, this article maps the congruence of the film to the novel by focusing on the role played by the eponymous mountain as the only invariant symbol in both. Some of the biographical contours of the two artists' relationship to Gurdjieffian and wider occultural esoteric discourses will also be traced to reveal the pre-critical and largely self-referential narrative of the film adaptation in the secondary literature as a species of academic urban legend-making.