Essay
Artists Shaping Policies Through Higher Art Education. How Visual Artists Develop Policies that Affect their Lives, Practices, and Careers
Abstract
This paper centralises visual artists in policymaking processes. It foregrounds the ways artists influence and determine the policies that affect their lives, practices, and careers through their higher art education in London (UK) art schools between 1986-2016. The uninvited and indirect processes by which artists are shaping policies using their education is captured through artsbased/informed methods developed for listening, analysing, and interpreting alongside grounded theory methodology. The practitioner-led approach is key to noticing and raising the subtle agitations in the actions and inactions that underscore artists’ role as policy progenitors. Artists’ relationships with professional development and their experiences of structureless pedagogies, which are aligned to artistic myth are foregrounded. Their acceptances, rejections, and reframing of their fine art curricula is where their influence in shaping policy sits.
Keywords
2022 (2)
Artists' Narratives in Cultural Policy and Management Research

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© 2023, Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy
Keywords
- aesthetics
- higher education
- cultural diplomacy
- career, professional role
- audience studies
- Business
- digitalization, digitization
- diversity
- empirical aesthetics
- entrepreneurship
- development, transformation
- ethics
- Evaluation
- festival
- film
- social change
- ideology
- staging
- communication
- Concert
- creativity
- culture
- arts organizations, cultural organizations
- fincancing the arts
- cultural history
- cultural economy
- art education
- cultural policy
- cultural sociology
- audience development, art education
- arts administration, arts management
- cultural industry
- cultural sciences
- art
- arts research
- curating
- artists
- leadership
- management
- marketing
- market
- media
- methods development
- museum
- music
- opera
- orchestra
- organization
- law
- social cohesion
- community arts
- state
- urbanism
- dance
- theater
- theory development
- tourism
- civil society, third sector