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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Keywords
- Aesthetics
- Higher Education
- Cultural Diplomacy and Foreign Cultural Policy
- Occupation
- Career and Professional Role
- Audience Development
- Audience Studies and Visitor Studies
- Visitor Motivations
- Business
- Covid Pandemic
- Democracy
- Digitalization
- Diversity
- Third Sector
- Empirical Aesthetics
- Development
- Ethics
- Evaluation
- Field Theory
- Festival
- Film
- Federalism
- Community Arts
- Societal Change
- Ideology
- Staging
- Career
- Communication
- Concert
- Creative Industries
- Creativity
- Crisis
- Culture
- arts organizations, cultural organizations
- Cultural Participation
- Cultural Change
- Fincancing The Arts
- Cultural Promotion Law
- Cultural History
- Cultural Management
- Cultural Economy
- Cultural Organizations
- Art Education
- Cultural Policy
- Cultural Production
- Cultural Sociology
- Art Education
- Cultural Understanding
- Arts Administration
- Cultural Industry
- Cultural Sciences
- Art
- Art Field
- Arts Research
- Artists
- Artistic Research
- Artistic Reputation
- Arts Management
- Arts Organizations
- Art education
- Arts Marketing
- Arts Administration
- Curating
- Leadership
- Literature
- Advocacy
- Management
- Marketing
- Market
- Media
- Methods Development
- Mexico
- Monumentalizing
- Museum
- Music
- Non-Visitor Studies
- Opera
- Orchestra
- Organization
- Political Expression
- Post-truth Politics
- Professional Role
- Audience
- Audience Development
- Law
- Government
- Role
- Socially Engaged Art
- Social Cohesion
- Social Change
- Social Cohesion
- Non-visitor Socio-demographics
- Socioculture
- State
- Symbolic capital
- Dance
- Participatory Justice
- Theatre
- Theatre Governance
- Theory Development
- Tourism
- Transformation
- Survey
- Entrepreneurship
- Urbanism
- Civil Society