Artist-led initiatives and cultural value/s in the contemporary art sector in the UK and Ireland from the 1990s to the present

This thesis challenges the misrecognition of artist-led initiatives as a merely casual or anticipatory epiphenomenon within the increasingly commercialised and centralised administration of contemporary art that is leading such initiatives towards funder-directed institutionalisation. Using qualitative research methods to analyse a significant archive of original interviews, in conjunction with my own research-led curatorial practice, the thesis poses a challenge to the discourses on cultural value and cultural ecology that form the dominant policy framework. From my analysis of the interviews with artist-led organisations and their directors, I displace these official frameworks by discovering counter-concepts of value and values sustaining artist-led initiatives as a singular and long-term component of cultural activity.
I identify the creation of artist-led spaces as a ‘locus of desire’ for self-organisation. In order to research this question, I have worked with the Grounded Theory Method [GTM] to analyse ten interviews with participants through the process of coding their statements in order to formulate new concepts through which to understand their practice and its challenges. The key concepts I have produced are: Doing, Negotiating, Lacking and Losing, and Feeling. These concepts capture the contemporary realities for artistic practice and the affective labour of artists beyond the circulatory meritocracies of major arts institutions. The concepts have been tested and thickened through analysis of three case studies moving from the centres of a major city and a northern town (Birmingham and Rotherham) to the specificity of one local community situated at the urban margins (Gipton in East Leeds). Finally, I propose artist-led spaces as critical spatial practices that incubate alternative – kinaesthetic – forms of collective knowledge production and community building.
The thesis presents a critical analysis of a major and widespread area of cultural production that has been a problematic and contested discursive and historiographic field. By researching and assessing the value and impact of artist-led initiatives in their own accounts and, by using primary qualitative research, I argue for the distinctive yet varied and socio-economically challenged role of sustained artist-led initiatives and their potential relevance elsewhere across the whole portfolio of contemporary artistic activities. Largely situated in urban settings, intersecting with the vagaries and changing terms of urban development and regeneration, my research addresses policy debates within civic initiatives in terms of cities and culture, creative education, and the challenges of creating and sustaining inclusive and egalitarian polities in which artists are able to practice beyond the centralised models that assume a single career path based on marketability and institutionalisation.