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LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL INTERNATIONAL 06 Conference, 19 – 22 October Static, Liverpool City Breaks? Art and Culture in Times of Expediency Today, the idea of culture as an expedient has gained legitimacy in West (Yudice, 2003), and underpins enormous capital investment in a contemporary art infrastructure (of late in China). Increasingly, culture is supported as a purveyor of economic development and a tool to remediate social inequality. This trend has produced a contradiction for art whereby accountability and visibility jar with self-organisation and open-ended processes of valorisation. Nagging debates on representation versus conceptualism are gradually displaced by discussions on the rise of research-based practices, which share a certain context sensitivity but diverge in the way they relate to respective art institutional systems. Roughly, we can distinguish between an ongoing object-based production of art and collaborative practices that exist between collective work, and social and political activism. In this field, arguably the role of the artist has shifted from content provider to a producer of contexts (Kester, 2002). Biennial exhibitions are habitually criticised for spectacularising the presentation of art. However, in recent years the proliferation of Biennials has yielded different models that distinguish themselves notably in their relation to place. Where on the one hand this multiplication follows the logic of globalised capital, on the other, a revaluation of our relation to the global has generated renewed attention to the local situations and translocal existencies. In addition to new alliances between art, science and fe. ngo’s, cunning, trickery and ruses displace rugged nostalgia for oppositionality. Arguably some Biennials have contributed to the creation of new public spheres and a meaningful critique therefore needs to be precise about the ways in which the relation between the local and global is constituted. How does this new g