plenarysessionpaperfortheartofmanagementorgani.docVIP

Plenary Session paper for The Art of Management Organisations Conference, King’s College, London, September 2002 Dr Jonathan Vickery Department of History of Art University of Warwick Paper: Art and the Politics of Administration: Managing Creativity. NB: This paper attempts to address some of the common issues in contemporary art with regard art’s institutional mediation. Due to time constraints only parts of this paper was delivered at the above conference. This paper was written as ‘spoken text’ for the above conference and has not been substantially altered, save that is to articulate some spontaneous prefatory remarks made at the time and to eradicate certain remarks whose meaning was only coherent within the context of the spoken moment.1 I will begin with a few remarks appropriate to the discussions that have emerged within the last few days [of this conference]. Firstly, we have all been using the terms ‘art’ and ‘aesthetic experience’ as general concepts and thus appealing to a consensus of intellectual opinion on what these terms mean. Of course, any consensus of general terms is necessary for any non-specialised discussion to take place. Yet at the same time it is difficult to say of what this consensus consists; there has been little consensus in the ‘art world’ as a whole for some time. Art since the 1960s has very little in common, both in the means of its production and the modes of its reception, with modern art before this era.2 The nature of the shift in art as a creative practice was complex, but can be characterised as a total relativisation of techniques, materials and subject matter. This was a process that has rendered the categories of style, convention, genre, medium, and expression – all previously inseparable from the very concept of art – largely redundant. However, if management and organisation studies sometimes generalises the concept of art in a way which misrepresents its recent historical evolution (i.e. whose concept of art