BOYCOTT OR NOT
Failing Criticality: white cube as whitewash
Sunday 12 June 12-1.30pm
Avalanche at The Field, New Cross SE14 5HD
Part of AntiUniversity Now Festival 9-12 June 2016
TICKETS THROUGH EVENTBRITE
At the level of the individual, how can responsibility for a political stand become effective, and, when organised, might solidarity between artists and individuals - united during austerity - bring about mobilisation, a consolidated push both for human rights internationally and for functioning public services and funding that have been marginalised here in the UK?
Art sponsorship, Collections and Trusts frequently appear to legitimise, through cultural acceptance, corporate interests with questionable ethics that further compound the problems citizens face through their lobbying of government for corporate/personal gain that have ramifications on local, national and international politics. Human rights, our environment, our education and our health are all at stake.
In openly questioning individual and collaborative interests around the funding of art and the lobbying of government, Boycott or Not aims to discover the level of duplicity that artists as individuals and as a group are willing to engage. And - failing criticality - is art a PR and marketing strategy for a wealthy elite and ruling class that increasingly fail us all?
Boycotts are generally understood as a public manoeuvre to empower citizens through organisation by way of non-violent political expression. In this open discussion the ever-increasing problematic enmeshment of ethics and the politics of art funding will be raised - sighting arguments from ‘philanthropic’ donations to a Tory government that's championing the cuts to the widely discussed Boycott Zabludowicz (BDZ Group) following PACBI guidelines and boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, as well as to consider compassion for individual needs to meet basic financial obligations - 'My poverty, but not my will, consents.'*
Introductions will include artists representing political groups and unions - Artists for Palestine, BDZ Group, Art Not Oil Coalition and Artists' Union England - before discussion is opened to the room. Critical discussion will include the implications of, and the resistance against, exclusively wealth-based interests, seen by many to engender power through binary and division - by class, race and sex. Here, the important movement is the public one - to challenge corrupt and exploitative business practice and forms of governance - by de-legitimising elite interests.
Related:
Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby
e-flux Conversations Why Boycott the Zabludowicz Art Trust?
Verso - The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Tory Donor Linked to Panama Firm The Times, 17 April 2016
Morgan Quaintance Right Shift
Documentary Take The Money And Run? Ethics, funding and art
Jodi Dean Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel – PACBI Statement
Brian Eno Apollo Magazine
Mute Magazine
Jodi Dean The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change e-flux
Artquest's System Failure - a series of recorded conversations
Previous discussion Decolonise Goldsmiths: Boycott Zabludowicz
Democracy Now! 100 Writers Call on PEN to Reject Israeli Embassy Sponsorship
Arts Strike Now! By BDZ Group
