Supervising the artistic autonomy: arts and the cultural policy in Lithuania

Project idea

This research focuses on the issue of valuation in the artistic practice. It takes its point of departure from the cultural policy dilemma, where the establishment of institutional autonomy (or the arm's length principle) seeks to protect art from political instrumentalism on the one hand, whereas, on the other hand, there stand the issues caused by the art institution's own priorities. Art is subjected to hegemonic decisions about what art and what artists are good, valuable or worthy of funding and representation, which also implies the related risks of elitism, systemic lack of permeability and opacity. The artist is not in a position of power in the institution, because itis not s/he who makes the decisions of representation and financing, nor does s/he form the cultural policy, but it is s/he who generates the product for the institution to operate – the artwork.

This research draws its uniqueness and relevance from the developments around this conflict and the artist’s perspective is at the core of the project. Research will contribute novel data and insights as it will focus on the post-Soviet process in Lithuania that is not sufficiently explored.

The research aims to find the premises that allow the coexistence of both: the principles of democratic society and freedom of self-expression. The research also aims to find out what kind of processual whole is operative in Lithuania, where cultural policy openly declares artistic autonomy, how it protects artistic expression from the political interests of the ruling majority, and how it ensures the democratic values, the freedom of artistic self-expression and the right for representation, and public interest.

Research field: institutional critique or, otherwise, institutional practice (Raunig & Ray, 2009). Research method: Participatory Action Research (PAR), which involves not only action, observation and critical assessment of the collected data, but also seeks a change in practice (Koshy et al. 2010). This performative research is a hybrid of artistic and scientific approaches, and its results will be both artistic and scientific respectively. The research will be carried out from the artist’s perspective and will involve the analysis of the autoethnographic material, the relevant case studies and the scholarship on the questions of cultural policy and administrative theory as well as the regulations and procedures of cultural policy, including the institutional positions, communication and control in Lithuania.

The uniqueness of the research project lies in the fact that this artistic research will be carried out in an institution of scientific research: the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University (IIRPS VU), which will provide an invaluable context for reflections on the epistemic clash within the artistic research itself, primarily because of the kind, method, structure and representation of research. The project will widen the field of institutional practices within the artistic research since it offers an expanded and innovative constellation of elements to institutional critique, and also adds an interdisciplinary perspective to the existing sociopolitical debates on culture politics.