Conferences at Middlesex and Salford

I’ve been on ‘tour’ in the past week presenting at conferences at the University of Middlesex and the University of Salford. Before doing a quick recap of those, first I’ll introduce what I presented myself. Compared to my previous conference presentations, this is a more rounded analysis of my pilot study because it includes material from the

Artists, expertise and mediation

The work of Bourdieu is useful for thinking about expertise in the art world as a social relation, and this has parallels with other definitions of expertise in other fields that I have used before (Arnoldi, 2007 and Prince, 2010 are examples). Another parallel I found across the literature is the tension between ‘publicness’ and legitimacy; and with social media allowing people to perform expertise in a public way, is this a tension for artists? Finally, I find Bourdieu’s ideas of field useful for conceptualising cultural production, but I argue that within the ensemble of agents and institutions he talks about, the mediating potential of social media platforms, and the corporations behind them, also need to be considered.