A working-class artist is something to be

The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them. It takes as its focus the filmmaker Alan Clarke and the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who were at the height of their success in the 1980s. It also considers the writers Darren McGarvey and Nathalie Olah, whose work has achieved prominence in recent years. It is through this focus I hope to demonstrate the long continuum of challenges for working-class creatives. This article also considers how, on the occasions when they are allowed the space they deserve, working-class artists have created powerful shifts in cultural production. Finally, it details some of the changes needed for working-class people to be able to take their rightful place in contributing to cultural life and the societal risks involved if they are denied that place.

Ablutionary Urbanisms: Water Infrastructures, Cultural Production and Charitable Dispensation

With interest in advancing inclusive urban landscapes and guided by principles of social and cultural sustainability, this essay speculates as to localized water infrastructures as “ablutionary urbanisms,” important forms of contemporary design expression in a context of rapid growth, widening inequalities, climate change and lack of resilience. It derives inspiration from vernacular precedents in advocating for an integrated, decentralized approach to addressing current urban water challenges. It explores the contemporary relevance of the sabil, a prominent civic feature of Islamic cities intended for the charitable dispensation of water. More specifically, this essay considers the contemporary relevance and potency of the sabil-kuttab, a hybrid building type unique to the city of Cairo in which a school (kuttab) sits atop a sabil. Such a type offers helpful guidance in devising principles and precepts relevant to contemporary infrastructural design in that: (1) it offers encouragement to advocate for distributed urban water systems as civically prominent elements of cities, particularly as these systems combine with other important community-focused programmatic features; and (2) given a reimagining of urban water systems as critical forms of cultural production, it offers encouragement for interdisciplinary teams to commit to the task of infrastructure planning as a promising locus of integrative design.

Return of Fandom in the Digital Age With the Rise of Social Media

In the digital age, the rise of social media has enabled the fan culture transitioning from “static” consumption to “dynamic” interaction. This is not only a result of the advancement of ICTs, but also a shift in digital communication driven by participatory culture. This chapter explores why social media in digital age have such a profound impact upon fandom. In particular, what is new with these fan communities that social media has done so much to enable. There is a blurring in the lines between fandom producers and consumers in the participatory fandom. Given the new forms of cultural production, fan culture has been enabled by social media and is more powerful than it was ever before. Finally, how the changing relationships between fans and producers have redefined the fandom economy.

Production of Aesthetic Tastes and Creativity Education of Indonesian Glass Painting Artists

This study aims to find the repertoire of aesthetic taste as a creative act and its relation to symbolic power in the arena of Indonesian cultural production of glass painting. The study used a qualitative approach with a phenomenological design. Data collection used in-depth interviews, participant observation, individual life’s history, and document examination. Data analysis used interpretive phenomenological analysis. The study finds five aesthetic taste repertoires that include: (1) the aesthetic taste of the palace which is characterized by the symbolic decorative visualization of calligraphy pictographs of petarekatan with wadasan and mega mendung ornaments; (2) the taste of strengthening cultural identity is marked by the symbolic decorative visualization of a traditional sourcebook for puppet shadow objects with wadasan and mega mendung ornaments; (3) the taste of traditional renewal is characterized by liberating expressive decorative visualizations; (4) the taste of cultural revitalization is characterized by decorative visualization of the superiority of tradition which is involute; and (5) the taste of marginalized community is characterized by the simplicity of traditional object visualizations. The five aesthetic tastes carry a decorative expression style with an interpretation of tradition based on the cultural capital of the artists. The production of aesthetic taste cannot fully be used to classify the social class structure of appreciators but is related to the identity of the cultural capital they have. The production of aesthetic taste is a creative education model that responds to the doxa of symbolic power in the form of orthodox or heterodox, resulting in defensive, subversive, defensive-subversive synthesis, and pseudo-subversive strategies, which are fought for legitimacy as symbolic power.

Poetry, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Cinema in Turkey’s 1960s

Using developments in poetry, music, and cinema as case studies, this article examines the relationship between left-wing politics and cultural production during the long 1960s in Turkey. Intellectual and artistic pursuits flourished alongside trade unionism, student activism, peasant organizing, guerrilla movements. This article explores the convergences between militants and artists, arguing for the centrality of culture in the social movements of the period. It focuses on three revealing debates: between the modernist İkinci Yeni poets and young socialist poets, between left-wing protest rockers and supporters of folk music, and between proponents of radical art film and those of cinematic “social realism”.

Le Génie du Nord: Sélection and the Advocacy of a Cosmopolitan Northern Culture

The article discusses the francophone review of art and literature Sélection published in Brussels (1920–22) and Antwerp (1923–33), Belgium, by André de Ridder and Paul-Gustave van Hecke. It takes as its point of departure the concept Le Génie du Nord [The Genius of the North], which was the title of a 1925 book published in Antwerp by De Ridder. The book mainly consists of essays previously published in Sélection between 1923 and 1924. De Ridder argues that France should not claim autonomy in the field of cultural production since throughout the centuries Nordic influence played a central role in its evolution. Although the book attracted little attention from the contemporary press, it offers a novel approach to the Nordic idea through the anticipation of a new classical order that distinguished itself from Southern classicism. While German expressionism is equally renounced, the book proposes a synthetic style — similar to the one that marked the gothic period — that also found expression in the art presented in Sélection. This style furnished a visual model for the invention of a new classical order stemming from the successful mingling of French rationalism with Flemish expressionism, a ‘constructive expressionism’ that became the precondition for a universal Nordic culture. The magazine was supportive of those French and Belgian artists who achieved a combination of the two styles — an ‘eclectic dualism’, in the words of Edmond Picard. Taking the origins of Gothicism and the Nordische Gesellschaft as case points of ideological complexity, the Génie du Nord concept forms an alternative discourse which intervenes in an ongoing art-historical and cultural debate that defines the identity of Sélection.

Knighthoods and Empty Benches: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and the Late Victorian Culture Industry

In locating Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866) in the context of its two subsequent dramatic versions, this article considers how the Victorian culture industry contended with an aggressively expanding market economy. It positions Collins’s work amid an ongoing Victorian debate that was especially prevalent in literary and dramatic periodicals concerning the bifurcated development of English drama and novels. Highlighting how Collins flexibly adapted his writing for the stage in the face of legal, commercial, and artistic pressures strengthens emerging links between the ostensibly discrete fields of novelistic and theatrical writing. The adaptation of novels for the stage is one of the primary areas where developing intellectual property law collided with cultural production, opening up, for writers such as Collins, new avenues to write, produce, and entertain. This article aims to expand on recent studies of the evolving nature of copyright law in the nineteenth century by considering the forms of cultural production that context facilitated. Considering the legal context of these adaptations in concert with, however, and not as ancillary to or separate from, their social and political valences highlights the modes of production that arose despite – or perhaps as a result of – the opaque nature of Victorian intellectual property laws. Wilkie Collins the successful dramatist, as opposed to Wilkie Collins the novelist writing for the stage, emerged in his own right partly due to the copyright contests that initially encouraged him to adapt his novels in the first place.