Quality: New Demands For Activating Creative Capacity and Seeing It In a Broader Sense

New participation-based methods, together with the need to incorporate administrative skills into professional artistic practice, demand a fresh look at artistic quality.

Direct and personal involvement is the key to a more responsible future, and it’s not just a question of sustainability, but also of our relationships with each other and with the society around us. This is the essence of new types of platforms, movements and collectives that borrow from activist and community-based groups and challenge the rationales and lifestyles of the majority. By opening up interdisciplinary and aesthetic experiences, art is used in these contexts to train citizens for a more responsible future. Here, creative potential and creativity are seen as something that needs to be activated in all of us, in order for us to learn new ways of being in and understanding the world.

The non-artistic artist life

The requirement to incorporate more “non-artistic” competencies challenges the understanding of artistic quality as a universal category. In parallel with citizen engagement, the signals also provide examples of how performing artists need to increasingly embrace non-artistic tools such as project management, leadership and fund-raising as an indispensable part of their everyday routine and professional artistic practice.

The ability to master the balance between the world of art and skills drawn from the external environment is increasingly the key to obtaining financial support, and raises the question of what the real quality of artistic work consists of. On the one hand, there are alternative ways of being an artist – while on the other, new economic gatekeepers have arisen, and a need for constant development outside the traditional core of artistic practice.