Evaluation Practices in Art Worlds

International Workshop
Social Science Research Center Berlin
November 27-28, 2009

The notion of art worlds has proved to be extremely productive when
studying the ubiquity and pervasiveness of collaborative practices
in the production of artworks and other cultural products in
architecture, design, film, television and the like. Conventions and
decisions have been featured as key elements in these multiple art
worlds. However, relatively little empirical work focuses on actual
evaluation practices, which connect and transform both conventions
and decisions within collaborative projects, and thus shape art
worlds.

Evaluation practices, in the sense used here, are ways of
establishing what counts as valuable and worthy. In art worlds this
certainly involves dealing intensively with the elusiveness of
aesthetic and artistic values, but also with a multiplicity of
evaluation criteria for judging careers, teamwork, collaborations,
social networks, artistic scenes, galleries, places of residence
and work, the studio, outsourcing strategies, fabrication
procedures, tools, materials, and so on. Practices and controversies
regarding the valuable and the worthy are crucial not just regarding
artworks and cultural products, but for the whole socio-material
arrangements of art worlds.

The workshop on "Evaluation practices in art worlds" addresses
these issues and seeks to bring together theoretical, methodological,
and empirical papers in an international gathering. We welcome papers
dealing with issues as the following:

- production and collaboration practices in cultural/creative
industries, and the collective negotiation of what counts as worthy
and as not-worthy,
- cultural scenes and their buzz as a type of worth,
- cultural institutions, and the intermingling of organizational
dynamics and evaluation practices,
- artistic commissions, and the formalization of evaluation
procedures,
- technological devices, and their use for evaluation,
- the specificity of evaluation practices at different sites,
such as the studio, artistic commissions, galleries, museums,
specialized magazines, and the like

All presentations will be held in English.

Please submit a 500-750 words abstract by July 20, 2009 to the
organizers: Ignacio Farías (fariaswzb.eu) and Sophie Mützel
(muetzelwzb.eu).

We will send out notices of acceptance until August 7, 2009. To
facilitate discussions at the actual workshop, we ask for short
papers until November 2, 2009, which will be made available to
workshop participants.

Some funding for travel expenses will be available.