Provinciality and the Art World: The Midland Group 1961- 1977

This paper takes as its focus the Midland Group Gallery in order to first, make a case for the consideration of the geographies of art galleries. Second, highlight the importance of galleries in the context of cultural geographies of the sixties. Third, discuss the role of provinciality in the operation of art worlds. In so doing it explicates one set of geographies surrounding the gallery – those of the local, regional and international networks that connected to produce art works and art space. It reveals how the interactions between places and practices outside of metropolitan and regional hierarchies provides a more nuanced insight into how art worlds operated during the sixties, a period of growing internationalism of art, and how contested definitions of the provincial played an integral role in this. The paper charts the operations of the Midland Group Gallery and the spaces that it occupied to demonstrate how it was representative of a post-war discourse of provincialism and a corresponding re-evaluation of regional cultural activity

Regional imaginaries of governance agencies: practising the region of South West Britain

publication-status: AcceptedHarvey D C, Hawkins H, Thomas N J, 2011. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A 43(2) 470 – 486 DOI: 10.1068/a43380Copyright © 2011 PionChanges in government and governmentality in the UK have witnessed what has been termed a ‘regional renaissance’ over the last decade. This has led to an increase in the number of offices, institutions and agencies operating with a regional remit that is based upon a notion of fixed territorial containers. One sector that has increasingly been brought into the orbit of the new regional policy framework is that of the creative industries, and research is required in order to understand how creative industry governance agencies imagine and interpret the regional spaces that they administer. Notwithstanding the supposedly agreed upon and bounded nature of the territories over which they have competence, we find that personnel working within these regional bodies negotiate and imagine regional space in a number of ways. Drawing on empirical work with three creative governance agencies in the South West of Britain, we consider a range of dynamic and sometimes contradictory understandings of regional space as practised through their policy development and implementation. The paper traces how the practice of creative industry governance challenges the governmentally determined region and, by implication, any territorial unit as a naturally given container that is internally coherent and a discrete space available for governance. In doing so, the paper has broader lessons for effective policy delivery more generally

Globalization and Mixing in the Visual Arts An Empirical Survey of 'High Culture' and Globalization

International audienceWhile there has been an increasing amount of research into globalization since the 1990s, empirical sociological studies in this area remain all too scarce. By analysing specific cases in contemporary visual art, this article shows that the widespread art world discourse on globalization, mixing and the abolition of borders is to a large extent based on illusion. By objectifying the positions occupied by different countries in the field of art, the article brings to light a marked hierarchy that reveals that, beyond the development of international exchanges, the art world still has a clearly defined centre comprising a small number of western countries, among which the US and Germany are pre-eminent, and a vast periphery, comprising all the other states. The specific example empirically analysed here leads to a reconsideration of earlier studies of cultural globalization, most of which are essentially abstract