Artists and collective citizen responsibility

Inaugurated in 1997, the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, gave rise to the term Bilbao Effect to describe the economic transformation of a city effected through regeneration and gentrification. The commodification of culture and new landmark iconic signature buildings by starchitects that ‘house’ this culture, have become the primary features of the processes of the Bilbao Effect in post-industrial cities. In a globally competitive neoliberal economy the state and corporate sector desire to be ‘seen’ commissioning and inhabiting these iconic buildings as a reflection of their financial status and aspirations; this is fictitious value creation based on the adage of speculate to accumulate. These cultural institutions create and sustain a top-down infrastructure of support. Simultaneously property developers ‘follow’ the transitory urban inhabitation of artists – “when the artists start coming, that’s when you want to get in” –, cultivate artists as cultural and commercial capital value asset, commission public art works, and deliver outreach art projects ‘to’ local communities as a form of ‘social good’.

This paper contextualises the session I organised ‘Artist strategies and methods of resistance in the regenerated city’. It offers an examination of the well-established relationship between the arts and urban regeneration and gentrification, and questions its short-term and short-sighted benefits to artists. This paper argues for artists to ‘not fill the gap’ in regeneration processes – to withdraw the cultural and socio-economic endorsement of the neoliberal project – take up collective citizen responsibilities, and propose possible alternate strategies.

This paper presentation was part of the two sessions I initiated and organised for the conference. The title of the session was 'Artist strategies and methods of resistance in the regenerated city'. The session abstract was: 'Urbanism as process and product is the source and profit of capital production. Hence the city, its urban fabric and socio-spatial structure manifest and correlate with its economy. Artists and art have long been at the centre of the economic transformation of the city with a well-established relationship between the arts sector and the private (commercial) sector of urban regeneration and gentrification. This varies from the temporary inhabitation of post-industrial urban areas and buildings under disrepair, as studios, galleries, and sites for temporary art works, through to the flagship tenant status of educational, gallery and museum institutions, and the commissioning of public artworks within urban redevelopment and regeneration projects. Their presence builds a positive image of a cultural ‘creative hub’ that both attracts a different social set and adds value to the area. This added cultural and commercial capital value asset for the developers render art and artists as complicit agents in social and economic injustices and inequalities effected through regeneration and gentrification processes. Their actions valorise the decanting of low-income residents and independent businesses, and help to striate the socio-economic make up of urban areas from which they eventually also end up excluded'.