A Critical Investigation into the Impact of Neoliberalism on the Production and Consumption of Art: The Case of the Istanbul and Liverpool Biennials

Genc, Eda Aylin (2020) A Critical Investigation into the Impact of Neoliberalism on the Production and Consumption of Art: The Case of the Istanbul and Liverpool Biennials. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Biennial culture plays a key role in the global transformation of cultural production and the urban experience in a neoliberal age. By focusing on the 15th Istanbul and 10th Liverpool Biennials, the research seeks to interrogate biennials as evocative and critical sites where market, state, and community actors construct and negotiate the processes of neoliberalism. Biennials revitalise the city through new mediums of display: they experiment with places, forms, and technologies that stimulate forms of spectacularisation. Based on the data collected from media analysis, participant observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups, the thesis contends that biennials are discursive spaces in which the tensions between neoliberalism and cultural production are played out. The thesis develops the notion of the ‘arts milieu’ as a means of better understanding the diverse range of factors that impinge upon the production and consumption of biennials in Istanbul and Liverpool. In doing so, it seeks to generate a critically balanced socio-political approach to biennial models that is better equipped to understand the complexities of cultural production at a time of anxiety and uncertainty than is conventionally allowed for in a single case study model. The thesis concludes with the contention that biennials operate as complex and often paradoxical glocal spaces which are complex and often paradoxical discursive spaces that simultaneously grease the wheels of neoliberal capitalism. It is suggested, on this basis, that a comparative approach might better facilitate the opening up of a critical space in which cultural policy can offer a more sophisticated means of critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the arts world.