Introduction: Resituating Art, Community and Citizenship

Abstract

There has been a diversification and dispersal of the ways in which art and community intersect. This chapter introduces the governmental, aesthetic and economic shifts that have enabled this dispersal, suggesting that they present new rationales and forms of value for art in community. These forms of value present the subjects of art in community — artists, arts participants, cultural workers and bureaucrats — with multiple and conflicting strategies of self-making. It is this unstable terrain that gives rise to the provisional citizen, a figure which reflects new kinds of relationships between government, art and everyday practices of the self.