Conciliating Between Polities: A Pragmatic Study on Contemporary Visual Artists in the Netherlands

Literature suggests that there is a presiding romanticized notion of what it is to be an artist, where they encompass the charismatic myth and thus use an aesthetic logic as the guide to make artwork. With today’s evolving post-industrial society, the traditional art career is of question, and for it to sustain itself in a modern-day context, literature indicates artists must conciliate between two forms of (non) mutually exclusive logics – the “aesthetic” and “market” logic. There are numerous factors that to extent provoke a conciliation process between these two polities, such as the role of the art academy, artistic labor markets, private versus public funding, and the relationships between artists and selling. Thus, via qualitative semi-structured interviews, a thematic analytical tool and a pragmatic sociological perspective, this study sets foot into understanding, how do contemporary visual artists in the Netherlands conciliate between the market and aesthetic logic, since graduating from a fine arts academy.