Between the cracks

This thesis discusses the ways in which governmental funding affects the artistic careers and working experiences of emerging interdisciplinary artists in the Netherlands. Given the lack of scholarly research on interdisciplinarity and its intersection with state-driven austerity within the Dutch cultural sector, I trace the insidious ways in which state funding is profoundly changing how artists relate to the art field, their practices, and themselves, teasing out its disciplinary effect on genre as an instrument of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on interviews with Netherlands-based emerging interdisciplinary artists, I map out how austerity politics and increasing professionalisation of the Dutch cultural sector condition interdisciplinary artists to a life of precariousness. Notably, I foreground issues around the intersection of interdisciplinarity and funding, revealing how experiences of austerity are not universal. Rather, I bring to the fore discrepancies stemming from contrasting perspectives of governmental funding as a normative instrument that regulates the aesthetic dimension of cultural production, namely, in terms of genre. I tease out two clusters of interdisciplinary artists, enacting different notions of interdisciplinarity: The lingering romantic artists, committed to ‘real’ interdisciplinary practice; and the new ideal artists, endorsing the state-prescribed progressive language of new media as synonymous with interdisciplinarity. Crucially, my discussion highlights how state-prescribed conventions of interdisciplinarity endorse neoliberalism’s focus on progress and technological innovation. Challenging the universalist view of cultural workers as ideal entrepreneurial subjects, my discussion of emerging interdisciplinary artists’ archetypes ties in with broader debates beyond the field of sociology of arts and culture on the rise of a new model of ideal worker. Most crucially, I foreground the ‘new ideal artist’ as a new model of ideal worker, linking these debates to one around aesthetics. That is, I reveal how this archetype is prototyping frameworks for cementing neoliberalism’s rule over the production of culture across disciplines and fields. Moving beyond the narrow view of austerity solely as an economic phenomenon, this paper expands the debate on subjectivities under neoliberal ideology, contributes to growing literature on archetypes of post-welfare ideal worker, and specifically advances understandings about cultural production and its regulation.