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Artists’ voices in cultural policy: careers, myths and the creative profession after German unification

In this book, Wesner draws on longitudinal, qualitative research to explore how the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the subsequent unification of Germany in 1990 has shaped the identity and work of East German visual artists. Drawing on the knowledge of the book, Wesner also points to preferred cultural policy agendas that accommodate to artist’s needs. Using a grounded theory approach with a phenomenological focus on the narrative constructions of the artists, Wesner conceptualises myth, memory, and identity as important markers of the specificity of artistic professionalism. To understand the specificity of artists’ careers, Wesner extends established theories of myth and identity to memory, aspects which hitherto has not been sufficiently acknowledged by current cultural policy schemes. The failure of understanding the formation of artist’s careers is what prompts the title of the book, stressing the need for ‘deep listening’ to artist’s voices (p. 4). Wesner points to three reasons for the importance of artist’s voices; first, to avoid misunderstandings that lead to the kind of antipathy that explains the surge of protest votes from far-right parties. Secondly, current research interest in labour in the creative industries and its focus on precarity that does not fully capture the life, identity and career of artists in the traditional sense. Thirdly, to redirect focus to works of art and the artist as producer. Wesner’s study is based on a rich body of material comprising interviews with artists in Saxony acquired during two periods, 1996–2001, and 2013–2014. Thus, the analysis represents a double retrospect; not before and after the unification of Germany but after and long after. Ideally, the material would have captured the viewpoints of the respondents before and after the unification but since the study considers the memory-making of the process of unification as a theoretical point of view, the points of collecting data pose no analytical problem. The concept of myth denotes the understandings of self and work the artist needs to persevere in career development, earlier theorised by researchers such as Becker ([1984] 2008), Beech (2015), and Røyseng, Mangset, and Spord Borgen (2007). Before, during, and after the unification of East and West Germany, mythic formations of artists shifted from artistic/ideological to political/ charismatic to artistic/entrepreneurial. The example of the Bilderstreit dispute highlights the issue of conflicting memories and the struggle for GDR artists not to be neglected and misrepresented in art history.