On Thursday 22 May 2014, Anna van Dillen will defend her PhD thesis "What Happened to Autonomy?"
"What Happened to Autonomy? Visual art practices in the creative industries era."
Supervisor is Professor Susanne Janssen, co-promoter is Dr. Pascal Gielen.
Time and location: The PhD Defense will take place in the Senate Hall of the Woudestein campus of the Erasmus University Rotterdam at 13:30hrs.
About the PhD thesis
This thesis concerns the autonomy of visual artists in an era of a booming creative economy and simultaneously declining governmental support for the arts and culture. The research is particularly directed toward the concept of autonomy. On the one hand, there is social autonomy, which can be deduced from the level of autonomy that the field of cultural production has as such, relative to the dominant field of power (politics and economics). On the other hand, there is artistic autonomy, which refers to the level of autonomy individual artists have in their artistic practices. Both can be determined by investigating overall tendencies in the practices and perceptions of the collective of artists. While there are a significant number of artists who can be pinned to either one of the opposing poles, it is exactly the in-between place that can help to determine potential value shifts within the art world. As political and economic restraints have been put on the field of cultural production from the outside, the question must be about the effect this has on the inside. By looking at the group of artists that engages in both autonomous production and more commercial applied art production as part of their multiple jobholding practices, it is possible to make distinctions.
About Anna van Dillen
Anna van Dillen (1983) completed a Bachelor of Arts in European Studies in 2006, and a subsequent Master of Arts and Heritage: Cultural management,policy and education (with distinction / Cum Laude) in 2007 at Maastricht University. Her focus within the interdisciplinary studies became the field of cultural sociology. In 2007 she started her doctoral thesis as an external PhD candidate to the Erasmus University Rotterdam at the Department of History, Culture and Communication under the supervision of Prof. dr. Susanne Janssen and Dr. Pascal Gielen (RUG). Next to her research, she was employed as a researcher, lecturer and supervisor at Fontys School of Art, Tilburg.
After finishing her PhD research, she left the academic world in order to work as a consultant.