A contested idea

Co-creation’s neoliberal roots

Co-creation is an increasingly widely used term but, as my research has shown, it is given a wide range of meanings with an equally wide range of purposes. Some of those are entirely at odds with what many people working in participatory art believe to be their ethos. So, the academic literature says that co-creation exists:

This is controlling language in which people are ‘allowed’ to engage and participate in the design of value based on their experiences: who benefits from that value is an obvious but unanswered question. The same authors go on to claim that:

Co-creation is a slippery, contested idea that is widely open to manipulation. Perhaps its contemporary apogee is social media, in which people participate in providing content that others control through algorithms, making it easier to extract money from them and others without appearing to do so. 

One task of A Selfless Art is to deconstruct this pleasant sounding term so that it can be defined as real, tough and with worthwhile values of its own. 

‘We’re here because we’re here’, Shetland 2016

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