This mid-length narrative essay tries to make an accessible case for a critical framework we might use when thinking about the overlaps between libraries and art, and artworks that are libraries, focussing on the different degrees to which such porjects manage to pose a double-barrelled question, challenging our ideas about what a library or artwork might be, separately or togther.
This essay summarises 15+ years of work I have done on the topic. My particular focus has always been on the relationship between public libraries and public art and art galleries, primarily in a British-centric history of libray culture, an issue made urgent by the shared horrors of neoliberal civic ideas that are crushing both in the UK.
The Related Entries links can point you to more work on the topic.
From the essay:
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I am chipping away at this essay right after the UK general election. New PM Keir Starmer has just promised a government built on decency and a commitment to public service, qualities more readily associated with civic library culture than Parliamentary life since the Public Libraries Act of 1850. Starmer has a lot to do. One headline in this weekend’s Observer reads, ‘End of the librarian? Council cuts and new tech push profession to the brink’. Public libraries have been closed or stripped with a numbing indifference by local authorities trapped by successive governments that have been caught between the twin death drives of neoliberal state economics: excessive borrowing and austerity measures.
Weathering this storm has been too much for many library networks. The same storm will be too much for many public art galleries, too. Everyday life is repeatedly teaching us that the all-engulfing ‘permacrisis’ is, in no small part, a wholesale crisis of publicness. I cannot get an NHS dentist, trust the security of the pension pot I am obliged to pay into, or vote in my constituency for a meaningful alternative to centrist candidates. The current civic sphere distorts rather than reflects the shared future many would like to contribute towards.
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The full article can be read here.
