Fiddling for Outcomes: Traditional Music, Social Capital, and Arts Policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra-artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so-called 'traditional arts', have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centered on the concepts of 'mutual understanding' and, more recently, 'social capital.' The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term 'social capital' in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu's articulation of the 'forms' of capital and Eagleton's 'ideology of the aesthetic,' the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of 'capital' and 'the aesthetic.'

Study of the images for the Visual Arts Education in Secondary Education textbooks: educational implications

In this paper we present the first data from the research conducted to determine the relationship between traditional visual arts and other forms of visual culture closer to the experiences of high school youth. The hypothesis of this research is that while students are nurtured and live primarily with the images provided by the media culture, their textbooks basically refer to the more traditional art images. The research has been limited to a review and analysis of the most common educational materials for teaching visual arts in high school. After the systematization and analysis of the images appeared in textbooks, we have detected three major types: the artistics, those who belong to media culture and others. The most relevant conclusions indicate that: there are hardly any connections between different types of images, they offer a very traditional view of art and they are far removed from the experiences of young book users.

Artistic proposals of visual arts of Ecuador since the second half of the twentieth century to the present

This article is the result of a research that analyzes the most important artistic proposals of Visual Arts in Ecuador, since the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Through literature review and data collection held in the city of Guayaquil, we could determine their influence and impact on the circuit of contemporary art. The instruments used for data collection were depth interviews that were done to experts in the field. Like surveys of attendees at different artistic events (exhibitions, permanent exhibitions, seminars), allowed to establish the social interests of those proposals. The methodology was mixed approach, quantitative and qualitative data were used.