The agonistic politics of invitation: narrating moments of cultural policy interventions in Berlin, New York, and Vancouver

This paper unpacks different modalities of urban cultural governance through a lens of agonistic conflict. It examines how invitations extended by local authorities such as arts administrators, councils, and arms-length advisory bodies to individual artists and collective artist-led organizations surface a range of conflicts that can shape cultural policy change, design, and implementation. Situated between invited and uninvited policy interventions, what this paper terms the agonistic politics of invitation, complexity is added to by understanding seemingly failed attempts at urban cultural policy collaboration. By addressing the multiple imperatives that underly invitations, this paper underscores how the scope, timing, and resources of invitations limits how artists are ‘given’ voice in the enactment of cultural policy change. Three empirical case studies of urban cultural political activism are straddled from Germany, Canada, and the United States: (1) Berlin’s trans-disciplinary activism by the Koalition der Freien Szene to counter the socio-spatial precarities of the independent cultural scene; (2) Vancouver’s municipally commissioned public art call to historically reconcile the century-long discrimination of Chinese Canadians that elicited fractured responses from street artists, business associations, and local community associations; and (3) New York City’s People’s Cultural Plan as a counter-formation to the racial inequities remaining in the municipal Cultural Plan. Ultimately, the paper contributes to interdisciplinary cultural policy scholarship the notion that political agency for artists may be found within the narration of invitations.