Preliminary Programme

In 1950 leading Dutch entrepreneurs founded Stichting Kunst en Bedrijf (Art and Enterprise Foundation). Their aim was to introduce art into the world of business, to help penniless Dutch artists and to educate and elevate employees. Where initiatives with similar goals in The Netherlands had failed to succeed, Stichting Kunst en Bedrijf managed to gain a large group of members and supporters in the first few years of existence, leading to a relatively successful intervention in the arts world.

Why did leading entrepreneurs in The Netherlands feel the need to start Stichting Kunst en Bedrijf and why were they able to attract such a large group of supporters amongst their entrepreneurial colleagues? In order to find the motives of these men it is necessary to look at the ideological, economical and societal context. What thoughts and ideas circulated amongst entrepreneurs on the role of art in business and society? What was the need for artists to be helped and employees to be educated? What general role did these men play in after war society?

It would be naive to assume that the ‘love of art’ constituted the sole reason for the Stichting Kunst en Bedrijf. In my presentation, I will argue that for many entrepreneurs art was a means to an end, not the end in itself. Stichting Kunst en Bedrijf was able to connect ideological concepts on art and society with pragmatic visions on doing business successfully. Art was on their mind, but business even more so. (Show less)

Since the 1970s, the presence of contemporary works of art and performances in the university rooms for teaching and research has become a generally accepted cultural and social phenomenon, in particular in the U.S.A. and Northern Europe. Also in Italy contemporary art was aligned with university activities, implemented in the rise of seminal museums, usually devoted to ‘laboratory experiments’. The Bocconi University in Milan, the universities of Trieste and Salerno, and the Second University of Naples in Santa Maria Capua Vetere are cases in point.
My paper analyzes university museums and collections of contemporary art in Italy, and focuses on the initiatives and proposals for a dialogue between contemporary art, the university and society, that aimed at an integration of research, teaching and the wider audience. (Show less)

In most publications on corporate art collections, little emphasis is put on the context in which the collections were established. Yet the historical context in which corporate art collections came into being, is often crucial to understanding their origins and development. I will use the history of the French car manufacturer Renault’s artistic initiatives, which eventually led to the establishment of a corporate art collection, to illustrate this idea. By analyzing the history of these artistic initiatives through a social-industrial perspective, I will make clear that they had a thoroughly social character.
I will begin my exposition by showing that in the late sixties, factory workers were largely unsatisfied with their working environment. In previous years, the working conditions in factories had severely changed. There were two main areas of change: 1) the standardisation of labour in regard to norms of productivity, budget and speed; and 2) the division of labour, which separated the factory worker from the end product. This working situation resulted in a deep dissatisfaction of the factory workers, who felt that they were being exploited. The feeling of dissatisfaction was widely shared and finally led to mass strikes that lasted for several months in 1968. The strikes at the Renault factories played a pivotal role in this development.
After describing this broader social-industrial context, I will argue that Renault developed several initiatives in order to appease its factory workers and provide them with a new perspective in reaction to the strikes. One of these initiatives consisted of introducing art into the factory. The art was not merely introduced to brighten up the workplace. Artists themselves were invited to create art with the tools that were available in the factories and the factory workers assisted them with this process, so that the artist’s creativity could spill over to the factory workers and thus raise their spirits.
Renault’s artistic initiatives eventually led to the establishment of a corporate art collection that exists up till this day. Neither the art collection nor the artistic initiatives from which the collection stems can be properly understood without their social and historical context. (Show less)