New Media Ecologies, Old Occupational Subjectivities and Practices: Tensions and Contradictions in Online Crowdfunding for the Arts in the Netherlands

Many artists in Europe now turn to online crowdfunding to fund their creative practices against the backdrop of cuts in state-funded subsidies for the arts. Based on an ethnographic analysis of online crowdfunding in the Netherlands, I suggest that this neoliberal context requires artists to cultivate occupational subjectivities and practices that share a number of dimensions with the occupational subjectivities and practices of artists in 15th-century Europe, which were rejected by Romantic aesthetic theories in the mid-18th century. In that pre-Romantic context, as in today's crowdfunding landscape, artists functioned as people who produce concrete and useful objects that cater to clients’ predilections and whose work can be regulated and remunerated based on extraneously derived and clearly defined quantitative and material parameters. Inasmuch as Romantic aesthetic theories have played an important role in the formation and continued saliency of the values of freedom and autonomy that donors to crowdfunding campaigns (and contributors to other algorithmically mediated forms of participation) are expected to have, the erosion of Romantic normative ideals of creative autonomy and freedom by online crowdfunding for the arts represents a form of hypercapitalist intensification that undermines its own ideological conditions of possibility.