COSMOPOLITAN: adj. 1) having worldwide rather than limited or provincial scope or bearing 2) having wide international sophistication: worldly 3) composed of persons, constituents, or elements from all or many parts of the world
Challenge:
We think that it is very fashionable and almost prestigious now to be cosmopolitan, for example in European cultural funds.
It is probably directly connected with the EU and all the efforts which are made politically to keep this new conglomerate together.
And naturally artists/performing artists are on the for front of the cosmopolitan fashion. Not that it is a negative thing to be fashionable, but a lot of times fashionable tendencies and in this case cosmopolitanism start to be commercialized or shall I say become a capitalistic pursuit. And in art this tendency makes you question if there is still space for artistic values left then.
Image :
Enterprener, nomadic artist, theater maker from Singapore Ong Keng Sen
and his recent project where he chose artists, representing different countries with either cultural or political issues, and organised the presentation of their work in Europe . We saw it in Rotterdam.
He invited Belarus theater, performance artists from Riga, Turkish film maker, Tunisian musicians to name few. The cosmopolitanism of this enterprise is obvious, but what we felt at the presentation of this project was that the unsettling issues (either political,cultural or financial) which each of the participants have in their local context were somewhat exploited and represented in almost commercial way, usually used to sell the new hip gadget for example. It was done probably to fit into the new fashion of being cosmopolitan and thus popular with cultural funding of EU.
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