U/Skrevne regler

Un/Written Rules: An investigation of the cultural political foundation, the administrative framework, and the artistic legitimacy of embellishment projects under the Art Circular investigates the complex connection between the political, managerial and artistic aspects of the Danish embellishment scheme and their mutual impact on each other since the establishment of the Danish Arts Foundation in 1956 and the Art Circular in 1983.

The thesis examines the relationship between official objectives, procedures and definitions and unofficial ideals and practices. Thus, the analysis of the values, practices and notions of art, previously shaping the 1,5 % scheme and currently informing it, is based on a broad variety of sources from laws, guidelines and evaluations through interviews and case studies to art works and art theory.

The thesis is structured in three parts: The first part maps and analyzes the wording, history and current administrative practices of the Art Circular, concluding, among other things, that the circular today is schizophrenically positioned between the original welfare state intentions of the embellishment scheme and the current competition state rationale. The first part also questions the legitimacy of the current decentralized management structure with the Danish Building and Property Agency, the Danish Defense Estate and Infrastructure Organization and the Danish Arts Foundation as main actors, which, in spite of certain strengths, on an overall level is characterized by a lack of transparency and unequal project conditions.

Through a linguistic discourse analysis, the second part investigates the Art Circular's continually contested core concept of "artistic embellishment". It demonstrates, on the one hand, a hegemonic linguistic "integration" discourse at the present, and, on the other, a decisive change of discourse taking place in the 1990s. From being the term used in general for art outside the white cube at the intersection between visual arts and architecture, at this point "embellishment" was gradually reduced to designate an area at the periphery of the field of art in public space.

In the third section the most recently realized projects under the Art Circular are analyzed as discursive articulations in their own right, leading to the conclusion that their specific content and form position the works within a 20th century modernist paradigm and outside the prevailing theoretical discourse on art in public space, informed by ideas on radical democracy. Using discourse theory as a methodological approach, the thesis shows how embellishment

Un/Written Rules: An investigation of the cultural political foundation, the administrative framework, and the artistic legitimacy of embellishment projects under the Art Circular investigates the complex connection between the political, managerial and artistic aspects of the Danish embellishment scheme and their mutual impact on each other since the establishment of the Danish Arts Foundation in 1956 and the Art Circular in 1983. The thesis examines the relationship between official objectives, procedures and definitions and unofficial ideals and practices. Thus, the analysis of the values, practices and notions of art, previously shaping the 1,5 % scheme and currently informing it, is based on a broad variety of sources from laws, guidelines and evaluations through interviews and case studies to art works and art theory.

The thesis is structured in three parts: The first part maps and analyzes the wording, history and current administrative practices of the Art Circular, concluding, among other things, that the circular today is schizophrenically positioned between the original welfare state intentions of the embellishment scheme and the current competition state rationale. The first part also questions the legitimacy of the current decentralized management structure with the Danish Building and Property Agency, the Danish Defense Estate and Infrastructure Organization and the Danish Arts Foundation as main actors, which, in spite of certain strengths, on an overall level is characterized by a lack of transparency and unequal project conditions.

Through a linguistic discourse analysis, the second part investigates the Art Circular's continually contested core concept of "artistic embellishment". It demonstrates, on the one hand, a hegemonic linguistic "integration" discourse at the present, and, on the other, a decisive change of discourse taking place in the 1990s. From being the term used in general for art outside the white cube at the intersection between visual arts and architecture, at this point "embellishment" was gradually reduced to designate an area at the periphery of the field of art in public space. In the third section the most recently realized projects under the Art Circular are analyzed as discursive articulations in their own right, leading to the conclusion that their specific
content and form position the works within a 20th century modernist paradigm and outside the prevailing theoretical discourse on art in public space, informed by ideas on radical democracy. Using discourse theory as a methodological approach, the thesis shows how embellishment