• Korean Association of Arts Management
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• no.50
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• pp.101-146
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• 2019

After the enactment of the Local Culture Promotion Act in 2014, the government has been continuously trying to find the direction of the local culture that reflects the local life and conforms to the local people's emotions. In response to these efforts, the Organizing Committee for the C Region Biennale has uniquely formed the Biennale Artistic Director as a local artist who includes the historical, ecological and emotional characteristics of the C region. Therefore, I sought to explore the perception of the identity and role of the local cultural arts director through the narratives of the research participants who were appointed as the local residents of the C region and the director of the Craft Biennale. For the study, six local cultural arts directors were selected as research participants, and their identity as a local cultural arts director and its role were explored, focusing on their narratives. In this process, various types of data such as photographs, documents, in - depth interviews, and conference materials were collected and narrative was analyzed based on deterministic events. The results of the investigation are as follows. The idea of the identity of the local cultural arts directors was found to be in three directions. First, it is the view that the symbolic role of the artistic supervisory system of the 10 persons guarantees the identity. Second, the identity of local cultural arts directors was recognized as a role to find ways to be localized by developing and debating cultural and artistic discourses in various regions. Third, the participants had a concern and affection for local cultural arts, not one-time but continuous, and recognized it as their identity. The directors who participated in the interviews showed that the discourse of cultural arts in various regions were developed and discussed, and they wanted to find ways to be localized. The roles of local cultural arts directors recognized by research participants in connection with their identity are as follows. First, it should be the subject of systematic and long-term planning that can close the year and connect with the art events of the following year. Second, it should play a role of academic / research that can derive the identity of social and cultural ecological analysis connected with the area. Third, local arts professionals are required to act as cultural brokers, ie local culture professionals, who can create a venue for international cultural exchanges. Research on the form of local government supervision as a mediator of local cultural arts is to find out the origin of the identity of local artists and to establish a methodology for the direction of culture and art as a subject of local people. In addition, there is a need for continued interest and research in providing a reflection on the communication and meaning of the desirable local culture, and suggesting the system for cultivating local cultural arts intermediaries.

• Review of Culture and Economy
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.141-173
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• 2018

In this article, we explore how artistic fame is formed by analyzing antecedents of fame the extent to which the name of an actor or his/her work is positively known by his/her audiences among Korean handicraft artists. Drawing on prior literature on reputation and fame, we clarify the differences between the concept of reputation and the concept of fame and further distinguish three types of reputation among individual artists, depending on its sources expert reputation, market reputation, and peer reputation. We employ the mixed method in this study, in which we first conducted open-end interviews with three kinds of constituents (i.e., critics, market intermediaries, and artists) and then developed and tested the hypotheses derived from the insights we had obtained from the interviews. We further considered the impact of reputational work, defined as the level of effort devoted and activities performed by an artist him(her)self geared toward promoting his(her) work, on artistic fame. We find that there are large differences in factors associated with artistic fame between non elite and elite Korean handicraft artist groups, where elite status is captured by artists' educational background (i.e., Seoul National University and Hongik University, which are considered elite schools in accordance with prior research). Specifically, findings suggest that among non elite status artists, recognition by experts, or what we call expert reputation, acquired through national awards and invitations from prominent exhibitions as well as artists' own reputational work that incurs high cost, such as self-financed exhibition openings, were shown to be highly significant factors associated with artistic fame, which was measured as the number of media exposures related to her/his art work. By contrast, among elite status artists, peer reputation acquired through an artist's institutional affiliations and relatively low cost artists' own reputational work, such as self listing on a highly publicized magazine, were shown to be significant factors associated with fame. Taken together, this paper contributes to research on cultural industries and markets by highlighting the importance of understanding artistic fame not just as the outcome of her/his talent but as the social product that arises at the intersection of actors (artists) and her/his audiences in the social evaluation process.