The "End" of Arts Administration: A Case for Infrastructural Embodiment

Abstract

Abstract: This essay departs from a public dispute between two arts economists wherein one challenges epistemic defaults embedded in US arts administration, management, and policy discourse and the other dismisses her critique through a defense of the status quo. Rather than adjudicate either position, I situate the exchange as a case study in what I call "infrastructural embodiments," acts by which white institutional insiders (beneficiaries of dominant systems) acknowledge or deflect responsibility for structural harm. Following Spade, Gilmore, Lorde, and Rothberg, I call for an end to administrative accounting and its replacement with a corporeal economics attentive to labor's felt costs.