Shifting Cultural Capital: Kenyan Arts in Digital Spaces.

Abstract

The discourse on African arts has, in the past, been framed by a dialectic between earlier traditions and practices (Kasfir 1999) and contemporary modes that face the problematic question of ‘authenticity’ (Oguibe and Enwezor 1999). More recently, scholars such as Bischoff (2017) and Bristow (2017) have recognized the emergence of so-called African digital arts, in a context where ‘Africa has certainly embraced new technologies, as is prevalent in the rising statistics of mobile phone, smartphone and Internet usage in many parts of the continent’ (Bischoff 2017, p. 261). Alongside this, a growing discussion of the impact of digital tools and technology in the arts and culture in general has moved beyond earlier ontological concerns to socio-political aspects of how these are ‘ dramatically transforming traditional curatorial practice and by extension archival practice, so that we are moving from a gatekeeping model to an open model steeped in digital relationships across global networks and the Internet’ (Giannini and Bowen 2016, p. 237). This chapter focuses on how digital technology impacts further on this discourse by challenging the cultural capital that is typically associated with curatorial practice, the gallery, and the marketplace (Bourdieu 1986) and how digital art practices can challenge notions of authenticity in the discourse on African art. Through a range of cases of Kenyan multi-media artists that operate virtually and physically, and stakeholders such as bloggers, the chapter seeks to identify whether a shift in cultural capital is emerging from popular and subcultural online spaces and the interactions that these bring about.