Convenor:
Stephen Foster and Oliver Sumner, John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ. Tel 01703 592158; Fax 01703 594192. sumner@soton.ac.uk.
The impact of the British state upon the production and understanding of the visual arts since 1945 has been relatively little examined. Themes addressed will include state enterprise and opportunism, centralism and regionalism, prescription and support, as they arise from party political policy for the arts, funding criteria and mechanisms, the activities of the Regional Arts Boards and the recent impact of the National Lottery. The particular relationship between state guidance and control, and the production of contemporary art in the 1990s, might form a focus of inquiry.

• Nicholas Webb (Open University) Art and British Politics Since the 1960s
• Chin-tao Wu (University of East Anglia) Guardians of Enterprise Culture: Art Trustees in the 1980s
• Anna Harding (Goldsmiths College) Jumping Through Hoops: Funding Criteria, Value Judgements and 'New Circus'
• Andrew Brighton (Tate Gallery) State Kitsch: the Social, Political and Aesthetic Origins, Assumptions and Consequences of 'Art for Everyone'.
• Mary Beale (Government Art Collection) The Changing Art of Government
• Randal Rhodes (University of Frostburg, Maryland) Fashioning, Wrapping and Shrouding the Dandiacal Body