Art as we know it - or knew it - is not what it used to be. Despite what we are told by gallery guides, museum leaflets, glossy coffee table books and biographies of heroic outsider artists, art is now a commodity like any other. The very idea that art and artists are special, that they can somehow occupy a separate realm of experience from which they can bestow cultural enlightenment, is not only absurd, it now also carries with it the hollow ring of marketing strategy and promotional rhetoric. Let us face facts - art is now a global brand. And like all other brands art brings with it the relentless promise of the new, the unique and the innovative - a promise which belies the fact that the art industry is now primarily concerned with recycling hackneyed clichés and worn out conventions. 'Brand Art' brings us blockbuster shows, publicly funded regeneration 'strategies' and a whirlwind of Biennials which seem unable to do anything other than regurgitate the same old stuff - the bland ubiquity of 'Airport Art', that slick, easily recognizable contemporary convention which looks the same the world over.

Within our globalized neo-liberal economy (a neo-liberal economy which thrives on its ability to encourage and re-absorb acceptable levels of dissent) art and the art industry are badly in need of a 'Napster moment' - a way of re-thinking and re-routing the circuits through which art is produced, distributed, evaluated and consumed. And this 'Napster moment' can no longer hope to somehow happen outside the confines and strictures of our current economically driven models of living - there is simply no outside left, no other place to go. Instead, and perhaps somewhat ironically, artists, critics, curators, writers, thinkers and radicals need to find new forms of autonomy within the structures of a globalized art industry, to carve out spaces which will allow us to rethink ourselves radically, imagine ourselves differently and re-configure our collective futures.

This symposium will explore, examine, scrutinize, critique (and hopefully propose) ideas for micro utopias, subversive strategies, Trojan horses and any other use of contemporary art that, frankly, tries to make a difference.