Things, practices & policies:Relationality and the early stages of the international promotion of Dutch design, 1920s–1970s

This article takes a practice theory approach to explore the little-known history of the Dutch government practices that, between the early 1920s and mid 1970s, preceded explicit Dutch international cultural policy in organizing the promotion of the Dutch arts abroad. Advancing from an understanding of international cultural policy as a ‘hybrid’ (socio-material) practice of meaning production, it examines how those government agencies defined ‘Dutchness’ and ‘design’, and how the specificities of the things being promoted influenced those definitions. From this detailed empirical study, I prop... Mehr ...