Lidenskap eller levebrød? (Passion or professionalism?)

This conference approached the overarching thematic of the project – the relationship between the historic regime of dilettantism and the increasing demand for professionalism in the arts on the brink of the nineteenth century. Dilettantism and amateurism had little room in the new era of aesthetic autonomy.

The project owners had invited scholars to reflect on the preconditions for the changes in the fields of art that took place around 1800, both factors of a more general kind and those being specific for the individual disciplines. Several aspects were covered during the conference; institutional factors, economic and judicial developments, gender, sociability, and philosophical issues. The problematic is, of course, an European one (and the contributors presented cases from Paris, Gothenburg, Leipzig ...), but at this stage of the project, the hosts chose to have a conference in Norwegian/Scandinavian. This gave the project the possibility of "rethinking" some well known traits and phenomena from a rather limitied and cultural homogenous geographical area through the lense of the dichotomy dilettantism/professionalism. 

Among the contributors were professor Marie-Theres Federhofer, musicologist Jørgen Hesselager, Ibsen scholar Jon Nygaard, and theatre historian Thoralf Berg. The conference resulted in the 2015 anthology Lidenskap eller levebrød?