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Oct 11, 2008
COMMENTS
pick it up and put it down
June 28, 2008, 12:46 pm - ladybeans
I'm trying to create a bank of accounts. How do things look?
---------------------------------------------
National Converence of Media Reform
http://www.freepress.net/conference
Audio/video of the events from 06/06-08/08
---------------------------------------------
Media Matters w/ Bob McChesney 06/22/08 guest is Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason.
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080622.mp3
----------------------------------------------
I just picked this book up tonight. We had to get out of the 101 heatwave in PDX- a are one. So we went to the world's biggest independent bookstore downtown and cooled off. I looked around at used book prices and my husband read a Hunter S Thompson book called 'The Curse of Lono'. Color pictures of Ralph Stedman's work. Really crazy. The book was $60. Out of our price range.
anyhow, looking at the roaster of essay writers for the book, i had to grab it. Chris Spannos, Michael Albert, Stephen Shalom, Cynthis Peters, Robin Hahnel, Tom Wetzel, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Richard Franke, Lydia Sargent and Brian Dominick- among others who I am not familiar, but had great essay titles!
Part 1- Defining Spheres of a Participatory Society
Part 2 - Revolutionizing Everyday Life
Part 3 - Assessing Parecon internationally
Part 4 - Looking Backward, Looking Forward: History's Lessons for the Future
Part 5 - Theory and Practice: Institutions and Movement Building
Part 6 - Moving Toward a Participatory Society
Incidentally I asked Brian and Michael on the Z Communication forum boards about why popular musicians haven't been organized with a slew of them coming off their contracts and being so disillusioned by the corporate model that engulfs all of us. I found the following essay in the book- so i kinda answered my own question- but this essay and my comments on the board are similar yet different. I'll have to get back to y'all when they respond.
I am adding the dedication for the book because it's just a great dedication. Probably the best one I've seen.
Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century
Edited by Chris Spannos
Dedication
This book is dedicated...
To the innocence, curiosity, and the wonder of early childhood, before society's defining institutions warp and corrupt.
To youth resistance and rebellion -- another world is possible!
To all adults struggling to change the world, living lives knowing everything is broken while new and better lives are waiting.
To older foils and those before them whose struggles offer lessons so we may stand on their shoulders to grab victory.
To human consciousness and potential waiting within, sometimes impatiently, for liberation.
To all revolutionaries everywhere and the lessons their efforts offer so we may win a new society and world.
....
Chapter 6
A Call to Artists: Support Parecon
by Jerry Fresia
A history of art over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of the decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products - and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.
I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.
With this in mind, let the following commentary serve as a call to artists to endorse the idea of a participatory economy and in particular the institutional design laid out in Michael Albert's Parecon: Life After Capitalism.
Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about "content" and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.
A commentary and Call to Action
For the past fifteen years I have made my living entirely as a visual artist. I have been able to do this only by exhibiting outside of the institutionalized academic-museum-gallery system. I exhibited outdoors in the parks of San Francisco so I could control the distribution of my work and enjoy direct and personal relationships with my audience. Additionally, for a ten-year period, I worked with public and private officials and artists in reinventing this mode of exhibition to the point where it was something quite unexpectedly professional, wonderful, enchanting, and lucrative - as opposed to the conventional "swap meet" set of exhibitions that one might expect to find outside established venues.
However, the model was impossible to sustain for a simple reason. Too few artists wanted to take time from their work to build an organization. Most artists had only one set of interests: making their art and promoting themselves within established institutions. In other words, the dominant modus operandi of the artist, as I know it, is the artist as individual and as entrepreneur. However, within the art industry today, entrepreneurialism cannot lead to ownership of any consequence. Decision making with regard to distribution (exhibition), what counts as important art, and what gets funded is not in our hands no matter how "good" any of our art might be. The decisions that structure our life chances are in the hands of an investor class, an oligarchy, that exercises substantial influence over boards of trustees, both academic and museum, non-profit foundations, public art commissions, and the galleries and auction houses that follow in their wake.
The individualist/entrepreneurial approach cannot lead but to utter dependency - a dependency on those who own galleries and control exhibition spaces, on critics, on those who control foundations or access to education, on those who direct competitions, on curators. This list is endless. And because we have become so thoroughly dependent on the institutions within the art industry, we are compelled to adopt as our own the very ideas, assumptions, and practices that the oligarchy uses within those industries that require our marginalization in the first place.
If we provide free inventories to galleries before they take 50 or 60 percent of any sale, we say that that is the nature of things. If the work we make following art school is not salable it is because the public is uneducated. If the cognoscenti define important work as conceptual - that is, a non visual visual art - we make an effort to understand, not to challenge. When we are told that only twelve of us in the city of nearly one million people (San Francisco) can make a living in the gallery system because we have chosen a difficult way of life, we believe it.
It gets worse. According to these cognoscenti, art is not a thing of value, it is the thing of value. We produce that incredibly valuable thing and we are tagged as a class of workers with the moniker "starving." And we accept it! Unlike other trained professionals, we have no expectation of having health insurance, a modieum of security, the ability to buy a home, have kids, send them to college, go out to dinner regularly, or even travel comfortably. Instead, our expectation is that we will have a second job or a partner to support us in order to do the work that transforms the filthy rich into better people.
My argument is that we toil in isolation and buy into the notion that the average person cannot really understand our noble sacrifice, or that it is beyond the intelligence and aesthetic sensibility of the public, because we have lost touch with the history of our profession, particularly as it relates to our life outside the studio. In order to become free artists we need to become free from the institutions that require our marginalization. We need to get back into the game of defining art ourselves, of teaching art independently of universities, of building movement with other members of the community and other artists, of controlling exhibitions, and enjoying direct and personal relationships with the public that artists of Michelangelo to the Abstract Expressionist enjoyed. In short, we need to build alternative institutions that permit us to have say over what we do, what we make, and how it is distributed.
Let's take a look, then, at parecon, a well-thought-out proposal for a participatory economy that would better serve the interests of artists as artists and as living, breathing members of communities. Briefly, I would like to touch upon the concepts of Worker Councils, Balanced Job Complexes, and Participatory Planning, and how each might impact our lives.
Worker Councils
Another word for participatory economics is democracy. Together with other artists and members of the community in which we live, we would decide what work would be produced and for what purpose. I can hear artists screaming bloody murder as I type: we don't want a "big brother" telling us what to do. Agreed. But we haven't been doing too well with the director either. In fact, it would be hypocritical to inveigh against a worker's council without first knowing something about how we are bossed around right now. Consider this, following World War II, a tiny handful of economic elites, by virtue of their right as property owners, together with their political and cultural allies, were able to direct and shape the lives of visual artists in the following ways:
* Important art and important careers - read a modicum of remuneration - had to be divorced from European influences.
* Art that suggested political commentary had to be displaced by art that suggested psychological angst - read abstraction.
* The teaching of art had to be removed from the studio and jurisdiction of the master artist and placed into the hands of corporate representatives or boards of trustees and into the university.
* The studio itself, once a locus of social and public activity, a place of exhibition and distribution, had to become the studio of the isolated, angst-probing artist. By the 1970's, the studio, as the workplace of the individual artist, was transformed further. It now resembled a factory, where the studio floor was the work site of artists' assistants who followed the direction of artists who in turned collaborated with the investor/collector.
* By the late 1960s painting and easel painting, as far as "important work" was concerned, were declared "dead," thus weakening the individual artist's access to and control over his or her means of production.
The question in this: What is it that we want? With worker councils, we, as participant decision makers, would enjoy far more power over our work and our lives than we have yet experienced.
Balanced Job Complexes
The principle central to this concept is a principle that most artists probably already accept: creative work is the province of every human being. As an artist interested in finding more people responsive to what I do, I find it a terribly exciting possibility that everyone might have the opportunity to engage in creative work themselves. Indeed, if my chances of making a living as a creative person are under assault, as in fact they are, it is in my interest to have involved as many people as is possible in creative work; work not only where workers alo make decisions but work where the creative process is central to the work process.
In helping to design balanced job complexes we would have much to contribute. Our work is not governed by the clock. We make time for reflection. An aesthetic dimension is always paramount. Mind and body are not separate. Could it be a rewarding experience to play a meaningful role helping to construct way of working rooted in the knowledge we possess? Might it be fulfilling to have this kind of ingoing discussion with the broader community? Might it broaden the interest in what we do? Would these types of personal contacts be a welcomed balance to the isolation of the studio?
Besides, artists are already deeply involved in what could be described as a balanced job complex. If we are painters, we are already photographers, web designers, mailing list managers, marketers, promoters, frame-makers, grant writers, and expert application makers. If we have jobs in addition to making art we are even more extended. In a participatory economy, much of the competitive work, such as making applications, might be reduced in favor of teaching and sharing our knowledge of design, color, writing, song, dance, theater, and various other aesthetic considerations with a population who have not had the opportunity, in their everyday lives, to explore the various ways they could creatively and rewardingly accomplish socially useful tasks.
Participatory Planning
Participatory Planning is the negotiation among workers' and consumers' councils that is intended to replace the market system of distribution, a system of distribution based upon price and one's ability to pay. It is important to recognize that while various market relations have existed practically forever, for most of human history social relations (kinship, communal, religious, and political) existed apart from the relationships of buying and selling. But we happen to live in a very unusual period, historically - one where virtually all social relations are embedded within the market, where decision about what we make, who gains access to it, how we live and use our time are determined by the impersonal imperatives of price and profit. But this is an historical anomaly, a convention that we can be changed.
Second, the irony for artists in this regard is that the market relations that we enter in order to gain access to the material means of life are skewed to the advantage of the very wealthy largely because planning mechanisms already have been inserted within the market. But these planning mechanisms, unlike the participatory model that Albert and Hahnel advocate, are exclusionary and elitist. If you have strong misgiving about challenging market forces of distribution, as an artist you ought to be quite upset already. The investors and owners of culture are quite adept as using an array of planning mechanisms - art commissions and auction houses that utilize market forces, for example - to control the goose that lays the golden egg.
The question becomes, If market-planning mechanisms are already in place, why do we permit them to be controlled by a few whose interests run counter to ours? And arguably against the interests of many? If we are the goose that lays the golden egg, how does it come about that our precious golden egg is taken from us? With our cooperation?
My suspicion is that we are too busy making art to take a good look at the institutional matrix that has us by the short hair. One example, along these lines, is our acceptance of one planning mechanism that was designed to mitigate against popular influence in the arts: the public benefit corporation, better known as the non-profit.
Non-profits are planning mechanisms. They are run by community elites, generally with artists representation, for the purpose of protecting culture within a market environment from popularizing influences. The sociologist Paul DiMaggio notes that non-profits, while claiming service to the entire community, actually function to mystify art and separate the community from the world of art and artists. Alice Goldfarb Marquis concurs and points to the "high-art" worlds of museums, operas, and symphonies where financial and social elites use the non-profit planning mechanisms for the same purpose. She notes that this capturing of culture is often accomplished by "pasting an altruistic, morally chase veneer over basically self-serving activities." Wealthy donors and trustees, she explains further, have long aligned themselves with "liberal, reformist intellectuals and critics who see themselves as guardians of high culture" and who has campaigned "against almost every artistic innovation of the past two centuries."
The non-profit as planning instrument by the investor class may be most visible in the creation of "art centers." In the creation of the Lincoln Center in New York City and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, for example, redevelopment interests, together with cultural elites and non-profits, use the rhetoric of public access around art to acquire monopoly control over the distribution of the art product. There "art centers" then become the site for glitzy chic-chic art events in order to anchor the array of upscale hotels, restaurants, and retailers that return competitive dividends to real estate investors. Many of us work with non-profits and do our best to make them function in a way that serves the community. but I ask, Is it not the case that we are always poor? That we are always beseeching the rich? That our non-profits are not dedicated to challenging the starving artist paradigm or amplifying public involvement as decision makers?
Artists today cannot have it both ways. We cannot run from parecon-type market alternatives in the name of artistic freedom and at the same time play our role as sidekicks within existing planning mechanisms that permit the wealthiest among us to direct and control all that we do.
Summary
I am not criticizing the intention of artists. We contribute much to rallies, marches, and numerous exhibitions, plays, music, and stories that inveigh against war and injustice. My concern is that this art spirit is not part of an institutional critique. We need a critique of our institutions so that we can develop a concrete strategy to build new ones. Artists opposed to war, to use on example, might be more effective by using their creative talents to build institutions that make the kind of war in Iraq impossible The good artist and the justice good artists seek cannot exist unless we first create institutions that require both.
Our history is replete with such transformations. While the Impression period is often referred to as the moment where visual art was first ridiculed and later accepted as prescient, let us recall that it was ridiculed not by the unsophisticated masses in need of education but by the educated and powerful whose control over culture had to be eliminated. Impressionism was a frontal assault to artists upon art institutions that, in the words of the rebellious artists, erected artificial barriers between themselves and the public.
Ditto jazz, rock n' roll, and Beethoven. Recall also that Michelangelo said of a statue that is was only by the "light of the public square" that it could be judged. The point is that we as artists are of the public and we are of the community. No better. No worse. And together it is necessary for us to regain control over our lives in order to become the artists we wish to become. Our best chance is to create the institutions necessary to give our voice best purchase. Democratic institutions. Participatory economics. Parecon.
Finally it is important, I believe, to explore further the artistic sensibilities that were widespread one hundred years ago, sensibilities that suggested revolutions required dancing, that suggested that, if what we create is not a better world, what is the point of our work? Creating better institutions, ones in which our voices are heard meaningfully, is both our responsibility and a pragmatic solution. It must also be our art. As Bertlot Brecht said:
Canalising a river
Rafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art."
---------------------------------------------
National Converence of Media Reform
http://www.freepress.net/conference
Audio/video of the events from 06/06-08/08
---------------------------------------------
Media Matters w/ Bob McChesney 06/22/08 guest is Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason.
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080622.mp3
----------------------------------------------
I just picked this book up tonight. We had to get out of the 101 heatwave in PDX- a are one. So we went to the world's biggest independent bookstore downtown and cooled off. I looked around at used book prices and my husband read a Hunter S Thompson book called 'The Curse of Lono'. Color pictures of Ralph Stedman's work. Really crazy. The book was $60. Out of our price range.
anyhow, looking at the roaster of essay writers for the book, i had to grab it. Chris Spannos, Michael Albert, Stephen Shalom, Cynthis Peters, Robin Hahnel, Tom Wetzel, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Richard Franke, Lydia Sargent and Brian Dominick- among others who I am not familiar, but had great essay titles!
Part 1- Defining Spheres of a Participatory Society
Part 2 - Revolutionizing Everyday Life
Part 3 - Assessing Parecon internationally
Part 4 - Looking Backward, Looking Forward: History's Lessons for the Future
Part 5 - Theory and Practice: Institutions and Movement Building
Part 6 - Moving Toward a Participatory Society
Incidentally I asked Brian and Michael on the Z Communication forum boards about why popular musicians haven't been organized with a slew of them coming off their contracts and being so disillusioned by the corporate model that engulfs all of us. I found the following essay in the book- so i kinda answered my own question- but this essay and my comments on the board are similar yet different. I'll have to get back to y'all when they respond.
I am adding the dedication for the book because it's just a great dedication. Probably the best one I've seen.
Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century
Edited by Chris Spannos
Dedication
This book is dedicated...
To the innocence, curiosity, and the wonder of early childhood, before society's defining institutions warp and corrupt.
To youth resistance and rebellion -- another world is possible!
To all adults struggling to change the world, living lives knowing everything is broken while new and better lives are waiting.
To older foils and those before them whose struggles offer lessons so we may stand on their shoulders to grab victory.
To human consciousness and potential waiting within, sometimes impatiently, for liberation.
To all revolutionaries everywhere and the lessons their efforts offer so we may win a new society and world.
....
Chapter 6
A Call to Artists: Support Parecon
by Jerry Fresia
A history of art over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of the decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products - and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.
I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.
With this in mind, let the following commentary serve as a call to artists to endorse the idea of a participatory economy and in particular the institutional design laid out in Michael Albert's Parecon: Life After Capitalism.
Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about "content" and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.
A commentary and Call to Action
For the past fifteen years I have made my living entirely as a visual artist. I have been able to do this only by exhibiting outside of the institutionalized academic-museum-gallery system. I exhibited outdoors in the parks of San Francisco so I could control the distribution of my work and enjoy direct and personal relationships with my audience. Additionally, for a ten-year period, I worked with public and private officials and artists in reinventing this mode of exhibition to the point where it was something quite unexpectedly professional, wonderful, enchanting, and lucrative - as opposed to the conventional "swap meet" set of exhibitions that one might expect to find outside established venues.
However, the model was impossible to sustain for a simple reason. Too few artists wanted to take time from their work to build an organization. Most artists had only one set of interests: making their art and promoting themselves within established institutions. In other words, the dominant modus operandi of the artist, as I know it, is the artist as individual and as entrepreneur. However, within the art industry today, entrepreneurialism cannot lead to ownership of any consequence. Decision making with regard to distribution (exhibition), what counts as important art, and what gets funded is not in our hands no matter how "good" any of our art might be. The decisions that structure our life chances are in the hands of an investor class, an oligarchy, that exercises substantial influence over boards of trustees, both academic and museum, non-profit foundations, public art commissions, and the galleries and auction houses that follow in their wake.
The individualist/entrepreneurial approach cannot lead but to utter dependency - a dependency on those who own galleries and control exhibition spaces, on critics, on those who control foundations or access to education, on those who direct competitions, on curators. This list is endless. And because we have become so thoroughly dependent on the institutions within the art industry, we are compelled to adopt as our own the very ideas, assumptions, and practices that the oligarchy uses within those industries that require our marginalization in the first place.
If we provide free inventories to galleries before they take 50 or 60 percent of any sale, we say that that is the nature of things. If the work we make following art school is not salable it is because the public is uneducated. If the cognoscenti define important work as conceptual - that is, a non visual visual art - we make an effort to understand, not to challenge. When we are told that only twelve of us in the city of nearly one million people (San Francisco) can make a living in the gallery system because we have chosen a difficult way of life, we believe it.
It gets worse. According to these cognoscenti, art is not a thing of value, it is the thing of value. We produce that incredibly valuable thing and we are tagged as a class of workers with the moniker "starving." And we accept it! Unlike other trained professionals, we have no expectation of having health insurance, a modieum of security, the ability to buy a home, have kids, send them to college, go out to dinner regularly, or even travel comfortably. Instead, our expectation is that we will have a second job or a partner to support us in order to do the work that transforms the filthy rich into better people.
My argument is that we toil in isolation and buy into the notion that the average person cannot really understand our noble sacrifice, or that it is beyond the intelligence and aesthetic sensibility of the public, because we have lost touch with the history of our profession, particularly as it relates to our life outside the studio. In order to become free artists we need to become free from the institutions that require our marginalization. We need to get back into the game of defining art ourselves, of teaching art independently of universities, of building movement with other members of the community and other artists, of controlling exhibitions, and enjoying direct and personal relationships with the public that artists of Michelangelo to the Abstract Expressionist enjoyed. In short, we need to build alternative institutions that permit us to have say over what we do, what we make, and how it is distributed.
Let's take a look, then, at parecon, a well-thought-out proposal for a participatory economy that would better serve the interests of artists as artists and as living, breathing members of communities. Briefly, I would like to touch upon the concepts of Worker Councils, Balanced Job Complexes, and Participatory Planning, and how each might impact our lives.
Worker Councils
Another word for participatory economics is democracy. Together with other artists and members of the community in which we live, we would decide what work would be produced and for what purpose. I can hear artists screaming bloody murder as I type: we don't want a "big brother" telling us what to do. Agreed. But we haven't been doing too well with the director either. In fact, it would be hypocritical to inveigh against a worker's council without first knowing something about how we are bossed around right now. Consider this, following World War II, a tiny handful of economic elites, by virtue of their right as property owners, together with their political and cultural allies, were able to direct and shape the lives of visual artists in the following ways:
* Important art and important careers - read a modicum of remuneration - had to be divorced from European influences.
* Art that suggested political commentary had to be displaced by art that suggested psychological angst - read abstraction.
* The teaching of art had to be removed from the studio and jurisdiction of the master artist and placed into the hands of corporate representatives or boards of trustees and into the university.
* The studio itself, once a locus of social and public activity, a place of exhibition and distribution, had to become the studio of the isolated, angst-probing artist. By the 1970's, the studio, as the workplace of the individual artist, was transformed further. It now resembled a factory, where the studio floor was the work site of artists' assistants who followed the direction of artists who in turned collaborated with the investor/collector.
* By the late 1960s painting and easel painting, as far as "important work" was concerned, were declared "dead," thus weakening the individual artist's access to and control over his or her means of production.
The question in this: What is it that we want? With worker councils, we, as participant decision makers, would enjoy far more power over our work and our lives than we have yet experienced.
Balanced Job Complexes
The principle central to this concept is a principle that most artists probably already accept: creative work is the province of every human being. As an artist interested in finding more people responsive to what I do, I find it a terribly exciting possibility that everyone might have the opportunity to engage in creative work themselves. Indeed, if my chances of making a living as a creative person are under assault, as in fact they are, it is in my interest to have involved as many people as is possible in creative work; work not only where workers alo make decisions but work where the creative process is central to the work process.
In helping to design balanced job complexes we would have much to contribute. Our work is not governed by the clock. We make time for reflection. An aesthetic dimension is always paramount. Mind and body are not separate. Could it be a rewarding experience to play a meaningful role helping to construct way of working rooted in the knowledge we possess? Might it be fulfilling to have this kind of ingoing discussion with the broader community? Might it broaden the interest in what we do? Would these types of personal contacts be a welcomed balance to the isolation of the studio?
Besides, artists are already deeply involved in what could be described as a balanced job complex. If we are painters, we are already photographers, web designers, mailing list managers, marketers, promoters, frame-makers, grant writers, and expert application makers. If we have jobs in addition to making art we are even more extended. In a participatory economy, much of the competitive work, such as making applications, might be reduced in favor of teaching and sharing our knowledge of design, color, writing, song, dance, theater, and various other aesthetic considerations with a population who have not had the opportunity, in their everyday lives, to explore the various ways they could creatively and rewardingly accomplish socially useful tasks.
Participatory Planning
Participatory Planning is the negotiation among workers' and consumers' councils that is intended to replace the market system of distribution, a system of distribution based upon price and one's ability to pay. It is important to recognize that while various market relations have existed practically forever, for most of human history social relations (kinship, communal, religious, and political) existed apart from the relationships of buying and selling. But we happen to live in a very unusual period, historically - one where virtually all social relations are embedded within the market, where decision about what we make, who gains access to it, how we live and use our time are determined by the impersonal imperatives of price and profit. But this is an historical anomaly, a convention that we can be changed.
Second, the irony for artists in this regard is that the market relations that we enter in order to gain access to the material means of life are skewed to the advantage of the very wealthy largely because planning mechanisms already have been inserted within the market. But these planning mechanisms, unlike the participatory model that Albert and Hahnel advocate, are exclusionary and elitist. If you have strong misgiving about challenging market forces of distribution, as an artist you ought to be quite upset already. The investors and owners of culture are quite adept as using an array of planning mechanisms - art commissions and auction houses that utilize market forces, for example - to control the goose that lays the golden egg.
The question becomes, If market-planning mechanisms are already in place, why do we permit them to be controlled by a few whose interests run counter to ours? And arguably against the interests of many? If we are the goose that lays the golden egg, how does it come about that our precious golden egg is taken from us? With our cooperation?
My suspicion is that we are too busy making art to take a good look at the institutional matrix that has us by the short hair. One example, along these lines, is our acceptance of one planning mechanism that was designed to mitigate against popular influence in the arts: the public benefit corporation, better known as the non-profit.
Non-profits are planning mechanisms. They are run by community elites, generally with artists representation, for the purpose of protecting culture within a market environment from popularizing influences. The sociologist Paul DiMaggio notes that non-profits, while claiming service to the entire community, actually function to mystify art and separate the community from the world of art and artists. Alice Goldfarb Marquis concurs and points to the "high-art" worlds of museums, operas, and symphonies where financial and social elites use the non-profit planning mechanisms for the same purpose. She notes that this capturing of culture is often accomplished by "pasting an altruistic, morally chase veneer over basically self-serving activities." Wealthy donors and trustees, she explains further, have long aligned themselves with "liberal, reformist intellectuals and critics who see themselves as guardians of high culture" and who has campaigned "against almost every artistic innovation of the past two centuries."
The non-profit as planning instrument by the investor class may be most visible in the creation of "art centers." In the creation of the Lincoln Center in New York City and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, for example, redevelopment interests, together with cultural elites and non-profits, use the rhetoric of public access around art to acquire monopoly control over the distribution of the art product. There "art centers" then become the site for glitzy chic-chic art events in order to anchor the array of upscale hotels, restaurants, and retailers that return competitive dividends to real estate investors. Many of us work with non-profits and do our best to make them function in a way that serves the community. but I ask, Is it not the case that we are always poor? That we are always beseeching the rich? That our non-profits are not dedicated to challenging the starving artist paradigm or amplifying public involvement as decision makers?
Artists today cannot have it both ways. We cannot run from parecon-type market alternatives in the name of artistic freedom and at the same time play our role as sidekicks within existing planning mechanisms that permit the wealthiest among us to direct and control all that we do.
Summary
I am not criticizing the intention of artists. We contribute much to rallies, marches, and numerous exhibitions, plays, music, and stories that inveigh against war and injustice. My concern is that this art spirit is not part of an institutional critique. We need a critique of our institutions so that we can develop a concrete strategy to build new ones. Artists opposed to war, to use on example, might be more effective by using their creative talents to build institutions that make the kind of war in Iraq impossible The good artist and the justice good artists seek cannot exist unless we first create institutions that require both.
Our history is replete with such transformations. While the Impression period is often referred to as the moment where visual art was first ridiculed and later accepted as prescient, let us recall that it was ridiculed not by the unsophisticated masses in need of education but by the educated and powerful whose control over culture had to be eliminated. Impressionism was a frontal assault to artists upon art institutions that, in the words of the rebellious artists, erected artificial barriers between themselves and the public.
Ditto jazz, rock n' roll, and Beethoven. Recall also that Michelangelo said of a statue that is was only by the "light of the public square" that it could be judged. The point is that we as artists are of the public and we are of the community. No better. No worse. And together it is necessary for us to regain control over our lives in order to become the artists we wish to become. Our best chance is to create the institutions necessary to give our voice best purchase. Democratic institutions. Participatory economics. Parecon.
Finally it is important, I believe, to explore further the artistic sensibilities that were widespread one hundred years ago, sensibilities that suggested revolutions required dancing, that suggested that, if what we create is not a better world, what is the point of our work? Creating better institutions, ones in which our voices are heard meaningfully, is both our responsibility and a pragmatic solution. It must also be our art. As Bertlot Brecht said:
Canalising a river
Rafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art."