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cc-eyebeam - [cc-eyebeam] In Praise of the Unprofitable

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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: Sal Randolph <sal AT opsound.org>
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-eyebeam] In Praise of the Unprofitable
  • Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 20:16:05 -0500


jippolito AT guggenheim.org wrote:

In principle, there is nothing wrong with wanting to make a living as an artist. What's wrong is the perception that our society's art market will ever make that possible for more than a token few.

I'm with Jon on this. My worry is that all of this talk about how artists are going to survive in the market economy is actually harmful, because it perpetuates the idea that if artists adapt better to to the current system, then all will be well.

When I talk about art as a gift economy one of the questions I am asked most frequently is, “how are artists supposed to live?” But this question tends to mask the fact that (as Jon pointed out) for most of the people who produce it, art is a decidedly unprofitable activity.

A moment in praise of the unprofitable.

Let’s start with the basics: love is unprofitable, and sex, children are unprofitable, sleep is unprofitable, and dreaming, eating, making meals for friends, giving parties, lying on the beach, swimming , hiking, reading, looking out the window. We could go on like this but even at the very beginning of such a catalog we can see that most of what we love and value we engage in for reasons other than productivity and profitability.

The question isn’t so much how does the artist make a living, as how does the daydreamer make a living, or the chess player, or the mother -- how does anyone make a living?

What is increasingly puzzling to me is how firmly the idea of art as production, as economic production, has taken hold in our minds. The problem is that somehow art and artists can only be taken seriously in the context of the market.

As art moves away from rare, collectible objects made by single authors it becomes more urgent to find a different way of being an artist.

donatomancini AT yahoo.com wrote:

Moving in the direction of such an art is necessarily to move away from a type of work that is either ownable or copyrightable, as the work, like curation, becomes merely a vessel, a vehicle for the transference of ideas. Artist as middleman. Or to state it differently, I think what Ritchie is imagining is an art that situates itself as say the plumbing (the piping) rather than the content (the water). But in the realm of ideas, the “plumbing” is often going to be some kind of ineffable, immaterial activity that it can be not only difficult to hold on to (own), but even to locate at all.

Do we know of very much work that achieves this?


I think there are many interesting experiments going on now in these areas - certainly among some net artists, and also artists pursuing what critic Nicholas Bourriaud referred to as "Relational Artist." There are threads of these ideas going back to Fluxus, the Situationists, and Allan Karpow's Happenings in the 60s (or even farther, back to Dada, the Futurists, and the Surrealists).

As Donato Manicini noted, newer non-object art forms, especially those without clear, singular authorship - the participatory, the collaborative or communal -- are more difficult to "own". The social architecture projects I've been working on (like Opsound, coming up in week 4, http://www.opsound.org ) are more structure than content (something like this idea of plumbing which Donato Mancini mentioned). It's not clear to me that any important aspect of the opsound project is copyrightable at all (although the content of participants is licensed under creative commons licenses).

Dmytrik says:

Art is not an object, art happens. Art happens when the actions of artists bring expressions into a state where they can be perceived. All objects that result from an incident are merely the residue of the incident, not the art itself.

I find I'm quite in sympathy with this, despite reliquar's interesting cautionary note about semantics.

As the Situationists liked to say, "the new type of beauty can only be a beauty of situations."








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