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

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  • From: Joseph Pietro Riolo <riolo AT voicenet.com>
  • To: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19 <cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-eyebeam] In Praise of the Unprofitable
  • Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 15:23:56 -0500 (EST)



On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Sal Randolph wrote:

>
> 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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>
> This discussion runs 2003 November 12-19. Submissions are licensed
> under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
> license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/>.
>




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