[iDC] Art, Lifestyle & Globalisation Questions
Simon Biggs
simon at babar.demon.co.uk
Sun Apr 1 04:46:37 EDT 2007
Rheingold's statement is West Coast liberalism at its worst! Furry
Capitalism.
In Europe and elsewhere we have lived for two generations within a rather
benevolent context. If it was not for a socio-economic system where
relatively generous arms length state support for the arts, and other
non-industrial means of production, was default we would have seen a very
different development in the arts and society since the mid 20th C.
Post Object art, performance and most media art, much of conceptual art...in
fact most of what could be described as post modern practice, would not have
become the dominant forms of our time. That much of the impetus for this has
come from Europe is not coincidental. Such paradigms of work are only
possible when value is ascribed in ways not afforded by the sort of
socio-economic model on which the US is predicated and which Howard is
suggesting should be default not only there but globally. One could also
argue this using the example of food production. McDonalds versus artisinal
food production.
I found Cecil's plaintive call for a different model both sad and uplifting.
Sad that after two generations of profound social change in Europe,
generally for the better, some of the same calls for change are made now as
in the 1960's. Uplifting, as you do not hear enough of these sorts of calls
anymore, perhaps because we have all become so cynical as a result of
persistent partial failure. Perhaps we expect to much of our social systems?
My life maps almost entirely to the social democratic model. As a young
artist my first professional activities were made under the fledgling but
nevertheless very beneficial wing of the Australia Council (founded 1972),
Australia's national agency briefed to fund the arts through peer review.
The effect the Oz Council had on the creative arts in Australia was
profound. Within a few years we had moved from an object based private
gallery dominated model, where a handful of collectors established taste and
the careers of a handful of artists, to a situation where thousands of
artists were producing all sorts of crazy things (and often nothing at all)
and showing this work in a diversity of artist run and non-profit spaces, or
simply in the street or on the beach. It was a very creative and healthy
time and in many respects resembled the joyful situation that Cecil calls
for.
In the UK this sort of system was also in place from even earlier, with the
Arts Council of England as a very early example of social beneficience.
Other European countries, Canada, New Zealand and a number of unusual
suspects, had similar models in place. Even in the US, at state level, there
were similar arrangements and, for a short time, even the NEA managed to
make a decent attempt at being a national arts agency run for and by
artists.
The sort of model that Howard is promoting is based on a mean perception of
human nature, predicated on an undertsanding that people are only motivated
by their own need and where profit can only be gained at the expense of
others. This is the logic of capitalism. It is also the logic of the
criminal mind.
So, I read Cecil and the innocent idealism makes me cringe; but I read
Howard and I get angry because what he espouses is the same ethic that
amoral corporations are trying to export to the world under the moniker of
Globalism. An ethic that has brought us to such a bad place in world history
and now threatens the social compacts and contracts that have underpinned
the relatively enlightened social models of a number of countries since the
Second World War.
Rheingold articulates an anti-intellectualism that compounds his sins.
Anti-intellectualism is of course a common symptom on the right of politics.
I find this interesting as in this Howard is denying his own roots.
Regards
Simon
On 1/4/07 01:06, "Howard Rheingold" <howard at rheingold.com> wrote:
> If people did not produce objects to be sold, we'd all be working
> very very hard to food, house, and transport ourselves. All too
> often, intellectuals who have never had to meet a payroll -- or face
> failure to meet a payroll -- fail to distinguish between a
> multinational corporation and a mom and pop store.
>
>
> Howard Rheingold
> howard at rheingold.com
> www.rheingold.com www.smartmobs.com
> what it is ---> is --->up to us
>
>
>
> On Mar 31, 2007, at 4:15 PM, Cecil Touchon wrote:
>
>> If artists are to engage in any dialog of a public nature such as
>> exhibitions, publications, performances and whatnot, how shall they
>> build enough wealth and capital to sustain their activity and carry
>> on a home life (support a family)? Capitalism as in produce objects
>> to be sold? The public dole? Maintain poverty? Work for a corporation?
>>
>>
>> If artists wish to engage in helping to shape the world to come,
>> toward what are they moving in terms of a desired result?
>>
>>
>> Is it enough just to complain about, point out the problems of, or
>> screw with the things you don¹t like? Assuming the answer to be no,
>> what else should one¹s time be spent doing in order to feel that
>> one is making a difference or helping to move the world in a better
>> direction?
>>
>>
>> I notice that universities are training a lot of people to work for
>> corporations and show them how to find ways to screw the general
>> public out of small enough amounts of money to avoid calling it
>> criminal behavior, yet we all know it is and are being screwed over
>> regularly.
>>
>>
>> How do we train ourselves and our children to shape the world into
>> a place we are not afraid to live in?
>>
>>
>> How do we establish and honor higher standards of living our lives
>> so as to generate joy and peace?
>>
>>
>> What ideals should we establish among ourselves that we can all
>> support together?
>>
>>
>> Why should we merely accept the ideals that organizations and
>> governments and corporations want to instill in us for their benefit?
>>
>>
>> Why do we allow ourselves to be thought of as corporate consumers
>> and properties of a state?
>>
>>
>> What would it be like if artists decided to shape a world where
>> artists would want to live in? What would be important to them? How
>> would they do it?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Cecil Touchon
>>
>> http://cecil.touchon.com
>>
>> 817-944-4000
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [mailto:idc-
>> bounces at mailman.thing.net] On Behalf Of Alan Clinton
>> Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 9:02 PM
>> To: dew.harrison at rgu.ac.uk
>> Cc: idc at bbs.thing.net; dewharrison at yahoo.co.uk
>> Subject: Re: [iDC] Art, Lifestyle & Globalisation
>>
>>
>> A couple of thoughts here related to the questions you have posed.
>> First, the rhetoric of purity (is there an outside of capitalism?)
>> can be, I think, an endgame producing the sort of corporate artists
>> Stallabras describes and those who are overly concerned that they
>> may make a mistake with their art (or their theory)--no one wants
>> to be called a hypocrite.
>>
>>
>> The problem of artists, intellectuals, and capitalism is a real
>> one. Should I refuse to teach at the Georgia Institute of
>> Technology because of its ties to the military industrial complex?
>> If I had refused, when I was just out of graduate school, I would
>> have had little opportunity to critique the system in anything
>> resembling a full-time way--I wouldn't have had those
>> impressionable students either. But then, if I had gone too far in
>> my critiques, I would have been fired. Artists, it strikes me, are
>> in a similar position. How to survive in an organism long enough
>> to destroy or recreate it?
>>
>>
>> Rather than attempting to start from a position of purity, perhaps
>> we should recognize that people will find themselves starting out
>> from various positions of impurity within the system. And, there
>> will be many ways of working against this system, of speaking to it
>> in ways that I call, borrowing one of Derrida's metaphors,
>> "Tympanic Politics":
>>
>>
>> "In his elucidation of marginalia as a discipline unto itself,
>> Derrida gives a poetic anatomy of the tympanic membrane and its
>> surroundings. The ear is swirling, labyrinthine, and cavelike.
>> Penetrating its depths presents a difficult, frightening prospect.
>> In addition to traversing a maze of passages, one must confront the
>> wall of the tympanum which has the capability to muffle the loudest
>> of noises. If normative discourse/art does not reach the inner ear
>> with the proper sense of volume or urgency, then how is one to
>> suggest the political or historical importance of a particular
>> issue? For the alternative would be to shock the system in such a
>> way as to puncture the tympanum altogether, effectively dismantling
>> the apparatus so that nothing can be heard at all. It would be as
>> if Constantin Brancusi, on the verge of rejecting Rodin's method of
>> clay modeling with taille directe, had shattered The Craiova Kiss
>> with the first hammer strike into formless stone. Derrida's answer
>> to such questions, of course, is always a more specific anatomy of
>> the situation at hand. He suggests that since the tympanum is
>> oblique with respect to the ear canal, its subversion requires an
>> oblique approach as well (taille indirecte?), some form of
>> rhetorical ambush. How does one 'unhinge' something that cannot be
>> shattered?"
>>
>>
>> Alan Clinton
>>
>>
>>
>> On 3/28/07, dew.harrison at rgu.ac.uk <dew.harrison at rgu.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Dear IDCs,
>>
>> I have been enjoying the recent discussion sparked off by the
>> passing of Baudrillard and would like to move the debate at a
>> tangent to this, but continuing with ideas surrounding forms of
>> social control, power and politics. I am concerned with the
>> domination of the corporate within the cultural and wonder at
>> the position I find myself placed in as an artist and academic
>> working in an educational instituion.
>>
>>> Digital media and new technology is reconfiguring our
>> relationship with the world and is also affecting how artists
>> relate with their public. Now, new locative technology can position
>> art in the everyday of people's lives and activities outside the
>> gallery space. Although psychogeography and mobile media enable the
>> 'interactive city' for artists to key into, they also promote ideas
>> of corporatised play in an urban space and tend to be
>> interventionist and intrusive. 'Big brother' media and cctv
>> surveillance allows for few informal, ungoverned social meeting
>> places. This means that artists are having to find interstices
>> between the formal constructed and observed social spaces where
>> unorthodox art can happen to engage with its audience. Just how is
>> such practice being supported within the neo-liberal economic
>> structures of globalistation? Julian Stallabrass suggests that this
>> only produces artists (in Brit Art particularly) who posture as
>> edgy, risky individuals but who are in real terms busy establishing
>> market positions for themselves. The answer lies somewhere in the
>> inter-related issues of art, lifestyle and globalisation.
>>>
>>> In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan predicted a technologically enabled
>> 'global village' and issued the warning -
>>> "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world
>> has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile
>> piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us,
>> Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall
>> at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a
>> small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and
>> superimposed co-existence."
>>>
>>> I would be extremely interested in your thoughts on the extent to
>> which we are 'aware of this dynamic' and offer some questions which
>> might help probe the territory -
>>>
>>> Corporations are rebranding themselves around lifestyle, is this
>> influencing creative practice or vice-versa?
>>> How do the principals and aesthetics of open source and
>> democratic media sit alongside corporate products (iPod etc)?
>>> How should arts organisations and institutions respond to open
>> networking and ideas exchange, what is a node and a network in
>> cultural terms?
>>> Are artists the software for the corporation hardware, or the
>> activists in sheeps clothing?
>>> Where does government funding for the arts sit in the global
>> cultural mix, or is corporate money driving the cultural agenda?
>>>
>> With thanks and kind regards,
>>
>> Dew Harrison.
>>
>>
>>
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Simon Biggs
simon at littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
AIM: simonbiggsuk
Research Professor in Art, Edinburgh College of Art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
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