[iDC] (no subject) - ethics

[R Labossiere]

I've just had the great pleasure of working on a book that tackles the 
difficult question of ethics and creative production and would like to quote 
a part of it (below) that I believe is particularly relevant to this thread. 
The book, as I proofed it so many times, struck me as so pertinent not just 
to the visual arts but particularly to our new media milieu. Jeanne 
Randolph, the author, is an artist and psychiatrist. Informed by object 
relations theory, Winnicott in particular, she conceptualizes the positions 
of creators and artists in terms of ethics, while tackling the ornery 
reality that our positions are fundamentally 'tainted,' by the reality of 
superabundance -  luxury. Randolph postulates community as a common illusion 
produced by the exercise of imagination in ways that involve trust and a 
shared ethics:

Randolph:

"I continue the make-believe of a group of basically imaginative people, a 
group formed on the basis of shared illusion of the experience of ethical 
imagining (or, if this is really a new idea, a group formed on the basis of 
the hypothesis that there is such a practice of ethical imagining).

It would be our joy, whenever given the impetus primum non nocere [from the 
hypocratic oath: before all else, do no harm], it would not be contradictory 
to suppose that in our enclave of luxury:

We would converse gladly;

We would delight in curiosity;

Certainly we would abhor objectification of any person anywhere;  this would 
include abhorrence of reacting to another person as a mere function of our 
own agenda;

Each of us would maintain equanimity about holding individual or group 
power;

We would never enforce judgments on the possible, to remove obstacles to 
playfulness;

If we witnessed someone(s) who rarely had the opportunity to participate in 
situations like ours, our saddened response would include reconsideration of 
the relevance of their situation to our enclave of luxury;

After many conversations we might even come to believe that the illusory 
experience we had conjured -- ethical imagining -- keeps us together even 
while we are dispersed ... working in separate enclaves of luxury."

- excerpted from Ethics of Luxury: materialism and imagination by Jeanne 
Randolph  https://nt2.nshosts.com/yyzartistsoutletorg/books.asp?language=en

Robert Labossiere
http://www.readingart.ca
http://www.robertlabossiere.com



> On Dec 18, 2007, at 6:00 AM, idc-request at mailman.thing.net wrote:
>
>>   "Is our primary mission as artists [people] to produce commerce
>> fitting monuments to ourselves, or is it to use art to help bring
>> ethics into the picture?" --
>>