Tag Archives: art

Protests Afoot in Budapest

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Text by Stephan Dillemuth in Munich, Anthony Davies in London, and Jakob Jakobsen in Copenhagen. Originally published June 12, 2005.

There is no alternative: The future is self-organised

As workers in the cultural field we offer the following contribution to the debate on the impact of neoliberalism on institutional relations:
• Cultural and educational institutions as they appear today are nothing more than legal and administrative organs of the dominant system. As with all institutions, they live in and through us; we participate in their structures and programmes, internalise their values, transmit their ideologies and act as their audience/public/social body.
• Our view: these institutions may present themselves to us as socially accepted bodies, as somehow representative of the society we live in, but they are nothing more than dysfunctional relics of the bourgeois project. Once upon a time, they were charged with the role of promoting democracy, breathing life into the myth that institutions are built on an exchange between free, equal and committed citizens. Not only have they failed in this task, but within the context of neoliberalism, have become even more obscure, more unreliable and more exclusive.
• The state and its institutional bodies now share aims and objectives so closely intertwined with corporate and neoliberal agendas that they have been rendered indivisible. This intensification and expansion of free market ideology into all aspects of our lives has been accompanied by a systematic dismantling of all forms of social organisation and imagination antithetical to the demands of capitalism.
• As part of this process it’s clear that many institutions and their newly installed managerial elites are now looking for escape routes out of their inevitable demise and that, at this juncture, this moment of crisis, they’re looking at ‘alternative’ structures and what’s left of the Left to model their horizons, sanction their role in society and reanimate their tired relations. Which of course we despise!

In their scramble for survival, cultural and educational institutions have shown how easily they can betray one set of values in favour of another and that’s why our task now is to demand and adhere to the foundational and social principles they have jettisoned, by which we mean: transparency, accountability, equality and open participation.
• By transparency we mean an opening up of the administrative and financial functions/decision making processes to public scrutiny. By accountability we mean that these functions and processes are clearly presented, monitored and that they can in turn, be measured and contested by ‘participants’ at any time. Equality and open participation is exactly what it says – that men and women of all nationalities, race, colour and social status can participate in any of these processes at any time.
• Institutions as they appear today, locked in a confused space between public and private, baying to the demands of neoliberal hype with their new management strucures, are not in a position to negotiate the principles of transparency, accountability and equality, let alone implement them. We realise that responding to these demands might extend and/orguarantee institutions’ survival but, thankfully, their deeply ingrained practices prevent them from even entertaining the idea on a serious level.
• In our capacity as workers with a political commitment to self-organisation we feel that any further critical contribution to institutional programmes will further reinforce the relations that keep these obsolete structures in place. We are fully aware that ‘our’ critiques, alternatives and forms of organisation are not just factored into institutional structures but increasingly utilised to legitimise their existence.
• The relationship between corporations, the state and its institutions is now so unbearable that we see no space for negotiation – we offer no contribution, no critique, no pathway to reform, no way in or out. We choose to define ourselves in relation to the social forms that we participate in and not the leaden institutional programmes laid out before us – our deregulation is determined by social, not market relations. There is no need for us to storm the Winter Palace, because most institutions are melting away in the heat of global capital anyway. We will provide no alternative. So let go!

The only question that remains is how to get rid of the carcass and deal with the stench:
• We are not interested in their so-called assets; their personnel, buildings, archives, programmes, shops, clubs, bars, facilities and spaces will all end up at the pawnbroker anyway…
• All we need is their cash in order to pay our way out of capitalism and take this opportunity to make clear our intention to supervise and mediate our own social capital, knowledge and networks.
• As a first step we suggest an immediate redistribution of their funds to already existing, selforganised bodies with a clear commitment to workers’ and immigrants’ rights, social (antiracist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic) struggle and representation.

There is no alternative! The future is self-organised.
• In the early 1970’s corporate analysts developed a strategy aimed at reducing uncertainty called ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). Somewhat ironically we now find ourselves in agreement, but this time round we’re the scenario planners and executors of our own future though we are, if nothing else, the very embodiment of uncertainty.
• In the absence of clearly stated opposition to the neoliberal system, most forms of collective and collaborative practice can be read as ‘self-enterprise’. By which we mean, groupings or clusters of individuals set up to feed into the corporate controlled markets, take their seats at the table, cater to and promote the dominant ideology.
• Self-organisation should not be confused with self-enterprise or self-help, it is not an alternative or conduit into the market. It isn’t a label, logo, brand or flag under which to sail in the waters of neoliberalism (even as a pirate ship as suggested by MTV)! It has no relationship to entrepreneurship or bogus ‘career collectives’.
• In our view self-organisation is a byword for the productive energy of those who have nothing left to lose. It offers up a space for a radical re-politicisation of social relations – the first tentative steps towards realisable freedoms.

Self-organisation is:
• Something which predates representational institutions. To be more precise: institutions are built on (and often paralyse) the predicates and social forms generated by self-organisation.
• Mutually reinforcing, self-valorising, self-empowering, self-historicising and, as a result, not compatible with fixed institutional structures.
• A social and productive force, a process of becoming which, like capitalism, can be both flexible and opaque therefore more than agile enough to tackle (or circumvent) it.
• A social process of communication and commonality based on exchange; sharing of similar problems, knowledge and available resources.
• A fluid, temporal set of negotiations and social relations which can be emancipatory – a process of empowerment.
• Something which situates itself in opposition to existing, repressive forms of organisation and concentrations of power.
• Always challenging power both inside the organisation and outside the organisation; this produces a society of resonance and conflict, but not based on fake dualities as at present.
• An organisation of deregulated selves. It is at its core a non-identity.
• A tool that doesn’t require a cohesive identity or voice to enter into negotiation with others. It may reside within social forms but doesn’t need take on an identifiable social form itself.
• Contagious and inclusive, it disseminates and multiplies.
• The only way to relate to self-organisation is to take part, self-organise, connect with other self-organising initiatives and challenge the legitimacy of institutional representation.

We put a lid on the bourgeois project, the national museums will be be stored in their very own archive, the Institutes of Contemporay Art will be handed over to the artists unions, the Universities and Academies will be handed over to the students, Siemens and all the other global players will be handed over to their workers. The state now acts as an administrative unit – just as neoliberalism has suggested it – but with mechanisms of control, transparency accountability and equal rights for all.

END

STRIKE

Updates on Hungary’s political situation outside the arts:

http://hungarianspectrum.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/the-significance-of-today-demonstration-in-the-hungarian-capital

http://nemma.noblogs.org/2013/03/10/the-constitution-is-not-a-game

Top images from the Free Artist Protest #4

Bottom image from Tamás St.Auby’s “IPUT: Subsist.Ence Level St.Andard Project 1984 W (or This is what has become of the unicell)” exhibition at the Ludwig Museum

What would Picasso’s hourly rate be?: Art & Copyright on the Internet

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tpb_awkThe new documentary Pirate Bay: Away from the Keyboard is out, telling the story of the three founders of the largest file sharing software in the world as they defend the legality of their role in the sharing of copyrighted information, predominately movies and music. A clear division exists between the defendants, three Swedish computer nerds interested in technical challenges and the open internet, and the plaintiffs, Hollywood and the music industry with its vested corporate interest in traditional methods of pricing and distribution. The defendants claim that Pirate Bay is just a vehicle for sharing information, and that they are not responsible for what any of their thousands of users choose to share. The plaintiffs allege that Pirate Bay actively enables the sharing of copyrighted information, and also profits from it (that is, rather than promoting the free exchange of information they are profiting from it in exactly the same capitalist way that Hollywood et al. does). After an initial loss and lengthy appeals, the founders of Pirate Bay were found guilty and sentenced to jail time—which is happening now.

This case is illustrative of the battle between the vested corporate interests in information and culture production and all the capitalist money-making behind it, and the open, flexible, low-cost alternatives made available by the internet and its ethos of free and open access to information. How the internet is handled—how and to what extent restrictions are placed on it, whether it will be allowed to function as a free and open conduit of information—is one of the central issues of our time, one that will determine the lives of many across the globe, who will either be included into a network of information that can benefit them or who will be excluded and will suffer from that lack of knowledge.

What does this have to do with Picasso? The alternatives offered by the internet are exciting, revolutionary even, in terms of arts and culture. To treat art (by art I am thinking of traditional visual arts, but also movies be they Hollywood blockbusters or experimental art films, music, etc.) as a commodity is standard today. Thus we have the art market, cinemas, expensive DVDs and CDs, an iTunes-mediated music purchasing system. But there is a huge discrepancy between the art market and the art. The value of a Picasso is apparently in the millions, but really this is an arbitrary number. It does not adequately represent the value of his work to our cultural life, nor can its costs of production be calculated the way we calculate the cost of a washing machine. What would Picasso’s hourly rate have been? The questions seem ridiculous. It does not make sense to us that Picasso would have sat at his stool and timed himself while he painted, and then charged an hourly rate for the product. To treat art as a commodity is to stuff a square peg into a round hole; it just doesn’t fit.

A corollary problem of treating art as a commodity is that it turns art into property that can be owned. Just as the art market exists, so too does art ownership. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, but it is an imperfect systems that does not adequately represent the value of art. And we see the cracks in this system all the time. On one hand, collectors buy and own art. Yet we also spend a substantial part of public money and private donations on funding the arts in the public cultural sphere through museums. We talk about cultural heritage as something to be preserved and protected, often in national terms. So we also have a sense of the arts as a societal value and belonging to the public.

Of course, just because the value of art cannot be defined in monetary terms does not mean an artist shouldn’t be able to earn a living, or that what an artist creates is not of value. Quite the opposite. While the art market offers a way for artists to earn a living, it is an imperfect one, based on the buying and selling of objects in a time when art has generally moved away from the central importance of the art object. The mechanics of the art market and the idea of art as investment transfers objects of cultural value into the private sphere, where everyone does not have access to them. But the solution is perhaps not to defend the established modes of copyright, but to create new systems. This might also offer a solution to some of the problems of the art market, which pools its dollars very much on the top end of the market without fostering the growth of emerging artists or the stable development of careers.

How does the internet offer anything exciting or revolutionary to solve these problems? It offers alternative modes of funding and distribution. In fact, there has been an emergence of many different ventures, created by individuals or small groups, that are able to survive because of the low barriers to entry and the active participation of individuals. For example, there are Kickstarter, Bandcamp, the now on-hiatus 20×200 and its subsequent, similar cohort of online fine art retailers. Just as people crowdsource information, through Kickstarter and Bandcamp artists and musicians can ‘crowdsource’ funds for projects. Many artists have successfully funded projects through Kickstarter, and many more have become their own internet business and PR teams, as artist websites become de rigueur and Facebook pages normal. Bandcamp is also notable because the money goes directly to the musicians, they control the pricing, and success is not manufactured by an industry machine with a huge advertising budget. Organizations like 20×200 offer the promise of affordable art to the masses.

The internet is an easy means to distribute your work outside of copyright and the traditional market. Flickr is populated by photographers who post their work with varying amounts of controls over how they can be used, often only requesting credit for the image if it used elsewhere. Radiohead released In Rainbows online, requesting donations in an amount that the user could determine, and it proved remarkably successful. Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev has renounced copyright on all his works, and now publishes on his website and Facebook.

Having alternative means of reaching and making, a third way between private and public money, seems incredibly promising. The concept of the internet is based on the idea of individual participation, a decentralized structure of connections, and an exchange of information without a monetary price on it. Yet when artists bring their ‘product’ directly to people through the medium of the internet, and ask for support in terms of a monetary contribution, despite assumptions of human selfishness especially in the supposed de-personalization of the internet, people choose to give. This sort of exchange, which is more marked by generosity and support and the creation of a direct connection to an individual or small organizations, seem to me to be more akin to the nature and value of art than our current system.

Similarly, my sympathies are very much with the pirates, the hackers, and the free and open source of information that the internet should be. Traditionally the hacker ethos behind the structure of the internet is not a destructive one, but a creative one—one that creates systems and facilitates the sharing of knowledge. This ethos finds a complement in academia, where scholarly results are published for the good of the community (and/or scholarly prestige/tenure, etc.) but not with expectations of high profits. Hackers are rarely destructive, except maybe of an ailing industry’s profits. I think the movie and music industry can hardly expect to stop the millions of people around the world who download music and movies by suing three men in Stockholm. They might more profitably investigate how to increase the value of DVDs with special features and alternate methods of pricing and distribution.

Sharing information online is not always illegal; the organization of non-copyright information shared over the internet has proved highly valuable. Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg are great examples of sites that contribute to human knowledge through the collaborative efforts of individuals across the world. (Did you know anybody could become a proofreader for Project Gutenberg? I just joined myself.) Most libraries and museums are dedicated to moving their collections into the online sphere. With the alternatives that the internet offers, the large, creaking corporate juggernaut of copyright could indeed be forced to adapt to how new cultural products are shared in a structure that might be less profitable for companies, but could enable a long tail of cultural producers to produce their artistic work through self-organized or small organizations.

Democracy, sche-mocracy: “I don’t give a damn for this modern democracy”

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For English subtitles, you may have to turn on the caption feature (first button, bottom right).

I wrote a bit about conservative controls on the Hungarian arts scene a couple weeks ago, but now there is a much better piece explaining the situation on ArtLeaks, based on a statement from the International Association of Critics, called “The anti-democratic makeover of the cultural scene in Hungary.” Also see the aptly titled “The Lunatics are Running the Asylum” post over on Beyond East.

Or, just take these titles at their word and revel in the absurdity of the comments in the video above of Gyorgy Fekete. Fekete, the head of the Hungarian Academy of Artists (MMA), was recently given control of Hungary’s entire cultural budget with an authority unmatched since Socialism. There is much choice language in the video above, an appreciation of which is only enhanced by further reading of the above listed articles, which elucidate the difference between reality and Fekete’s statements further. However, my personal favorites are:

  • “unambiguous national sentiment” being the third requirement for membership in the MMA, that is “someone who feels at home and doesn’t travel abroad in order to revile Hungary from there.” [00:47]
  • “There must not be blasphemy in state-run institutions.” [2:19]
  • “This is about a Hungary built on Christian culture; there is no need for constant, perpetual provocation.” [2:25]
  • “I don’t give a damn for this modern democracy” [2:46]

    • And it’s certainly worth watching to the end. On his haircut, he remarks:

  • “I cut it myself.” [3:38]

Stay informed of absurd news on the Hungarian cultural scene (and hopefully more positive news as well)! Now in English! Check it out here: Autonomy for Art in Hungary.