Short answer
Short answer:
1) Disenss gender, regions;osm and unpaid domestic work in The Vastness of the
Dark and Praxis
2) Disenss crime as work answering the following questions: When is crime work? Who
are crime workers? What are examples of crime work?
3) Compare and contrast canonical art, market system art, and community-based art Praxis 1
Praxis 2
Praxis 3
Praxis 4
praxis 5
praxis 6
praxis 7
praxis 8 Dark 1
Dark 2
Dark 3
Dark 4
Dark 5
Dark 6
Dark 7
Dark 8
Dark 9
Dark 10
Dark 11
Dark 12
Dark 13
Dark 14
Dark 15
Dark 16 Crime 1
Crime 2
Crime 3
Crime 4
Crime 5
Crime 6
Crime 7
Crime 8
Crime 9
Crime 10
Crime 11
Crime 12
Crime 13 Reading 2FROM GALLERIES TO GRAFFITI CRN-80832-201903 Course Home Page … Module 3 & 4
Page 4 of 9
Reading 2
A still of Dillon Cox & Loentes Puppet
pictured here performing in, Like An
Reading 2
Market System and Community Based art
Community-based art is any art created with the purpose of engaging a
particular community (defined by any geographical or demographic
boundaries you see fit) into a larger dialogue with the purpose of
generating positive change.
Tim Takechi of Global Visionaries.
Art for change?
It is often taken for granted that art functions as a tool and a vehicle of
social change; indeed, it was just this theme that we took up in our rst
discussion board posting. While the vocal majority seemed to agree
that art could foster social change, many of us, when encountering
work such as Warhols 200 One Dollar Bills or Marcel Duchamps
Fountain might nd ourselves wondering exactly what type of change
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Old Tale in, December of 2011. The
play was put on in association with
the Community Artist Guild , a
community based arts project in East
Scarborough, Toronto. Photo:
Katherine Fleitas.
such work could really make. Does a painting that takes money for its
subject do anything to unsettle a culture that seems more and more to
place the individual pursuit of money above the needs of the
community? Does a urinal inscribed with a forged signature (see
Duchamps work mentioned above) do anything more than oer a
paltry challenge to the taste of a leisured class?
It was precisely the complicity of market system art like Duchamps and
the American Pop artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert
Rauschenberg with the oppressive class that was at the heart of a 1973
protest staged in front of another landmark Sothebys auction. On that
October day a group of New York City taxi drivers and artists stood
before the renowned auction house to call down Robert C. Scull who
they claimed made his fortune robbing cabbies and hawking art. Some
of the artists marching in solidarity with the taxi cab drivers rushed out
to a nearby hardware store to by a snow shovel to sell at exorbitant
price, poking fun at Duchamps In Advance of the Broken Arm. Is this
critique of arts complicity with big money an apt one?
The idea that the art market is synonymous with business as usual is
an idea that is as pervasive today as everif not more so. As Eleanor
Heartney reminds us in her lecture on art and labour, one move made
by activists of the recent Occupy Wall Street movement was to set up
occupations in a number of New York Citys museums. The organizers
of the Occupy Museums march declared in a public statement that for
the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims
of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art. They further
claimed that art is for everyone, across all classes and cultures and
communities and not merely for the cultural elite, or the 1%. The artist
activists closed their statement by exhorting museums to open their
minds and their hearts:Art is for everyone! they claimed. The people
are at your door!
These two protests demonstrate an abiding and perhaps growing
suspicion of the received idea that market system art can change
things. But while market system art is placed under intense scrutiny, a
growing eld of artists and educators have been working to
disseminate the practices and techniques of art making in order to sow
the seeds of change. This community based art (sometimes referred to
as dialogical art or community arts) seeks to place in the hands of the
marginalized, the worker, or, in the words of the Occupy Movement,
the 99%, the means of cultural production. The hope is that providing
someone with the tools to tell her story in her words, will foster the
sort of change that some fear art has become incapable of.
Community based art: a voice of change, a voice of
ones own
A term popularized in the 1960s, community based art, and community
based art education quickly became a popular practice of cultural
enrichment in community centres, union halls, and educational
institutions across North America, parts of Europe, and Austrailia.
Although the recent economic downturn and the resulting deep budget
cuts have lead to the stemming of funds to such programs, the success
stories and the tangible production of meaning and pride that have
resulted from these initiatives show us art really does have the power
to make change; indeed, commentators such as Mcleod might well
argue that the sorts of cuts we see happening to arts budgets are not
merely the result of necessary belt-tightening, but instead represent
an active eort to undermine the change provoked by such community
based art work.
The idea behind community based art is simple: it is meant to give
voice to the otherwise voiceless or silenced. Two fundamental and
related claims lay at the foundation of community based art: 1) that the
canonical, or market system art of the cultural elite neither speaks to
nor for the experience of marginalized or under-privileged groups,
classes, or communities; 2) that art and the means of its production are
not the exclusive property of a creative or initiated class. To put it in
somewhat less politicized terms: community based art allows folks to
tell their own stories, in their own words.
Community based art in practice
Community based art involves an artist or art educator working within
a classroom or community to teach the techniques and practices of
artmaking. Equipped with these tools students and community
members are able to engage with their own experiences of their
culture, workplace, and daily lives. Such work documents these
experiences and allows for such newly empowered artists to paint,
narrate, play, sing, photograph, sculpt, or act their stories their way. In
the process of this expression one is invited to reect on oneself and
ones values, and a new relationship with ones place in the larger social
context is fostered; one is invited to open both to ones own creative
processes and that of others. In sharing in these explorations with
others, one encounters both the similarities and the dierences
between oneself and the community with which he or she works.
Community based art is often created with specic goals in mind. Some
work is produced to raise awareness about certain a certain cause or
community concern such as bolstering labour relations, or the
prevention of gang violence, drug use, or the spread of STDs. One
recent community based art program has taken up the cause of
making people more comfortable with the idea extended
breastfeeding. Far from being prescriptive, these goals are arrived at
organically by members of the community.
Other work is meant to document the story of an under-represented
segment of society. The photographs of Hurmuses, the WDI
photography program, and those available on the websites of unions
such as OPSEUs do just this work. They show people on the job, on the
picket line, on the march on labour day, and otherwise sharing in and
working with their community. Documentaries like China Blue and
Maquilapolis by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre (discussed by
Eleanor Heartney in this weeks second video) also do this sort of work;
Funari and de la Torre, for instance, invited the maquiladora workers
documented in their lm to themselves shoot footage and conduct
interviews.
We have already had a taste of the sort of work community based art
programs do today, in the shape of the photography produce by Gayle
Hurmuses, and in the rap, graphic design and photography programs
of the WDI. Eleanor Heartney in her video describes some market
system artists whose work can be productively read as taking up the
practices of community based art, just as the work of John Ahearn
(taken up in our third reading) can be. Throughout the remainder of
the semester we will continue to explore community based art both as
it was practiced in decades past, and as it is practiced today.
Reading 3: Whose Art Is It?
John went home from the meeting with community approval though
it is probably accurate to say that a community board of thirty-five
people appointed by their borough president is no more and no less the
community than a block on Walton Avenue.
Jane Kramer
In this the third reading of module 3 & 4 Jane Kramer explores the
controversial work John Ahearn produced for New York Citys Percent
for Art program. Ahearn is a white artist with an upper middleclass
background, who moved to a South Bronx neighbourhood to work in
and with a community hed grown to love and be a part of. The work he
produced for the 44th Police Precinct, featured painted bronze castings
of members of the Ahearns Walton Avenue neighbourhood. The
response to Ahearns work raises a number of question about who the
artist works for (especially where his work is meant to represent a
community); To whom the art work belongs; how the race and privilege
of the artist impacted upon the works interpretation; and otherwise
challenges us to think about the conicting and overlapping values of
market system art and community based art.
While Ahearn is undoubtedly an exponent of the art market and the
gallery system, he has nonetheless tirelessly worked to embed himself
in his South Bronx community the better to work through and with it.
He views his eort to produce work that he felt represented the
community indeed, work that was produced with the community
as a failure precisely because of the ways in which it upset a number of
parties. He even going so far as to alter the work to better please the
works critics. Yet, despite the harsh and emotionally charged criticism
of Ahearns work, both his subjects (Corey and Raymond) and his
appointed jury of artists and ocials deemed the work good, or even
important.
What do you think of Ahearns work? Was it a misguided attempt to
speak for a community he had no business attempting to speak for?
Was he misunderstood by his detractors? Did the community
ultimately gain or lose by the removal of his short lived installation? Reading 1FROM GALLERIES TO GRAFFITI CRN-80832-201903 Course Home Page … Module 3 & 4
Page 3 of 9
Reading 1
200 One Dollar Bills by Andy Warhol (1962) which in
November of 2009 raked in $43.8 million at a
Reading 1
Market System and Community Based art
Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is
hard cash. The whole of art, its growing tip included, is assimilated to
familiar values. Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based
on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.
Art critic and art historian Leo Steinberg on the state of art in 1968.
This is a long and somewhat complicated reading, but please work
through it carefully, as it helps us to establish an important, if
sometimes subtle distinction between the modes of art well be
addressing for the remainder of this course. Please pose any and all
questions you might have on this material on the discussion board.
While completing this material please take notes on key ideas,
themes, and facts, as these will be helpful to you both in aiding your
major research project, and in preparation for your nal exam.
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Sothebys auction.
Market system art: use value and exchange value
We can think of the art market in its relationship to the metaphor
whence it gets its name: the market. The market is where one would
go to trade some thing for some other thing. This might mean
trading milk for textiles, beets for beef, or it might mean trading gold
for pottery, a paper note for a hammer.
The items Ive used in my example here have at least two dierent
types of value: use value, and exchange value (this denition
borrows from traditional denitions and from Marxist denitions of
the market economy). You can use a hammer to erect your barn, or
to, say, set a nail upon which to hang a picture. A hammer has use
value. So too then does milk, a pot, or swatch of cloth from which to
fashion a shirt, etc.
A paper note, like a ve dollar bill, has what is called exchange value.
There is nothing about a piece of coloured paper with an old prime
minister printed on it, besides perhaps a quaint patriotism, that
should make it worth any more than a discarded cigarette carton on
the side of the road: indeed, at least on the blank side of packet of
cigarettes one could write a laundry list try doing the same on a
one-hundred-dollar bill! Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine oneself
thanking ones lucky stars for stumbling upon an empty packet of
Marlboros the way one might upon nding a homeless scrap of
paper depicting Sir Robert Borden.
Exchange value, then, is what you are able to get for something.
Lets look at textiles as an example of something that has a value in
terms of both exchange and use (to be clear: hammers, and money
also have both forms of value to varying degrees). Cloth (another
word for textile) can be fashioned into a shirt, but it can also be
decorated, embroidered, brocaded, histories can be printed upon it,
a pattern or image or symbol or brand name can be emblazoned
upon it; all of these things that can be done to a shirt can
signicantly alter its exchange value. A shirt, covers your skin,
protects you from the weather, etc. This is its use. The fact that a
shirt can be sold for two dollars at a Value Village, or $200 at couture
shop on Queen, or that a traditional garment might be taken to be a
priceless exhibit in a museum shows the sharp contrast between
use and exchange value.
All art is quite useless
Irish playwright, poet, and humourist Oscar Wilde, in the preface to
his popular novel The Picture of Dorian Gray famously wrote: All art
is quite useless. While we shall see where this claim is not the case
with all art (especially, for instance with community based art), for
many, this idea about art does ring resoundingly true even if the
sense in which Wilde thought art should be useless is not quite that
which is popularly held. Why is it that we think of art as useless? Why
is making art not considered labour? Why is it considered a luxury
for the wealthy to pay for, and to be rst on the chopping black
when government spending must be cut? One reason this might be
the case is the perceived inated exchange value of certain works of
art.
The emergence of market system art
Although the value of a work has long been linked to its cost it is
subsequent to the Second World War that the exchange value and
the price a work fetches as a commodity began to aect the value of
the work as art. This shift results from the emergence of the art
market and has to some extent to do both with the turn away from
traditional formal and canonical values from the late 19th-century
on and the decline of the patronage system..
A number of changes began to take place in the European art world
of the late 19th-century. The traditional subjects of art and the way
that art was made were changing in a way that they hadnt since
perhaps the time of the Italian Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age
of painting. One such change saw the turn away from
representational forms of art to more abstract forms, such as
impressionism. This change was no doubt hastened by mechanical
forms of reproduction such as the daguerreotype and photography.
Representational forms of art such as landscape and portrait
painting began to seem less valuable when one could simply aim a
camera at a person or scene and snap picture. Traditional technical
values were traded in for experiments in representation that
challenged the very basis of traditional and canonical art work. The
upshot of this turn away from tradition was that the very values that
had once sponsored art and the meaning it had could no longer be
depended upon to be criterion against which a great work of art was
measured. If you wish to challenge the very idea of painting as the
old masters did, then how can you be judged by such standards?
While some of this new work did nd favour with the art buying
elite, it was the arbiters of taste themselves, the rich, and those who
bought art for the rich, who began to play a major role in
establishing the value of a work of art. It is in this way that market
economy and the so-called laws of supply and demand began to
play a major role in what art was.
So, when tradition no longer dictates the value of art, the market,
and the art works exchange value, comes to do just this. The work
of Andy Warhol is considered to be important, valuable, an example
of 20th-century art at its best. But what transformed Warhol from a
person who decorated department store windows, and illustrated
fashion magazines to a world class artist? Some would argue that
this was due at least in part to his work beginning to fetch massive
prices.
In a recent Sothebys auction Andy Warhols 200 One Dollar Bills, a
silkscreened image of 200 one dollar bills stacked in a grid, fetched
$43.8 million; youve read correctly, a bit of cloth, stretched across a
softwood frame, decorated in manner that a homemade t-shirt
might be, and depicting a number of notes (themselves almost
arbitrarily ascribed value) cost as much as it might to feed, clothe
and shelter several hundred Canadian families for a year. The use of
those materials, then, is not reected in their cumulative exchange
value. Art as a commodity is made valuable by what you can get for
it, and as traditional art forms are increasingly marginalized market
based art and its exchange value comes to dictate what makes the
art good.
Who pays for arts work?: patronage system
Art has traditionally been paid for by the moneyed classes. The word
patron itself comes from the Roman Catholic tradition, where a
pope would oer an artist a certain amount of money to complete
certain works on the behalf of the church. This money would not
only pay for the work, but would support the artist in his life in
general (until perhaps the last few centuries or so women have been
largely excluded from being or acknowledged as artists). Versions of
such patronage of the arts are evidenced in ancient Roman, and
Southeast Asian cultures as well as in feudal Japan, but we see it
ourish in Europe in particular during the Renaissance. Through the
patronage system, not only the very wealthy representatives of the
papacy, but too kings, noblemen, and eventually successful
merchants could pay to support the sort of art, and the sort of
artists they saw t.
It is in this sense that art has for centuries been dictated to and
directed by the wealthy classes. It is noteworthy to point out that the
services of such artists were frequently bought and paid for by the
sort of people whod gotten their money in less that honourable
ways including colonialism and war proteering; the art the money
paid for was meant to purify these ill-begotten funds not only by
ennobling the patrons in the work of art, but by turning the dirty
money into immortal works of art.
The grant system
While the patronage system has not totally disappeared in the
contemporary art world, in Canada it has largely been supplanted by
the market system and the granting system.
Private organizations and governments (such as the Canadian
government) oer grants. A grant is a sum of money given to an
artist or artists to complete a given work. This sum of money can
vary dramatically, ranging typically from a few hundred to several
thousand dollars.
Generally speaking, an artist or group of artists will apply for a grant,
detailing the project she or he has in mind, and a jury made up of
representatives from that organization will decide which projects
should be sponsored and which not. These grants are good,
because, in theory, they allow an artist to pursue her own work on
her own terms.
This does not always happen in practice, however. As Mcleod
suggested in our readings from week one, governments such as
those run by Mike Harris, and in more recent years Stephen Harper,
have sought to cut arts funding and to alter the infrastructure of the
granting process. This is signicant for a couple of reasons: with less
money going to the arts via the granting system, artists who will
make a living, and therefore continue to make work, will tend to
respond to the needs and wants of the market. So, just as artists in
the patronage system worked to ennoble the people who paid them
to work, successful market system artists will cater to the desires of
the market values or tastes that will allow them to live and eat.
Besides curtailed funding, the makeup of the juries who oer
government grants is also of consequence. Such juries decide who
gets funding and for which projects. This is why, as Macleod points
out in our module 1 readings, it is important to have labour
represented in the decision making processes of our art and cultural
institutions, so that the stories, themes, and concerns of the classes
who cannot pay to be represented, are able to be by other means.
Whose art is it?
Michelangelo, whose work in the famous Sistine Chapel is
considered by some commentators to be the most iconic work of art
in the world beside Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa (a painting
depicting the wife of a famous patron), was not only all but forced by
the war-mongering art patron Pope Julius II to complete the work in
the lavish chapel, but, as was traditionally done, he included at
regular intervals the acorn, a symbol of the Sixtus family, after
whom the chapel was named and of which Pope Julius II was a
member. A more dramatic illustration of the impact of Pope Julius
IIs inuence on Michelangelos work can be seen in the image St.
Zacharia painted directly above where the Popes throne would have
been. Zacharia, a bible gure, is painted to look exactly like Pope
Julius II himself. In this way Pope Julius II resides not only over the
immortal chapel itself, but to the biblical subject it immortalizes.
In the same way that the patronage system can dramatically impact
upon the work of the artists it supports, so too does the market
system. Artists such as Je Koons and Damien Hirst are in todays art
world equivalent to the Drakes, Justin Biebers, and Madonnas of
todays music scene: they are popular, and they are big time. Je
Koons, who was in his early career, perhaps not surprisingly, a Wall
Street commodities broker, produces work which regularly fetches
prices in the millions.
Dismissed by some critics as expensive trinkets, the presence of his
work in such internationally renowned galleries as the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City, is justied by some apologists as
being precisely representative of the commercialism of our late-
capitalist moment: in this sense Koons work (as is perhaps Warhols
work, and specically his 200 One Dollar Bills) functions as an
homage to the market economy in its relationship to art in one
sense, the meaning of the work is the price it fetches as art. We
see here, then, where some critics are willing to call art quite
useless; at the very least, art objects are more valuable in terms of
exchange than they are in terms of use value.
The risk then of the market dictating the value and even the
meaning of an art work, is that market system art either will not, or
cannot oer the sorts of challenges many feel must be made to the
current capitalist system with its often inhumane and
unsustainable abuses upon which such work is inextricably
dependant.
The overlap of the art market and community
based art
Much of the art work discussed by Heartney in her lecture on art
and labour (the second of our two videos for module 3 and 4) is
aware of itself as belonging to the market art system and therefore
the market economy in general of which it is critical. As such, the
work takes up the practices, subjects, and concerns of community
based art in order to challenge the market system. Such work walks
the line between market system art given that it shows up in art
galleries, is being bought and paid for by art consumers and
community based art in so much as its practices and themes are
in keeping with the latter.
