<nettime> artists, commercialization and institutions

[Molly Hankwitz via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

hello dear nettime! 

molly hankwitz resurfacing after along absence while thinking I was doing something in the feeds of fb to circulate pieces of activist activity and hilarious comedy re current maga politics - my psychological survival depending upon putting up a fight to the ludicrous tyranny 

david cox and I - formally archimedia, now bivoulab.org  - have undertaken morning conversations about the tragedy of the petrified  institutional commercialization of digital media - under other terms frequently but still a kind of prevelant dumbing down.( I couldn’t help but think that jumping ship and signing up to the nettime army a better possibility in these fraught times, than simply being siloed, as my acquaintance suggested I had fallen prey to…)

 this article and text below resonates on these topics, as related to artist-run spaces…
(From which we come…)

please take care of yourselves in this increasingly slickebing, violent, violating, “mad Nazi” world, and enjoy…


https://direct.mit.edu/octo/article/doi/10.1162/OCTO.a.539/135707/New-York-Real-Estate-and-the-Ruin-of-American-Art?fbclid=IwZnRzaARItAVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEexk0GO1xbpARr9SBZIVQPMY5LttPzmu8B4CjsSCPBg-Miw-Rp-OrXr1_lUWQ_aem_PEz6eOapPrCikFDmIcwGGg

And this addend text by Sachiko Hayashi, editor of h-z journal

"There is a real and meaningful difference between a true artist-run space and institutional alternative spaces. ...
The lack of true artist-run alternative spaces in the American art industry's center is important because it is often only in artist-run spaces that artists—as individuals and as groups—can work out their ideas on their own terms. For most artists, it's only possible to fully understand a body of work that they've made when it becomes an exhibition. ... Exhibitions remain the main route through which artists bring their art to their peers and to the public. ...In non-commercial artist-run spaces, artists hold a final veto on decisions about who exhibits, what a show is, and what art can be: Dealers, institutional curators, and educators do not get the final call. The other concerns that these gatekeepers juggle—client sales, ticket sales, making funders or administrators happy, avoiding political offense, their own generational or class or racial biases, etc.—are absent in spaces like these. Preconceived notions about what will sell are not the determining factor for whether artists receive invitations to exhibit in DIY artist-run spaces. Very little work gets sold out of these true alternative spaces. The communities of young artists that come together and thrive in them compete to make ambitious work and exhibitions, not to make sales.
The scarcity of artist-run spaces is likely one factor inhibiting the emergence of major new art movements in the United States over the past quarter century. Museums, galleries, and art schools don't see nurturing artist communities and the art movements they give birth to as part of their job. ...
My own career and the careers of artists in my cohort during the early 2010s would never have happened without artist-run spaces and platforms like 179 Canal, Dismagazine.com, Ramiken Crucible, 247365, and Real Fine Arts, among others. Alongside DIY projects like Cleopatra's and Audio Visual Arts, these were spaces for and by our generation of artists where we were able to develop new practices, ideas, forms, and communities....
...[T]he alternative remains as a ghostly question: What would a twenty-first-century American art world look like in which many different kinds of artists—not just well-off, market-approved white painters—put forward arguments about what contemporary art could be? What would happen if these questions were reclaimed by artists and taken away from the art industry?"

https://dismagazine.com/?fbclid=IwZnRzaARItLhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeYfg20pxSkSeL8bFToirpNHd7HsHxzEhZo7FrshEig7D6IPQDo6dJqZSIrgY_aem_Bn_YqZTzE7Loot0Y_aHpkw
-- 
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