I Cani Abbaiano - journal

 Our class created a journal for our one class called Economy of arts under the guidance of journalist Manuela Gandini who regularly contributes to Alfabeta 2 a critical Italian journal focussed on arts,culture and society.The title of the journal translates as The dogs are barking. You can get the actual journal here in pdf but it is in Italian. 

Open publication - Free publishing

 Here is the editorial that I wrote. 

“An old west African proverb compares the artist to a dog. Positioned at the interface of the

human and the natural worlds, the dog in most ancient African societies enjoyed slippery and

highly ambiguous cultural status.

Neither a human being, nor a wild animal, it was nevertheless admitted in the domestic

sphere where it was recognised as man's best friend.

Loyal to a fault, it was committed to its master to the point of helping him hunt wild animals.

This is why it enjoyed special rights.

Because a dog was never happier than when its nose was up another's rear end- the anus,

that sensory button of the world - it also symbolised debasement and degradation.

Just like the dog, the artist also enjoyed special rights, including the right to conduct

forbidden experiments. His task was to translate society to itself”. – Achille Mbembe, Cape

Times, June 5 2012

The economic crisis has stimulated a range of conversations against the capital and consumer driven

system that the Western world have been comfortably nesting in for years. It has illuminated the

flaws of a system that has dominated and affected the core values of Western society the 21 st

century. It has in fact illuminated us to see that change is necessary, that is also a change in the

values that informs our decisions.

It is from here that we can see why it is necessary to create an enquiry also from the perspective of

the arts. The most obvious reason is that economic crisis’s or government financial policies affect

also the cultural sector. Producers of culture needs financial support and space in order to live, and

produce work.

When analysing the current situation crashing financial markets, greed driven corporations and

speculation are terms that superficially touch on the causes of this crisis. It easy to lay out the

blame on investment bankers, CEO’s and governments, but it did not come over night with a few

evil personas. It is a system of values - a culture - that has been the basis of the production and

consumption that we live in. We are not innocent bystanders or just simply victims of this system;

we were also participants in it. This includes the cultural sector; us as artists, curators and writers.

Thus as cultural workers we need to understand how we fit in to this economy, what systems of

production we use and what we do to change or uphold it.

Starting with a historical analysis allows us to see how we got here. Understanding how the arts

came to reflect the financial system of speculation, understanding the invention of the art market.

This also reflects on systems of power and how it came to be in the hands of a select few. We

look to the economic crisis of the past, the great depression, reflecting how it was dealt with even

sometimes in bazaar ways.

If one can understand the past we can reflect on the current situation. How is art valued today, what

is its role in society and how does political policies and the financing of it affect it. In the globalised

world we can learn from each other and trace similarities. An analysis of different concepts of

financing and public perception in different geographical areas starting from the sophisticated

funding system of Northern Europe to the complications of funding in a developing country; South

Africa. Another analysis shows the political complications affect art in Columbia and the review of

public art policies in Taiwan. We understand that we are not isolated.

A final part looks at how it has come to this, how the world has been perceived theoretically and

philosophically and how artist imagine and approach the situations. One might argue against or an

autonomous group of artists occupying and appropriating corporate buildings and urban spaces, or

Utopic imagined spaces as unrealistic, but it serves as mirrors held up to imagine what can be, or

what should not be.

One might ask why it is important that we as cultural workers publish a volume of articles on art

and the economy. The answer is this, we are the dogs, we need to dig up the old bones, we need to

start barking at the gates to warn of the thieves that enter to prevent them from stealing the good

ideals of society. We are not wild animals outside of the house; we are part of it and will contribute

to improving it.

I Cani Abbaiano.pdf

The art buying game.

A new project of mine. It is game based on a Monopoly game but placed within the art market.The objective is to buy all the artist work and thus gain monopoly over the art world.  

The value of art

While doing research for the text I have to write for my subject Economy of arts, I came across this really great interview with Achille Mbembe a theorist living in Johannesburg. He discusses the problem with art funding in South Africa, and addresses some issues also about funding coming from the Western world to Africa and the traps of thinking so narrowly about the value of culture. Go read it here.

"We have to realize that culture is not yet another form of “service delivery”. It is the way human beings imagine and engage their own futures. Without this dimension of futurity and imagination, we can hardly write a name we can call ours or articulate a voice we can recognize as our own". 

"We need to move away from this form of crass materialism and this empiricism of wants and needs in order to rehabilitate cultural and artistic critique as a public good in and of itself. The value of art cannot solely be measured on the basis of its contribution to material well-being. Nor is artistic creativity a luxury or an immoral pursuit that should be redeemed by its annexation and inscription in the official, state-sanctioned discourse of development and poverty reduction. We must resist this trivialization.

 Artistic creativity, cultural and theoretical critique is an integral part of the immaterial and unquantifiable assets produced by a society. It is a constitutive dimension of our communities and nations wealth in the same way as our physical infrastructures. It’s value by far exceeds the means by which this value is counted. The management and regulation of art and culture should therefore pertain to a different order, one that takes seriously the “intangible” and “inalienable” qualities of culture and one that, as a result, is not dependent on purely quantitative measurements and indexes".Achille Mbembe. 

And you can read a constructive response to this by Pamela Allara , I tend to agree more with  Achille in a sense that I feel that often in South Africa, getting funding is directly related to it having some social activist role, or having to fit into the role of producing art reflecting on  Apartheid or ethnic identity.