Wednesday, March 24, 2010

#Class Reflections

Sadly, #class is out for an extended recess, but that doesn't mean it's over. We would like to invite all the participants of #class to submit personal reflections on your experiences. It has been said that there is no organized thought without writing. While #class was an amazing, immersive, and exhausting experience, the chalkboards never achieved what one might call 'organized thought' in response to our thesis statement. So, we would like to extend #class back into your think/work spaces to organize your thoughts.

I don't think there's any single way to approach this reflection, but we would ask you to respond in your own way to our original thesis, “art is a luxury commodity for the wealthy that limits the possibility of ownership, understanding, and access based on class, education and geography." We'd also encourage you to see if your experiences lead you to any solutions for helping "art make friends" because we realize that if we want public funding, support, and understanding for contemporary art then we need to earn it. It may not be enough to simply work hard in our studios and demand respect and support from others. We may have to, as Ben Davis argues, see ourselves as activists and artists. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but perhaps it begins with arts education for me, as a public school teacher. Maybe it is taking the awkward step of asking non-profits and museums if they have a budget that includes paying the artists as W.A.G.E suggests we all do. However you decide to approach your reflection, please keep in mind that we would like to post them on the blog (keep it brief!) If your reflection involves pictures or video that's also welcome as we'd love visual documentation of #class as well. Also, please reach out to anyone who might not be on our mailing list or contributed to #class in a spontaneous manner.

As of now, Jen and I also need to reflect on our experience and give ourselves some time to recover emotionally and physically from the marathon #class turned into. Believe me when I say we didn't understand what #class would require from us or what an amazing space it would become with all of your participation. While we figure out what's next for #class, we will continue the dialogue here. Please send your reflections to hashtagclass@gmail.com

Apparently, school is never out.




4 comments:

  1. "art is a luxury commodity for the wealthy that limits the possibility of ownership, understanding, and access based on class, education and geography."

    Speaking as someone who has created art on the web (& Internet), in comic books, via email and other populist formulations I'd say that this statement is only true for art that is created in such a way as to make it scarce. If it's not scarce, it's no longer a luxury. Simple economics.

    An artist chooses to make their work scarce. Current media creation and dissemination technologies make it stupidly simple to make one's work unscarce. If one chooses.

    Speaking as someone trained as a painter, I can understand a painter's objection to this idea. Their expression requires scarcity. A painting, sculpture or drawing on paper can be in only one place at a time obviously. But artists working in these types of media shouldn't do so ignorantly -- especially if they're worried about the class implications of the distribution of their work. There are other means of expression.

    It's not required to play in that system to make work or find an audience. Making a living? That's another story...

    ReplyDelete
  2. art is messy, that was my biggest revelation during my time at #class. big thanks and ups to Bill & Jen and Ed for letting us rock the house.

    Art Shred will continue on with me and c-monster to Los Angeles in April where will dispose of the "art remains" at sea.

    thanks again for including us! there are some great pix here

    http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=art%20shred&w=all

    and here

    http://www.jenisfamous.com/dev/2010/03/art-shred-performance-art-piece-with-el-celso.html

    Some reporting here:

    http://hragvartanian.com/2010/03/03/celso-presents-powhidas-contribution-to-art-shred/

    I'm still working on the video footage but there's a little here:

    http://www.youtube.com/user/elcelsovision?feature=mhw4

    Looking forward to your next best thing...

    congrats,

    celso

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