I used to cover gallery openings, but those days are over.alternet.org- Roger Boyce What about the author's : "3. Conceptual art is a joke." I don't know what to think. Maybe you can shed some light here?
- Wells Tao you mean actually read the article? I was just agreeing with the title
- Sam Hamilton I personally like a good joke myself.
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- Sam Hamilton If you live in NYC and have to look at Jeff Koons works everywhere then this is the natural conclusion you might draw. I would hesitate to say that's a bit blinkered though. I think it's possible, if not pretty vital for artists to called themselves artists while not wanting to be lap dogs for the 1%. if we let them those fucks will gobble up everything they can at which point there'll be nothing left. I would suggest to the author that they move out of of New York cause there are still plenty of people making art, making communities, making friends and contributing to a mutually inclusive society rather than the horrors they're describing. it's like food... if your eating shit, don't blame food, blame your dietary choices.
- Wells Tao It's a nice metaphor, art as food but I guess for me that idea misses the reality I'm interested in. But to continue with the metaphor, organic food from NZ, ever bought that in NY? Good idea, great infrastructure, good for everyone, but who can afford it? Now move out of NY live say, Nelson NZ, who can afford local organic food? Me? Nope. (yes we grow our own, but did I make my point?) The sacrifice it takes for a non 1 percenter to 'eat well' has me asking why continue the delusion thinking you can compete with "those fucks will gobble up everything". Other wise aren't you just working to keep their franchise sign "art" / "organic food" above your labor?
- Sam Hamilton some expandable points for sure.
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- Sam Hamilton not that I disagree with much of the article - there's alot of things wrong that desperately need addressing - school art programs, equal representation of woman in art museums; totally %100 with that of course.
- Sam Hamilton I was in NYC last november for work and was using the opportunity to figure out whether I wanted to move there and I quickly decided that that was a bad idea - for numerous reasons - but idea i developed from that time that I'd like to maybe think about more is the idea of artists boycotting entire cities.
If you ask me, I think that city is totally dead. it's no longer actually generating any culture itself but imports it, relying on a steady stream of young enthusiastic kids from smaller towns who've got youthful drive to move to a bugger city in search of bigger opportunities who move there, work to hard to actually grow and develop and form any cultural social fabric, burn out and move away. 
- Wells Tao yeah I think the reasons people moved to big cities have been nulled perhaps by the internet, but as factories, they continue to drag net fresh meat to feed to the surviving mechanisms. It's still a podium and while it may not have the grass roots it will always be able to sell the dream of it's existence... meanwhile, during that cycle of delusion small town life goes missing, leadership not developed exploitation given another layer of insulation.
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- Sam Hamilton eventually it'll become a dead, over priced museum of itself and young artists will no longer want to live there - but how could that be expedited? cities like NYC rely heavily on their cultural identity. the French of on occasion done it right by having mass strikes in the performing arts industry. It's a pipe dream, but I've love to see something similar happen in the US - god knows NYC needs it bad.
- Wells Tao I'm pretty sure post Guillani, and the great clean out, NY has been just that a museum. And yes museums our public institutions and what's left of them are the place to stage protests. Occupy was the flash of brilliance that is still growing. My instinct though is saying let it be called art, by others, but don't your self give your power back to that old deity. It's gone, the harness has materialised and is found wanting.
- Sam Hamilton p.s. are you following the socialist Occupy woman who's know rocking it in the Seattle council?. some great things are happening in Washington State at the moment - Seattle being the fasted growing city in the US today makes it an interesting hotbed of politics to - incredible new governance movements mixed with massive growing housing problems similar to Auckland.
- Sam Hamilton as for art; in the one hand I agree on just letting it go; if it becomes so heavy with excess baggage that its beginning to slow down our evolution into the future, then be rid of it. But theres another hand that's saying something else, that's more ready to put up a fight to protect what I think is important and truly valuable about it. I don't know. The art world is of course going to be full of shitty shitty shit, egos, money, bad politics and hierarchies; but then speaking as someone who's made art and engaged with communities around it for 15 years so, I can empirically say that that is only a part of it, and a part that it's actually not that hard to navigate around and avoid if you want to. If you want to interview dealers, look at Jeff Koons work or sit in Bentlies sitting champagne and soak up all the ugliness represented by arts sinister corners, the fine - but don't go fucking everyone elses buzz who - although might at points be forced to engage in capitalistic culture (which is pretty hard to avoid. just buying a simple banana entails a horrific footprint in terms of societal impact) but are otherwise not sitting in bentleys, not siting champagne, not making jeff koon works but who are - excuse the imperfections - working hard, figuring shit out, hanging out, thinking and living. Allthough I'd love to sell some art and make some money so that I don't have to deal with the ups and downs of being utterly broke, scared and worried; I've only actually sold a single art work in the last decade despite making alot of it. if I wanted to, i could have make more commercially viable works, or spent more time pimping myself in the scene, networking and commodifying my identity, but hey, that's not why I like art and make it and struggle with it and fight for it.
- Wells Tao i think if you'v only sold one art work in a decade but "make a lot of work" I think it would be a great idea to consider that what you've been doing has left art. I'm at a similar point in someways, 'engaged with communities around 'it' for 15 years' and my thinking at the mo is, well looking at art, I keep wanting to get paid for what I've been doing for free. By graduating from that master, I still make in many ways the same work but don't look for pay off in the same place. And that is significant. Shifts everything, capitalism or no capitalism.
- Sam Hamilton that does correlate not only the value but also meaning of art directly to money though.
- Sam Hamilton i'm a bit of the opposite mentality that having sold practically nothing but having made alot of work that has been appreciated by people is a stronger qualifier
- Wells Tao "Allthough I'd love to sell some art and make some money so that I don't have to deal with the ups and downs of being utterly broke," - quote Sam Hamilton
- Sam Hamilton yes, but not at the expense of making art that i want to make for the primary reason i want to make it
- Sam Hamilton perhaps what would have been better was to say I'd love to just get paid so i can freely make my art without monetary constraints. I'd rather get paid for simply being a breathing membe of society
- Sam Hamilton actually I do say that alot in regards to conversations about potential future economic models. particularly those that investigate the potential for Basic Universal Wages
- Wells Tao I don't see how anyone gets to participate in art and not evoke the myths that are tied to priveledge and power of the historical and contemporary 1%. That will always continue and like capitalism is part of the air we breathe. However, there is the opportunity of dropping off the lanugage map, and creating new tangents. This doesn't happen when 'art' swallows all such activites under it's myth.
- Sam Hamilton thats cool but I would perhaps say it would be resourcefully pretty intense and monumentally adventurous to have to construct new languages every time there is an attack on our existing one. saying that you cant see how anyone can participate in art without evoking the myths that are tied to the %1 etc sounds crazy if not super unfair - try telling some kid that while their drawing a picture, or someone enjoying a sunset.
- Sam Hamilton I agree that some new stratagies for disenfranchising the ability of the super rich to exclusivise art is needed though.
- Sam Hamilton i'm not sure I totally get your meaning though.
- Sam Hamilton what do you mean by new tangents too?. like new tangents of creative thought paths? cultural and societal trajectories?
- Sam Hamilton I agree language can be a force of conservative restriction upon any form of growth that requires constant struggle - and definitely needs people stepping beyond the boundaries of it's mapped terrain - but i see that as expanding the map in order to obtain a wider, and more thorough and knowledgeable picture of that language, not a denial of it. jin the same way we record history, that map is not fixed but pliable - fix it rather than discard it.
- Sam Hamilton I'm not entirely certain, but I do believe we're somewhere on the same page together here - just perhaps on different sentences.
- Wells Tao I think art is unfair. It is brutal hierarchical, selfish etc.. and full of beauty, the beautiful etc.. there's no fixing art, in my opinion, it's not broke. Working better than ever. I love the hugeness and popularity of the art world it is changing things. There is also a huge return of the medievil like guilds and class divisions that unsurprisingly are positioned to cap and drain potential. It is this capture that I am attempting to articulate when I desire to remove art from the top of the evolutionary triangle, and see it more of in the middle, a pupae, neither a live or dead, it's very transformation process caught determined by a system that as Greenberg once famously put it, "repudiate(s) revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics". There's no reason that 'art' can't be put to work for other uses, as it sounds like you've been doing. Only I feel it is time that this be called what it is, it is the art of something and no longer, just art. Be it the art of propaganda as I identify with, under my new title as a community conceptualist or some other invention, The point is invention.
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Sunday, April 12, 2015
I wouldn't call myself an artist because its like admitting your some wonna be i%ers lap dog! Sola Agustsson nails, it I totally agree! - Jack Barton My thoughts exactly. - Wells Tao
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