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Who is faking it: artists or activists, or both? | 11 comments
[new] reply to Martin Lucas (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#10)
by BrianHolmes on Wed May 28th, 2003 at 01:06:15 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Yeah, we seem to be on the same playing field in this discussion anyway. I quite agree about the danger of seeing your inventions, or your bare beginnings of "cultural capital," coopted and turned around against you by people who have the production and broadcasting resources. It happens all the time. I should have talked about that in my article. What's interesting is the way people try to resist that appropriation. The point of Yo Mango as an example was exactly that: it's currently impossible for any institution to coopt shoplifting! But note that it's also a pretty slim basis for credibility in the public eye. And the aura of that kind of illegality (if not the fact) actually can be coopted by a museum as "transgression," which probably explains the support that certain museums have given to Yo Mango. Ultimately more interesting to me are less showy gestures. I don't find it paradoxical that Jeanne van Heeswick's project was supported by the City and the transportation department rather than the museum - the project was, after all, directed toward the city's educational system and involved the trans. dept., while on the other hand, it threatened the detachment and abstraction which the museum has staked out as its high ground in society. But for van Heeswick's project to even get onto the city's radar and succeed in gaining access to the people and the resources, required playing that game with the museum, in fact it also required a curator playing a game with/against the other curators, and so on. So far, this kind of game is one of the major ways in which art practices reach beyond their aesthetic limits. But it would be nice to go further, to get beyond those limits: to have autonomous institutions and infrastructure, on the one hand, and to cooperate with institutions that are not hypocritical, on the other. That's what I'd like to see more of. Best, Brian

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Who is faking it: artists or activists, or both? | 11 comments
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