Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

Dark Matter

Marxism and Culture

Series Editors:

Esther Leslie (Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London) and Mike Wayne (Reader in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University)

Other titles available:

Red Planets

Marxism and Science Fiction

Edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville

Marxism and the History of Art

From William Morris to the New Left

Edited by Andrew Hemingway

Magical Marxism

Subversive Politics and the Imagination

Andy Merrifield

Philosophizing the Everyday

The Philosophy of Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Studies

John Roberts

Marxism and Media Studies

Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends

Mike Wayne

Dark Matter

Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

GREGORY SHOLETTE

First published 2011 by Pluto Press

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Copyright © Gregory Sholette 2011

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This book is dedicated to Lucy R. Lippard, whose tireless energy remains an inspiration to me as an artist and writer; to the memory of Sophie Saroff (1917–88), comrade and mentor; and to Patrick Sholette (1958–2010), brother, worker, and friend.

CONTENTS

Series Preface

Acknowledgments

Exordium: An Accidental Remainder

Introduction: The Missing Mass

Notes

Bibliography

Appendix: Artists’ Groups Survey 2008

Index

SERIES PREFACE

Marxists frequently point out the crisis of the present and proclaim We’ve never had it so bad—now is the time for revolution. And here we go again. But, by any account, the events of the past couple of years have been turbulent and critical. Bank bailouts, meltdowns in major financial institutions, long-established businesses going to the wall, the collapse of economies and economic zones, rising world unemployment, humanly-induced ecological disasters, and that perennial feature of the post-war world, ongoing war and occupation. There is a widespread perception of systemic instability and many fear worse to come. In the realm of culture, there are concrete threats ahead—the arts, which in such times of crisis are perceived as a luxury, face a period of cutbacks. Universities are slashing courses in the Arts and Humanities, now defined, under current funding regimes, as of no financial value—the only legitimate measure today. Our series, Marxism and Culture, continues in this bleak context, in which there is less and less to lose.

Eighty years ago, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht planned a journal, in order, as they saw it, to seriously wage the intellectual civil war against their many reactionary or incompetent fellow critics. It was to be called Krisis und Kritik [Crisis and Criticism] and drew in figures such as Lukács, Adorno, and Marcuse. Its character was political, standing on the ground of class struggle, and its critical activity anchored in clear consciousness of the basic critical situation of contemporary society. At that moment, the many forms of crisis—social, economic, political—appeared to be ever more manifest and they pressed themselves in to become part of the context of criticism. The critical moment is, precisely, the moment of the splinter, the shattering. Critical is derived, of course, from crisis. It is defined as a turning point, an interruption, a change in quality. This sense is most explicit when it is used in chemistry or physics: where it relates to the value of a measurement, such as temperature, at which an abrupt change in a quality, property, or state occurs. The critical moment proposes a before and after or a wavering on the cusp of those two moments.

Our book series would hope to address such a critical moment. It is a decidedly post-post one. The delusions of the 1980s, which took on concrete critical form in Post-modernism, seem otherworldy now. Post-marxism, post-feminism, the third way—these appear as the concerns of another epoch. It is not uncommon to hear talk again of that oldest of Marxist bugbears, Imperialism. And today Capitalism—and its anti-, are even part of the media’s vocabulary.

This current volume investigates a terrain of critical art practice, or, better put, tactical media work that exceeds the white walls of the gallery and takes the battle of and in representation—in all its senses—to the streets. It builds on previous work in our book series, melding the work on Marxism and Art History (edited by Andrew Hemingway) with the analysis of the Everyday (John Roberts). It brings to light the dark matter of the art world, the unrepresented missing mass, wresting creativity from professionals and commodifiers, in order, not least, to rewrite art history and re-invigorate the everyday.

Esther Leslie (Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck,

University of London) and Mike Wayne (Reader in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A substantial roster of groups and individuals made this decade-long study possible. Foremost among them are Carol Duncan and Andrew Hemingway, whose support and insights over many years cannot be overestimated. I am also indebted to Janet Koenig, and Ariana Sholette, as well as a remarkable group of teachers including Hans Haacke, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Steve Fagin, Benjamin Buchloh, Charlotte Schatz, and Jeanne Burford. My gratitude extends to my friends David Stern, Sue Giffard, and Rachel Stern who provided me with a place to work in a time of need; Olga Kopenkina for her guidance and encouragement; Jeffrey Skoller for his enduring intellectual engagement and friendship; Lucia Sommer who expertly helped with the project survey as well as designers Noel Douglas, Emily and Scott Santoro; Lize Kirwin who generously provided access to The Archives of American Art, and the staff of the Museum of Modern Art Archive for their able assistance with research in the PAD/D Archive. This book would also not have been possible without the adept editing of Esther Leslie, David Castle, and Tim Clark from Pluto Press, as well as a host of artists, friends, and scholars who have contributed in countless ways to my knowledge of this subject for several decades, including: Dennis Adams, Alexander Alberro, Melody Aleen, Jerri Allyn, Aryeen Anastas, Rasheed Araeen, Doug Ashford, Todd Ayoung, Scott Berzofsky, Brett Bloom, Mary Ann Calo, Jessica Cannon, Ron Clark, Keith Christensen, Salem Colo-Julin, Maureen Connor, Jim Costanzo, Ivet Curlin, Edward DeCarbo, Ana Devic, John Duda, Dan Eisenberg, Andrea De Felice, Ed Eisenberg, Marcelo Expósito, Nina Felshin, Marc Fischer, Kirsten Forkert, Emily Foreman, Rene Gabri, Aaron Gatch, Benj Gerdes, Philip Glahn, Leon Golub, Dara Greenwald, Libertad Guerra, Brian Hand, Marc Herbst, Robbert Herbst, Brian Holmes, Nataša Ilić, Paul Jaskot, Fred Lonidier, Tom Klem, Lisa Maya Knauer, Carin Kuoni, Steve Kurtz, Dejan Kršić, Nicolas Lampert, Ernie Larson, Pedro Lasch, Marc Leger, Martin Lucas, Rikke Luther, Jerry Kearns, Mary Kelly, Martin Krens, Moukhtar Kocache, Ed Marszewski, Lydia Matthews, Micki McGee, Josh McPhee, Karen van Meenen, André Mesquita, Sherry Milner, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Naeem Mohaiemen, Alan Moore, Barbara Moore, Beverly Naidus, Catherine Queloz, Trevor Paglen, Herb Perr, Jenny Polak, Tatjana von Prittwitz, Yasmin Ramirez, Gene Ray, Gerald Raunig, Oliber Ressler, Scott Rigby, Tim Rollins, Martha Rosler, Ellen Rothenberg, Julia Rothenberg, Orla Ryan, Sabina Sabolovic, Rasha Salti, Dread Scott, Jacque Servin, Stephanie Smith, Åsa Sonjasdotter, Christoph Spehr, Nancy Spero, Blake Stimson, Eva Sturm, Bill Talen, Nato Thompson, Daniel Tucker, Igor Vamos, Vanni Brusadin, Wolfgang Zinggl, Vera Zolberg, Dan Wang, O. K. Werckmeister, Nicholas Wisniewski, Chin-tao Wu. I am also grateful to the publications Afterimage, Artforum, Circa, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Proximity, and Third Text for their support (and who in a different form first published some of this book’s ideas and material), and to Professional Staff Congress union ADT Local #2334 and Queens College City, University of New York for making possible the release time from teaching to complete the manuscript.

EXORDIUM: AN ACCIDENTAL REMAINDER

Many years ago, when I began my initial research for this book, I purchased a volume of essays by the late art critic Craig Owens, a New York-based art historian and theorist closely identified with 1980s post-modernism. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture was published in 1992, two years after Owens died of complications from AIDS.¹ Though I never met Owens, his ideas about the politics of contemporary art left their mark on my intellectual development. Beyond Recognition was of particular interest to me for several reasons. One of these centered on a short essay the critic wrote in 1984 entitled, The Problem With Puerilism.² Drawing on the social art history and cultural theory of Stuart Hall and Thomas Crow, the two-page essay roundly denounced the gentrifying effects of the East Village Art Scene, then in full bloom on New York’s Lower East Side. Originally published in Art in America magazine, Owens’ commentary is one of the first texts that links contemporary art with what we now call neoliberalism: the radical deregulation and privatization of the post-war Keynesian economy initiated by Thatcher and Reagan.³ The cultural changes brought on by the rise of neoliberalism runs like a leitmotiv throughout this book. However, there was another reason I wanted to look over the text republished in Beyond Recognition: in its original form in the magazine his essay was accompanied by several anti-gentrification street graphics created by PAD/D, the group I had worked with in the early 1980s (and in fact, to my knowledge The Problem With Puerilism is about the only occasion when PAD/D was referred to in any major art magazine).

Owens’ brief editorial in Art in America was in fact a barbed rejoinder to a far lengthier article that unabashedly eulogized the gritty, self-proclaimed Bohemianism of this new, East Village art market. Both texts appeared in the same 1984 Summer issue. At the center of the debate stood dozens of commercial art galleries that had sprung up in what was then one of the most ethnically diverse and working-class sections of Manhattan. The presence of these new Bohemian artists, dealers, and their posh clientele had begun pushing up rents and accelerating the exodus of low-income residents out of the neighborhood. Owens took to task the mannered affect of East Village art, a mostly painterly and expressionistic style largely churned out for novice collectors riding the mid 1980s stock-market boom, but he also deftly focused on the symbiosis between art and real estate. In a sense, The Problem With Puerilism offered an early description of what was to become a new urban lifestyle woven from equal parts entrepreneurship and avant-garde dissent. A decade later such simulated Bohemia would spread from New York City to Chicago, London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Budapest, and beyond. The critic’s essay did not end on a pessimistic note however, and instead, in a gesture invoking Benjamin’s The Author as Producer, Owens called upon artists to reject their own class interests in order to work within the community to call attention to, and mobilize the political and economic interests East Village art serves (as the artists affiliated with PAD/D, who are responsible for the illustrations accompanying this text, have done).⁴ Owens parenthetical comment referred to several graphics that had been part of a guerrilla-style poster campaign PAD/D directed (ineffectively) against the gentrification of the Lower East Side. The street exhibition was entitled Not For Sale, and it overtly parodied the informal character of East Village art galleries in a bid to stimulate some form of social involvement by an otherwise politically passive art scene. By linking his text with these agitational graphics, Owens likewise shifted the tenor of his commentary from that of a purely analytical tract, to something approaching political pedagogy, and therefore closer to the tendentious style of Benjamin’s anti-fascist essay.

Upfront newsletter was produced on a semi-annual basis by the artists’ collective PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution) and featured illustrations, reports, reviews, and full-length articles about engaged art practices in the New York City region and beyond. On the cover of this issue on gentrification, from Summer 1983, is a large stencil mural by artist Anton van Dalen (Lower East Side: Portal to America; medium: latex and spray paint stencils on wall; size: 148x180ins; exhibition date: May 31–June 28, 1981). It was located inside CHARAS/El Bohio (at 605 E. 9th Street, New York, NY), a former public school building occupied in the 1970s and 1980s by Nuyorican community activists. In 1998 a private developer purchased the building from the City with the intention of transforming the former school into luxury apartments and the mural was painted over. Image courtesy Gregory Sholette Archive.

PAD/D’s Not For Sale committee launched its anti-gentrification guerrilla project OUT OF PLACE on the streets of Manhattan’s East Village in the mid 1980s by designating the façades of four boarded-up buildings as mock art galleries. Pictured here is the poster for the project and the then derelict Christa Dora building transformed into the mock art venue Leona Helmsley Gallery (named for one of the city’s real estate moguls). A series of graphic works were wheat-pasted onto each of these illegal venues explicitly protesting the role of artists in displacing local residents and small businesses. The opening of the project took place at the Guggenheim Downtown on the corner of Avenue A and 10th Street on April 28, 1984 during the height of the East Village Art Scene. Images courtesy Gregory Sholette Archive.

However, when I opened the posthumous collection of his writings the Art in America essay appeared quite different. There were no reproductions of PAD/D’s images, and no parenthetical statement praising the group’s anti-gentrification stance. I turned to the index. There I found an entry entitled PAD/D 266. But this index entry was all that remained of PAD/D, a small residuum certain to be overlooked by even the most observant reader. The most interesting angle to this minor art-historical mystery is not why or how PAD/D’s presence was excised from the text—such editorial oversights happen all the time and no doubt my book is no exception—but rather it is the way this textual ellipsis relates to my own project, which seeks to unearth this and other accidental remainders, or, more accurately, to point to their present absence. Granted, it is a warning that almost certainly comes too late. With increasing, often cybernetic energy, a shadowy social productivity now haunts the very notion of a proper artistic canon with its exemplary practices and necessary acts of exclusion. These ghosts pour out from the crypts and basements of culture’s dwelling places, including its poorly kept records and shadowy archives of over-productivity. They multiply faster than any newly devised tomb (or text-tomb) could even hope to retain them. Along with the explosive activity of non-artists, the increasing visualization of countless failed professionals, and the diminutive trace of activist groups such as PAD/D, the uncomfortable but growing presence/absence of culture’s missing excess mass announces its arrival. Think of this book therefore, as a tentative lumpenography of artistic dark matter.⁵

INTRODUCTION: THE MISSING MASS

The dreaming collective knows no history.

Walter Benjamin¹

Dark Matter

Astrophysicists describe dark matter (and dark energy) as forming an invisible mass predicted by the big bang theory, yet so far only perceived indirectly by observing the motions of visible, astronomical objects such as stars and galaxies. Despite its invisibility and unknown constitution, most of the universe, perhaps as much as 96 percent of it consists of dark matter, a phenomenon sometimes called the missing mass problem. The gravitational presence of this unseen force presumably keeps the universe from flying apart. This book borrows the metaphor of an unknown but ubiquitous stellar mass and applies it to the world of art and culture. Like its astronomical cousin, creative dark matter also makes up the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society. However, this type of dark matter is invisible primarily to those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of culture—the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators, and arts administrators. It includes makeshift, amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices—all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible. While astrophysicists are eager to know what dark matter is, the denizens of the art world largely ignore the unseen accretion of creativity they nevertheless remain dependent upon.

Consider the destabilizing impact on high art were some of these hidden producers to cease or pause their activity. What would happen for example if the hobbyists and amateurs who purportedly make up a billion-dollar national industry in the US simply stopped purchasing art supplies or no longer took classes with professional artists, or ceased going to museums to see what bona fide artists do?² And why consider only the tactical withdrawal of amateur participation, which is by definition marginal? What about the dark matter at the heart of the art world itself? Consider the structural invisibility of most professionally trained artists whose very underdevelopment is essential to normal art world functions. Without this obscure mass of failed artists the small cadre of successful artists would find it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the global art world as it appears today. Without this invisible mass, the ranks of middle and lower level arts administrators would be depleted, there would be no one left to fabricate the work of art stars or to manage their studios and careers. And who would educate the next generation of artists, disciplining their growing numbers into a system that mechanically reproduces prolific failure? Furthermore, by purchasing journals and books, visiting museums and belonging to professional organizations, these underdeveloped invisibles represent an essential pillar of the elite art world whose pyramidal structure looms over them eternally out of reach. And yet there is no material difference between an earnest amateur on the one hand, and a professional artist made invisible by her failure within the art market on the other; except perhaps that against all the odds she still hopes to be discovered? How would the art world manage its system of aesthetic valorization if the seemingly superfluous majority—those excluded as non-professionals as much as those destined to fail—simply gave up on its system of legitimation? Or if they found an alternative to it by creating a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network of support and direct sales bypassing art dealers, critics, galleries, and curators? Indeed, to some degree this has already begun to take shape via media applications of Web 2.0. What has not happened is any move towards re-distributing the cultural capital bottled up within the holding company known as high art.

The first newsletter of PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), a single folded offset page published in February 1981, approximately one year after the group’s founding. Shown is the group’s mission statement Waking Up in New York City, as well as the artwork Un Certain Art Anglais! by artist and founder of the journal Third Text, Rasheed Araeen. Image courtesy Gregory Sholette Archive.

All of these forms of dark matter play an essential role in the symbolic economy of art. Collectively, the amateur and the failed artist represent a vast flat field upon which a privileged few stand out in relief. The aim of this book is to raise an inevitable question: what if we turned this figure and ground relation inside out by imagining an art world unable to exclude the practices and practitioners it secretly depends upon? What then would become of its value structure and distribution of power? The answer is not to imagine the emergence of a more comprehensive social art history in which the usual art subjects are better contextualized. Nor is it to take part in some rarified tour of this dark-matter world in which the mysterious missing cultural mass is acknowledged, ruminated over, and then re-shelved or archived as a collection of oddities. Instead, when the excluded are made visible, when they demand visibility, it is always ultimately a matter of politics and a rethinking of history. This is often the case with artists’ collectives, groups, and collaborations whose communal self-embrace inevitably spotlights the general superfluity of artistic production and producers. But something has also happened in recent years to that far larger mass of inert dark matter. It is a change that dramatically alters the relationship between visible art and its shadowy other, between professional and amateur, the institution and the archive. Dark matter is getting brighter. And simultaneous with that change in status, this once missing mass has also been forced to undergo its own adaptations and mutations. The essays that make up this volume do not seek to link the growing illumination of imaginative dark-matter productivity with a market-generated notion of outsider art or some other facile locus of cultural colonization. Rather, their allegiance is with those artists who self-consciously choose to work on the outer margins of the mainstream art world for reasons of social, economic, and political critique. In a sense, these artists have learned to embrace their own structural redundancy, they have chosen to be dark matter. By grasping the politics of their own invisibility and marginalization they inevitably challenge the formation of normative artistic values. Here politics must be understood as the imaginative exploration of ideas, the pleasure of communication, the exchange of education, and the construction of fantasy, all within a radically defined social-artist practice. Such informal, often highly politicized micro-institutions are proliferating today, and have been growing in number for the past 15 years at least. This kind of self-organized dark matter infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate websites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for art world discourse or private interests. Which is why the responses to this growing illumination made so far—including the various narratives and theoretical attempts to manage dark matter, from the academicization of public art to relational aesthetics—are no doubt transitory, and merely part of a greater shift taking place within the broader cultural paradigm.

Look again at the art world and the dark matter it occludes. Few would deny that the lines separating dark and light creativity, amateur and professional, high from low have become arbitrary today, even from the standpoint of qualities such as talent, vision, and other similarly mystifying attributes typically assigned to high culture. What can be said of creative dark matter in general, therefore, is that either by choice or circumstance it displays a degree of autonomy from the critical and economic structures of the art world by moving instead in-between its meshes. It is an antagonistic force simultaneously inside and outside, like a void within an archive that is itself a kind of void. But, as I hope to show, the archive has split open, its ragged contents no longer hidden from view. Still, this growing materiality is not necessarily a politically progressive event. Increased visibility not only poses certain risks for any institution that seeks to enclose it but also—by privileging spontaneity and discontinuity, repetitions and instability—dark matter can seldom be sustained as a political force. What proves effective in the short term or locally remains untested on a larger scale. And that is the point we appear to be rapidly approaching: an encounter with matters of scale and the need for a new sustainable political culture of the Left. Dark matter’s missing cultural mass is both a metaphor for something vast, unnamable and essentially inert, as well as a phantasmagoric proposition concerning what might be possible at this moment of epistemological crisis in the arts and structural crisis in global capital.

Commitment

This then is a book about the politics of invisibility that could only have been written at a moment when invisibility itself has emerged as a force to be contended with, or, conversely, a provocation to be selectively controlled. It is as much dedicated to those who refuse the capture of their invisibility, as it is to those whose very visibility has been and continues to be refused. But this is also a study of something else. We might call it the ubiquitous gaze of the social factory that now looks back at us tirelessly, unblinkingly, and with an unprecedented historical hunger. The collision of these visibilities and shadows, appetites and circumventions defines the spaces of my text, as well as the very conditions that artists, myself among them, must operate under within a post-Fordist enterprise culture. And yet, as odd as a book about invisible artists and artwork may seem, my methods are less orthodox still. In his essay The Author As Producer, Benjamin called upon cultural workers to become producers transforming the very means of their artistic production.³ What follows is my attempt to respond to that call. Throughout these pages I have sought to write tendentiously, in the critically engaged manner proposed by Benjamin, producing, I hope, a committed work that never disengages from its political core. By turns it invokes historical research, critical theory, empirical observation, and journalistic reportage approached from the bottom up, from the viewpoint of a cultural worker who necessarily labored at numerous ignoble jobs from janitor, to dishwasher, to industrial fabricator before becoming a college instructor, all to maintain his existence as an artist. And while these sundry work experiences were admittedly privileged by gender, ethnicity, and education, they nonetheless remain deeply instructive for my work and mark this volume in ways that have sometimes taken its author by surprise. This fundamental identification as a cultural worker leads me to push my critique of enterprise culture beyond an analysis of representation in order to examine artists’ working conditions and the power of the market. It also draws directly from my own history as an artist, specifically with two artists’ collectives—Political Art Documentation/Distribution, or PAD/D (1980–88), and REPOhistory (1989–2000)—both informally structured groups whose relationship to the art world was, and remains, marginal at best. Finally, whenever possible, attempts to define art and aesthetics have been avoided. For obvious reasons an artist is not able to step outside of such discourse into some detached critical space. Instead, I allow those who claim to make art to define it on their own terms, even if their identification with the practice is provisional, ironic, or tactical, as for example when artist Steve Kurtz insists I’ll call it whatever I have to in order to communicate with someone. And perhaps this playful relationship to the word art has its downside, given that Critical Art Ensemble, the Tactical Media group Kurtz co-founded, has received very little direct financial support from cultural foundations.⁴ My aim in other words is not to separate art from non-art, the rubbish from the dross, but to examine how these self-defined cultural practices operate within a changing economy involving material and symbolic rewards and penalties, visibilities and shadows. I leave it to the reader to decide if this idiosyncratic approach permits the airing of ideas and histories that would otherwise remain in the dark. What follows therefore is one admittedly partial attempt to articulate the politics of this missing mass. To paraphrase the cosmologists: there is perhaps no current problem of greater importance to cultural radicals than that of dark matter.

Redundancy

We can measure the waste of artistic talent, the art historian Carol Duncan perceptively observed as early as 1983, not only in the thousands of ‘failed’ artists—artists whose market failure is necessary to the success of the few—but also in the millions whose creative potential is never touched. Duncan adds that this glut of art and artists is the normal condition of the art market.⁵ As an artist trying to make my way through the complexity of New York’s cultural scene in the 1980s her comments struck me as both accurate and suggestive of an unglimpsed reality just below the surface. It seemed as though some vaguely visible structural condition peculiar to contemporary art had briefly flashed up before me. After several decades of working at being an artist, political activist, writer, teacher, curator, and founding member of two political artists’ collectives, Duncan’s comments returned to me with a vividness that only lived experience can furnish: The oversupply of artistic labor is an inherent and commonplace feature of artistic production. Why? In preparing this study I reinterpreted the art historian’s remarks as a series of questions. What do the many, necessarily failed artists, as Duncan calls them, actually provide to a system that handsomely rewards some of its participants? Artists are educated by the art world to see such failure as a kind of chaff that must be removed to release a small nucleus of value. Yet, even this agricultural metaphor reminds us that a wasted husk once protected a valuable seed. Perhaps most importantly, this creative chaff maintains and reproduces the system’s symbolic hierarchies by exchanging information about the luminaries of the art world at openings, parties, on blogsites, doing so reflexively, like a vast field of heliotropic flowers always oriented towards a brightly lit center. Even if the soil at the margins of this field is sewn with bitterness, such gossip reinforces the apparent naturalness of the overall art economy and its hierarchies. To restate this point with a shift of metaphors, the artist Martha Rosler was once brazenly informed by an art dealer that either you’re on the art world table or your not. The question today is, who supports the table?⁶

As peculiar as the cultural economy of fine art may be, there is no getting around the fact that an increasing number of individuals are choosing to become artists.⁷ This is all the more