Lamp Life

Read Beyond Civilization going back and forth on the LA Subway (wouldn’t you know) to downtown. It’s interesting in the fact that the LA Subway is one of the few rail systems I’ve been on that is as class reinforced as the Bus System and that Beyond CIvilization (BC) sort of highlights some of this divisiveness.

Anyway, the other thing I noted was that what we’ve got here in BC is a very approachable conversation of what McLuhan speculated on in the 1960s in Understanding Media and other of his works. His theory was that the electric environment would cause us to re-tribalize in very much the way BC discusses. It’s much more in depth, but I recommend it since it really gets into a lot more of the social and critical theory behind the observations and muses of BC.

It also, interestingly, relates to what Anne Bogart talked about recently at the CETT conference in London in her keynote “6 real things” in that there are artists that need managers to organize vision and then the artists leave or pass on the the managers make institutions, which lose vision. It seems this in the paradigm of the artist seeing beyond civilization, needing to make it work and then the obligation of the manager to carry it on. This is speaking in inaccurate archetypes, but I thing that the newspaper in BC actually follows this line pretty straight forwardly.

I think it gets to the question of 501c3 status as well. Thats all about assigning a value to the work of artists in a bureaucracy. It’s saying hey, there is no absolute value of your work like a car or a ream of paper that properly assigns a value in the marketplace so we’re going to free you from those constraints. But to do so you must be modeled after government, because it is establish infrastructure to help value public work that is either not feasible based on solely market forces or has no absolute value. But since public works for roads and infrastructure have a set outcome, and a tangible benefit to their creation it is justifiable to run these projects at a loss due to ancillary gains (a road will not make it’s money back, but the tax revenue from the trade it empowers will).

Art’s ancillary benefits though are equally intangible to the project it creates. This subjectivity prevents it from existing within bureaucracy. Like when Ginsberg asked about when he can go into the supermarket and buy what he needs with his good looks.

So is the 501c3 the best model when one is trying to go BC? Or would existing as a tribal corporation (even what Bill Gates has been talking about with social corporations) be the goal? Would this mean not accepting the ability to accept tax deductible income and instead developing a way to support art making by ancillary income… what can you offer the market that will fund your non-marketable art?

If you look at the arts on Bali and in traditional balinese culture you actual see that everyone is an artist. No one is trying to be a famous artist, it is the balinese hindu belief that it is your duty to create beautiful things to thank higher powers for the earth. The gods want to be entertained, so you must make art (which happens to entertain you fellow people.

And then you get into the question of Humanism. If Humanism is placing man in the place of god (which isn’t anti-religion if your concept of man is as an extension of the universe and god), and theater is a humanist church, and it is you duty to create beauty in the world and be creative to please the humanist god (i.e. people collectively) then getting outside the entrapments of civilization and doing whatever you can to be able to be creative is a noble goal.

Just try and find an unhappy balinese artist.

thoughts?