Sunnydale Recycling

“Who’s afraid of an artist escort?” - Placebokatz

Oct 17 at 11:11pm by wilkins

Placebokatz has a piece about ARTOUT which is

ARTOUT is an experimental art service that allows those (with the financial means) to spend time with an artist. To get into their minds and hear first hand what they believe and how they represent it through their work. A novel idea, but not an insane one. Like it or not, we are in the thick of capitalism, which means that any and everything we as consumers can conjure up to ‘need’ have and will be addressed and cured.
…Artistic creativity results from the dialectical relation between the acceptance of the market as the underlying principle of social reality, and the need to escape its imperatives of obedience and consensus; its locus is the individuality of the artist. The artist plays the “messenger” and the “message”, the self-medium that finds its legitimacy through the charismatic negation of conventionality.

…Spending time in the company of the artist is a creative act; it reveals power relations within the existing artist-patron paradigm and leads to the mutual liberation of both artists and art-patrons from the condition of simple material production and accumulation to the next level of the direct creative exchange and immediate human solidarity.

Link to PlaceboKatz coverage.

This seems like a reasonable thing - from more than one ideological perspective. If you’re a libertarian/extreme capitalist type - it’s an exchange of money for information. If your ideology isn’t so well defined, it’s still an exchange of money for information - but it’s also patronage of the arts - by patronizing (in the non-pejorative sense) artists. If your politics lean a bit to the left - it’s a small-scale redistribution of wealth.

Seems not only unobjectionable - but we’ll go out on a limb here and say that not only is it not a bad thing - it’s a good thing. At the very least, an experiment to see what happens.

However - from the petition to which you are about to be directed, here’s what happened to one guy in Paris:

In September 2007 A. Kozlov, a well respected artist and writer, was accused by Parsons Paris management of associating the school’s name with “an illicit” business, thus damaging the reputation of the school, and forced to leave his teaching position. The reason for such an accusation was his participation in the ARTOUT project. This accusation is groundless, ludicrous and unworthy of any self-respecting academic institution. ARTOUT is an experimental art project in which many of us participate, not an illicit business as the administration of Parsons Paris has declared. By engaging in the act of artistic censorship, your affiliate campus has blatantly violated our colleague’s fundamental right to free speech and insulted not only those of us who participate in the ARTOUT project, but the artistic community at large. We all feel concerned.

I quote only the petition - which you can find here - and which I urge you to read, which I hope will persuade you to sign it, if I have not already so persuaded you - I quote only the petition because Mr. Kozlov’s original post, alas, is not in English.

Here’s an ARTOUT pitch:

We don’t normally like to admit such things - but Sunnydale Recycling’s General Counsel is, in fact, a licensed attorney. But not in Paris. But he wonders if Parsons’ conduct doesn’t violate the spirit and principle of droit moral?

So sign the petition;

Patronize artists via ARTOUT, if you can.