The Fiction of the Creative Industries
Florian Cramer
[This text was written for the emergency issue of the journal "Open"
by the Dutch Foundation for Art and the Public Space (Stichting Kunst
en Openbare Ruimte / SKOR) SKOR/Open is one of the arts organizations
to lose their funding in the Netherlands. The complete
(Dutch-language) emergency issue of Open can be downloaded from:
http://www.skor.nl/nl/site/item/open-noodnummer-over-de-nieuwe-politiek-...
The German artist Gerhard Merz said in 1991 that "creativity is for
hairdressers".[^1] Professional artists and designers never had a high
opinion of the word "creative" and the people bearing it on their
business cards, from creative directors to creative consultants and
creativity trainers. An exception perhaps was Merz' colleague at the
Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Art, Joseph Beuys. Anticipating much of
today's community art, he embraced the notion of creativity in its
broadest sense and sanctioned any type of socially constructive work
as art. And Merz, while making a sound point against romanticized
artistic subjectivity and the overall stupidity of the word
"creative", was a highbrow art snob dismissing the lower crafts.
Two Aspects of Austerity
Bar-Yuchnei
Endnotes
What are we to make of the current round of austerity? Should we believe Keynesians like Paul Krugman, when they argue that capitalists are acting against their own best interests in calling for cuts? Are government finances really under stress, or is it all just a ploy to undermine the last remaining gains won by workers' struggles? Some members of Endnotes throw in their hats...
Oxcars and Free Culture Forum 2011
Networks for a R-evolution
27 to 29 of October 2011 - Barcelona*
**Three days to think about what the Internet has done for us, and what we
can now do for it ;-).*
http://whois--x.net/english/oxcars-and-freecultureforum-2011
2011 is the year when the consciousness of a global network has
emerged. The massive and strategic use of social and digital networks
has allowed the movement of citizen empowerment to step up a notch,
and has facilitated a viral uprising of civil society in many parts
of the world. The struggles to defend the Internet have shown to be a
fertile breeding ground for such uprisings.
ephemera cfp: communism of capital?
Call for Papers for an ephemera Special Issue on: Communism of Capital?
Issue Editors: Armin Beverungen, Anna-Maria Murtola and Gregory Schwartz
Deadline for submissions: 29 February 2012
Today, neoliberal capitalism is increasingly put into question. Whereas two decades ago business school gurus argued that the US was ‘the most “socialist” country around’ (Drucker, 1993: 6), today’s self-appointed business leaders know they cannot do without a certain communism. George Soros, Bill Gates and others refer to themselves – not without irony – as ‘liberal communists’ (Žižek, 2008a). Recognising the evils induced by capitalism these patricians of the market proselytise market philanthropy to deliver many of the ostensible benefits of the communism of yore. Newsweek, reflecting on the national bailout of the banks in response to the financial crisis, declared: ‘We are all socialists now’ (Meacham, 2009). Yet, the one thing that seems beyond question in such projections of communism is capital itself.
Aldo Tambellini: Black Zero
1 October through 1 November, 2011
Chelsea Art Museum
Performance of Tambellini’s Black Zero featuring Christoph Draeger, Ben Morea, and Keweighbaye Kotee 20 October, 6 pm.
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation is pleased to announce a major retrospective exhibition of paintings, sculpture, lumagrams, videograms, film, video, and television work (1960-1990) by the American avant-garde artist, Aldo Tambellini
Release Events for "White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race"
September 22 - October 6
Please come celebrate the publication of Maxwell Tremblay and Stephen Duncombe's new book: White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. Just released from Verso, White Riot is a collection of first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk
history on issues of racial identity. This book brings together writing from leading music critics, personal reflections from punk pioneers, scholarly essays from academics, and reports on punk scenes from around the world.
New Old Stories from the Other Situationists
Alan W. Moore
review of Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen
with contributions by Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Gordon Fazakerley, Jacqueline de Jong, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home and the editors
Nebula (Copenhagen) and Autonomedia (Brooklyn), 2011
This book is a badly needed English language introduction to the stories of northern Situationism. While this political and aesthetic avant garde movement of the 1960s is most famous for the work of Guy de Bord (especially Society of the Spectacle, 1967), it had many other adherents and accomplishments, as the Expect anthology makes clear. Most notably for me is the description of a 1963 exhibition produced in Copenhagen in solidarity with a British direct action anti-nuclear group, “The Destruction of RSG-6.” But the northern Situationists also published an important artists' magazine, The Situationist Times, organized a commune in Sweden called Drakabygget, produced many short films and participatory art installations, painted slogans on drab public fences, and for years launched provocations against the smug consensus cultures of post-war Europe.
Since the 1970s I've had a sidelong relationship to the Situationists. They were really out there, politically, when I bought my copy of Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" published by the Detroit anarchist Black and Red house. Now there is a handsome MIT edition at many times the price of that pamphlet as the Situationist movement has emerged from the fog of the underground into the dry bright light of academic industry. In the 1990s, I used the resources of my artists' video distribution project to make pirate copies of De Bord's film for Bill Brown as he intervened in the commodification of the drunken sage's oeuvre.
New York as the Occupied Territories
Mark LeVine
As the US security state grows and civil rights and liberties erode, Osama bin Laden gets the last laugh. A recently exposed decade-long relationship between the CIA and NYPD that shows how the two agencies have worked together to monitor Muslim communities in New York has alarmed lawyers and analysts
Only two weeks before the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Associated Press has broken a story that reminds us of just how much America has changed during the last decade, and how the government - and as important, some of the country's most powerful corporations - routinely intrude into the lives of communities and individuals in a manner that would few would have thought imaginable the day before the planes struck the World Trade Center.
After a lengthy investigation, the Associated Press has published a story detailing a highly secretive decade-long relationship between the CIA and the New York Police Department (NYPD), in which the two agencies have worked together in "a massive covert programme to monitor the Muslim communities" living in the New York metropolitan area and surrounding regions.
Dignified and Undignified Rage: Brief Notes on a Pending Invitation, the UK riots, and Our Collective Failure to Construct Revolutionary Responses to the Global Crisis
Kolya Abramsky
Up there, they intend to repeat their history.
They once again want to impose on us their calendar of death, their geography of destruction.
When they are not trying to strip us of our roots, they are destroying them.
They steal our work, our strength.
They leave our world, our land, our water, and our treasures without people, without life.
The cities pursue and expel us.
The countryside dies and we along with it.
Lies become governments and dispossession is the weapon of their armies and police.
In the world, we are illegal, undocumented, unwanted.
We are pursued.
Women, young people, children, the elderly die in death and die in life.
And up there they preach to us resignation, defeat, surrender, and abandonment.
Down here we are being left with nothing.
Except rage.
And dignity.[1]
With these words “the men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista Liberation Army in Mexico convoked all the rebellious of Mexico and the World” to attend the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, under the theme “Another World, Another Path: Below and to the Left”. Coincidentally, or not, the call was issued on the very same day that Lehmann Brothers bank, metaphorically, went up in flames, September 15th 2008.
Nearly 3 years later, in mid August 2011, the UK exploded in nearly a week of urban war. Sparked by the killing of a young Black man at the hands of the police, London and other major (and also not so major) cities proceeded to burn in the worst riots the country has seen in decades. A tinder box, waiting for a spark. And, though not directly related, it was nonetheless impossible not to notice the fact that the riots took place exactly the same time as the world’s stock markets once again found themselves hurtling towards a free fall.
Understanding the Present-Day World Economic Crisis
An Eco-Socialist Approach
Saral Sarkar
The current economic crisis that, roughly speaking, began in January 2008 and is, in July 2010, still going on, has shaken the world. Politicians, economists, and publicists are using superlatives to describe it, It has been described as the severest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Seen superficially, similar, though not equally severe, crises have also taken place in the past few decades. There have been share market crashes, bank failures, crises in the finance market, credit crunches, strong recessions, state insolvencies etc. I have described them in my book Die Krisen des Kapitalismus (2010).
But the scale, depth and spread of the current crisis has been so great, that all concerned got panic. Many observers feared for the survival of capitalism. The question came up: is it only another crisis in capitalism, or is it the crisis of capitalism that Marxists, communists, socialists and other critics of capitalism have been waiting for since long? At least on one point all agree. Capitalism will never be the same again as it has been before the crisis, i.e. unbridled globalized neo-liberal capitalism will henceforth be bridled, more or less. That work has already begun.
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