“A HISTORY OF ART over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products – and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.

“I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation, is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.
[...]
“Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about “content” and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.”

What you just read was the introduction to A Call to Artists: Support Parecon by Jerry Fresia, an article in the book Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, edited by Chris Spannos. I’ve only read a couple essays from this book but I’m becoming quite fond of it. The book seems to contain lot about determining and participating in the building of our own present and future, and in a very tangible way. The articles I’ve read so far talk a lot about parecon, or participatory economics, as a viable political model. There is also a text from Michael Albert who wrote Parecon: Life After Capitalism, what seems to be an initial text for this participatory economics. I am positive that some of thoughts in this blog will be influenced by this book, so I will continue to update you.