Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#12/Dollars and Sensibility: Extras

“Under capitalism, everything can be turned into a commodity, therefore anything that can be sold as art is art. Until we can replace the capitalist system with either socialism or something in which the needs of people and the planet are placed above the pursuit of profit/accumulation, we have to not only survive, but politically and economically thrive, make victories, gain greater ground overall. Individual success doesn’t necessarily have to be counterposed to collective gains and progress, indeed, it should be concomitant and mutual. “Success” can be evaluated by how much an artist and his/her work has attained greater force: the broadening of one’s base of support, the gathering of greater resources, and the extent to which one has become a threat to the status quo.” — from HOW TO SELL BUT NOT SELL OUT: Some Personal Lessons From Making a Career as a Subversive and Radical Performing Artist by Fred Ho

In celebration of Movement Research’s 30th Anniversary, Critical Correspondence is reprinting monthly excerpts from each of the first 30 Performance Journals. We will be featuring representative and relevant articles as well as each of the issues’ editorial note. It is both enervating and challenging to look at the historical map that precedes our time – the continuity of mission, the diverse attempts to “word” a practice, the voices that have gone and the ones that keep returning, the ongoing development of discourse alongside political struggles.

Dollars and Sensibility gathers artists, scholars, thinkers, community activists – all in their most natural habitat, that of the survivor. It seems as we read that the economic crisis is nothing new. (It is the policies that bring crisis that are never new, or at least not that different. They develop, on course, forward and upwards! Crisis is new by definition.) Editors Annie Lanzillotto and Alice Naude open up a can of warms – a slippery, swampy and muddy field of reflection on need, want, capitalism, interaction, technology and more. We reproduce Daria Fain’s It Topples Fast, which takes us through a comparison of the French state-support-for-the-arts system vs. her experience of the American way of defining a living.

“But the most dynamic example of this type of art are the contemporary transactions of J.S.G. Boggs, who trades his own drawings of currency for goods and services, in elaborate bartering performance pieces. When Boggs offers one of his money-like drawings in exchange for a restaurant meal or a motorcycle, how is the participant to decide the ‘real’ value of what is being offered? Boggs’s money art, instead of fooling the eye, boggles the mind with its challenges to our assumptions about money, art and value. His transactions effectively merge the substances money and art, and confuse their traditional roles as carriers of value.” — from Money in Art: From Face Value to Critical Value by Michelle Bennett