In August 2007, it was alleged by Art Review that YBA artist Damien Hirst reportedly sold For the Love of God — a platinum-cast human skull encrusted with $28 million worth of diamonds — for a record $100 million. With this sale, Hirst not only cemented his stature as one of the richest living artists, he also clarified the relationship 
between art, commodity, and technology.
Robert Preece writes in an article on Damien’s skull that “what strikes me about the skull is its giant stride forward in media coverage and what lurks at the heart of this interest — price.”
As “the most expensive piece of contemporary art,” the skull’s close link with price on the internet — like “large sales figures trotted out by auction houses — helps to account for the skull’s magnetism in international business and new media, something that would have been nearly impossible before today’s high-speed information flows,” Preece writes.
Hirst’s skull epitomizes the commodification that a confluence of technological and economic strategies can create; technologies spread information and hype and increase demand by reaching a bigger audience, and art inserted into first world global economies caters to those with money to spend (at least before the economic crisis of 2008) and a mind for investments.
Jeffrey Deitch writes in “The Ultimates: Art from the Ultimate Maker to the Ultimate Consumer Good,” that in today’s global world, “the artist is not only the producer of one of the hottest investment commodities of the decade, but the producer of the ultimate consumer as well. This new state of affairs outrages and sickens many of those who have become aware of it, but it presents an extraordinary opportunity to artists who can figure out how to exploit it.”
While many artists such as Hirst exploit the current economic and technological conditions of today, many operate outside of the gallery, auction and “fine arts” world altogether. Much of the contemporary art in today’s global world opposes this notion of art as commodity; the work of artist collectives and the growing social practice and DIY movements exhibit alternatives to traditional methods of making and sharing art.
Rebellious roots
Today’s alternatives to gallery art and the associated price tags are born out of the rebellious practices that began in the 1950s and 60s with neo-Dada, happenings and intermedia.
These revived (from Dada) or new methods of approach to art making and exhibition circumvented the traditional “rules” of making art in one medium and showing it in a gallery. Neo-dada begins in the late 50s with artists starting to “experiment with unconventional materials, formats, techniques, and exhibition spaces.” The reinvigoration of a creative approach to art suggests to others down the line that anything is possible; artists are not to be confined to one manner of making and showing.
The Neo-Dada movement extends from Dada itself which began in 1916 and which “mocked traditional culture” with its experimentations in performance and theater, its readymades, and political collages, etc. In the article “Neo-Dada: Redefining Art” in the Performing Arts Journal, it’s mentioned that the Neo-Dada artists perpetuated earlier ideas: “the Neo-Dada artists’ use of chance as a compositional method, their interest in performance and other ephemeral manifestations, and their challenges to the conventional exhibition, distribution, and commodification of art, reflect profound shifts effected by Dada in attitudes about making art.”
Happenings and new definitions such as intermedia also directly shaped the artistic climate for the collectives, social practice and DIY culture we see today.
Dick Higgins defines the happening as follows, based on an earlier definition by Michael Kirby: A form of theatrical composition begun in the late 1950s, rejecting all narrative logic and all forms of stages in favor of maximum exploitation of the performance environment, lyrical performing elements within a matrixed structure, and an overall synthesis of music, literature, and the visual arts. The early happenings involved many artists of a variety of specialty to create moments that were about experience, collaboration, and people in time. Even more broad in its attempt to define alternative art makings and shows is the term intermedia, which “covers those art forms that are conceptual hybrids between two or more traditional media, such as concrete poetry (visual art and poetry), happenings (visual art, music, and theater), and sound poetry (music and literature),” (Higgins, 271). These artistic amalgams are important in considering the decommodification of contemporary art because they reset our understandings of what art includes, what it can be comprised of, and how it can be shown in alternative to the gallery where the association to a price is inherent.
The international artist network, Fluxus, is a great example of an early collective that incorporates these rebellious ideas. Though in “Fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods, individuals with something unnameable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work,” (Oren, 3). The group’s manifesto put out together by George Maciunas—thought to be the creator of the group—and Joseph Beuys makes such statements:
Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, “intellectual,” professional and commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, — PURGE THE WORLD OF “EUROPANISM”!
PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
FUSE the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action. (Oren, 13).
In a 1963 demonstration, several Fluxus members “picketed the MOMA, the Met, and the Lincoln Center in New York with signs reading ‘DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE!/DESTROY ART!/DEMOLISH ART MUSEUMS!’” etc. along with lecture details about “the suffering caused by Serious-Cultural snobbery, by its attempts to force individuals in line with things supposed to have objective validity, but actually representing only alien subjective tastes sanctioned by tradition,” (Oren, 10). In some of Maciunas’ writings he notes also that “Fluxus is definitely against art-object as non-functional commodity-to be sold and to make livelihood for an artist,” (Oren, 12). Fluxus artists also deviated from traditional art showing of the time through their performance, demonstrations, and their heavy reliance on printed material. The group printed invitations, pamphlets, flyers, longer writings in such a manner that “publication projects would come to occupy just as important a place as performance within the history of Fluxus,” (Dreyfus, 128). Both printed matter and performance exemplify the use of alternative venues for creativity, artistic spaces that often operate outside of the commodifying gallery.
Fluxus stands as an early example of other artist collectives or networks that operate in a similar fashion today, though often in a much smaller and more clearly defined manner. Rebar is a more contemporary example of a group doing work outside of traditional spaces. The San Francisco based art and design collective “ranges broadly in scale, scope and context, and therefore belies discrete categorization. It is, at minimum, situated in the domains of environmental installation, urbanism and absurdity,” according to their website. One of their projects, known as PARKcycle is a “human-powered open space distribution system designed for agile movement within the existing auto-centric urban infrastructure,” (rebar.org).
Rebar’s PARKcycle
Another of their projects, titled Cabinet National Library, is an installation on a small piece of land purchased by Cabinet Magazine. Certainly difficult to think of as a commodity, this project illustrates the clear departure from gallery art that is earth installation. Another of their projects, as part of the annual, international PARK(ing) DAY, Rebar explored the potential of metered parking spaces. This project in particular stands as a strong example of the reactionary work that many contemporary artists are making in response to the global economic and technological pressures. Many feel that we are inundated with technologies like headphones, cell phones, and online networking programs in such a way that we are becoming isolated from healthy, real-life interactions. The increased use of vehicles also adds to the isolation while at the same time depressing our natural environments. Parks that replace parking spaces reclaim public social spaces from the clutches of technological isolation. Further, a project like this offers a challenging concept to viewers for free. Stepping outside of the gallery and offering a visual or physical experience such as this, decommodifies art in a successful and rebellious way.
The Social Practice movement is another contemporary example of resistance to the institution. Its origins also come out of the early happenings of the 1960s with elements of performance, interaction, and varied mediums. Social Practice, according to the California College of the Arts social practice website, “incorporates art strategies as diverse as urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, “new genre” public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, interactive media, service dispersals, and street performance.” Social Practice also “focuses on topics such as aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, persona, media strategies, and social activism, issues that are central to artworks and projects that cross into public and social spheres.” One artist active in Social Practice artwork is Harrell Fletcher, professor and director of Portland State University’s Master’s in Social Practice program. In a collaboration with Miranda July, the two set up a website that suggests “assignments” that engender creative participation in the experience or sharing of things such as:
39. Take a picture of your parents kissing.
40. Heal yourself.
41. Document your bald spot.
42. List five events from 1984.
43. Make an exhibition of the art in your parent’s house.
(www.learningtoloveyoumore.com)
The site elicits participation on a private or public level and showcases some of the responses, photos, or videos from contributors. Anyone is able to participate, it’s free, and the results are accessible to anyone with web access. This project requires technology and thrives on the globalized social networking that is the Internet, but stands in great opposition to art as commodity. It is a strong example of the decommodification of art and its success outside of a gallery setting. It connects people and shares stories in a personal, local way; this itself, though using a globalized system like the Internet, resists the commodification that so often goes hand in hand with globalization.
Finally, the DIY movement is another emerging artistic avenue that stands to decommodify art in the traditional sense. Handmade, unique, custom creations are produced in a manner that resists the “industrialized mass production,” (Postrel, 108). It is about reclaiming power. And even though technology is a necessity for the DIY culture to sustain itself—“it’s brought together like-minded people and allowed them to share and grow together via blogs, Web sites and viral networking”—it’s popularity came from “people reacting to a highly technological society and wanting to have control over their lives,” (Bond, 22-23). Even as their crafts are marketed on etsy.com as a commodity, creations coming out of DIY culture do not partake in the global commodification of art in the grander sense. Rather, DIY creations are to the globalized art institution as local food is to industrialized agriculture; it partakes in the system but resists it all the while. DIY creations reclaim the specific, the unique, and the handmade. It celebrates and capitalizes on the skills that each of us has or can easily attain. It is a local lifestyle; creations are made apart from the energy of the elite global art centers. It enables us all to fashion a style that fits our tastes: “DIY can be a style, with a deliberately unpolished look and feel, including such marks of amateurism as handwritten letters, inelegant spacing, and slightly crooked type,” (Postrel, 108). It is a stylization of the handmade. The attraction to DIY creation often begins in each individual with the reminiscence of childhood crafting, but it also has beginnings in the punk and zine eras. It is tied to craft and appeals to the craft aesthetic; it “recalls John Ruskin’s Victorian-era nostalgia for the imperfections of Gothic handcraft; it’s a rebellion against machined perfection,” (Postrel 108). Faythe Levine, writer, filmmaker, and crafter of Handmade Nation: the RISE of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design is but one example of a DIY artist, but they are everywhere. DIY provides “a way for people to reconnect, to express themselves and be creative in their everyday lives,” something that isn’t possible for everyone to do within the high-art institution (Bond, 22).
Contemporary examples of the decommodification of art are abundant in today’s art world. Artist collectives, social practice art, and art emerging from the DIY movement exhibit artistic value that operates outside of the commodified gallery setting and thus the traditional institution of fine art. This trend responds to the economic and technological climate of today; inflated art prices and the proliferation of internet art-hyping have amplified the concept of art as a product. Stepping outside of the gallery, many artists reclaim creative originality and standards for strong, relevant concepts that can greatly affect an audience without such strong ties to the tradition of art as a gallery-based commodity.
Kristen Roland is an art student at PSU.
