OBJECT RELATIONS

BHQFU

WEEK 7 NOVEMBER 23
RD



COCO FUSCO


Andrea Fraser Le 1% Cest Moi

Gregory Sholette Dark Matter

David Harvey The Right to the City

Dorothea Von Hantelmann On the Socio-Economic Role of the
Art Exhibition
How do the worlds leading collectors earn their
money? How do their philanthropic activities relate to
their economic operations? And what does collecting
art mean to them and how does it affect the art world?
If we look at the incomes of this class, it is conspicuous
that their prots are based on the growth of income
inequality all over the world.
This redistribution of capital in turn has a direct
inuence on the art market: the greater the discrepancy
between the rich and the poor, the higher prices in
this market rise. The situation, it would seem, urgently
calls for the development of alternatives to the existing
system.
Who are the collectors of contemporary art today?
The ARTnews :cc Top Collectors list is an obvious
place to start. Near the top of the alphabetical
list is Roman Abramovich, estimated by Forbes
to be worth $+. billion, who admitted paying
billions in bribes for control of Russian oil and
aluminum assets.
+
Bernard Arnault, listed by Forbes
as the fourth richest man in the world with $+
billion, controls iv:n, which, despite the debt
crisis, reported a sales growth of + percent in
the rst half of :c++.
:
Hedge fund manager John
Arnold, who got his start at Enron where he
received an $8 million bonus just before it col-
lapsed recently gave $+c,ccc to an organization
seeking to limit public pensions.

MoMA, MoCA
and i\c:\ trustee Eli Broad is worth $.8 billion
and was a board member and major shareholder
of AIG. Steven A. Cohen, estimated to be worth
$8 billion, is the founder of s\c Capital Advisors,
which is under investigation for insider trading.

Guggenheim trustee Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who
is also chairman of the Hellenic Federation of
Enterprises, recently called for modern private
initiative to save the failing Greek economy
from a bloated and parasitic patronage-ridden
state.

Frank J. and Lorenzo Fertitta were the

third and fourth highest paid men in the Us in
ANDREA FRASER
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Figure 1: Andrea Fraser,
Index, published anonymously
in Artforum, Summer 2011,
p. 431. Produced for 24
Advertisements, a project by
Jacob Fabricus, with design
assistance by Santiago Prez
Gomes-de Silva, Studio Manuel
Raeder.
:cc,, according to Forbes. Guggenheim trustee
David Ganek recently shut down his $ billion
Level Global hedge fund after an F.B.I raid.
6
Noam
Gottesman and former partner Pierre Lagrange
(also on the ARTnews list), earned cc million
each on the sale of their hedge fund cic in :cc,,
making them among the worlds biggest win-
ners from the credit crunch, according to the
The Sunday Times. Hedge fund manager Kenneth C.
Grifn supported Obama in :cc8 but recently
gave $cc,ccc to a political action committee
created by former Bush adviser Karl Rove and was
also seen at a meeting of the right-wing-populist
Koch Network.
,
Andrew Hills $+cc million in
compensation in :cc, led Citigroup to sell its
Philbro division, where he was the top trader,
after pressures from regulators to curtail his pay
on the heels of Citigroups receipt of $ bil-
lion in Us federal bailout funds (he subsequently
moved the company offshore).
8
J. Thomilson Hill
is one of a number of principles of the Black-
stone Group investment rm who were listed
among the : highest-paid men in the Us by
Forbes in :cc,, with $6. million in compensa-
tion that year. (Fellow Blackstone cofounder and
Frick Collection and Asia Society trustee Steven
Schwarzman recently compared Obamas effort to
raise the tax rate paid by private-equity manag-
ers on their prot shares, currently taxed as
capital gains at + percent, to Hitlers invasion of
Poland
,
). And there is Damien Hirst, estimated
by The Sunday Times to be worth :+ million. Peter
Kraus collected $: million for just three months
work when his exit package was triggered by
Merrill Lynchs sale to Bank of America with the
help of Us federal funds.
+c
Henry Kravis income
in :cc, was reported to be $+. million a day.
++

His wife, economist Marie-Jose Kravis, who is
MoMAs president and a fellow at the neocon-
servative Hudson Institute, recently defended
Anglo-Saxon capitalism against Europes social
capitalist politics in Forbes.com. Daniel S. Loeb,
a MoCA trustee and founder of the $,.8 billion
hedge fund Third Point, sent a letter to investors
in the midst of recent federal budget negotiations
that led the US to the brink of default, attacking
Obama for insisting that the only solution to the
nations problems lies in the redistribution of
wealth (the negotiations concluded with drastic
cuts and no tax increases).
+:
Dimitri Mavromma-
tis, the Swiss-based Greek asset manager, paid
+8 million for a Picasso at Christies on June :+,
:c++, when Greeks were rioting against austerity
measures. And of course, there is Charles Saatchi,
who helped elect Margaret Thatcher. Peter Simon,
the founder of one of the Uks biggest retail
chains, was paid a +6.million dividend this
year by his company, which is based in the British
Virgin Islands, where there is no capital gains or
corporate tax and the income tax is zero. The rm
of MoMA chairman Jerry Speyer defaulted on a
major real estate investment in :c+c, losing $cc
million for the California State Pension Fund and
up to $: billion in debt secured by US federal
agencies.
+
And there is Reinhold Wrth, worth
$., billion, who has been ned for tax evasion in
Germany and compared taxation to torture.
+
He
recently acquired Virgin of Mercy by Hans Hol-
bein the Younger, paying the highest price ever
for an artwork in Germany and outbidding the
Stdelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt/M.,
+
where
the painting had been on display since :cc.
Until about ten years ago, one of the most
widely cited texts by an economist about the art
market was a paper called Unnatural Value: or
Art Investment as a Floating Crap Game, written
in +,86 by William J. Baumol. Baumol analyzed
several centuries of price data and came to
the conclusion that the real rate of return on
art investments was basically zero hardly an
encouragement for art collectors.
+6
In :cc:, two
New York University-based economists, Jiangping
Mei and Michael Moses, claimed to prove him
wrong
+,
and began publishing an analysis of art
auction results that showed art outperforming
many other investments. This was the beginning
of the Mei Moses Art Index (as well as their art
consulting business, Beautiful Asset Advisors,
Figure +), which quickly began to appear on art
investment websites and in publications like Forbes,
playing a signicant role in the development of
the art investment industry.
Finally, a couple of years ago, a group of econ-
omists began to look at these comparative indexes
not simply for evidence of arts investment value,
but for an explanation of its price structure.
William N. Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog, and
Christophe Spaenjers suspected that equity market
returns actually have a direct impact on art prices
by increasing the buying power of the wealthy.
So they compared art prices to income measures.
As they report in their paper Art and Money,
their analysis did not nd a relationship between
art returns and overall income variables (such
as cbr or total personal income) but only with
income inequality: art prices do not go up as a
society as a whole becomes wealthier, but only
when income inequality increases. Their analysis
suggests that a one percentage point increase in
the share of total income earned by the top c.+
percent triggers an increase in art prices of about
+ percent. They conclude: It is indeed the
money of the wealthy that drives art prices. This
implies that we can expect art booms when-
Figure 2
ever income inequality rises quickly. This seems
exactly what we witnessed during the last period
of strong art price appreciation, :cc::cc,.
+8
A quick look the Gini index (Figure :),
which tracks income disparity worldwide, shows
that the countries with the most signicant art
booms of the past two decades have also experi-
enced the greatest rise in inequality: the United
States, Britain, China and, home to the most
recent boom, India. In the US, at least, the steep
increase in inequality has been reported widely
for years, with economists like Paul Krug-
man and fellow Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz
sounding alarms in the mainstream press. Even
The Economist has shown concern. Recent articles
have focused on new data showing that the top +
percent now take : percent of the income and
control c percent of the wealth in the US, up
from +: and percent : years ago, while the
income of the bottom ,, percent has not risen
since +,,. This brings inequality in the Us back
to +,:, levels and close to the current level of
Mexico.
+,
With regard to the art market, however,
focusing on the + percent is misleading. The
threshold for + percent status in the Us in :cc8
was an annual gross income of $8c, hardly
the makings of a signicant collector. It is only
at the + percent threshold of $+,8c,8 that we
begin to encounter our patron class. As Goetz-
mann et. al. note, art prices, like real estate prices
in desirable cities, rise with income inequality as
the wealthy outbid each other for rareed proper-
ties. Steeply increasing top incomes set off an
equally steep ination in the goods and services
associated with afuence
:c
resulting in a down-
classing of formerly afuent income levels. In the
art world, this has effectively priced professionals
and other traditionally art-supporting groups out
of the market. More broadly, it produces a distor-
tion in the perception of wealth, as members of
the top :c, +c, and even + percent may no longer
perceive themselves as afuent.
The art market boom of the past decade has
been associated widely with the rise of n:vis
(high net worth individuals, Figure ) or ultra-
n:vis (people worth over $+ million or $c
million respectively), terms popularized by the
World Wealth Reports that Merrill Lynch and
CapGemini began releasing in +,,,. These reports
show the total wealth of n:vis exploding from
$+,.+ trillion in +,,, to $:., trillion in :c+c.
Art+Auction recently celebrated trends documented
in the :c++ report: the number of n:vis world-
wide, which almost doubled between +,,, and
:cc, from ., to more than +c., million, has
recovered from its :cc8 dip to pre-crisis levels;
best of all, n:vi demand for investments of
passion including cars, boats, jets (:, percent),
jewelry, gems, watches (:: percent) and art (::
percent) has also rebounded!
:+
But it is not only the market-based sector of
the art world that has beneted from the rise
of n:vis. Since public arts funding has mostly
declined in Europe and North America since
the +,8cs, it must be assumed that, directly and
indirectly, this increasingly concentrated private
wealth has also fueled the enormous expansion
in the past few decades of museums, biennial
exhibitions, studio art and art related degree
programs, art publications, art residencies and
awards, etc.
In the Us at least, the causes of rising inequal-
ity are relatively clear: anti-tax and anti-govern-
ment politics that reversed progressive taxation
and led to corporate and nancial deregulation;
political and legal assaults on organized labor
that led to falling wages and, together with
deregulation, removed any checks on skyrocket-
ing executive compensation. These politics have
been supported by a hugely successful culture
war that has effectively identied class hierar-
chy and privilege with educational and cultural
capital, rather than economic capital, for much
of the population outside of urban centers.
It is also clear that nancial deregulation played
a major role in the subprime crisis, as did the
cheap credit that propped up consumer spending
and the real estate market as real wages declined.
And it is also clear that the sovereign debt crisis
that has followed the subprime crisis will only
further increase inequality as austerity measures
are implemented to protect banks and bondhold-
ers. The pain of cuts to cultural budgets is hard
to compare to the impoverishment inicted on
millions by mass foreclosures and job loss; the
bankruptcy of pension plans; cuts in public sector
wages, in health care, in support for the unem-
ployed, for students; with steep increases in the
cost of education, etc. Anyway, we can always
turn to s, who continue to privatize prots
at pre-crisis rates. And as our survey of Top Col-
lectors shows, many of our patrons are actively
working to preserve the political and nancial
system that will keep their wealth, and inequality,
growing for decades to come.
Except to stalwart adherents of trickle-down
theory, it must be abundantly clear by now that
what has been good for the art world has been
disastrous for the rest of the world.
How can we continue to rationalize our par-
ticipation in this economy? In the United States,
it is difcult to imagine any arts organization or
practice that can escape it. The private nonprot
model which almost all museums as well
as alternative art organizations exist within is
dependent on wealthy donors and has its nine-
teenth century origins in the same anti-tax and
anti-government ideology that led to the current
situation: the principle that private initiatives
are better suited to fulll social needs than the
public sector and that wealth is most productively
administered by the wealthy. Even outside of
institutions, artists engaged in community-based
and social practices that aim to provide public
benet in the context of budget cuts may be just
what George H. W. Bush called for when he envi-
sioned volunteers and community organizations
spreading like a thousand points of lights in the
wake of his rollback in public spending.

Figure 3: Number of HNWIs per region (in millions) / Anzahl der HNWIs nach Region (in Millionen)
If our only choice is to participate in this
economy or abandon the art eld entirely, at least
we can stop rationalizing that participation in the
name of critical or political art practices or add-
ing insult to injury social justice. Any claim that
we represent a progressive social force while our
activities are directly subsidized by the engines of
inequality can only contribute to the justication
of that inequality the (not so) new legitimation
function of art museums. The only alternative
today is to recognize our participation in that
economy and confront it in a direct and immedi-
ate way in all of our institutions, including muse-
ums, and galleries, and publications. Despite the
radical political rhetoric that abounds in the art
world, censorship and self-censorship reign when
it comes to confronting its economic conditions,
except in marginalized (often self-marginalized)
arenas where there is nothing to lose and little
to gain in speaking truth to power.

In the , the duplicity of progressive claims

in art may also contribute to the success of culture
warriors and right-wing populists in convincing
economically and culturally marginal popula-
tions outside of urban centers that progressive
politics is just a ruse of cultural and educational
elites to preserve their privilege. In our case, they
may be right. It increasingly seems to me that
politics in the art world is largely a politics of
envy and guilt, or of self-interest generalized in
the name of a narrowly conceived and privileged
form of autonomy, and that critique most often
serves negation in a Freudian rather than a Marx-
ian sense, distancing, above all, these economic
conditions and our investment in them.

As such,
it is a politics that functions to defend against
the contradictions that might otherwise make
our continued participation in the art eld, and
access to its considerable rewards which have
ensconced many of us comfortably among the
percent, if not the percent or even the .
percent unbearable.
In Europe, however, there may be more
choices as long as direct public subsidy exists.
The debt crisis is pushing more and more of the
European art eld toward the model. The Brit-
ish Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, recently called
for an American-style culture of philanthropy
to save the arts in Britain from a percent cut in
the Arts Council and a percent cut in fund-
ing for museums.

Dont do it! Let this tale of

inequality and crisis in the US be a cautionary
one. Rather than turning to collectors to subsidize
the acquisition of art works at grotesquely inated
prices, European museums should turn away from
the art market and the art and artists valorized in
it. If this means that public museums contract and
collectors create their own privately controlled
institutions, so be it. Let these private institutions
be the treasure vaults and theme-park spectacles
and economic freak shows that many already are.
Let curators and critics and art historians as well
as artists withdraw their cultural capital from
this market. At the very least, we must begin to
evaluate whether artworks fulll, or fail to fulll,
political or critical claims on the level of their
social and economic conditions. We must insist
that what art works are economically centrally
determines what they mean socially and also
artistically. I believe that a broad-based shift in
art discourse can help bring about a long overdue
splitting off of the market-dominated sub-eld
of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs. Let this
sub-eld become the luxury goods business it
already basically is, with what circulates there
having as little to do with art as yachts, jets, and
watches. European museums have the potential
to be the birthplace of a new art eld that could
emerge from this split, where new forms of
autonomy can develop: not as secessionist alter-
natives that exist only in the grandiose enact-
ments and magical thinking artists and theorists,
but as fully institutionalized structures, which,
with the properly social magic of institutions,
:6

will be able to produce, reproduce, and reward
specic and, lets hope, more equitably derived
and distributed forms of capital.
Thanks to Sven Ltticken for his valuable comments on drafts
of this text.
First published in: Texte zur Kunst 8, September :c++,
pp. +++:,.
Notes
+ Dominic Kennedy, Chelsea owner admits he paid out
billions in bribes, in: Irish Independent, July , :cc8.
: Stephanie Clifford, Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly
Off Shelves, in: New York Times, August , :c++.
Will Evans, CA pension overhaul group gets grant from
Texans, in: San Francisco Chronicle, August +:, :c++.
Azam Ahmed, DealBook: SAC Capital Said to Face Insider
Trading Inquiry, in: New York Times, June +, :c++.
Annual General Meeting of SEV Hellenic Federation of
Enterprises, adress [sic] by SEV Chairman Mr. Dimitris
Daskalopoulos, May :, :c++, http://www.sev.org.gr/
online/viewNews.aspx?id=+,+8&mid=&lang=en.
6 Azam Ahmed, Dealbook: For Level Global, F.B.I. Raid is a
Final Blow, in: New York Times, March , :c++.
, Chicago Billionaire Leads Hedge Fund Shift Away from
Obama, abcnews.go.com, December ,, :c+c; Kate Zer-
nike, Secretive Republican Donors Are Planning Ahead,
in: New York Times, October +,, :c+c.
8 Dealbook, Ex-Citi Trader, Hall, Raises $+ billion, in: New
York Times, :+ June :c+c.
, Mark DeCambre, Blackstone Chief Schwarzman likens
Obama to Hitler over tax rises, in: The Telegraph, August +6,
:c+c.
+c Heidi N. Moore, Deal Journal: Merrill Lynchs Peter Kraus
Collects $: Million, Then Resigns, in: Wall Street Journal
Blogs, December ::, :cc8.
++ Dealbook, Henry Kravis in Focus as Buyout Backlash
Spreads, in: New York Times, December 6, :cc,.
+: Azam Ahmed, Dealbook: Writing Again, Third Points
Loeb Takes Swipe at Obama, in: New York Times, July :,
:c++.
+ Charles V. Bagli and Christine Haughney, Wide Fallout in
Failed Deal for Stuyvesant Town, in: New York Times, January
:, :c+c.
+ Melanie Ahlemeier, Die Rache des Schraubenknigs, in:
Sddeutsche.de, +8.+:.:cc8.
+ Rose-Maria Gropp, Deutschlands teuerstes Kunstwerk,
in: faz.net, July +, :c++.
+6 The American Economic Review, Vol. ,6, No. :, May, +,8,,
pp. +c+.
+, Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of
Masterpieces, in: New York University Finance Working
Paper, No. c++:, February :cc:.
+8 Art and Money, in: Yale School of Management Working
Paper, No. c,:6, Yale School of Management, April :8,
:c+c.
+, Of the +%, by the +%, for the +%, in: Vanity Fair, May
:c++.
:c Economics: Free Exchange: The Cost of Living
Extremely Well, in: Economist.com, http://www.
economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/:cc,/c,/
the_cost_of_living_extremely_w.
:+ Roman Kraeussl, Following their Passions, in:
Art+Auction, Summer :c++.
:: George H. W. Bush, Inaugural Address, January :c, +,8,.
: I began much of this research in the spring of :c+c, when
Artforum asked me to contribute to their summer issue on
museums. Artforum declined to publish the text I submitted,
which detailed the involvement of MoMA trustees in the
subprime crisis. That research developed into an initiative
called Artigarchy, an interactive web-based data platform
that would track the political and economic afliations of
top collectors and trustees. I have yet to nd an art organi-
zation willing to take it on.
: See Andrea Fraser, Speaking of the Social World , in:
Texte zur Kunst, Vol. :+, No. 8+, March :c++, pp. ++6.
: Quoted in Chartlotte Higgins, Will philanthropists save
the arts?, in: The Guardian, October :+, :c+c.
:6 Pierre Bourdieu/Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reexive
Sociology, University of Chicago Press, +,,:, p. ++,.
HEART OF
DARKNESS
A Journey into the Dark Matter
of the Art World
We can measure the waste [of artistic talent] not only in the
thousands of failed artists--artists whose market failure is
necessary to the success of the few--but also in the millions
whose creative potential is never touched... This glut of art
and artists is the normal condition of the art market.
Carol Duncan
All men are intellectuals one could say: but not all men
have in society the function of intellectuals
Antonio Gramsci.
1. Invisible Worlds
A
n estimated ten thousand hopeful artists entered graduate
level art programs within the United States in 1998.
3
Assum-
ing a modest graduation rate of sixty percent the total num-
ber of academically trained professional artists holding Master of Fine
Arts degrees between the dates of that statistic and the time of this
writing must hover around twenty four thousand individuals. The MFA
was initiated under the GI Bill in 1944. Extrapolating from these past
four years we might therefore expect the total number of artists with
such degrees to top several million people.
4
But this number would be
greatly amplied if we add to it individuals who received a non-degree
certicate in programs such as the Art Students League in New York
or the Philadelphia Academy of Art. The size of this pool of cultural
producers grows larger still if we include artists who only hold under-
graduate degrees and the gure virtually explodes beyond enumeration
if amateur and self-trained practitioners are included in the statistics.
5
Clearly the size of the art producing masses in the US is nothing
less than astronomical and like other informal regions of social life may
Temporary Services , One Week
Boutique, Chicago 2000
This text is being made available for scholarly purposes only. You are free to copy
an distribute it, but never for commercial prot. Please attribute the author whenever quoted
or cited. All illustrations are included here solely for educational purposes.
This essay was rst published in the book Visual Worlds, John R. Hall, Blake Stimson &
Lisa T. Becker editors, (NY & London: Routledge, 2005), Pages, 116 - 138.
2 GREGORY SHOLETTE
prove impossible to gauge.
6
What is unequivocal however is the way
this multitude greatly exceed the small coterie of artists visible within
the formalized region known as the art world. This is true even if we
focus only on those practitioners who have received graduate level
training in the past four years. Is it the case therefore that the majority
of creative activity in our post-industrial society remains invisible to
the institutions and discourses -the critics, art historians, collectors,
dealers, museums, curators and arts administrators-- which manage
and interpret contemporary culture? If we set aside the standard art
historical explanation that signicant cultural production takes place
only within a narrow zone inhabited by visionaries, several additional
questions arise. First, just where are these other practitioners, these in-
formal artists and shadow creators and what impact might they have on
contemporary culture if any? Second, how would the hegemony of the
art world be affected if scholars began to discuss, classify and assess
the work of Sunday painters, amateur artists and hobbyists in terms
similar to those used for professional artists? It is worth noting that
specic examples of this work are far from invisible, we encounter
them far more often than we do serious art. Rather what remains out
of bounds is any consideration of this work as complex or compelling
or forming its own cultural category. This taboo extends especially to
the sort of irregular systems informal culture has evolved for circulat-
ing work outside the dominant art market. This paper will not only
address these issues, it will argue that the gravitational force of this in-
denite shadow realm is already having a denite affect on the elite art
world. If this essay seeks to open these questions up for examination
however, it does so not with the aim of expanding the hegemony of the
art world into this shadow zone. Instead the hope is to nd within this
nether world what Walter Benjamin understood as the explosive power
of the inconspicuous and overlooked.
7
The term I choose to give to this vast and heterogeneous pool of
conspicuous yet unseen artistic activity is Dark Matter. It is a term
borrowed from the science of cosmology. Dark Matter is what cosmol-
ogists call the enormous quantity of non-reective material predicted
by the Big Bang theory. Theoretically, this unseen matter makes up
most of the universe and provides an explanation for why the universe
will not continue to expand indenitely. In a sense, cosmic Dark Mat-
ter serves as a sort of counter-weight to the powerful thrust of the Big
Bang explosion that initiated time and space eons ago. Yet despite
the omnipresence of DM so far its presence has only been inferred
indirectly by observing the motions of visible objects such as plan-
ets, comets, stars and nebula.
8
Like its astronomical cousin, artistic
Dark Matter makes up most of the cultural universe in contemporary,
post-industrial society. Yet, while cosmic Dark Matter is actively being
sought by scientists, the size and composition of artistic Dark Mater
is of little interest to the men, women and institutions of the art world.
This apathy would be of little signicance if it were not the case, or so
Panamanian bus with home-made
decorations 1986
DARK MATTER 3
I shall argue in this paper that the art world is highly dependent on its
Dark Matter much in the same way the physical universe depends on
the presence of cosmic Dark Matter.
By the term art world I mean the integrated, trans-national economy
of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials and trade
publications that, together with curators, artists and critics, reproduce
the market, as well as the discourse that inuences the appreciation and
demand for highly valuable artworks. I prefer this admittedly stingy,
even economically determined notion of art world to the often-cited
denitions coined by sociologist Howard S. Becker or philosopher Ar-
thur C. Danto respectively. Becker explains his term art worlds as:
The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their
joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the
kind of art work that art world is noted for.9 And while I agree with
Becker that there are multiple, overlapping art worlds more or less
collaboratively organized he looses a great deal of analytical power by
ignoring the historical and class-based antagonism between different
conceptions of art that make up these art worlds. Dantos coinage
of artworld on the other hand from his inuential 1964 essay The
Artworld states that in order to know one was in the presence of art,
one needed to know something of the recent history of art and be able
to participate in the dening theoretical discussions of the moment.
10

Danto mystify art practice. He does so when he emphasizes the accu-
mulation of specialized information a viewer must possess in order to
recognize what is and what is not art rather than the key role played by
the highly privileged art market in dening its products and services.
Ironically, by providing credibility to the hermetic expert culture sur-
rounding art he contradicts the claims of avant-garde artists who once
sought to democratize culture under the slogan, art into life.
Because I am interested in socially critical and activist art I per-
ceive the role of engaged artists, scholars and critics as an interven-
tionist one within an already antagonistic eld. The initial focus of
this paper therefore is on the relationship that Dark Matter has to the
most visible of art worlds, more accurately understood as the elite art
world. The latter is dependent on the accumulated wealth of the eco-
nomically privileged and it has hegemony over the very idea of cul-
ture. But why if forms of cultural Dark Matter are already successfully
operating outside this hegemony should one bother intervening in the
art world at all? There is no easy answer to this question. In fact, to a
large degree many artists are self-consciously doing just that, turning
their collective backs on the formal art world and exploring alternative
and somewhat autonomous systems of exchange and production of art.
However there is a danger in thinking that one can achieve autonomy
in a cultural environment as rapacious as ours simply by ignoring the
obvious forms of institutional power. From my own experience in
New York in the 1980s, it did not take long for the art world to se-
lectively choose its political art stars during a similar wave of col-
4 GREGORY SHOLETTE
laborative and socially engaged art activism as that of today. Nor am I
proposing that one merely work within the art world. It is instead a
question of rst knowing where the existing pitfalls of building alter-
native operating platforms lie and second of nding ways to leverage
both the actual and symbolic power of the elite art world for purposes
other than the aggrandizement of art collectors and large art institu-
tions. In other words, it is a matter of historical analysis coupled with
a strategic practice.
11

At the very least the elite art world is a signicant site of critical
intervention because of its near-virtual hegemony it wields over no-
tions of serious cultural value. Such values may be generated by a
relatively small group of individuals including collectors, dealers and
curators, but the inuence on everything from public policy to the di-
rection of art education takes its queues from who and what the elite
art world draws into its inner circle of light.
12
It is key to my argu-
ment however to understand that the line separating prominent artistic
value from all other artistic production is, in theory, an arbitrary one.
I will return to this important point in more detail in the section on
value. But rst, what might the general lack of interest, even selective
contempt expressed by the art world towards this realm of informal
art suggest? Is it the case as I am suggesting that within Dark Mat-
ter there is a hidden, counter hegemonic potential? Considering that a
once socially dissident avant-garde now asserts itself as a marketing
prototype for hip fashion designers, advertising agencies and informa-
tion technocrats even the possibility of critical opposition is refreshing.
I hope to do more than intimate such an appearance while avoiding the
typically dispassionate forms of academic insubordination. Indeed,
this essay asks that we not only understand the subordinate ranking of
informal artists as equal to the glut of professionally trained artists
who remain in the shadow of the mainstream art world, but it insists
we take careful aim and overturn the way cultural values are gener-
ated. One weapon in this destructuration is the theoretical and practical
mobilization of Dark Matter. And this means doing more than chal-
lenging the exclusion of specic groups of people from the art world
which has been the dominant oppositional practice of the last ten to
fteen years. Rather it means dening the possibility of an inclusive
and liberatory artistic practice that: 1. moves beyond the elitist dis-
course of the art world and its markets, and 2.constitutes a politically
radical challenge to the increasing privatization of the public sphere in
general. This paper will examine several specic shadow practices
in light of this agenda. First however there is one additional aspect of
the Dark Matter phenomena that is important to my argument: Dark
Matter it seems is getting brighter.
The demise of modernist formalism and the legitimation of ver-
nacular and outsider art are no doubt two reasons for the increasing
visibility of informal art. It is my argument however that these are
minor reasons and do not account fully for the shift in status we are
DARK MATTER 5
seeing for some forms of Dark Matter. In-
stead, it is my contention that the visibility
of informal art is due in large part to the
increasing accessibility of inexpensive dig-
ital technologies that allow for the precise
replication, appropriation and virtually free
distributing of information and images.
However before expanding on this asser-
tion I want to explain why the increasing
visibility of non-professional art has not yet
brought about the undermining of the elitist
art world as promised. Let me start with a
denition of the way the elite art world pro-
duces artistic value in the rst place.
2. Art Worlds
The art world is structured like a pyramid. Most practitioners are
massed at the base and a select group of artists occupy the apex near-
est the light. Supercially it is similar to other competitive elds that
employ highly educated workforces. Specialized lters regulate up-
ward mobility. Those who reach its summit are well rewarded and
nd themselves made extremely visible to those beneath. In this sense,
the art world is not greatly different from the culture of academia or
politics or other professions such as medicine, science, engineering or
law. However, if we look more closely at the structure we nd strik-
ing differences. For one thing these other professions provide most of
the many individuals gathered at the base of their salary pyramid with
reasonable employment in the eld. Not true of the art world. Unlike
these other highly educated professionals, artists typically work two or
three jobs, often in other areas than art, just to make a living wage. In
1990, as many as half of all artists earned less than $3000 from mak-
ing art. A quarter earned only $500 from art sales!
13
Not surprisingly
unemployment is chronic amongst artists with a drop-out rate far
than in other specialized professions. Remarkably, those who give up
making art actually tend to earn more money than those who continue
to practice it.
14
All of which indicates what many of us artist knew already: that
artists are over-educated, overworked, and structurally unemployable.
Bu just what differentiates the practice of the small number of success-
ful artists from the many who fail?
According to the economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner this phe-
nomena can be explained by applying what is known as the Tourna-
ment Model to the art world. It works like this: In many sporting com-
petitions just one athletes performance will be recognized even if it is
a mere fraction of a second faster or better than that of other competi-
tors. This one individual wins the prize and many others loose de-
spite achieving outstanding athletic performances. Plattner insists that,
CNN Headline News showing the
27.4 Million Dollar record-breaking
price fetched for Brancusis sculp-
ture, Bird in Space at Christies, May
4th, 2005
6 GREGORY SHOLETTE
this model is relevant to the art market because it describes a situation
of workers receiving payments that dont seem related to their input
of effort.
15
In other words, given a group of similar looking aesthetic
products there will ultimately be just one that is considered truly sig-
nicant in art historical and therefore art collectible terms. However,
if this winner takes all formula offers an explanation for why nearly
identical objects or activities can wind up at radically different loca-
tions on the sloping sides of the art world pyramid, it does not provide
how this happens. In other words, how are often minute differences in
artistic practice evaluated by the art industry thus producing profound-
ly dissimilar values? Unlike in the Tournament Model, in the art world
there are no clear goal posts or records to compete against. Therefore
what criteria are used in the art world to judge winners?
This question becomes especially interesting when we think about
the pricing of art works. Unlike other commodities, the cost of an art
object can not be evaluated simply by using patterns of supply and
demand or other, traditional means of determining market value. Once
again Plattners work is useful as he applies the notion of Consump-
tion Capital to explain the paradoxical nature of the art commodity.
Consumption Capital is the accumulated knowledge one requires in
order to become an efcient consumer of a given commodity (Plattner,
14). One way to explain why artists with similar looking work are
valued differently, or why well-crafted and labor intensive work is of-
ten less costly than an informal installation made on the cheap, is to
consider the way accumulated consumer knowledge or Consumption
Capital is used for determining what art is collected and what is criti-
cally rewarded. A collector, who compiles a great deal of Consump-
tion Capital about an artist, not only increases the pleasure of purchas-
ing a high-end, luxury item such as a painting or installation, but this
informational accumulation also helps insure the long-term value of
an acquisition. Since every consumer inevitably wants to economize
the process of gathering knowledge about what they consume, most
collectors inevitably focus more attention on those artists frequently
referred to within the art world itself. This insider knowledge is cir-
culated amongst other collectors as well as critics and curators who are
know to already hold substantial amounts of Consumption Capital.
Curiously however, the art worlds dependency on Consumption
Capital also leads to a paradox in which the artist who lowers the price
of a given work looses value in the market because a drop in price
signals to collectors not a bargain but a loss of demand. Compare this
quandary to purchasing almost any other commodity such as groceries
or computers but also most luxury items such as high-priced cars or
even stocks. This paradox means that in the art world, a large dollop of
oily fat scooped into the corner of a white room, or a stitched together
clump of discarded dolls can command a higher price in the art market
than a skillfully rendered realistic painting or sculpted bronze. Note
that if we revisit for a moment Arthur Dantos artworld in light of this
DARK MATTER 7
Consumption Capital model we can see that his ideal artworlder , the
expert who knows when they are in the presence of art, has acquired
a different, more realistic countenance. Far more insightful is the work
of artist Hans Haacke whose installations offer a more precise deni-
tion of the art world.
For the purposes of my argument however, it is enough to assert
that establishing value in the most elite strata of the art industry has
very little to do with the quality of workmanship, the caliber of ma-
terials used, or the amount of labor time invested in making the art.
Instead it is dependent on such intangibles as the network of journals,
dealers and institutions most highly regarded by the wealthy collectors
of contemporary art. Returning to the question of Dark Matter,: in
what specic ways is the art world dependent on the realm of informal
art and does this have signicant consequences? In order to answer
this question, let us imagine that cultural Dark Matter, including hob-
byists and home crafts-people as well as failed artists, simply ceases
to exist as of tomorrow morning? In other words, the shadowy base of
the art pyramid is disappeared. In order to offer a picture of why this
would be a problem for ne artists let me turn to an important study
by Columbia College of Chicago entitled The Informal Arts: Finding
Cohesion, Capacity and other Cultural Benets in Unexpected Places.
The study asserts that the formal and informal arts,
operate on a two-way continuum, upon which information,
personnel, nancial benets and other resources ow
back and forth....the informal arts create employment
opportunities for professionally working artists,
play a research and development role, and provide
knowledgeable and committed audiences for the formal arts
sector.
16
The report admits that, despite its popularity, informal arts prac-
tice remains largely hidden from view. And certainly what I call Dark
Matter does provide professionals in the arts with opportunities such as
teaching all those artists who feel they are not yet professional enough
or who simply want to learn more about a specic art technique. The
visual arts in particular offer a unique set of employment positions
ideally suited to people with some art skills already in place. These in-
clude the studio assistant and the art fabricator, two niche jobs that take
advantage of Duncans glut of trained artists within the marketplace.
Another aspect of this co-dependency are those artists who make a liv-
ing photographing the work of other artists for portfolios and for grant
applications. And there are artists who take on administrative tasks
such as grant writing or curating. One can see why the Columbia study
uses the phrase two-way continuum. To look at this question of how
the formal arts are dependent on Dark Matter, consider the impact on
the availability and cost of art supplies if hobbyists, Sunday Painters
and failed artists stopped producing work. Should the demand for
8 GREGORY SHOLETTE
art supplies suddenly become limited to the small group of success-
ful artists, inevitably the cost of canvas, pigments, and brushes would
skyrocket.
17
There are still other ways Dark Matter directly and positively af-
fects the art world and its institutions including subscriptions to art
journals and museum memberships. All of which leads the Columbia
College study to nally recommend that these shadow practices be
brought into the light and to be recognized as vital to the entire cultural
community. Among the studys specic recommendations include a
call for further research into the informal arts as well as the suggestion
that informal arts receive direct assistance from cultural foundations
and public arts agencies. In light of this apparent symbiosis you may
ask where is the radical conict between formal and informal art that I
have insisted upon? What became of the potential for sweeping change
that Dark Matter secretly harbors? To answer this, I turn offer a pas-
sage in the same Columbia College study. It reads as follows:
It will be helpful to understand the informal in informal arts
as involving the process and the context of art-making, not, as a
threshold matter, the product of the activity, nor the characteristics
of the artists training.
18
How to read this inelegant sentence? For one thing it appears that
the members of the research team had difculty agree on some deni-
tions and key aspects of their ndings. More importantly it asserts that
before informal art can hope to shed its pejorative associations embod-
ied in words such as amateur, unskilled and dilettante, those who mold
cultural values will have to shift their emphasis away from a reverence
for collectible objects and brand names and towards
the far more ephemeral practices of creative activ-
ity itself. In light of I have written so far about the
way art world value is constructed the kind of shift
proposed here is nothing less than radical. It chal-
lenges the very heart of the modern art market and
its roots in capitalist society dating back at least to
the 18th century. With our attention now hopefully
drawn to the potential oppositional charge hidden
in Dark Matters gravitational eld, let me next of-
fer an explanation for how the formal and elitist art
world is already being contorted by this dimly seen
mass, this Dark Matter.

3. Slack Art and the Illumination of Dark Matter
In his book Avant-garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, the British
art historian Brandon Taylor adopts the term Slack Art to describe
the way certain younger artists use ephemeral materials, a marked dis-
interest in skilled craftsmanship and an extemporaneous approach to
organization and display in their installation works. Unlike the concep-
Mike Kelley installation with found
stuffed toys
DARK MATTER 9
tual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the new
disinterestedness in artistic craft does not appear aimed
at either democratizing the practice of art or a rejection
of the art objects status as a valuable commodity.
19
Taylor describes the politics of this self-consciously
adolescent slack art style as an anarchy that percolates
but never exceeds a slow boil.
In other words, this new species of de-skilled artist
(to borrow a term from the late Ian Burn) may indeed
be aware that rejecting formalism once implied a politi-
cal act on the part of artists. Nevertheless today, at least
prior to the events of September Eleventh, there has been little desire
to move ones artistic focus beyond the self-absorbed and seemingly
autonomous art world itself. In this sense at least, Slack Art is a recent,
conservative reaction to the informally constructed but highly political
work of artists such as Martha Rosler (garage sale), or Mierle Lader-
man Ukeles, or more recently the art of Renee Green.
20
To restate my earlier contention, if informality is one of the out-
standing features of contemporary art, this fact is due to the increas-
ing visibility of the creative activity I am referring to as Dark Matter.
Indeed, could we not just as accurately describe the direction that art-
ists including Mike Kelley, Julie Parsons, Jason Rhodes, Sarah Luckas
or Thomas Hirshhorn to name only some of the better exemplars of
slack art as an amateurization of high art practices? As if what is
taking place is some form of mimicry by which the art world responds
to the danger of Dark Matter by reecting its appearance if not its
substance. In order to put a ner point on the arbitrariness of where
these lines are drawn I will turn to a specic form of visual culture that
appeared in the streets following the tragic events in New York City,
September Eleventh, 2001.
A month after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers I
visited the Firemans Memorial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
It is a limestone monument designed by H. Van Buren Magonigle in
1913 to honor those re ghters killed in the line of duty and several
miles from ground zero. What I discovered was that the memorial had
become host to a spontaneous shrine for the victims of the September
11th. Like numerous other sites around the city, this shrine consisted
of owers, candles, and childrens drawings not unlike those that ap-
pear at the sites of automobile accidents along highways. Attached to
the side of the monument is a plastic covered photographic depicting
some of the New York City re ghters lost when the towers collapsed.
For the purposes of this essay I want to call attention to a grouping of
soft toys bunched together like silent mourners, in the middle of this
informal memorial that included a frayed teddy bear and at least one
character from the television series Sesame Street. All of the toys had
become soiled and stained from a month of sitting out of doors. In
spite of, or perhaps because of this desolate condition they managed
Makeshift memorial post-911
10 GREGORY SHOLETTE
to reect quite powerfully the theme of the Firemans Memorial itself:
the veneration of civic responsibility even at the price of personal sac-
rice. Now the unambiguous, signifying force of this informal display
is an important reminder that the art world holds no monopoly on ex-
pressiveness, even if this particular kind of statement is dismissed by
serious artists and critics as mere sentiment or kitsch. (I hope to deal
with the role played by sentiment in the informal arts in more detail in
a future essay.)
More importantly for my argument here however is to consider
exactly how this impromptu shrine with its polyester-lled homun-
culi differ from the stitched together stuffed-toys displayed by the well
know artist Mike Kelley in museums, and prestigious art galleries?
Specically, why is there a volume of art writing about the way some-
one such as Kelley produces signicant cultural and artistic value while
the display of toys by grieving neighbors is relegated to the status of,
at best, noteworthy social phenomena noted by journalists or anthro-
pologists? Now the aim of this paper is not to open up another tired
discussion about high versus low art or the use of Duchampian irony
by the neo avant-garde. To do so means uncritically accepting the same
narrow conditions set up in Dantos version of artworld. My interest
in comparing these outwardly similar arrangements of commonplace
objects is to raise what I hope is a broader set of questions, including
why the elite art world requires the separation between professional
and amateur art and how precise is the partition?
What if there exists work by artists who have professional cre-
dentials, yet who extol not merely the look, but also the less visible
value structure of Dark Matter? Consider as an example of this self-
conscious informal art practice the project One Week Boutique. It was
produced in July of 2000 by a group of Chicago based artists that go
by the name Temporary Services . Like the work of Kelley and com-
pany, One Week Boutique or OWB was rendered in an informal,
amateur-like mode. But unlike such Slack Art it did not aim for an
ironic, artistic navet or sink into an intellectual melancholy or play
at radical politics by indulging in luke- warm anarchism. Rather
OWB self-consciously stepped outside the exchange economy of the
art market while seeking an audience indifferent to the self-reexivity
of contemporary art.
One Week Boutique or OWB was promoted Via email, word of
mouth and photocopy yers and consisted of donated clothing, neatly
hung within the small ofce space the group rented at that time in the
Chicago Loop area. It is important to note that the Loop is the citys
ofce district. It is located far from Chicagos art gallery scene. Dur-
ing the OWB exhibition, Temporary Services invited the public to
come by, drink coffee, look at our booklets,
21
try on clothes in our
dressing room and take whatever clothing they want. OWB actually
wound-up lasting several months with a constant stream of visitors
many whom apparently came because they needed clothing more than
DARK MATTER 11
craved art. This attention prompted Temporary Services to realize
several other versions of the project including one in the streets of San
Juan, Puerto Rico.
As Temporary Services member Brett Bloom explains, the intent
of OWB involved,
... a conscious decision to make One Week Boutique hard
for the art world to participate in- not so much to discourage
them, but not to cater to their expectations. OWB wasnt
an installation...we didnt steal the aesthetics from these
situations found in the world, but used them to create a
unique and interesting social situation. OWB was intended
to exist somewhere between a high-end boutique and a thrift
store. The clothing was all in good condition. ...We talked
about the project in terms of the aesthetics of expected
situations...[and] tried to articulate things in terms of applied
aesthetics of daily, lived experience. People up off the street
interacted immediately as they would in any clothing store.
The questions and strangeness of the situation came only
when the economics were discussed.
22
It is crucial to my argument to understand that the reason OWB
does not t comfortably within the current bias of the art world is NOT
because the work lacks quality, at least as this is dened by current
art world discourse. Nor is it because the project looks radically differ-
ent from what is currently being exhibited in established museums and
leading art galleries. Temporary Services project One Week Boutique
is less recognizable as art because it focuses on the process and or-
ganization of creative work itself rather than the production of objects.
It is my contention that such self-governing yet still experimental prac-
tices are most similar to the kind of creative self-validation typical of
much amateur and informal art but no longer conceivable within most
of the contemporary art world. Nor is Temporary Services unique. A
partial list of artists and organizations operating in the various shadow
zones of the art world include the on-line collaborations of RTMark
and Critical Art Ensemble; counter-globalization activists and urban
interventionists such as Reclaim the Streets (located internationally),
Ne Pas Plier (France), Las Agencias (Madrid & Boston), and The
Reverend Billy (NYC); the list also includes organizations that focus
on re-mapping space such as Ultra-Red, The Center for Land Use In-
terpretation (both LA), and REPOhistory (NYC); in addition there are
educational activists such as Jim Duignan and The Stockyard Institute,
as well as Video Machete (both Chicago); and nally there are groups
centered on alternative forms of exchange or institutional infrastruc-
ture including Collectivo Cambalache (London), and Dan Petermans
Experimental Station (Chicago).
23
12 GREGORY SHOLETTE
All of these informal institutions challenge the uniquely authored
collectible art necessary for sustaining art world hegemony. Further-
more, these informal, politicized micro-institutions make work that
inltrates high schools, ea markets, public squares, corporate Web
Sites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in
ways that do not set out to recover a specic meaning or use-value for
either art world discourse or private interests. To put this more suc-
cinctly: the work of informal, collective, politicized artists, includ-
ing Temporary Services , might be seen as structurally closer to the
anonymous, installations I witnessed at the Firemans Monument than
to the very similar looking work made by any number of highly vis-
ible, contemporary artists recognized by the art world. In this sense, I
offer Dark Matter as an alternative narrative to the now conventional
genealogy of avant-garde and neo avant-garde art. At the center of this
counter-interpretation are the informal and often perverse social ex-
change systems Dark Matter spawns for circulating work.
4. Dark Matter as A Gift Economy
Today, one can hardly escape an encounter with informal art. It is a
vast and heterogeneous bounty of production radiating from homes
and ofces, schools and streets, community centers and cyberspace,
especially in cyberspace. Furthermore, Dark Matter exhibits qualities
that are anathema to notions of serious or high art including fantasy,
nostalgia, and sentiment. This informal artistry ranges from the whim-
sical to the inspired, from the banal to the absurd and to the obscene.
And it is incontinent. Unlike the art worlds market Dark Matter does
not impede its own production in order to create a ctional scarcity.
Most important to my argument are those species of Dark Matter that
partake of what Georges Bataille described as a principle of loss, a
pathological economy of expenditure without precise utility. Bataille
borrows some of his perverse anti-capitalist concepts from the anthro-
pologist Marcel Mauss whose concept of gift giving among Native
American cultures is focused on strengthening social relations rather
than optimizing ones position in a market. In many instances the gift
economy serves to level-off differences of power and wealth amongst
individuals in the same social group.
24
An example of Dark Matter
built around the form of a gift economy is Elfwood.
Elfwood is an on-line art gallery that serves non-professional art-
ists who produce images and stories about dragons, witches, wizards,
and of course elves. An amateur artist named Thomas F. Abrahams-
son hosts the site. Abrahamsson lives in Sweden and makes a living
as a computer specialist. Elfwood claims to host some 14,968 artists.
(That is more than half the number of estimated MFA graduates in
the US since 1998!) Not unlike Temporary Services and the other
groups mentioned above, Elfwood is nanced with enormous amounts
of in-kind labor as well as donated cash. Nor does it appear to provide
any direct income to Abrahamsson or any of the artists who use the
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/about.
html?9986
DARK MATTER 13
site. Several additional features make Elfwood relevant to my discus-
sion of Dark Matter. For one thing it has several levels including one
called Lotherlorien that is named for an imaginary place described in
the writings of J.R.R Tolkien. Lotherlorien is governed by a stringent
policy whereby the only art accepted onto the site is made by amateurs
who make no money off their work. The rules for Lotherien state that
you may not use Elfwood to promote yourself... At the same time
Elfwood imposes few aesthetic lters on the art stating that we are
not the ones who judge if art is good or bad. The Elfwood mission
statement re-afrms this commitment to a judgement free exchange of
ideas and images stating:
Showing pieces of art from the wonderful world of fantasy
to the general public. Letting all amateur fantasy artists
show their work for free, helping them to get a name and
reputation. Helping other artists with inspiration by giving a
chance to look at fellow artists art.
25
One lesson drawn from this is that the capacity of the internet
to host a large volume of images and information in an inter-active
format has made it possible to create a virtual art community that is
the size of a large museum. Because the cost and skills required for
capturing and processing images, sound and text from a wide variety
of sources continues to spiral downwards, the growth of Dark Matter
such as Elfwood is inevitable. One last example of Dark Matter offers
still another form of gift giving only made possible by this increasing
accessibility of digital technology.
The fan cut is made by and for the viewing pleasure of acionados,
who share an interest, some might say an obsession, with a particular
lm or television program. If the better known fan zine takes advan-
tage of the rst generation of copying technology such as photocopiers
and facsimile machines the fan cut consists of a digitized copy of an
original media product re-edited to suit a particular group of fans. One
of the largest fan networks centers around George Lukass Star Wars
series. Participants occupy hundreds of web sites and chat rooms as
well as meet in person whenever possible. Recently a fan cut known
as the Phantom Edit circulated within the Star Wars fan community as
a free download. The Phantom Edit is based on Lukass Star War epi-
sode, the Phantom Menace. According to reports it eliminates twenty
minutes of the studio version of the lm including most appearances
by one animated character uniformly disliked by Star Wars fans. Ac-
cording to one on-line star wars web site the new version has xed
a large number of things the fans are upset with in Episode One.
26

Signicantly this unauthorized cut was made on a Macintosh G-4, 400
megahertz computer using Final Cut Pro, a professional quality pro-
gram for editing digital images that is nevertheless relatively inexpen-
sive and user friendly.
14 GREGORY SHOLETTE
Elfwood and the Phantom Edit indicate how digital technology can
amplify the social networking and gift economy typical of informal art
practice. In the second part of this paper these qualities will be con-
nected to certain activist and oppositional cultural practices including
the growing counter-globalization movement. I conclude with a sum-
mation of the key points outlined in this paper.
5. Summary
HIGH ART VALUES
The elite, high art market is stabilized by the routine production of
minor differences. These differences are based less on formal char-
acteristics of art works than on a systematic segregation of non-com-
modiable practices such as those I have detailed in this paper. Seem-
ingly identical products are valued in radically different ways in a
process that, from the perspective of a non-participant, seems entirely
arbitrary. However, as I have attempted to show, there are ways to ac-
count for this activity if we understand the economy of the art world as
predicated on the concentration of knowledge and capital rather than a
wholesale expansion of the market for artistic goods and services.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE DARK MATTER
At the same time, it is clear that most of the people who graduate with
professional degrees in art as well as all of the people who identify
themselves as hobbyists or amateurs, represent a far larger and hetero-
Temporary Services project Free For
All, one day art give away in Chicago,
February , 2000.
Selling art in an auction
DARK MATTER 15
geneous mass of creative activity than that which appears within the
limited sphere known as the art world. It is this vast pool of largely in-
visible art making that I have provisionally called Dark Matter. Mean-
while, this nebulous region is getting brighter thanks in part to ever
more affordable information related technologies. And not only does
this increasing visibility permit informal art to be seen by art world
institutions, but it permits informal artists to better see one another.
ART IN THE SHADOWS
By contrast, the work of Temporary Services and the other groups
I have presented perceive not only the visual intensity of these in-
formal, amateur practices, but also the economic subversivness they
Temporary Services brochure of
Product Placements monthly public
event yer, circa 1985
Political Art Documentation and
Distribution (PAD/D) and Prisoners
Inventions by Angelo
16 GREGORY SHOLETTE
theoretically exemplify. And it is this engagement with how Dark Mat-
ter behaves rather than what it looks like that segregates such practices
from those of the elite, art world, no matter how similar they super-
cially appear. Meanwhile, this simultaneously forces the work ofTem-
porary Services, REPOhistory, RTmark and other non-conventional
groups into an alignment with the vast majority of cultural practices
unrecognized by the art world described here as Dark Matter. n
Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist, writer and a co-founder of the artist col-
lectives REPOhistory and PAD/D. He is co-editor with Nato Thompson of The In-
terventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT:
2004 & 2005); and Collectivism After Modernism co-edited with Blake Stimson
(University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
NOTES
1. Carol Duncan Who Rules the Art World?from the Aesthetics of Power:Essays
in Critical Art History. Cambridge University Press: 1983. 172 & 180.
2. Quoted by Carol Becker in her book The Artist as Public Intellectual from
Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art,
Rowman and Littleeld Publishers, US & UK: 2002, 14.
3. Andrew Hultkrans and Jef Burton, Surf and Turf, Artforum, Summer 1998,
106-9.
4. The MFA degree was initiated under the Servicemens Readjustment Act of
1944 better known as the GI bill. see MaLin Wilson-Powell, After Theyve Seen
Paree, Art Issues, No 64, Sept/Oct. 2000, 23-6.
5. According to the 1997 National Endowment for the Arts Survey entitled Public
Participation in the Arts some 31 million people paint, sculpt or draw pictures while
33 million make photographs. Compare this very statistic to the just under 2 mil-
lion who self identied themselves as artist for the 1997 U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics. All gures taken from the Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts
research brief the Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and other Cultural
Benets in Unexpected Places. Spring, 2002.
6. Compare the problem of dening the informal art world with that of economists
facing the informal or shadow economy. To some degree the questions raised can
be equally applied to culture: The lack of consensus in formulating a unied theory
of the shadow economy, or even a precise denition of the components that comprise
it, suggests that important questions remain unanswered. To what extent does the
exclusion of shadow economic activity distort ofcial estimates of macroeconomic
variables, including output, employment and ination? What are the policy ramica-
tions of these exclusions? What is the distribution of shadow economic behavior be-
tween unrecorded, but legal, and illicit activities? Can the overall size of the shadow
economy be estimated, and is it changing over time? Do countries at different stages
of development possess different types of hidden economies? What is the relationship
between regulatory (in)efciency and the size of the shadow economy? from the
The Shadow Economy by Matthew H. Fleming, John Roman, And Graham Farrell
*http://www.britannica.com/magazine/article?content_id=171785&query=currency
See Benjamins essay Traumkitsch in Volume 2 of his selected writings pub-
lished by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1999.
An excellent piece by Vera Rubin called Dark Matter in the Universe can be
found on the Scientic American website at: http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/
0398cosmos/0398rubin.html
DARK MATTER 17
Howard S. Becker from his introduction to Art Worlds. University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1982.
Aurthr C. Danto, The Artworld The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964)
I have written elsewhere on these themes and humbly refer the reader to the fol-
lowing four texts: On the complications of collective practice see Counting On
Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice, Afterim-
age 11/99. On the issue of institutional autonomy see my essay Fidelity, Betrayal,
Autonomy: In and Beyond the Contemporary Art Museum forthcoming from Third
Text, Summer 2002 as well as the essay Some Call It Art: From Imaginary Au-
tonomy to Autonomous Collectivity forthcoming from Social Text and also acces-
sible at: http://www.eipcp.net/diskurs/d07/text/sholette_en.html. On the issue of the
co-optation of 1980s activist art by the art world please see my essay News from
Nowhere: Activist Art & After. Third Text Winter #45, 1999 and in the book Kunst,
Kultur und Politik in den Grostdten der 90er Jahre, ed. by Jutta Held.
Not only do we nd more and more museums displaying exhibitions of popular art
and commercial art including Armani fashions, star Wars props and even Hip Hop
culture, the latter dispossessed of its potentially abrasive, socio-economic context,
but according to a 1992 NEA report U.S. museum attendance gures topped 164
million in 1992. With close to half the population attending institutions specializing
in exhibiting culture the inuence of the visual arts is practically unprecedented.
Nevertheless it is important to note that the national as well as even international art
market remains anchored in a handful of global cities including most prominently
London and New York. According to the economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner
only elite-gallery exposure in New York creates art historical signicance Plattner
points out that over 80% of artists do not live in NYC, despite the fact that what he
terms the gatekeeper galleries are located there. Furthermore, 94% of the artists in
New York City are not signicant sellers of work in the high end, elite market. To
drive home the idea of hegemony: it seems clear that most of the thousands of art
world actors in New York have more in common with their St. Louis counterparts
than they do with the well-publicized, but extraordinarily few, art stars represented in
the national media. Staurt Plattner, High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnogra-
phy of a Local Art Market, University of Chicago Press: 1996, 3,8.
Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall, More Than Once In a Blue Moon: Multi-
ple Jobholdings by American Artists, Research Division Report #40, (Washington:
NEA, 2000), p. 97.
A study of 300 graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were tracked
between 1963 to 1980 by researchers Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, Jacob W. Getzels
and Stephen P. Kahn in Talent and Achievement (Chicago:1984, an unpublished
report), p. 44.
See Plattner:12, 13.
Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts research brief the Informal Arts:
Finding Cohesion, Capacity and other Cultural Benets in Unexpected Places.
Spring, 2002.
7. According to the Hobby Industry Associations Nationwide Craft & Hobby Con-
sumer Usage and Purchase Study from 2000, 70 % of US households reports that at
least one member participates in a craft or hobby. Meanwhile, the total sales hobby
supplies was 23 Billion dollars in 2000. Inevitably manufacturers of high-end art
supplies depend on sales by less demanding hobbyists simply to remain in business.
See the Hobby Industry Association website at www.hobby.org.
8. Columbia College Study, Ibid.
9. Brandon Taylor, Avant-garde and After : Rethinking Art Now, H.N.Abrams, New
York:1995, 153.
10. For more on the connection between informal art practices and radical, femi-
nist theory I refer you to a short yet provocative essay that parallels some of my
18 GREGORY SHOLETTE
arguments here entitled, Making Something from Nothing (Toward a Denition or
Womens Hobby Art) by Lucy R. Lippard. The essay rst appeared in Heresies,
no. 4, Winter 1978 and is reprinted in the book Get the Message by Lucy R. Lippard
. New York 1984. Dutton Books. 97, 104.
11. All quotes about OWB are taken from an October 2001 email sent to the author
by Brett Bloom, a founding member of Temporary Services. The booklets Bloom
makes reference to are self-published, zine-like brochures the group produces about
each of its public art projects. A selection of these photocopied booklets include the
documentation of a stealth installation involving artists books the group inserted into
shelves of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. Another booklet describes a
one-day give away of donated art called Free For All. And still another brochure
detailed the results of the groups Public Sculpture Opinion Poll in which citizens
were given the opportunity to respond in the street to an abstract public art work
sponsored by the city. (One copy of this booklet of mostly negative opinions was
sent to the citys Public Art Department.) SEE: http://www.temporaryservices.org/
12. Ibid.
13. Georges Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure, in Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings 1927-39, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. See also Bruce Barber and
Jeff Dayton-Johnson, Marking the Limit: Re-Framing a Micro-Economy for the
Arts, Parachute, no. 106, April, May, June 2002, 27, 39.
25. See the Elfwood web site at: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/
26. While the maker of Phantom Edit distributed his fan cut for free, others were
not so gift oriented. Bootleg copies of the Edit were soon being made and sold.
Meanwhile, Lucas has taken legal action against the distribution of the new edit and
formally requested ebay, the largest online auction site, to voluntarily not list the
Phantom Edit, an action that further underscores the potentially destabilizing power
of Dark Matter especially when it collides with the formal, cultural economy.
1

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

David Harvey


CHANGE THE WORLD SAID MARX; CHANGE LIFE SAID RIMBAUD; FOR US, THESE TWO
TASKS ARE IDENTICAL (Andr Bretton) - (A banner in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the City of
Mexico, site of the student massacre in 1968, January, 2008)



We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved center stage both politically and ethically.
A lot of political energy is put into promoting, protecting and articulating their significance in the
construction of a better world. For the most part the concepts circulating are individualistic and property-
based and, as such, do nothing to fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics
and neoliberal modes of legality and state action. We live in a world, after all, where the rights of private
property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights one can think of. But there are occasions when
the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, as when the rights of labor, women, gays and minorities
come to the fore (a legacy of the long-standing labor movement and the 1960s Civil Rights movement in
the United States that was collective and had a global resonance). These struggles for collective rights
have, on occasion, yielded some results (such that a woman and a black become real contestants for the US
Presidency). I here want to explore another kind of collective right, that of the right to the city. This is
important because there is a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvres ideas on the topic as these were
articulated in relation to the movement of 68 in France, at the same time as there are various social
movements around the world that are now demanding the right to the city as their goal. So what might the
right to the city mean?
The city, as the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is:
"man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more
after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is
henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in
making the city man has remade himself."
1

If Park is correct, then the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of
what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we
cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic
values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources
that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our hearts desire. It
is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon
the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake
2
ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human
rights.
But since, as Park avers, we have hitherto lacked any clear sense of the nature of our task, we must
first reflect on how we have been made and re-made throughout history by an urban process impelled
onwards by powerful social forces. The astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred
years means, for example, we have been re-made several times over without knowing why, how or
wherefore. Has this contributed to human well-being? Has it made us into better people or left us dangling
in a world of anomie and alienation, anger and frustration? Have we become mere monads tossed around
in an urban sea? These were the sorts of questions that preoccupied all manner of nineteenth century
commentators, such as Engels and Simmel, who offered perceptive critiques of the urban personas then
emerging in response to rapid urbanization.
2
These days it is not hard to enumerate all manner of urban
discontents and anxieties in the midst of even more rapid urban transformations. Yet we seem to lack the
stomach for systematic critique. What, for example, are we to make of the immense concentrations of
wealth, privilege and consumerism in almost all the cities of the world in the midst of an exploding planet
of slums?
3

To claim the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim some kind of shaping power over
the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and re-made and to do so in a
fundamental and radical way. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and
social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomena of
some sort, since surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody (usually an oppressed
peasantry) while the control over the disbursement of the surplus typically lies in a few hands. This general
situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is an intimate connection with the
perpetual search for surplus value (profit) that drives the capitalist dynamic. To produce surplus value,
capitalists have to produce a surplus product. Since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus
product an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization.
Let us look more closely at what capitalists do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money
and end the day with more of it. The next day they wake up and have to decide what to do with the extra
money they gained the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more money or
consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coercive laws of competition force them to reinvest because
if one does not reinvest then another surely will. To remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to
make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough surplus to reinvest in
expansion and satisfy their lust for pleasure too. But the result of perpetual reinvestment is the expansion of
surplus production at a compound rate - hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output and
population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation. This is paralleled by the logistical growth
path of urbanization under capitalism.
The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital
surplus production and absorption. In this the capitalist faces a number of barriers to continuous and
3
trouble-free expansion. If there is a scarcity of labor and wages are too high then either existing labor has
to be disciplined (technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working class power
are two prime methods) or fresh labor forces must be found (by immigration, export of capital or
proletarianization of hitherto independent elements in the population). New means of production in general
and new natural resources in particular must also be found. This puts increasing pressure on the natural
environment to yield up the necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable wastes. Terrains for raw
material extraction have to be opened up (imperialist and neo-colonial endeavors often have this as their
objective). The coercive laws of competition also force new technologies and organizational forms to come
on line all the time, since capitalists with higher productivity can out-compete those using inferior methods.
Innovations define new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital through speed up and reduce
the friction of distance that limits the geographical range within which the capitalist is free to search for
expanded labor supplies, raw materials, etc. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market then
new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting new products and lifestyles, creating
new credit instruments and debt-financed state and private expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too
low, then state regulation of ruinous competition, monopolization (mergers and acquisitions) and capital
exports to fresh pastures provide ways out.
If any one of the above barriers to continuous capital circulation and expansion becomes impossible
to circumvent, then capital accumulation is blocked and capitalists face a crisis. Capital cannot be
profitably re-invested. Capital accumulation stagnates or ceases and capital is devalued (lost) and in some
instances even physically destroyed. Devaluation can take a number of forms. Surplus commodities can
be devalued or destroyed, productive capacity and the assets can be written down in value and left
unemployed, or money itself can be devalued through inflation. And in a crisis, of course, labor stands to
be devalued through massive unemployment. In what ways, then, has capitalist urbanization been driven
by the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable capitalist activity? I here
argue that it plays a particularly active role (along with other phenomenon such as military expenditures) in
absorbing the surplus product that capitalists are perpetually producing in their search for surplus value.
4

Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The crisis of 1848 was one of the first clear crises
of unemployed surplus capital and surplus labor side-by-side and it was European-wide. It struck
particularly hard in Paris and the result was an abortive revolution on the part of unemployed workers and
those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the capitalist greed and inequality that
had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries
but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered
a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor in 1852. To survive politically, the authoritarian Emperor
resorted to widespread political repression of alternative political movements but he also knew that he had
to deal with the capital surplus problem and this he did by announcing a vast program of infrastructural
investment both at home and abroad. Abroad this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe
and down into the Orient as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home it meant
4
consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbors, draining marshes, and the like. But above
all it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought Haussmann to
Paris to take charge of the public works in 1853.
Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus capital and
unemployment problem by way of urbanization. The rebuilding of Paris absorbed huge quantities of labor
and of capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with authoritarian suppression of the aspirations of
the Parisian labor force, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. Haussmann drew upon the utopian
plans (by Fourierists and Saint-Simonians) for re-shaping Paris that had been debated in the 1840s, but with
one big difference. He transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect
Hittorf, showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying not
wide enoughyou have it 40 meters wide and I want it 120. Haussmann thought of the city on a grander
scale, annexed the suburbs, redesigned whole neighborhoods (such as Les Halles) rather than just bits and
pieces of the urban fabric. He changed the city wholesale rather than retail. To do this he needed new
financial institutions and debt instruments which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines (the Credit
Mobilir and Credit Immobilire). What he did in effect was to help resolve the capital surplus disposal
problem by setting up a Keynesian-like system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.
The system worked very well for some fifteen years and it entailed not only a transformation of
urban infrastructures but the construction of a whole new urban way of life and the construction of a new
kind of urban persona. Paris became the city of light the great center of consumption, tourism and
pleasure - the cafs, the department stores, the fashion industry, the grand expositions all changed the urban
way of life in ways that could absorb vast surpluses through crass and frivolous consumerism (that
offended traditionalists and excluded workers alike). But then the overextended and increasingly
speculative financial system and credit structures on which this was based crashed in 1868. Haussmann
was forced from power, Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarcks Germany and lost, and
in the vacuum that followed arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in
capitalist urban history. The Commune was wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the urban world that
Haussmann had destroyed (shades of the 1848 revolution) and the desire to take back their city on the part
of those dispossessed by Haussmanns works. But the Commune also articulated conflictual forward
looking visions of alternative socialist (as opposed to monopoly capitalist) modernities that pitted ideals of
centralized hierarchical control (the Jacobin current) against decentralized anarchist visions of popular
organization (led by the Proudhonists), that led in 1872, in the midst of intense recriminations over who
was at fault for the debacle of the Commune, to the radical and unfortunate break between the Marxists and
the Anarchists that to this day still plague all forms of left opposition to capitalism.
5

Fast forward now to 1942 in the United States. The capital surplus disposal problem that had
seemed so intractable in the 1930s (and the unemployment that went with it) was temporarily resolved by
the huge mobilization for the war effort. But everyone was fearful as to what would happen after the war.
Politically the situation was dangerous. The Federal Government was in effect running a nationalized
5
economy, was in alliance with the communist Soviet Union and strong social movements with socialist
inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. We all know the subsequent history of the politics of McCarthyism
and the Cold War (abundant signs of which were already there in 1942). Like Louis Bonaparte, a hefty
dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time. But what of the
capital surplus disposal problem?
In 1942 there appeared a lengthy evaluation of Haussmanns efforts in an architectural journal. It
documented in detail what he has done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate
Haussmanns reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than
Robert Moses who after World War II did to the whole New York metropolitan region what Haussmann
had done to Paris.
6
That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process and through the
system of (debt-financed) highways and infrastructural transformations, through suburbanization and
through the total re-engineering, not just of the city but of the whole metropolitan region, he absorbed the
surplus product and thereby helped resolve the capital surplus absorption problem. For this to happen, he
needed to tap into new financial institutions and tax arrangements (subsidies to homeownership) that
liberated the credit to debt-finance the urban expansion. This process, when taken nation-wide, as it was in
all the major metropolitan centers of the United States (yet another transformation of scale), played a
crucial role in the stabilization of global capitalism after World War II (this was a period when the US
could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy through running trade deficits). The
suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As happened in
Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles and produced a whole new way of life
in which new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners as well as two cars in the
driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil, all played their part in the absorption of the
surplus. It also altered the political landscape as subsidized homeownership for the middle classes changed
the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities (turning
the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism). In any case, it was argued, debt-encumbered
homeowners are less likely to go on strike. This project succeeded in absorbing the surplus and assuring
social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the central cities and generating a so-called urban crisis
of revolts in many US central cities of impacted minorities (chiefly African-American) who were denied
access to the new prosperity.
This lasted until the end of the 1960s when, as happened to Haussmann, a different kind of crisis
began to unfold such that Moses fell from grace and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and
unacceptable. To begin with the central cities were in revolt. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and
sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses projects with a localized neighborhood aesthetic. But the
suburbs had been built and the radical transformation in lifestyle that this betokened had all manner of
social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb and its lifestyle as the locus of
all their primary discontents.

And if the Haussmanization of Paris had a role in explaining the dynamics of
the Paris Commune so the soulless qualities of suburban living played a critical role in the dramatic
6
movements of 1968 in the USA, as discontented white middle class students went into a phase of revolt,
seeking alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights in the central cities and rallying against US
imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of world including a different kind of urban
experience. In Paris the movement to stop the left bank expressway and the invasion of central Paris and
the destruction of traditional neighborhoods by the invading high rise giants of which the Place dItalie
and the Tour Montparnasse were exemplary, played an important role in animating the grander processes of
the 68 revolt. And it was in this context that Lefebvre wrote his prescient text in which he predicted,
among other things, not only that the urban process was crucial to the survival of capitalism and therefore
bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that this process was step by step
obliterating the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across
the national space if not beyond.
7
The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban
process that was increasingly dominating the countryside (everything from agribusiness to second homes
and rural tourism).
But along with the 68 revolt, part nostalgia for what had been lost and part forward looking asking
for the construction of a different kind of urban experience, went a financial crisis in the credit institutions
that had powered the property boom through debt-financing throughout the preceding decades. This crisis
gathered momentum at the end of the 1960s until the whole capitalist system crashed into a major global
crisis, led by the bursting of the global property market bubble in 1973, followed by the fiscal bankruptcy
of New York City in 1975. The dark days of the 1970s were upon us and, as had happened many times
before, the question now was how to rescue capitalism from its own contradictions and in this, if history
was to be any guide, the urban process was bound to play a significant role. In this case, as Bill Tabb long
ago argued, the working through of the New York fiscal crisis of 1975 pioneered the way towards the
construction of a neoliberal answer to the problems of perpetuation of class power and revival of a capacity
to absorb the surpluses that capitalism must produce if it is to survive.
8

Fast forward once again to our current conjuncture. International capitalism has been on a roller-
coaster of regional crises and crashes (East and SouthEast Asia in 1997-8; Russia in 1998; Argentina in
2001, etc.) but has so far avoided a global crash even in the face of a chronic capital surplus disposal
problem. What has been the role of urbanization in the stabilization of this situation? In the United States it
is accepted wisdom that the housing market has been an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly
since 2000 or so (after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s) although it was an active component of
expansion during the 1990s. The property market has absorbed a great deal of the surplus capital directly
through new construction (both inner city and suburban housing and new office spaces) while the rapid
inflation of housing asset prices backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low
rates of interest boosted the U.S. internal market for consumer goods and services. The global market has in
part been stabilized through US urban expansion as the U.S. runs huge trade deficits with the rest of the
world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the debt financed war in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
7
But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. It has, in short, gone global.
So we cannot focus merely on the United States. Similar property market booms in Britain and Spain, as
well as in many other countries, have helped power the capitalist dynamic in ways that have broadly
paralleled what has happened in the United States. The urbanization of China over the last twenty years
has been of a different character (with its heavy focus on building infrastructures), but even more important
than that of the USA. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997 or so, such that China
has absorbed nearly half of the worlds cement supplies since 2000. More than a hundred cities have
passed the one million population mark in the last twenty years and small villages, like Shenzhen, have
become huge metropolises with 6 to 10 million people. Vast infrastructural projects, such as dams and
highways again, all debt financed are transforming the landscape.
9
The consequences for the global
economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms because of the demand
for copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina recover in part because of the strength of
demand from China for raw materials. Is the urbanization of China the primary stabilizer of global
capitalism? The answer has to be a partial yes. But China is only the epicenter for an urbanization process
that has now become genuinely global in part through the astonishing global integration of financial
markets that use their flexibility to debt-finance urban mega-projects from Dubai to Sao Paulo and from
Mumbai to Hong Kong and London. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the
secondary mortgage market in the USA while Goldman Sachs has been heavily involved in the surging
property market in Mumbai and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. Every urban area in the
world has its building boom in full swing in the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants that is
simultaneously creating a planet of slums. The building booms are evident in Mexico City, Santiago in
Chile, in Mumbai, Johannesburg, Seoul, Taipei, Moscow, and all over Europe (Spain being most dramatic)
as well as in the cities of the core capitalist countries such as London, Los Angeles, San Diego and New
York (where more large-scale urban projects are in motion than ever before and where, just to set the tenor
of the times, a recent exhibition sought to rehabilitate Moses as the author of the rise of New York City
rather than the agent of its fall, as Robert Caro had depicted it back in 1974
10
). Astonishing and in some
respects criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places like
Dubai and Abu Dhabi as a way of mopping up the surpluses arising from oil wealth in the most
conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible (like an indoor ski slope). We are
here looking at yet another transformation in scale, one that makes it hard to grasp that what may be going
on globally is in principle similar to the processes that Haussmann managed so expertly for a while in
Second Empire Paris.
This global urbanization boom has depended, as did all the others before it, on the construction of
new financial institutions and arrangements to organize the credit required to sustain it. Financial
innovations set in train in the 1980s, particularly the securitization and packaging of local mortgages for
sale to investors world-wide, and the setting up of new financial institutions to hold collateralized debt
obligations, has played a crucial role. The benefits of this were legion: it spread risk and permitted surplus
8
savings pools easier access to surplus housing demand and it also, by virtue of its coordinations, brought
aggregate interest rates down (while generating immense fortunes for the financial intermediaries who
worked these wonders). But spreading risk does not eliminate risk. Furthermore, the fact that risk can be
spread so widely encourages even riskier local behaviors because the risk can be transferred elsewhere.
Without adequate risk assessment controls, the mortgage market got out of hand and what happened to the
Pereire Brothers in 1867-8 and to the fiscal profligacy of New York City in the early 1970s, has now turned
into a so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. The crisis is concentrated in the first
instance in and around US cities with particularly serious implications for low-income African Americans
and single head-of-household women in the inner cities. It also affects those who, unable to afford the sky-
rocketing housing prices in the urban centers, particularly in the US Southwest, were forced to the semi-
periphery of metropolitan areas to take up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates but who
now face escalating commuting costs with rising oil prices and soaring mortgage payments as the market-
rates click in. This crisis, with vicious local impacts on urban life and infrastructures, also threatens the
whole architecture of the global financial system and may trigger a major recession to boot. The parallels
with the 1970s are, to put it mildly, uncanny (including the immediate easy-money response of the US
Federal Reserve in 2007-8, which is almost certain to generate strong currents of uncontrollable inflation if
not stagflation, as happened in the 1970s through similar moves, in the not too distant future).
But the situation is far more complex now and it is an open question as to whether a serious crash in
the United States can be compensated for elsewhere (e.g. by China, although even here the pace of
urbanization seems to be slowing down). But the financial system is also much more tightly coupled than it
ever was before.
11
Computer-driven split-second trading, once it does go off track, always threatens to
create some great divergence in the market (it is already producing incredible volatility in stock markets)
that will produce a massive crisis requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work,
including in relation to urbanization processes.
As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought
with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Quality of urban life has become a commodity for those with
money, as has the city itself in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based
industries have become major aspects of urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for
encouraging the formation of market niches, both in urban lifestyle choices and in consumer habits, and
cultural forms, surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice in the
market, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate (the
production of each has become big business) as do fast food and artisanal market places, boutique cultures
and, as Sharon Zukin cutely puts it, pacification by cappuccino. Even the incoherent, bland and
monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas, now gets its antidote in
a new urbanism movement that touts the sale of community and a boutique lifestyle as a developer
product to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive
individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal of support for collective forms of action can become
9
the template for human personality socialization.
12
The defense of property values becomes of paramount
political interest such that, as Mike Davis points out, the homeowner associations in the state of California
become bastions of political reaction if not of fragmented neighborhood fascisms.
13

But we also increasingly live in divided, fragmented and conflict-prone cities. How we view the
world and define possibilities depends on which side of the tracks we are on and to what kinds of
consumerism we have access to. In the past decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich
elites.
14
Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since the neoliberal turn and Mexico now boasts the
richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor have either stagnated or
diminished. The results are indelibly etched into the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly become
cities of fortified fragments, of gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant
surveillance. In the developing world in particular, the city:
is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many microstates. Wealthy
neighborhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts
and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is
available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the
roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears
to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for
survival.
15

Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging, already threatened by the
spreading malaise of the neoliberal ethic, become much harder to sustain. The privatization of
redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn prompting popular
demands for police suppressions. Even the idea that the city might function as a collective body politic, a
site within and from which progressive social movements might emanate, appears increasingly implausible.
Yet there are in fact all manner of urban social movements in evidence seeking to overcome the isolations
and to re-shape the city in a different social image to that given by the powers of developers backed by
finance, corporate capital, and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus.
But surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect. It has entailed
repeated bouts of urban restructuring through creative destruction. This nearly always has a class
dimension since it is usually the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that
suffer first and foremost from this process. Violence is required to achieve the new urban world on the
wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation for
supposedly public benefit and did so in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately
engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from Pariss city center
where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. He created an urban form where it was
believed (incorrectly as it turned out in 1871) sufficient levels of surveillance and military control were
possible so as to ensure that revolutionary movements could easily be controlled by military power. But, as
Engels pointed out in 1872:
10
In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion
that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution perpetually renews the question anew. This
method is called Haussmann (by which) I mean the practice that has now become general of making
breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in areas which are centrally
situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health or for beautifying the
town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or, owing to traffic
requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets (which sometimes seem to have the aim of
making barricade fighting more difficult).No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is
always the same; the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise by the
bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere
else..The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of
production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere!
The same economic necessity that produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.
16

Actually it took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisment of central Paris with
the consequences that we have seen in recent years of uprisings and mayhem in those isolated suburbs
within which the marginalized immigrants and the unemployed workers and youth are increasingly trapped.
The sad point here, of course, is that the processes Engels described recur again and again in capitalist
urban history. Robert Moses took a meat axe to the Bronx (in his infamous words) and long and loud
were the lamentations of neighborhood groups and movements, that eventually coalesced around the
rhetoric of Jane Jacobs, at both the unimaginable destruction of valued urban fabric but also of whole
communities of residents and their long-established networks of social integration.
17
But in the New York
and Parisian case, once the brutal power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and
contained, a far more insidious and cancerous process of transformation occurred through fiscal
disciplining of democratic urban governments, land markets, property speculation and the sorting of land to
those uses that generated the highest possible financial rate of return under the lands highest and best
use. Engels understood all too well what this process was about too:
The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which
are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas
depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances.
They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers houses which are
situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly,
increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public
building are erected.
18

It is depressing to think that all of this was written in 1872, for Engels description applies directly to
contemporary urban processes in much of Asia (Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai) as well as to the contemporary
gentrification of Harlem in New York. A process of displacement and what I call accumulation by
dispossession also lies at the core of the urban process under capitalism.
19
It is the mirror image of capital
11
absorption through urban redevelopment and is giving rise to all manner of conflicts over the capture of
high value land from low income populations that may have lived there for many years. Consider the case
of Mumbai where there are 6 million people considered officially as slum dwellers settled on the land
without legal title (the places they live are left blank on all maps of the city). With the attempt to turn
Mumbai into a global financial center to rival Shanghai, the property development boom gathers pace and
the land the slum dwellers occupy appears increasingly valuable. The value of the land in Dharavi, one of
the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is put at $2 billion and the pressure to clear the slum (for
environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab) is mounting daily. Financial powers backed by
the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of a terrain occupied
for a whole generation by the slum dwellers. Capital accumulation on the land through real estate activity
booms as land is acquired at almost no cost. Will the people displaced get compensation? The lucky ones
get a bit. But while the Indian constitution specifies that the state has the obligation to protect the lives and
well-being of the whole population irrespective of caste and class, and to guarantee rights to livelihood
housing and shelter, the Indian Supreme Court has issued both non-judgments and judgments that re-write
this constitutional requirement. Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively
prove their long-term residence on the land, they have no right to compensation. To concede that right,
says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. So the slum-
dwellers either resist and fight or move with their few belongings to camp out on the highway margins or
wherever they can find a tiny space.
20
Similar examples of dispossession (though less brutal and more
legalistic) can be found in the United States through the abuse of rights of eminent domain to displace long-
term residents in reasonable housing in favor of higher order land uses (such as condominiums and box
stores). Challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, the liberal justices carried the day against the conservatives
in saying it was perfectly constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase
their property tax base.
In Seoul in the 1990s, the construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo
wrestler types to invade whole neighborhoods and smash down with sledgehammers not only the housing
but also all the possessions of those who had built their own housing on the hillsides of the city in the 1950s
on what had become by the 1990s high value land. Most of those hillsides are now covered with highrise
towers that show no trace of the brutal processes of land clearance that permitted their construction. In
China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied (three million in Beijing
alone). Lacking private property rights, the state can simply remove them from the land by fiat offering a
minor cash payment to help them on their way (before turning the land over to developers at a high rate of
profit). In some instances people move willingly but widespread resistances are also reported, the usual
response to which is brutal repression by the Communist party. In the Chinese case it is often populations
on the rural margins who are displaced illustrating the significance of Lefebvres argument, presciently laid
out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction that once existed between the urban and the rural was gradually
fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development under the hegemonic command of
12
capital and the state. This is the case also in India, where the special economic development zones policy
now favored by central and state governments is leading to violence against agricultural producers, the
grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal, orchestrated by the ruling Marxist
political party, to make way for large scale Indonesian capital that is as much interested in urban property
development as it is in industrial development. Private property rights in this case provided no protection.
And so it is with the seemingly progressive proposal of awarding private property rights to squatter
populations in order to offer them the assets that will permit them to emerge out of poverty. This is the sort
of proposal now mooted for Rios favelas, but the problem is that the poor, beset with insecurity of income
and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a cash payment at a
relatively low price (the rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price which is why Moses
could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue). My bet is that, if present
trends continue, within fifteen years all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by
high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the fabled bay while the erstwhile favela dwellers will
have filtered off to live in some remote periphery.
21
The long-term effect of Margaret Thatchers
privatization of social housing in central London has been to create a rent and housing price structure
throughout the metropolitan area that precludes lower income and now even middle class people having
access to housing anywhere near the urban center.
Urbanization we may conclude has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses and
has done so at every increasing geographical scales but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative
destruction that entail the dispossession of the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet
of slums collides with the planet as a vast building site. Periodically this ends in revolt, as the dispossessed
in Paris rose up in 1871, seeking to reclaim the city they had lost. The urban social movements of the
1960s (in the US after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968) likewise sought to define a
different way of urban living from that which was being imposed upon them by capitalist developers and
the state. If, as seems likely, the fiscal difficulties in the current conjuncture mount and the hitherto
successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist absorption of the surplus through
urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 68 or, even
more dramatically, our version of the Commune?
As with the fiscal system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban
process is now global in scope. Signs of revolt are everywhere (the unrest in China and India is chronic,
civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment, autonomy movements are emerging all over the
place, and even In the United States the political signs suggest that most of the population is saying
enough is enough with respect to the rabid inequalities). Any of these revolts could suddenly become
contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of
which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled at all. Indeed many have no connection to
each other. But if they did somehow come together, then what should they demand?
13
The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the
production and use of the surplus. Since the urban process is a major channel of use, then the right to the
city is constituted by establishing democratic control over the deployment of the surpluses through
urbanization. To have a surplus product is not a bad thing: indeed, in many situations a surplus is crucial to
adequate survival. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value created has been taxed away by
the state and in social democratic phases that proportion rose significantly putting much of the surplus
under state control. The whole neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards
privatization of control over the surplus. The data for all OECD countries show, however, that the share of
gross output taken by the state has been roughly constant since the 1970s. The main achievement of the
neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the state share expanding in the way it was in the 1960s. One
further response has been to create new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests
and, through the application of money power, assure that control over the disbursement of the surplus
through the state apparatus favors corporate capital (like Halliburton) and the upper classes in the shaping
of the urban process. Increasing the share of the surplus under state control will only work if the state itself
is brought back under democratic control.
Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In
New York City, for example, we have a billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is re-shaping the city
after his hearts desire along lines favorable to the developers, to Wall Street and transnational capitalist
class elements, while continuing to sell the city as an optimal location for high value businesses and a
fantastic destination for tourists, thus turning Manhattan in effect into one vast gated community for the
rich. He refuses to subsidize businesses to come to New York City saying that if they are the kind of
business that needs a subsidy to be in this high cost but high quality location then we do not want them. He
has not said the same of people but this is the principle applied in practice. In Seattle, a billionaire like Paul
Allen calls the shots and in Mexico City the wealthiest man in the world, Carlos Slim, has the downtown
streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze. And it is not only affluent individuals that exercise direct power.
In the town of New Haven, strapped for any resources for urban reinvestment of its own, it is Yale
University, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to
suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore and Columbia University plans to do so
for areas of New York (sparking neighborhood resistance movements in both cases). The right to the city,
as it is now constituted, is far too narrowly confined, in most cases in the hands of a small political and
economic elite who are in the position to shape the city more and more after then own particular hearts
desire.
In January every year an estimate is published of the total of Wall Street bonuses earned for all the
hard work the financiers engaged in the previous year. In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by
any measure, the bonuses added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 per cent less than the year before. In mid-
summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank pumped billions of short-term credit
into the financial system to ensure its stability and thereafter the Federal Reserve dramatically lowered
14
interest rates or pumped in vast amounts of liquidity every time the Wall Street markets threatened to fall
precipitously. Meanwhile, some two million people, mainly women single headed households and African
Americans in central cities and marginalized white populations in the urban semi-periphery, have been or
are about to be rendered homeless by foreclosures. Many city neighborhoods and even whole peri-urban
communities in the US, have been boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices
of the financial institutions. This population is due no bonuses. Indeed, since foreclosure means
forgiveness of debt and that is regarded as income in the United States, many of those foreclosed face a
hefty income tax bill for money they never had in their possession.
This awful asymmetry cannot be construed as anything less than a massive form of class
confrontation. It then poses the following question: why could not the Federal Reserve extend medium-
term liquidity help to the two million threatened households to forestall most of the foreclosures until
mortgage restructuring could resolve much of the problem? The ferocity of the credit crisis would have
been mitigated and impoverished people and the neighborhoods they inhabited would have been protected.
To be sure, this would extend the mission of the Federal Reserve beyond its normal remit and interfere with
the neoliberal rules of income distribution and personal responsibility. But it would also have prevented the
unfolding of that financial Katrina, which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low
income neighborhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner city areas far more effectively and
speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain. The social to say nothing of economic price we
are paying for the observing of such rules and the senseless creative destruction they engender is enormous.
We have, however, yet to see a coherent oppositional movement to all of this in the twenty-first
century. There are, of course, multitudes of diverse social movements focusing on the urban question
already in existence from India and Brazil to China, Spain, Argentina and the United States - including a
nascent right to the city movement. The problem is that they have yet to converge on the singular aim of
gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus (let alone over the conditions of its production). At this
point in history this has to be a global struggle predominantly with finance capital for that is the scale at
which urbanization processes are now working. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a
confrontation is difficult if not daunting. But the opportunities are multiple in part because, as this brief
history of capitalist urbanization shows, again and again crises erupt either locally (as in land and property
markets in Japan in 1989 or as in the Savings and Loan crisis in the United States of 1987-90) or globally
(as in 1973 or now) around the urbanization process, and in part because the urban is now the point of
massive collision dare we call it class struggle? - between the accumulation by dispossession being
visited upon the slums and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize more and more urban space for
the affluent to take their urbane and cosmopolitan pleasures. One step towards unification of these
struggles is to focus on the right to the city as both a working slogan and a political ideal, precisely because
it focuses on who it is that commands the inner connection that has prevailed from time immemorial
between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of the right to the city and the
construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative, if the dispossessed are to take
15
back control of the city from which they have for so long been excluded and if new modes of controlling
capital surpluses as they work through urbanization processes are to be instituted. Lefebvre was right to
insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.



Notes
1. Park, R., On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago, Chicago University Press, p.3.
2 Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Oxford, Blackwell, 1952;
Simmel, G. The Metropolis and Mental Life, in Levine, D. (ed.) On Individuality and Social Forms,
Chicago, Chicago University Press, 324-39.
3 Davis, M., Planet of Slums, London, Verso, 2006.
4 Perceptive critics will doubtless note that each of the barriers to capital accumulation enumerated in
this highly simplified account roughly corresponds to a particular theory of crisis: labor constraints lead to
profit squeeze theories; natural resource constraints lead to OConnors second contradiction of
capitalism; excessive or imbalanced technological changes generate falling rates of profit (and ruinous
competition); lack of markets indicates an under-consumption problem. My own simplified view is that
crises can and do take on all of these forms in particular historical and geographical situations and that all
of these barriers can sometimes be implicated even as one might stand out as the main problem to be
confronted (as, e.g. Reagan and Thatcher evidently thought it fundamental to confront the power of labor in
the early 1980s whereas now the problem mainly lies in credit-fuelled consumption that is breaking down
and threatening shrinking effective demand).
5 This account is based on Harvey, D.. Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York, Routledge, 2003.
6 Moses, R., What Happened to Haussmann? Architectural Forum, 77, 1942, 1-10.
7 Lefebvre, H., The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2003; Writing on
Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996.
8 Tabb, W., The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York, Monthly Review
Press, 1982.
9 Harvey, D., A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, chapter 5.
10 Caro, R., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, New York, Knopf, 1974;
Ballon, H. and Jackson, K., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, New
York, Norton, 2007.
11 Bookstaber, R., A Demon of our own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial
Innovation, Hoboken, NJ., Wiley, 2007.
12 Nafstad, H., Blakar, R., Carlquist, E., Phelps, J., and Rand-Hendrikson, K., Ideology and Power: The
Influence of Current Neo-liberalism in Society, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology,
17, 2007, 313-27.
16
13 Davis, M. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London, Verso, 1990.
14 See Harvey, D., op.cit. chapter 2.
15 Balbo, M. cited in National Research Council, Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its
Implications in the Developing World, Washington, D.C., The National Academies Press, 2003, p.379.
16 Engels, F. The Housing Question, New York, International Publishers, 1935 edition, 74-7.
17 Berman M., All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1982.
18 Engels, F. op.cit.(1935), 23.
19 Harvey, D., The New Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, chapter 4.
20 Ramanathan, U., Illegality and the Urban Poor, Economic and Political Weekly, 41, no.29, July 22,
2006; Shukla, R., Rights of the Poor: An Overview of the Supreme Court, Economic and Political
Weekly, 41, no.35, September 2, 2006.
21 A lot of this thinking follows the work of Hernan de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism
Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York, Basic Books, 2000; see the critical
examination by Mitchell, T., The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World, Archives
Europennes de Sociologie, 46, 2005, 297-320.
.








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FuIIisIed I College Art Association
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068403 .
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6 1st STRKHT BO?TLECAP PASTA
Dan
Peterman,
workstation for 61st Street
Bottlecap Pasta, 2001-04,
installation
view,
Baltimore Museum of Art
(artwork
? Dan
Peterman, photograph by Jose
A.
Sanchez, Jr.)
The
practice
of
creating
a small clamshell
like
pasticcio using
a
recycled
bottle
cap
as
stamp
evolved out of the
community
kitchen
and
garden operated by
Peterman in
Chicago's Hyde
Park.
84 FALL
200?
Chris
Gilbert,
Carlos
Basualdo,
T.
J. Demos,
and
Gregory
Sholette
44
Dark Matter into
Light":
A Round-Table Discussion
Today
there are
signs
of increased attention to informal art
production
and
pro
duction networks. A wave of "slacker chic"
making
the circuits of the
galleries
joins attempts
to historicize the inclusive East
Village
scene of the
1980s
and also
sometimes-more-than-passing glances
at
contemporary
street art. These
symp
toms of a
groundswell
of interest in the art world's
purported
others have not
gone unrecognized
or
untheorized;
in a series of recent
essays,
artist and writer
Gregory
Sholette used an astronomical
metaphor
to frame the vast realm of below
the-radar
production, calling
it the "dark
matter" to the art world's
"light
matter."
'
As
Sholette describes the former term, it
applies
to a
range
of
practices
such as
"home-crafts,
makeshift
memorials,
Internet
art
galleries,
amateur
photography
and
pornography, Sunday
painters, self-published
newsletters and fan-zines" as well as
"artists who
sel?-consciously
work outside and/or
against
the
Features
parameters
of the mainstream art world for reasons of
political
and social cri
tique."2 Paralleling
the relations between
gray
economies and
legal
ones, these
dark
practices
exist in
dynamic
and
symbiotic,
if
usually unrecognized,
relation
ships
to the more visible art world. Sholettes
discovery?in part
an act of nomi
nation?led to his
calling
for "a radical
rezoning
of art world real
estate,"
as
well as a revision of "the
very
notion of artistic value as it is defined
by
bour
geois ideology."3
In an effort to
respond
to these ideas and consider their
convergence
with
autonomist theories of immaterial labor
(as
well as
anthropological
work on cre
ative
consumption),
I
recently organized
the exhibition Cram Sessions: 02 Dark Matter
at the Baltimore Museum of Art
(on
view November
3-28, 2004).
The second in
a
two-year
series of
experimental
exhibitions,
the show
proposed
a radical level
ing
of
ideas,
objects,
and
programs,
all of which were treated as
equal inputs
into the exhibition
space (see diagram
on
following pages).
True to the initial
theorization of dark matter, the
project
included an unusual swath of contem
porary production,
with contributions
by
Dan Peterman and
Marjetica
Potrc?
artists whose work in different
ways
steers close to life?as well as work
by
zine
makers,
punk
knitters,
experimental
musical-instrument
inventors,
and
fantasy
gamers.
Rather than
simply presenting
or
displaying
this
material,
the show
proposed
that an
important part
of its
agency
would be to
link, mobilize,
and
empower
the
practitioners.
With these aims in
mind,
it
staged
a series of events
that
sought
to theorize the
subject
on the one
hand,
and to
organize
and
politi
cize both the
participants
and audience on the other. These events included a
panel
discussion
involving
the curator and writer Carlos
Basualdo,
the art histo
rian and critic T.
J. Demos,
Gregory
Sholette,
and me that convened two
days
before the exhibition's
closing.
An edited
transcript
of that discussion follows.
?Chris Gilbert
Chris Gilbert: I wanted to
begin by making
clear that the title of this
panel,
"Dark Matter into
Light"?always
used in scare
quotes?is
not offered without
irony.
The idea that the
agency
of the exhibition should consist in
making
what
is unseen seen?this is
absolutely
not what Cram Sessions: 02 Dark Matter is about.
Rather,
questioning
the effects of
taking
dark matter into
light
is central to the
85 art
journal
1.
Among
the indexes of interest in "dark" or
informal
practices
one
may
note the Yerba Buena
Art Center's
Beautiful
Losers:
Contemporary
Art
and Street Culture
(coorganized
with the Contem
porary
Arts Center, Cincinnati,
on view in San
Francisco from
July
17 to October 10,
2004),
Jeffrey
Deitch's
many engagements
with street
and skater art in shows such as Street Market
(an
installation
by Barry
McGee, Steve Powers, and
Todd
James,
on view at Deitch
Projects,
New
York, October 5-December 2,
2000)
and the
group
exhibition Session the Bowl
(Deitch Projects,
New York, December 14,
2002-February
15,
2003),
and the
wide-ranging
inclusions in the
broad
sweep
of Lawrence Rinder's 2003
Whitney
Biennial. In
planning
the latter exhibition, Rinder
asked, "What are the
assumptions
that underlie
the divisions and boundaries that we have come
to take for
granted
and which
stipulate
that this,
but not that, is suitable for museum
display?"
and
proposed
to
open
the door "to the
possible
rich
ness of a
truly expanded
view of art
practice."
Sholette's discussion of dark matter can
be found
principally
in two
essays:
"Heart of
Darkness: A
Journey
into the Dark Matter of the
Art World" and "Dark Matter: Activist Art and
the Counter Public
Sphere,"
both
posted
on his
Web site,
http://gregorysholette.com.
In addi
tion, the former text is found in the book Visual
Worlds, ed.
John
R. Hall, Blake Stimson, and Lisa T
Becker
(New
York:
Routledge, 2005),
I 16-38;
the latter will
appear
in the
forthcoming
book
(Image)ining
Resistance, ed. Keri Cronin and
Kirsty
Robertson, with a short version available in
Journal of
Aesthetics and Protest 3
(2004):
12-25,
and online at:
http://www.journalofaesthetic
sandprotest.org/.
2. Sholette, "Dark Matter: Activist Art and the
Counter-Public
Sphere."
3. Ibid.
PROGRAM 1
Lecture:
Greg
Sholette discusses
informal art and activism
11.06.04
ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLE
CADRE MODEL
Subsumption
of
techniques
and
practices
to a core
ideology
/PROGRAM
4
Panel Discussion:
m Dark Matter into
Light
^1.27.04
_
DARK MATTER: PERVASIVE INVISIBLE MAKING
[GREG SHOLETTE]
The "dark matter" thesis aims to
challenge
the
production
of value
within the
specialized
art world
industry
and its
expert culture: "Like its
astronomical cousin, creative dark matter makes
up
the bulk of the
artistic
activity produced
in our
postindustrial society. However, this
type of dark matter is invisible
primarily
to those who
lay
claim to the
management
and
interpretation
of culture. It includes informal prac
tices such as home crafts, makeshift
memorials, Internet art
galleries,
amateur
photography
and
pornography, Sunday painters,
self
published newsletters, and fanzines."1
ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLE
GRASSROOTS MODEL
Spontaneous integration
of inde
pendent
initiatives
PROGRAM 2
Radical Information Center:
introduction and
workshop -
.13.04
PROGRAM 3
Skill Share: artists
present
and
exchange
ideas and methods
11.20.04
FANTASY GAMING [DARKON LARP]
Self-designed props including heraldry, scrolls,
weapons, armor, and
clothing
used in live action
?
role
playing games.
86 FALL
200?
DISPLAYED PROJECT V
POWER TOOLS [MARJETICA POTRC]
Experimental prototypes
and utilitarian
objects
# proposed
as solutions to concrete cases of need,
including
the
Hippo
Water Roller and Solar Oven.
^^OC
/ The
I
DAT
LOCATION:
The Baltimore Museum of Art
DATES:
November 3-28, 2004
NOTE ON THE INSTALLATION:
The space of
visibility
in the exhibition is the
central colonnaded hall of the BMA's
original
build
ing, designed by
John Russell
Pope
and
completed
in 1929. For the exhibition, the hall's
agora-like
character is enhanced
by temporary
walls that
wind
through
the columns. The
design
references
a
marketplace (exchange) and, because of the cen
tral focus created
by
the inward
facing
exhibition
booths, crucible
(pressure).
Diagram
for Cram Sessions: 02 Dark Matter.
The central
gridded
area schematizes the
space
of the exhibition.
IMMATERIAL LABOR: POST-FORDIST "AESTHETIC" PRODUCTION
[PAOLO VIRNO, MAURIZIO LAZZARATO, MICHAEL
HARDT/ANTONIO NEGRI]
Dominant in
postindustrial society,
immaterial labor
comprises
"a series of activities that are not
normally recognized
as "work"?
in other words, the kinds of activities involved in
defining
and
fixing
!
cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, and consumer norms :
and, more
strategically, public opinion" (Lazzarato).2 The
productive ?
forces
today,
on which every contemporary
work process
must draw,
are
linguistic competence, knowledge,
and
imagination (Virno).3 '.
Living
labor is an absolute
positivity
that
"always
seeks to break the
<
fixed
territorializing structures, the national
organizations,
and the
political figures
that
keep
it
prisoner.
. . . this process of
rupture
throws open all the windows of
history" (Hardt and
Negri).4
CREATIVE CONSUMPTION: AN ART OF USING
[MICHEL DE CERTEAU]
Commodity usage is itself a kind of creation, an art of
using:
"To a
rationalized, expansionist
and at the same time centralized, clamorous
and
spectacular production corresponds
another
production, called
"consumption."
The latter is devious, it is
dispersed,
but it insinuates
itself
everywhere, silently
and almost
invisibly,
because it does not
manifest itself
through
its own
products,
but rather
through ways of
using
the
products imposed by
a dominant economic order. . . . The
making
in
question
is a
production,
a
poiesis [from the Greek word
poiein,
"to create, invent, generate"]?but
a hidden one, because it is
scattered over areas defined and
occupied by systems
of
"production."6
\
EXPERIMENTAL INSTRUMENTS
[JOHN BERNDT, NEIL
FEATHER, MICHAEL
*
^
JOHNSEN] Modified and invented instruments
*
used in
improvisational
music.
Greg Sholette, Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public
Sphere, online: http://www.artic.edu/-gshole/pages/Writing%20
Samples/DarkMatterTWO.htm.
Maunzio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor." in Radical Thought in Italy, Paolo
^
Virno and Micheal Hardt. eds. (Minneapolis: University of Mm
Press, 1996). 132.
'e
(Cambridge: Harvard University
87 art
journal
project's conception
and to the discussion we are
having
now. Nor was the
exhibition ever intended to formulate a
positive
aesthetic
proposition
but to
focus on the
political
and economic
importance
of
informal,
less visible forms
of
production.
Now,
it
may
seem like a
surprising
idea,
that such creative work could
embody
a
politics.
There are
actually
two sides to that claim: One is that informal
art
production
can have an instrumental value in a
political struggle.
For
example,
some of the
techniques
of
do-it-yourself creating,
such as
zine-making
or
pirate
radio,
can be used as
ways
to distribute minoritarian
ideas,
especially
in contexts
of
censorship,
both
outright suppression
and more subtle forms of media control.
Yet
perhaps
more
significant
is the idea that there
might
be a
politics
that
actually
inheres in
production,
that informal forms of
production
themselves,
in a
very
general
sense,
might
have irreducible
political
dimensions. In
particular,
I am
interested in Toni
Negri's
claim that what he sometimes refers to as the "funda
mental
productivity
of
being" might
constitute a
challenge
to
capital.
In
Empire,
Michael Hardt and he
suggest
that,
to a certain extent,
a failure to track the
pro
ductive
capacity
of the multitude is a blind
spot
of a
great
deal of
thought
that
holds
capitalism
to be an
unchangeable
feature of
contemporary
life.4
This is the basic
impetus
of the show As far as this
panel
discussion is con
cerned,
I would like to
put
three
questions
on the table for the discussants. One
concerns how
fully
informal creation and
underground practices?their
look
and their
techniques?can
be commodified
by
the market and
incorporated
into the
gallery system. Greg
has
suggested
that dark matter is
only superficially
appropriable?that
the art
industry merely
trades in simulations of collective
informal work and
adopts only
the look or manner of dark matter. It could be
argued,
however,
that
appropriation
of an
underground
is
always superficial
and
that there is
something
circular about
saying
that the
politics
of the work is not
appropriable
or
commodifiable?since,
of course, the
politics
of
underground
work could be defined as
simply
that-which-is-not-commodifiable.
A second
question
concerns the internal structure of dark matter. How
are informal
production
and its creators
organized?
For
example,
how are zine
makers connected with each other? A tentative answer, and a
seeming given,
is
that there are
many-to-many
connections
among
the
producers,
who relate to
one another
through
rhizomatic structures rather than
arborescent,
hierarchical
ones. For
example,
in the
way
zine creators communicate with each
other,
a
weblike or horizontal structure is
immediately suggested.
Another
seeming given
is that there is an inherent
collectivity
to dark matter s
organization; working
together, working socially, appears
to be
integral
to labor in its immaterial form.
A third and final
question
concerns the
agency
of this exhibition and of art
exhibitions more
generally.
If exhibitions
organize
work?and exhibition cura
tors are often described as
"organizers"?to
what
degree
does their
organiza
tional work
play
into the hands of
capital
and increase the
governability
of the
work and the
producers?
This raises the further
question
of how one can exhibit
artworks as
singularities (in
their
singularity)
and resist the
unifying logic
of an
exhibition. For some
years
I've been concerned with the
problem
of "curatorial
panopticism," by
which I mean not so much the literal
figure
of the
panopticon
as it
might
be realized in this or that
exhibition,
but the idea that a
panoptic
logic underpins
the structure of most exhibitions.
88 FALL
2005
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Empire
(Cambridge,
MA: Harvard
University
Press,
2000).
Michael
Johnsen, Voltage-Controlled
Phase
Difference Networks,
2002
(artwork
?
Michael
Johnsen, photograph by Margaret
Cox)
The Dark Matter exhibition included an
array
of invented
experimental
musical
instruments.
following pages:
Installation view of Cram Sessions 02: Dark
Matter,
Baltimore Museum of
Art,
2004
(photograph by Jose
A.
Sanchez, Jr.)
Carlos Basualdo: In
contemporary
art contexts there's often and
increasingly
a notable lack of
ideas,
so I think all of us here
discussing
this set of
questions
is
itself
quite stimulating....
Chris has
pointed
out that the show has other sources
than
simply Greg's essays,
but since the exhibition is named after
them,
I would
like to
begin
there.
Initially,
I was
quite surprised
to hear
Greg
use the term dark
matter for all these activities that have an aesthetic nature
^HHH^^hhHHJI
but do not
quite
fit into the art that is seen in the
gal
^^^^^Bfl|^^^H
leries. He referred to
unemployed
artists
(those
who
^^^ ^^^rWw??i
went to art school but couldn't find a
job
in the art
sys
^^P^
^^^^BHH
tern), Sunday painters, activists?categories
that to do
jj^^?HjpB
not
quite
fit into the record of the art-historical
map.
a?S^M W???m? &
When he named all of those
categories together,
it
s*Kr?^
P?P8HH|
sounded a little bit like the Chinese
encyclopedia
that
^Jj^H
Jorge
Luis
Borges
writes about in one of his short sto
||mh^HH^H
ries,
in which
you
could find animals that
bark,
animals
M?I^H^Hn|^H
with two
legs?
animals with
spotted
skins,
etc. As we
jMfln^^^^^^^H
know,
an
encyclopedia pretends
to be a matrix for order,
J^ytt^^^BJnBB
kut in fact its
categories
are
conventional,
and the sheer
^K?
B\
JhRHS
conventionality
of
categories
in
general
was what
caught
5S&
JtlL^^^Wii
Borges
's attention in the first
place.
To me this kind of
idiosyncratic encyclopedia
of dark matter was at the
same time
extremely
coherent and
extremely
incoherent. And it was that
paradox
that
initially
attracted me ...
In the
past
five to ten
years, contemporary
art
practices
seem to have taken
two
very opposite
directions. On the one
hand,
we have seen the
increasing
importance
of the art market in terms of events like the art
fairs,
whose relevance
?relative to other events such as biennials and
group
exhibitions in
general?
number,
and size have
grown
so
tremendously
of late. A
good
deal of
contempo
rary
artistic
production
seems to be
increasingly organized
around that
growing
scene. On the other
hand, many
other artists seem to be
reacting against
that
tendency.
Their work seems to have
emerged
as a form of contestation
against
a
market-driven art world
(though
it is
important
to note that this
process
seems
to be
happening
without
being
a form of manifest contestation or criticism of
the art
system).
These alternative
ways
of
working?which
often involve work
ing collectively,
in collaboration with
people coming
from other
disciplines,
in
very specific
contexts, for
longer periods
of time,
and seem to be
targeted
to
the
production
of what I would like to call
experimental communities?present many
challenges.
For while we do have a
highly sophisticated vocabulary
to talk about
art
objects
and about those
objects
in
relationship
to a certain
genealogy
of other
objects
and actions to which
they
are
related,
it is more difficult to talk about
these artists and
groups that,
although they
do not seem to
completely reject
the
museum and
gallery space
and
although they
sometimes exhibit the results of
their work in these
spaces, ultimately
don't
produce
art
objects
in the traditional
sense. I think that one of the
challenges
for the curators who are
trying
to deal
with that
situation,
with that
schism,
and with these new forms of
production
is
to
develop
a critical
vocabulary
of some sort that is still related to the art-histori
cal
legacy,
that accounts for those works that
ultimately
do not
quite
fit within
the
parameters
of traditional art
history.
A
vocabulary
that would itself mediate
89 art
journal
3