FREE
ART

B R A D T R O E M E L







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INTRODUCTION TO FREE ART

Art’s role in society has undergone many drastic changes and is due for another
right now. This is a new gospel intended for a generation of artists tragically forced to
clutch cynicism as their only reliable conviction. To them The Art World is not only
hopelessly outdated, but exploitative as well– an abusive Grandpa lurking in the distance.
This essay endorses a new way for art to exist in the 21st century by using the technology
we already have as a means to efficiently distribute art freely among viewers and
satisfying society’s positive right to information. It holds the utilitarian belief that for the
purpose of art to be granted to the greatest number of people, there must be an alternative
posed to our current commodity-based system of circulation. As art’s producers, it is our
duty to make sure our contract with distribution is negotiated in a way that properly
reflects contemporary methods and intentions. The road to an unhealthy status quo is
paved with the passivity of all who walk on it. I would like to spend the next 19 pages
outlining how to change everything about art completely.
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1: THE FALSE PROPHET OF PROFIT MOTIVATION

As artists, we tried free market capitalism as our system of distribution and it

failed. Capitalism failed us when every possible place for viewing or presenting art
became privatized or functioned to aid private interests. Galleries, print media and
museums entered a suicide pact with one another to live and die by the capacity of the
world’s wealthiest elite to foot their expensive bill. In return for collectors’ support,
institutions gave their backers free reign to dictate art’s discourse through their buying
power. Unmarketable art became forgotten and forgettable work was marketed in its
place as a consequence.1 We now live in a world where Sotheby’s auction results
masquerade as art history pages.2

Even those most drunk on the Chicago School’s economic Kool-Aide didn’t
really think this would last forever, did they? Everyone knows the greed that propels
laissez-faire capitalism is self-devouring. Unregulated financial competition inevitably

























































1
There exists a large amount of art that supplies profound meaning though is not
marketable because the type of meaning it provides makes collectors uncomfortable.
Implicating the viewer is a powerful gesture that requires a great amount of maturity on
the part of an audience who is typically more used to being ignored by art’s abstract
content than being personally provoked. Divisive art is exactly what public institutions
like museums should protect in order to preserve work the market may ignore. But when
80% of new art acquisitions to American museums come by way of private donations
originating from the market, we can expect public institutions to merely be a reflection of
influential collectors’ buying tastes. (Merryman, John Henry. The American Art System
and the New Cultural Policy, October 15, 2009, Stanford Public Law Working Paper No.
1489612. Pp. 5)
2
The conflation of aesthetic and economic worth is historically rooted in the American
public’s first wide spread exposure to fine art through the Interstate Industrial Expositions
popularized in the late 19th century. These novel expositions featured new industrial
equipment and art “with the kind of auratic presentation usually reserved for objects of
worship”. (Germer, Stefan. “Pictures at an Exhibition”, Chicago History, Spring 1987 pp.
6) The machinery and art had a dual purpose: to be purchased by those elites who could
afford it and to give new beliefs to the middle class. For the equipment, this meant an
ideological promotion for the Industrial Revolution. In the case of art, the promoters
sought to engrain the middle class with a desire and appreciation for high culture.
(Germer 8) The aesthetic criteria set for the ‘best’ art was lost on a formally untrained
public who preferred to see images that reflected small domestic scenes. (Germer 10) Art
sales proved a far more effective grading scale for the middle class to judge the ‘best’
work by. This price-based understanding of value was first used for the industrial
equipment being sold identically alongside the art, creating a confusion between the
“aestheticized commodities and the commodified aesthetic objects” that has lasted to the
present day. (Germer 10)



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leads to the monopolization of resources. Chuck Close’s recent statement that “No great
artist has ever gone undiscovered” is a perfect illustration of the trouble we find ourselves
in.3 Determining whether there was a great artist that went undiscovered would be
impossible because inclusion in art’s history is dependent upon the artist’s ability to
achieve commercial success within the inter-connected spheres of fine art galleries,
museums and print media. We are so reliant on businesses to define art’s cannon that we,
as producers, lost the ability to define ourselves. By leaving profit motivations to
determine the course of art’s history what we received in return was a slimy mess of
insider trading falsely depicted as connoisseurship.4

























































3
NPR, Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate: On Ethics, Is Art Market Worse Than Stock
Market? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100557165. (February
11, 2010)
4
When collectors successfully donate to a museum’s collection it raises the profile of the
artist whose work is granted admission. Museums’ status as a not-for-profit public
archive suggests the art admitted was given an objectively positive quality assessment.
Should that artist’s work be taken out of the archive and shown in a group exhibit (or
afforded a major retrospective) as a result of a donation, the value of her work could
skyrocket in the private market due to the publicity. This is quite common because the
majority of art museums own comes from donations. If a collector can publicly donate
half of her collection and, as a result, triple the private value of the remaining half,
shrewdly giving art away is more lucrative than keeping it.
As a collector, having a reputation of never donating to museums or, worse yet, putting
work up for auction too quickly after it’s initially bought from the gallery could earn you
a permanent spot on a dealer’s ‘waiting list’– an act highly unethical in free market
economics. The goal of the Sherman Act was to end businesses’ ability to intentionally
manipulate the public’s perception of supply (and demand) through uncompetitive
behavior like fictitious waiting lists. Due to influence from the Chicago School of
economics, government regulation has taken the stance that so long as the actions of
businesses are economically efficient they need not be prosecuted. This development
fundamentally reverses the original aim of the Sherman Act from protecting competition
to protecting the most lucrative interests.
Dealers are well aware of this profit-generating scheme and prefer to sell to collectors
who have a reputation of museum gift giving so they can raise the primary market prices
of their museum-certified artists. To lure these collectors, dealers offer them favorable
prices and access to works for sale. Such preferential treatment on the part of dealers
compromises museums’ integrity because it grants a very narrow group of powerful
collectors the ability to determine a disproportionate amount of what art will be offered
for admission to museums’ collections.
The natural monopoly of mega collectors can be explained in three easy steps:
1.) Mega collectors have a great advantage in buying bulk amounts of art from dealers at
a significantly lower price than smaller collectors, allowing them to have more for less.
2.) Because they have received more for less, the financial forfeiture of mega collectors
donating discounted art to museums is less taxing than someone who is not within this
circle of cut rate deal making (not to mention the inherently larger wealth mega collectors
have to begin with).



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The stain of profit motivation extends well beyond historical representation,

perversely seeping into the very act of art’s creation. It is the economy artists’ seek to be
a part of that structurally defines the content and rate of their production. Time plays an
important role in regulating the art market’s supply and demand of goods. When galleries
open every first Friday at the same time in the same place in the same cities they create a
consumptive ceremony for collectors to be publicly recognized as needed participants on
a habitual basis. By institutionalizing a rate of presentation, the market is able to create
routines of desire and expectation for the sale of the commodities it is reliant on. In order
for these routines to work, the artist must schedule their rate of production in line with the
ceremony they wish their work to be a part of. With artists’ willingness, the same market
that created these routines of desire then fulfils them, legitimizing the continuation of pre-
determined production rates as a method to keep profits regular.

Because the function of art galleries is– above all –to sell luxury commodities,
art’s producers must aid this function in the products they intend to present. This means
that the individual intentions of artists are inseparable from the universal necessity to
engender their work with recognizable traits and formats of sellability. In effect, the free
market creates an incentive for similarity between work not yet made and work known as
sellable– a regressive influence that acts against art’s very purpose.5

























































3.) By donating more art for less money, mega collectors are able to raise the price of the
rest of their collection through museum donation at a rate smaller collectors cannot
compete with. Those un-donated parts of mega buyers’ collection can be sold at auction
for dramatically raised prices, increasing their wealth from where they started. With their
increased wealth, they are in an even more advantageous position to buy bulk amounts of
art from dealers once more. Assuming their auctions go successfully, this creates a
vicious circle of financial efficiency for mega collectors. This monopoly is pushed to a
point of absurdity when mega collectors create their own museums, effectively donating
work to themselves to raise the value of their own purchases even further.
For a more thorough description of the extent to which the art market is an elaborate web
of deceptive marketing and corruption I strongly recommend Olav Velthuis’s Talking
Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton
University Press 2005) and Don Thompson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious
Economics of Contemporary Art (Pallgrave Macmillan 2008).
5
The creation of difference is ontologically innate to art if we understand its purpose as
being an agent to change our perception of life. As societal conditions constantly alter, so
too must art in order to fulfill its role. Oppositely, capitalism does not benefit from the
eclecticism of endless change in producers. Limiting difference to as few competitors as
possible is necessary to maximize profit. In art, exclusion leads to specified artist identity
brands; individuals so profitable they practically become companies in themselves. Like
their corporate counterparts, artist brands are based on reliability and marketability. The
question for them is whether galleries and museums can trust the artist brand to offer
similar products of similar quality routinely. One way for artists (and businesses) to
satisfy both of these production qualifications is through specialization. By choosing a
single subject matter or method, the artist’s output is safely pre-determined regardless of



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By pre-determining when artists will produce new work, the market has a
similarly middling effect on content. Artists unable to keep up with the rate of production
they’ve agreed to are put in a position to create work imitative of art made by themselves
or others that was previously able to be sold. Oppositely, artists able to create more work
than what is demanded of them are left with nowhere to display it, lowering the incentive
for surplus creation beyond what will be included in their next show. It is art’s producers
who have praised the false prophet of profit motivation most of all, endlessly chasing a
mirage of personal wealth at the cost of their creative integrity.

A similar rhetoric of individual advancement over common good was used to bust
America’s unions– but this essay is not a call for collectivity in the traditional sense. The
unionization of artists would change their role in capitalism, but not remove them from it.
Any attempt to force artists to fit the part of a tradesman is doomed for failure.
Equalizing a group so diverse in applied labor and intent has proven impossible. If art in
its current form were to exist without the aid of the free market, complete government
assistance would be necessary. Nationalized funding provides another monopolization of
resources not unlike capitalism. Whether bending to the demands of a congressman or a
collector, the artist is on her knees in both cases.


























































what societal transformations occur in the mean time. Though specialization is the
optimal method for repetition, it is also the opposite of art for this reason.



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2: THE ROLES OF INFORMATION AND COMMODITY

As you can see, the problem we face is one of dependence. Why is it that artists
always need someone else to show their work for them? Why must funding come from
above? The reason for our chronic dependence is because we have come to accept the
viewership and creation of art as being a material process. Identically, it is this very same
materiality that allows art to be readily commodified. Commodities cost money to make,
store and present because producing raw goods, erecting buildings and paying a security
staff all require use-valuable labor. Artists look to museums and galleries to foot their bill
for production just as museums and galleries look to collectors to foot their bill for
presentation. As a result, a host of middlemen profit from the artist’s financial
dependence on investors able to build and publicize the events necessary to materially
present her work. The irony of this situation– an infinitely impoverishing desire for
prosperity – has been long lost. Instead, we choose to be self-enslaved by passively
accepting the demand to present our work as a luxury good. The salary for our indentured
servitude is half of the profit from the commodities we produce but are too poor to buy
for our selves– an example of what the term ‘abstraction of labor’ was made for.
Questions of funding all pre-suppose the idea that an economy of private goods is an
ideal system for art’s distribution, as opposed to this essay’s proposal for art to exist
through and as a system of digital communication.

It is because we are willfully enslaved we can just as easily free ourselves. To do

so means understanding what ends art serves in order to identify how it and we, as
producers of it, have been manipulated into believing materiality is indispensable. This
requires the critical recognition of commodity as secondary to art’s native function as
information.6 Philosophically speaking, the purpose of information (contained in art or
elsewhere) is to knowably exist. Information that cannot be accessed is not actually
information for this reason. The difference between the ‘real’ cure for AIDS and the idea
of the cure for AIDS is purely conceptual if the ‘real’ cure exists to no one’s knowledge.
The most highly functioning information is the most openly accessible; the kind that is

























































6
Simply put, ‘art’s function as information’ is another way of saying ‘any intellectual
meaning derived from art when placed in context’. Just as signifiers must be signified to
produce meaning, raw data must be synthesized to become information. (Burnham 35) To
be recognized as Art, a potential artwork requires the viewer’s awareness of its context.
Without this recognition, the work’s visual ‘data’ is free to fulfill whatever non-art
purpose possible, to be synthesized towards a near infinite number of other possibilities.
A William Wegman photograph may cease to be Art and instead become a fitting
birthday card if the costumed dogs on it are chiefly perceived as decorative. If we cannot
recognize something as art without it first undergoing a contextually informed ‘data’
analysis, all things considered Art must inherently have been synthesized as information
to be identified as such in the first place.



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potentially able to inform. This framing reveals information ideally as being a public
good, echoing Stewart Brand’s quote, “information wants to be free.”7 Due to the
Enlightenment’s lasting influence, it is widely understood that a society comprised of
educated individuals is best able to govern itself, insuring happiness and security for the
greatest number of citizens. Such thinking has led to the practical establishment of free
information centers, including everything from public schools to public libraries to public
media. The information art provides is very much a part of this commonwealth of
knowledge. As defined by the 1954 Hague Convention art is the “the cultural heritage of
all mankind.” 8

Art’s secondary role as commodity most often occurs when information is given
material form and is sold as private property. Much work exists materially without being
sold, so while art must inherently be synthesized as information, it exists only potentially
as a commodity. The word commodity came into English use in the 15th century from the
French commodité, which means to benefit or profit. The association between
commodity and private interest is self-evident. For property to be recognized, conditions
must be arranged which separate owners from non-owners. Possession is the dividing line
between the two parties. Commodities are what possession is laid claim to, allowing us to
define ourselves from one another based on the specificity of our own holdings.


























































7
Transcript from the first Hacker’s Conference printed in the May 1985 Whole Earth
Review, p. 49.
8
Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed
Conflict, The Hague, 14 May 1954. The Convention and its first (1954) and second
(1999) Protocols are set out in LEVA5 at pp. 65ff.



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3: THE FAILED HISTORY OF MAKING ART PUBLIC

It is here that we arrive at a stark opposition: commodity and information

naturally are in conflict over art’s real life application as a privatized luxury and the
philosophical demand for it to be publicly owned by all. History does contain examples
of when the possibility for a publicly distributed fine art seemed possible or was openly
pursued. I will explain how the Industrial Revolution, Greenbergian Modernism, and
Conceptualism relate to art’s dialectical functions. An examination of these periods will
frame my proposal for how artists can wrest power back from commodification as being
part of a larger historical struggle. Additionally, understanding these moments’ failure is
necessary to see how we are now in a uniquely advantageous position to successfully re-
organize The Art World in a way never before experienced.

Art objects long acted as the sole point of interaction available to viewers. The
inception of photography complicated this relationship by allowing the chance to see art
at a distance from its original, physical form. Once accepted as a medium of fine art,
photography brought forward the idea of an art infinitely and identically reproducible,
separate from the singular paintings that preceded it.9 Similarly, the industrial
revolution’s factories gave artists uniform materials to work from and the chance to
mechanically replicate art previously hand assembled.10 From this point on, an art
object’s uniqueness was no longer the necessary by-product of handcrafted production
but a choice to be made in light of the mechanical alternatives.

Art’s participants could have jumped at this opportunity to replicate all of history,
to offer every museum the chance to own an exact replica of whatever work they wanted
for the benefit of local visitors unable to travel to see the original. Despite the geographic
limitations of museums existing in major cities alone, this act would still have given art a
dramatically wider circulation than being tucked away in the dusty warehouses of
collectors. At the time, Nelson Rockefeller (of all people) vocally supported art’s mass
reproduction by using the same line of reasoning as the Enlightenment’s thinkers
regarding access to information.11 The dream I describe hopefully– of fine art being such
a ubiquitously reproduced part of everyday life that you could practically find it in an
alleyway –was the nightmare of many who fiercely resisted the societal benefits of mass
reproduction for fear that it would devalue their commodity investments. Mass
reproduction also threatened to abolish the material barriers to entry art’s hierarchies

























































9
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.
Chapter 1. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(May 10, 2010)
10
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.

Chapter 1. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(May 10, 2010)

11
Edward Banfield, The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest (New
York: Basic Books, 1984), p.31



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relied on, allowing nearly anyone financially able with the chance to become a collector,
dealer, or to even start their own museum. Because the museums of the time served as a
tool for elites to direct the middle class’ understanding of culture, the possibility of
citizens forming their own institutions to create separate or opposing histories would
render universalist sites useless.

In response to mechanical reproduction, it was conceded that the limited

replication of certain kinds of work already reproducible (photography and film) was
acceptable. This was the birth of what we now know as ‘editioning’; where an artist and
her dealer conspire to artificially limit the number of an artwork’s reproductions to a
point that ensures the work remain a luxury good while maximizing the price of each
reproduced piece. Such a small concession to societal change would not be enough to
quiet the Dada-influenced voice for the end of boundaries between artistic mediums as
well as the dissolution of ‘high’ and ‘low’ conceptions of art.

Because the tools to practically implement a new Art World had already been
created, the only way to discredit this potential was through changing the public’s
perception of how art should theoretically exist. To avoid obsolescence, Modernist
institutions endorsed freshly conceived forms of conservative connoisseurship at the
informational cost of the public they served. A new generation of theorists led by
Clement Greenberg did their best to combat the potential for art’s immersion in to every
day life with writing that privileged medium specificity, aesthetic purity and American
individualism. Once thought of as a tyrannical dictator, the notion of boundaries was now
marketed as the friendly neighborhood cop here to save us from a shameful descent in to
kitsch. This was a romanticized discourse that heroicized men with rolled up sleeves
smoking cigarettes in their studio, churning out objects as unique as their brawny
creators’ immaculate visions. Sadly, machines capable of mass reproduction could not
smoke cigarettes.

Aiding their promotion of singularity, Modernists prior to, during and after
Greenberg’s influence cast a ghost story upon art that still haunts us to this day: the
presence of ‘aura’ in original art objects. Using the Benjaminian sense of the term, ‘aura’
is characterized as the unique (spi)ritual presence of humans exemplified through the
material things they produce.12 This mistaken attempt to imbue inanimate objects with
supernatural meaning was likely caused by the perplexingly powerful sentimentality
objects are capable of inspiring in us. As Jean Baudrillard explains:

No doubt objects do play a regulative role in everyday life, in so far as within

them all kinds of neuroses are neutralized, all kinds of tensions and frustrated
energies grounded and calmed. Indeed, this is what lends them their ‘spiritual’
quality; this is what entitles us to speak of them as ‘our very own’. Yet this is


























































12
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.
Chapter 4. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(viewed May 10, 2010)



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equally what turns them into the site of a tenacious myth, the ideal site of a
neurotic equilibrium.13

Spirituality has long been the default explanation for all that we cannot yet explain. In
using ‘aura’, Modernists described seeing a clairvoyant window into the essence of others
that was actually just a psychological reflection of the self. Baudrillard continues:

The object emerges as the ideal mirror: for the images it reflects succeed one
another while never contradicting one another. Moreover, it is ideal in that it
reflects images not of what is real, but only of what is desirable. In short, it is like
a dog reduced to the single aspect of fidelity. I am able to gaze on it without its
gazing back at me. This is why one invests in objects all that one finds impossible
to invest in human relationships.14

It is important we abandon using ‘aura’ to describe what is, in reality, a tautological event
where the viewer recognizes her own absolute singularity by bearing witness to another
absolutely singular thing.15 The metaphysical implications of ‘aura’ are flawed and have
the affect of aligning artists with a kind of material worship that dogmatizes the criticality
necessary to understand the negative role object-commodities play in continuing the
privatized status quo.

‘Aura’ is similar to Modernist formalism in that it was a term used with objective
reverence justified by subjective and experiential reasoning.16 Like a conversation with
an imaginary friend, it appeared that high Modernism’s critics were only in dialogue with
themselves regarding what constituted an aesthetically ‘correct’ image, as all attempts to
present complete criteria for visual success to the rest of the world theoretically fell apart.
Many grew skeptical of Greenberg’s hole-filled theology and soon Pop, Fluxus and
Conceptual Art looked to dismantle every defective truism the New York School once
held dear. Of these, it was Conceptual Art who took rebellion against Modernism the
furthest. By prizing the idea (or, informational content) of art over material concerns,
Conceptualism posed a direct threat to commodification. Many artists of the movement
were concerned with finding alternative forms of presentation to art’s traditional audience
by existing outside of the market altogether. Unfortunately, these noble attempts would
be doomed to begrudgingly return to the realm of commodity as well.

Conceptual artists creating ephemeral works found themselves trapped in a

paradox regarding documentation. On one hand, they could entirely resist all materiality

























































13
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting.” Cultures of Collecting (Critical Views)
Ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Reaktion Books (March 1994) p. 11
14
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting.” Cultures of Collecting (Critical Views)
Ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Reaktion Books (March 1994) p. 11
15
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting.” Cultures of Collecting (Critical Views)
Ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Reaktion Books (March 1994) p. 12
16
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (Confrontation with Twentieth Century Art) (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1972). p. 69



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by leaving their performance undocumented, existing solely in the memories of the

viewers lucky enough to see the event first hand. This resistance proved to create an
audience as provincial, if not more, than the institutions they sought to escape. On the
other hand, artists who did provide evidence of their ephemeral works found that the
documentation they used was quickly interpreted as the art itself, leading viewers to
mistakenly engage the work materially. Vito Acconci’s 1970/1987 performance
Estimations (a work where the artist tried to estimate the number of steps it would take to
end up at an arbitrarily chosen location) is now remembered as a series of framed
photographs and handwriting used to explain a process that was actually a performance
of the body.

Other Conceptual artists concerned themselves with using the mass media
available as a way of aggressively reaching a new audience. These efforts would be
limited by financial dependence as, at the time, access to larger audiences directly
correlated with higher prices for use of those media. Innovative as it was, display in mass
printed reproductions and television proved too costly for artists to routinely self-present
their work through, failing as alternative systems of distribution even if they were used
for individual pieces. Even Seth Seigelaub’s seminal show, The Xeroxbook, (consisting
of reproduced Conceptual works bound and printed on paper) was too expensive to
actually Xerox print that many copies. Instead, the books were more cheaply letterpress
printed, existing as a Xerox in name only.17


























































17
Alexander Alberro. Conceptual art and the politics of publicity (The MIT Press,
January 2003) p. 136



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4: FREE ART TODAY

Conceptualism’s troubled hope to achieve new distributional possibilities for art

has been given a new lease on life. As historian Edward Shanken notes:

Advances in electronics, computing and telecommunications– and especially the

advent of the internet –have provided tools that enable artists to interrogate the
conventional materiality and semiotic complexity of art objects in ways that were
not available 30 years ago.18

Today, I would like to formally welcome art to the 21st century. The Information Age has
produced a new system of distribution called Free Art. This system exists through and as
an immaterial mode of communication, privileging internet documentation over material
interaction with art. Free Art is a decentralized system of display that allows anyone to
appropriate and re-contextualize the work of others online. To achieve an audience no
longer requires being initially purchased as a luxury good nor the high cost of a
traditional mass media broadcast. Free Art is a digital conversation among producers, a
system of endorsements among peers. Divorced from material commodity, Free Art is the
display of art’s information through individual creation and links. The social capital of
each participant in Free Art is dependent on her intellectual contribution to its discourse.
Just like Gift Economies, the more information a participant is able to create,
contextualize or make others aware of, the more she is respected in her community by
living up to Free Art’s aim for self-reliance. In the absence of profiteering middlemen, we
are asked to fill the roles we formerly outsourced by doing them ourselves.


























































18
Edward A. Shanken. Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art (The
MIT Press, Leonardo, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2002, pp. 434-438) p. 438



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5: THE NEW HOME OF THE EDUCATED MASSES

Complete trust in museums and galleries is a form of self-deprecation; it is the

viewer’s acknowledgement that she is not in a position informed enough to define her
own taste. Perhaps the idea that we must outsource the course of art’s history to those
more educated held weight during a time before photography, when knowledge of art was
largely limited to those who were in direct contact with art objects. We no longer live in a
world with such a limited circle of people knowledgeable in art’s history and methods. In
the year 2007-2008 alone, 87,703 students were awarded bachelor degrees in the visual
and performing arts.19 The colleges that award these degrees are often attached to major
art institutions, proving a formal acknowledgement by museums that their graduates
possess a level of knowledge they consider professional. By museums’ own admission,
there are a vast number of people qualified to make informed decisions about art without
institutional training wheels. Every year this number grows by nearly 90,000 more. Free
Art is the outlet for the educated masses, the transfer of power from individual
institutions to actual individuals in determining what art they value and will be in contact
with.20

Presently, the exclusion of this educated mass in the construction of art’s history
has resulted in a major gulf formed between those who identify with the work institutions
claim to represent their time and those who find little resonance in an art dictated by
profit motivations. When asking, “What museum represents me?” or even “What widely
publicized artists have the same interests as me?” many find the answer is non-existent.
In the lives of contemporary artists, Free Art is a place to find one’s self through the
existence of others– to individually reclaim the ability to self-mythologize and
empathetically pick from your peers for influence. Thus, Free Art is marked by the
compulsive urge of searching (or, surfing) to connect with others in a way that is not
dictated by profitability, but found and shared charitably among individuals based on
personal interests.


























































19
Statistical data found online at the Nation Center for Educational Statistics regarding
Bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by
sex of student and discipline division: 2007-08 available for view at
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_275.asp (Viewed May 10, 2010)
20
The ‘educated masses’ certainly include those who have not been formally trained as
well.



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6: CHANGING ART’S DISTRIBUTION REQUIRES A NEW

PERCEPTION OF OBJECTHOOD

In a globalized world of production, the notion of seeing all art in person is simply
no longer feasible. Access to contemporary art museums and galleries is not a God-given
right but a privilege we who have access to them have become painfully dependent on.
The qualitative differences offered by seeing art materially are belittled by how
inefficient and exclusionary the act of seeking out single objects in single places is.
Inefficiency isn’t just a penalty for the ignorant but also a luxury enjoyed by the able. For
those who can’t travel the globe to see work first hand, digital viewership is a necessity to
maintain a relevant understanding of a rapidly changing art world. Free Art is a call for
the expansion of art’s presentational boundaries into a digital system that moves as
quickly as the society that produces it. Liberation in this kind of digital display is
twofold: it allows art’s creators an openly available space to present their work simply by
claiming a URL as their site of exhibition and it allows viewers the chance to see new art
regardless of their geographic location.21

Free Art does not necessitate its participants stop making art objects, but that they
start taking pictures of those objects and offering them for the widest viewing audience
possible on the internet. In this process, the likeness of art objects becomes a source of art
itself. Jack Burnham explains:

Graphic reproductions of original works of art were a form of advertising. We

now look upon them as works of art in their own right. Electronics have taught us
that we often confuse software with its physical transducer. In other words, if we
extend the meaning of software to cover the entire art information processing
cycle, then art books, catalogs, interviews, reviews, advertisements, sales and
contracts are all software extensions of art, and as such legitimately embody the
work of art. The art object is, in effect, an information “trigger” for mobilizing the
information cycle.22

While addressing the use of images in an era prior to the digital, Walter Benjamin offers
a fitting description that can also explain the mindset behind Free Art:


























































21
Many will be quick to note Free Art’s limitations because not everyone has computers
or internet. Free Art is not a utopia, but a step towards a more perfect art world. We must
remember that many more have access to the internet than access to seeing the Venice
Biennale or have a subscription to Art Forum. While many cities have libraries with
computers, few cities have blocks full of contemporary art galleries. Free Art is
decentralized online and has no capital.
22
Jack
Burnham,
Systems
Esthetics,
Artforum,
Vol.
7,
No.
1
September
1968,
p.
28




 15


To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception
whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree
that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.23

However, the “universal equality of things” Benjamin speaks of is not universally

accepted. Many people still support the boundaries of physical display as rewarding,
lamenting the loss of emphasis on objecthood in art. It is important to understand this
feeling of loss so we can move beyond it to a more useful system of distribution. First,
we must recognize that digital technology is able to fully account for all static visual
information an art object may provide through 3D scanning. While 3D scanning is not
present in all installation images on the internet, we are capable of rotating and moving
images of objects to see them at every angle and in full detail online. The potential for
viewing images online and objects in person has been equalized on a purely visual-
informational level. Free Art champions the universal realization of this potential, the
imminent future when all installation images online feature complete views of work.

But if you ask people what they hate about the loss of art objects, few will site
quality of digital detail compared to how many will talk about the difference in viewing
experience. While Baudrillard’s explanation of our close-knit ties to objects as being the
result of their use as a site of self-affirming meditation may account some of this
attachment, I believe interaction with objects also serves as a faulty source of control. In
the experiential moment of being physically present with art, the viewer commands an
intense, if brief, amount of jurisdiction over the object. The tactile destruction the viewer
is capable of committing is total. Unlike the deletion of a digital image– which exists
ahistorically through a series of unnoted copies and transfers –the singular art object
contains an irrecoverable provenance of interactions and owners specific to its material
composition. It is due to this physical potential for destruction that the viewer is
empowered with a temporary feeling of ownership and thus, control. After all, it is the
pinnacle of true ownership to be able to destroy your property without consequences.

Even though the museumgoer would reap major penalties for her destructive
actions, she is still presented with a choice: will you punch a hole in this painting or will
you be a good girl and stand there as a passive observer? While the chance to destroy art
empowers viewers with a shade of ownership’s God-like control, the decision to let it
stand provides them with the self-satisfaction of knowing they are behaving properly. In
the context of museums and galleries– where social behavior is silently governed with an
iron fist –the ability to recognize and abide by unspoken rules (most importantly, the rule
that you can’t wreck the work you are there to see) confirms the viewer’s inclusion in a
pre-ordained cultural class. For this, the viewer is empowered by the ability to control her
self by mimicking the behavioral habits of those around her.


























































23
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.
Chapter 3. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(viewed May 10, 2010)



 16


The opportunity to experience the feelings of power provided by physical objects

comes at the cost of an even greater matter of control: who determines art’s
representation. Continuing the ‘auratic’ belief that the only valid experience with art is
one that takes place with original objects in person necessitates the kind of funding that
only big business or big government can provide. This dependence is the effective
forfeiture of our ability to define our own sites of distribution and ourselves as artists.
Free Art is not against objects in themselves, but the way an Art World made of
commodities quickly becomes full of limitation and exploitation– an unfortunate side
effect of materiality.



 17


7: TRADING FANTASY FOR A MORE SATISFACTORY REALITY

Without being commodified, art takes on the function it has had all along– to
communicate information to viewers. People flock to producing art because of the joy
they receive during the act of creation and the effect they are able to have on how other
people perceive the world. Believing that one should be able to make a career from
something that is already self-satisfying is an idea that has grown in popularity most
recently, though is ultimately unrealistic. As the writer Chris Anderson suggests:

What our “free labor” in an area that we value grants us is respect, attention,
expression, and an audience. In short, doing things we like without pay often
makes us happier than the work we do for a salary. You still have to eat […] but
there is more to life than that. The opportunity to contribute in a way that is both
creative and appreciated is exactly the sort of fulfillment that Maslow privileged
above all other aspirations, and what many jobs seldom provide. No wonder the
web exploded, driven by volunteer labor– it made people happy to be creative, to
contribute, to have an impact, and to be recognized as an expert in something. The
potential for such a nonmonetary production economy has been in our society for
centuries, waiting for the social systems and tools to emerge to fully realize it.
The web provided these tools, and suddenly a market of free exchange arose.24

Of course, the majority of fine artists have worked for free throughout their lives anyway.
Despite a printed press that glorifies art’s auction achievements every chance it gets, and
a secondary education system that depends on the myth that its graduates can all sustain
themselves from selling their work, the reality is that a very limited number of people
have ever went their entire life selling art for a living alone. For nearly everyone, Free Art
does not deprive of us of a paying occupation but eliminates an unlikely fantasy. After
removing this pipedream, what we get in return is the satisfaction of all the things
Anderson details: the respect of a group of like-minded peers, exposure to an audience
that may think differently, attention from the kind of international viewership galleries
could never provide, an unlimited place to store and display art, the ability to express
yourself regardless of profitability, a chance to create a new kind of art in an uncharted
territory, and to be one of the first to ever try something so ideal in art’s history and
succeed.


























































24
Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, 2009) p. 189



 18


8: DECENTRALIZED AND DEMOCRATIZED

Releasing individual control for the sake of collective emancipation is a theme

that runs through Free Art in more ways than the forfeiture of material commodities.
While the artist claims the use of a URL as their primary site of exhibition, their work
travels far beyond this address, aided by viewers who take the artist’s work and post it on
other websites– most often, blogs. Prophetically, Walter Benjamin describes a similar
process in The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, stating:

By making many reproductions [we substitute] a plurality of copies for a unique

existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in
his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two
processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which [sic] is the obverse of
the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately
connected with the contemporary mass movements.25

The plurality described is the common practice of Free Art, an encouraged form of
appropriation fueled by bloggers’ desire to be associated with peers creating favorable
work and supported by artists eager to reach a new audience. It’s a win-win situation for
both parties: the blogger posting the artist’s work becomes a trusted source of links to
‘quality art websites’ while the artist who originally created the work receives traffic
back to her own URL due to the endorsement. Audiences grow or shrink based on how
useful each viewer finds a promotional blog to be. The same can be said for websites
archiving individual artists’ work– they will be reblogged at a rate equal to the desire of
people willing to be associated with their art. Democratically, audience and promotional
power forms around websites that are posting art viewers find relevant to themselves.
Free Art does not guarantee everyone will be paid attention to equally, but that everyone
has an equal chance to be seen in the first place.

Free Art is art’s immersion into every day life, allowing it to exist within and
alongside the society that created it. What better place for art to act as a derivé than here,
at the heart of the beast? How could art ever change our perception of life when displayed
in sterilized white cubes specifically designed to make viewers forget what ‘life’ actually
is? ‘Change’ is impossible when all points of comparison have been neatly scrubbed
away. The gallery and museum exist outside of time and culture, they are like a casino
intentionally without clocks– a ploy used to create a perception of space that is
autonomous and referential only to itself. Far from Donald Kuspit’s paranoid belief that
art and consciousness become “double castrated” upon contact with image-based digital
media, it is the fluidity of this media that allows art to take on whatever use applicable to


























































25
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.
Chapter 2. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(viewed May 10, 2010)



 19


it.26 Free Art offers viewers a contextualized chance to view art and understand it as such
but does not necessitate an artistic use or meaning. Free Art begs of the viewer, “How can
you use this?” and accepts entertainment, comedy, pornography or any other use as an
answer. The same liberty that allows bloggers the chance to promote an artist’s work by
taking it and retaining a reference to its context also allows a viewer to take an artist’s
work and forget who made it. You cannot have one result without the other because they
are cut from the same cloth: two intentions enabled by one method. Free Art is both
beautifully useless and useful at once. If material art is too proud to let museumgoers pee
in Duchamp’s urinal, Free Art doesn’t mind what you do to it– so long as you do what
you want.

What artists like Walead Beshty and Tino Sehgal want– to stay off the internet –
no longer matters. Sorry boys, you’re already here. Free Art takes images from the
material world as quickly and often as it does from itself. This is not a system of
separation, but inclusion of all things publicly visible. Images of art institutions exist on
the internet, though art institutions no longer control them. Online viewership of
installation images routinely surpasses the foot traffic received art galleries. Jack
Burnham’s quote that “more organized systems always gain information and energy from
less organized systems” describes our condition exactly.27


























































26
Donald Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambridge University Press 2004) p. 9
27
Jack
Burnham,
Alice's
Head:
Reflections
on
Conceptual
Art,
1970,
p.
36
in
Great


Western
Salt
Works:
Essays
on
the
Meaning
of
Post­Formalist
Art
(New
York:
George

Braziller)
1974




 20


9: CONCLUSION

This is not a proposal for Free Art to exist– it already does! You can find it on
every Tumblr, Youtube, Delicious and personal website of every artist available. The
odds are, if you’re reading this you are already a Free Artist. Congratulations.

The purpose of this essay is twofold: First, it is an invitation for unacquainted

artists to directly engage this digital system of distribution instead of waiting for a
stranger to appropriate their work into it with a cell phone. Additionally, this is an
invitation for people who are already Free Artists to value and understand what they are
doing. Free Art is not cast to be permanently referential to the material art world. While
the digital art world instantly contains information on all of the things happening in the
material, the material world contains little to no information on all of the things
happening in the digital– so why wait for the material world of institutions to commend
us for our actions when it is unlikely they will be made aware of Free Art for at least
another decade?

Free Art is a rich environment and the viewership artists receive, the connections
with other people they make and the information they learn are all real. Let’s encourage
the digital process we engage in on a daily basis and enjoy the things it has given us.
Let’s celebrate our new community and existence for art. Don’t allow nihilistic and
boundary-loving critics to convince you that the tools at our fingertips ‘are not worth it’
once more. The fervor of a conviction that dares to break from what already exists
equally inspires respect from those who share the desire for change and reactionary
criticism from those who are too afraid to believe in anything. So long as art and the
internet exist, Free Art will be right here too. Don’t let a history book tell you Free Art
was revolutionary when you have every right to believe you are a radical today.

While the digitization of all information made public is certain, each of our
ideological positions toward this fact remains to be decided. Similarly, we all must
determine our relationship to the art market at some point in our lives– a decision marked
by compliance or resistance. The time has come for us to stop waiting for the market’s
hand of god to scoop us up and place us in an unlikely land of fame and fortune. We have
been given a chance to achieve great things on our own without the market, galleries’ or
museums’ corrupting effects. The sacrifice Free Art asks is your own comfort and
complacency; it is easier to continue to allow others to represent and distribute art, but
wouldn’t you rather do it yourself? When assessing this sacrifice, please remember that a
failed attempt at change is better than a successful assimilation, and a successful attempt
at change is better than all else. Heaven and hell are not faced upon death, but when we
close our eyes to sleep at night. While others endlessly dream of a better life, the Free
Artist sleeps with a grin.