It’s good to be reminded of the important role these other art-worlds and creative practices play in the maintenance and improvement of our own lives. Which is the ultimate test of their value, isn’t it?

Wow, thanks for this great summary – I didn’t make it to the talk – but its a subject thats been on my mind for a while.

Regarding the ‘art world’ that is being left behind here – I really wonder how coherent it is in the first place – there are a lot of marginalized art ‘worlds’ that have very little to do with what goes on in hip arts journals, biennials, ARI’s and contemporary art galleries, that focus on art more as a therapeutic, sense-making process.

I’m thinking here not just about ‘amateur’ art events in community halls i.e. within the context of small community ethnic groups /communities-of-interest, but also other art-forms and traditions of creative practice (choral singing, line-dancing, yoga groups, calligraphy and seal-carving groups etc. I imagine that for many of the people engaged in these alternate art worlds – the art world as we know it simply irrelevant.

Personally – I’m going through a dark period re ‘THE (visual)art world’ – I’m telling my self to be more conciliatory – maybe I just need to look for some different art worlds: sound/noise is one option for the work I do, as is arts-health, art therapy. New Age Self-Help is another one (thinking of somaesthetics here)… but maybe I’m missing the point here?

Thanks again to all the contributors to this thread – its been very nourishing.
x George

“Something like apatheism is needed”… (needed by who, one wonders?)

I guess the thing is that historically, artists (being artists) have trumpeted their lack of belief in the artworld. This trumpeting is heard by the artworld and brought back in as a new and groovy kind of art. This of course isn’t the “apatheism” you describe. Even Kaprow, bless his escapist cotton socks, never really stopped referring back to the artworld.

Sam Hsieh, who did not participate in the artworld for 13 years, has now had that very gesture of non-participation re-incorporated in a grand way. (See Barbara’s article about that here.

To disappear would be to really disappear. But what would that look like? Presumably, we wouldn’t be able to recognise it at all.

Isn’t the artworld a special kind of boundary-crossing phenomenon? Even your talks and blog entries on apatheism and leisure-art/slacker stuff are presented within the art world, right?

brilliant. really brilliant.

Do you really believe this? It is so totalizing and has a certain
religious quality to it…It seems like you’re using art as some kind
of ultimate referent, God, if you will. It is only the faithful who
see one’s lack of belief as “opposition.” The sort of escape I’m
interested in is not (to extend this metaphor) atheism, which already
concedes the idea of God as worth rejecting in the first place.
Instead, something like apatheism is needed which says “I don’t care
whether God exists or not. The entire discussion is irrelevant to me.”
So, it is not escape from art, but escape from the very question of
art in the first place.

Does that make me a glass half empty person?

yes, I think you’ve got it. Something I didn’t mention in the blog post above is the transformation of the artworld itself that comes about via these escape attempts.

If the artworld gobbles up these escape attempts, it “expands” as you say, until its own boundaries necessarily overlap with life, activism, social processes…

If this is true, the paradoxical result of escape attempts is reintegration.

I too am glass half full tonight!

LL started off describing an art world in terms of commodification. And it was this narrowly defined world that needed the escape attempts. Perhaps the attempts have actually been successful, not in terms of getting to the green pastures on the other side but that in each instance she spoke about: conceptualism, feminism and collaborative practices, the boundaries of art expanded beyond commodification. So the escape wasn’t necessary. The world (of art) became a more tolerable place to live. (seeing glass half full tonight)