No.

A Response to Claire Bishop's talk “Is Everyone An Artist?”

Russian Avant-Garde Revisited, March 2010
Former West, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (NL)

Lisa Radon

I'm going to start with a statement Claire Bishop makes midway through her talk “Is Everyone an
Artist?” She says, “There is a widespread consensus that an art project is better the more people it turns
into collaborators.”

And she draws this use of the word collaborator from the quote that she reads at length from Walter
Benjamin's “The Author as Producer.” By collaborator, she means participant (given the examples that
she uses at the end) because collaborator implies authorship on behalf of each collaborator whereas the
participant in a project (as well as institution, critic, historian) acknowledges that it is not his project,
but the artist's and that he merely made a contribution.

I'll come back to the word collaborator in a minute.

She also picks up on Benjamin's use of the word “apparatus” setting up what I believe is a creative
misreading of Benjamin. And one that spawns buckets of projects in which the artist sets up a
mechanism, issues an invitation for the amateur to make a piece of the piece, and the work is exhibited
under the artist's name in an art institution. This is important because Bishop's right, it is widely
accepted that the more collaborator-participants the better a work is. But in my reading, this is not what
Benjamin said or meant.

The translation I read, read “An author who teaches a writer nothing,teaches nobody anything. “ In the
translation that Bishop quotes Benjamin writes, “A writer's production must have the character of a
model....It must be able to instruct other writers in their production, and ...place an improved apparatus
at their disposal.”

Her translation concludes, “This apparatus will be the better the more consumers it brings into contact
with the production process, in short the more readers or spectators it turns into collaborators.”

I do not believe that Benjamin means apparatus as a frame or project or process through which other
artists, amateur or otherwise can create like Hans-Ulrich Obrist's “Do It” on e-flux. And I certainly
don't think he meant it to include participation, i.e. squeezing between a naked Marina Abromovic and
Ulay or drinking art project beer.

In my translation, the word is not collaborator but co-worker. Benjamin talks about leading “other
producers to this production.” He is focusing on not just any reader/spectator/consumer, but a fellow
writer.

A better work is a model that allows another writer (or artist if we were talking about artists) to think
about work, to make work differently, transforming that reader into a fellow traveler on an exploratory
path. Earlier in his essay, Benjamin writes “To an author who has thought through the conditions of
production today...His work would never merely be developing products, but always at the same time
working with the means of production themselves.” As an example, Gertrude Stein models a
syntactically exploratory way of dealing with words, and it's a foray into a kind of writing that we still
have barely come to terms with as a model. See also: Duchamp modeling artist as selector.

And if we want to extend the concentric circles out beyond writers/artists to any and all
consumers/readers/spectators if the work can provoke them to explore with Stein writing that is not
readily commodifiable, not propaganda for the creative economy's desire machine, well the more the
merrier.

But it's precisely because the platforms that Bishop mentions do not make the participant a full
collaborator, a co-author (and in fact there's some cynicism, really, on the part of the artist). or fellow
worker that the valorization of “the more collaborators the better” rings so hollow.

Secondly, Bishop notes that in the face of the policy conversation around the “creative economy”
which lumps art in with design, music, advertising, etcetera, few are willing to defend art as a separate
realm of creativity. I do like her notion of creativity as the capacity of the many and art as the skill of
the few. But there's an even more fruitful way of thinking about this.

A t-shirt design on Threadless and an installation by Jacob Kassay at Car Hole gallery are not the same.
But why?

And we can get at that by asking: How much attention does this demand of me? And how much
attention does it reward? And how great is the reward for that attention?

Because I write about art, I have been thinking for a long time about the attention that I pay, and it is a
payment, an allotment of my time and brain time that I offer up to an object or time-based work. And I
do want to distinguish this—particularly because I am using a YouTube video as an example—from the
so-called “attention economy,” a notion laid out by Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck , because its
implications are all business: clicks, eyeballs, turning your online attention into dollars.

That's not what I'm talking about. And the distinction is important because what I am talking about
truly is an alternative value system. One based on my attention. The critical difference is that how I am
asked to pay and how I do pay attention (and what the reward is) is more important than how many pay
attention.

Look at one of many YouTube cover versions of Willow Smith's “I Whip My Hair Back and Forth” and
ask this: How much attention does it demand, how much does it reward?

Considering YouTube cover videos as a whole, we can think of engagement with self-representation,
identity creation, pretending celebrity, the importance of celebrity culture, but for the specific instance
of this particular video, it doesn't, it's maker doesn't ask much from us beyond that we be entertained,
that we “like” the performer, and doesn't offer much more than that.

It probably demands and rewards about as much attention on my part, in different ways, as
embroidered tea towel or tole painting on a wooden chair, hand turned wooden chair leg, in other
words, examples of folk art.

Again, on the whole we can think about the lineage as well as the social aspects of the practice
traditional craft and folk arts, we can think about mass creativity and the affirmation of making for the
human spirit which goes back to the passages Bishop quotes in Marx which I appreciated, but the
specific instance of the tea towel merely asks that we appreciate its aesthetic and its craft.

Distinguish this from “Our Best Machines Are Made Of Sunshine,” a video work by Paige Saez and
Rebecca Steele, a video in which they reenacted YouTube response video made by adolescent girls, that
I recall involved them jumping around to a song I don't remember in their underwear.

When we view Our Best Machines in a gallery, the work takes a critical position regarding many of the
larger issues I raised above of identity, celebrity, not to mention mimicry and voyeurism all facilitated
by the apparatus of YouTube. It demands more of the viewer, what is going on here, what is being said,
and reward or invitation to consider these issues is far greater.

The distinction between the amount and degree of attention that Saez and Steele's video both demands
and rewards that of the YouTube response video on which it's based helps me understand that while
everyone may be making things (and if we want to, as Bishop does via Groys' talk about the digital
realm it's still not the case...a very small percentage YouTube users are actually making videos...but we
could just as well look at the DIY craft trend), everyone is not an artist.

Delivered as part of a panel at Conference of Conferences at Field Work in Portland, Oregon February
2011 in response to Claire Bishop's talk “Is Everyone an Artist?” for Russian Avant-Garde Revisited,
March 2010, Former West, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (NL). Garrick Imatani, Jen Delos Reyes,
Michael Reinsch, Hannah Jickling, Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen, and I made up the panel.