Diabolical Dispersion, or, How to Get Ahead in the Arts* Richard Fletcher – Minus Plato
* This talk is delivered in a provisional and exploratory spirit
Seth Price’s Dispersion (2002-) • Artist Seth Price’s essay Dispersion(2002-) explores the implications for aligning artistic production with established forms and systems of distribution (e.g. cheap paperbacks, free digital files, open-source operating systems, the Internet, publishing and exhibitions). • A key component of Price’s argument (and practice) is how such distributed media also coopts a wide span of practices (e.g. music, fashion, poetry, filmmaking, criticism) which ‘resist easy assimilation into a market-driven art system’. • Dispersion of the artist? “Price himself becomes [a] sort of self-othering, self-troubling agent”, John Kelsey ‘Steh Pirce’, in Social Synthetic, p. 265.
How to Get a Head
Bruce Robinson (director) How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) – film
From Dispersion to ‘Mythmaking’
Demonology as translation: Apuleius of Madauros
Dispersion as practice: the novel from Apuleius to Seth Price
Dispersed Model for Arts Education? “If when we work, we expect remuneration and discrete satisfaction for our part in the production of an object, an event or an outcome; when we practice, we do not have such discrete expectations – rather, we understand that we participate in a flow of process that is both immanent and interdisciplinary, through which we develop an event-based and ongoing, improvisatory state of productivity. […] Pedagogy slips between these definitions. It is at once involved in the production and promotion of skills-based training (however ambiguous) and in the production and promotion of immaterial conceptions of practicebased knowledge; this situation is perhaps most exacerbated by arts education itself.” - Andrea Phillips ‘Education Aesthetics’ in Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (eds) Curating and the Educational Turn (2010) 85-90.
Demonic Translation for Art Enterprise? “A growing expertise in the negotiation of entrepreneurialism: whilst all three directors [at three arts institutions in Scotland] expressed concern with the way that entrepreneurialism has become dominant both within the arts and more generally, they are committed to…translating entrepreneurialism to serve values that are socially and artistically, as well as financially, beneficial. Each understands that their roles as value generators are important, especially for audiences’ experiences and artists’ careers, but also precarious and potentially exclusive. - Andrea Phillips How to work together, 2014 http://howtoworktogether.org/think-tank/andrea-phillips-how-towork-together/
But how does this work at the research university? • What would an integrated arts project look like from the perspective of dispersion? • Could a cunning (i.e. demonic, translation-focused) deployment of distributed media break down established disciplinary boundaries and the divide between the arts and other disciplines?
Our A-Z of Dispersed Arts Education and Enterprise at the Research University
The Road to Recognition - I’m Seth Price. Can I help you? • A-Z of personal branding for accelerating success
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Authenticity Blog Content Design Email Followers Google Helping Influencers Joining Keywords LinkedIn Media Network
Authenticity as persona
Blog offline
Content curating
Design for good
Email as Syllabus
Followers in movement
Google’s inner law
Helping as framework
Influencers to students
Joining the campus
Keywords for dialogue
LinkedIn alternatives
Media/Medea/Medya
Network for fiction
Offers as seeds
Podcast for memory
Questions from the dead
Recognizing Others’ futures
Speaking as Echo
Target as group
Unique is obsolete
Video record
Website interventions
eXamine institutions
The “You Do” List for communities
Zeal beyond the Cheese Pavilion In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear Is the sound of someone stacking chairs And mopping up spilt beer And someone asking questions and basking in the light Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses While looking down the corridor Out to where the van is waiting I'm looking for the great leap forwards - Billy Bragg Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards