W.A.G.E. LIVE!
Image courtesy W.A.G.E.
After reading Trong Gia Nyugen’s great interview with activist group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), I become really interested in their work. I started to poke around the Internet to see if there were any upcoming live events in New York City and there is one tonight! W.A.G.E. is speaking on a panel.
Here is the information:
Arts Funding for Sustainable Creative Practice
Thursday, April 30th
7:00pm
NYU’s Barney Building
34 Stuyvesant Street at 9th Street between 3rd and 2nd Avenues
Free and open to the public
Panelists: Ruby Lerner (President, Creative Capital), Katie Hollander (Deputy Director, Creative Time), Tim Cynova (incoming Deputy Director, Fractured Atlas), Jeff Hnilicka (Founder, FEAST [Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics]), Bryce Dwyer (InCUBATE, Chicago IL), A.K. Burns (W.A.G.E. [Working Artists in the Greater Economy])
Organized and moderated by Tracy Candido, a Master’s candidate in Steinhardt’s Visual Culture Theory program and founder of Sweet Tooth of the Tiger’s Bake Sale Residency for Artists, a mini grant for artists who like to bake.
If you live in New York City, please attend and let us know what you think!
One Response to “W.A.G.E. LIVE!”
[...] W.A.G.E., the arts activist group based in NYC, has been rallying for changes in arts infrastructure to include fees paid to artists and cultural workers as compensation for their labor. An attempt to create movement in this stagnant situation—while waiting for the government to act in support of the arts, and for museums and art institutions to adopt a “best practices” policy that includes a valid fee structure—has been initiated. Groups like InCUBATE (Institute for Community Understanding for Art and The Everyday), FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics), and my own project, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger (a mobile bake sale table that engages ways of thinking about circulating capital in the arts), are functioning as socially collaborative practices that view a dissolved hierarchy shifting the public’s role from distant viewer to active participant as integral to preserving artist networks and communities. Much like socially collaborative artwork (such as the work of Kaprow and Fluxus), a desire for art’s sake is at the heart of these groups (for more on this subject, see RoseLee Goldberg’s text Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present or Claire Bishops’s Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art). Unfortunately, the cost of living in U.S. cities has skyrocketed while the infrastructure of the art institution hasn’t changed much. Adapting to these circumstances, these groups view arts administration as a creative practice that is adept at problem-solving in a dysfunctional system. By incorporating an economy that is facilitated by a democratic model, in which the public pays small amounts of money directly to the artist (contrarily, criticism has recently cropped up regarding “new” economic models in the arts; see Morgan von Prelle Pecelli’s Jan 29, 2009 City Council Testimony), we are able to support artists in their pursuit of sustainable practice both monetarily and culturally as a way to undermine the authority of the art institution and its infrastructure. [...]