A Gift

What am I here for?

Is it possible to use the internet as a delivery vehicle for art? Or to put it another way, is it possible to make art specifically to be experienced on the internet, to use the principles of the internet to resist the tendency of visual art to be turned into private property? Can I propose a different way of being an artist that better aligns with my belief that the creative potential of human beings should be harnessed for the greater good rather than personal enrichment?

Not long after I began life as an artist, the great cultural critic Lewis Hyde published a book-length essay called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, in which he put forward the notion that art, at its most basic, should be created as a gift to the culture or the society in which it is born, rather than as a commodity for sale. I believed that proposition then and I believe it now. The Conceptual Artist’s Cookbook, then, is offered in that spirit, whether you be an artist fellow-traveler, someone on the cusp of an art career, or a cultural warrior of another stripe.

I came to art believing its purpose to be transformation, whether personal or cultural, but soon realized that to sustain a life as an artist for the long haul, say for fifty years, you must first transform yourself. You must, in fact, make your life into a work of art. It takes courage, luck, but mostly, what my mom called stick-to-itiveness. I call it resourcefulness mixed with a little grit. Such a life is unequivocally a financial strain, and if it’s not, it’s because you are extraordinarily lucky or because you have not been true to your real vision–you have conspired with the market forces that are constantly at war with the forces of transformation.

What you will find here are recipes for art, art actions, and art activism, as well as recipes for how one might keep body and soul together while being an artist: inexpensive but nourishing and delicious food drawn or adapted from traditional agrarian societies–my own American South and others more far flung. You might call it soul food. I call it The Conceptual Artist’s Cookbook.

My hope is that this venture will help me discover a community of people who want to use social media to make art rather than promote it, as well as folks interested in the ways art of all types might interact with and subtly transform culture. I hope to publish a hybrid text/image piece once a week, occasionally adding just images, my own work or other artists’, to amplify the weekly pieces. Sometimes these will be accompanied with recipes for soul food from some of the places I have lived or visited. Please participate in the comments section. Let me know what you think works, point me –us– to other work in this vein. Re-post something that appeals to you.

In the spirit of art as gift, I am choosing to have no pay wall. As Lewis Hyde might say, if the gift does not continue to circulate, it withers and dies. Or as I said to him a while back, I want to make the case for a different paradigm for being an artist; one less about cultivating unique exceptionalism and more about engaging inventively and poetically with a broader community.

Please, join me –its free.

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