I would like to give some examples first.

1) Victoria Miro Gallery - auction/who sell to (price vs. content). The gallery goes to art auctions to check out what prices their artists works are sold at. If it is too low they will buy it themselves to keep the price up. If it is too high it is also problematic to them as collectors would then want to sell their works, with the effect that the market will have to many of that artist, and the price would then fall again.

2) Ad/Gillian Wearing. Her photos with people holding signs up with a statement of their own choise. This form was used in an ad, leaving the content behind!

4) I have some friend in Denmark that I studied economics with. and they do not understand the purpose of doing something without the intention of selling it or earning money on it. They simply do not have a consciousness for understanding that you can spent your working life at something that does not make money.

What I want to address here is what it means when you sell your art as an artist and if this can be problematic.

For some reason it is always taken more or less for granted that we as artist want to sell our art. And most artist do sell or want to sell their art. It's the norm. For some reason I have never seen selling my art as interesting, or a natural thing to do. But lets have a look at what selling art means:

In order to generate meaning we need to classify what we encounter. (Stuart Hall): "Classification is a fundamental aspect of human culture". So in order to encounter art we need to classify it somehow. One of the ways I see this is done is by commodifying it, to let it enter the system of exchange. Art then at one level works in a predefined way that for example allows us to talk about it and its value: What does it cost?, is he famous?, can you live of your art?, etc.

By this classification as a commodity art is kept in place, so to speak. It is fixed in a certain relation to people and there are certain expectations about the work. By this fixing, a lot of other things fall into place - people know much better how to relate to it when it is a commodity. What can be disturbing to the "order" is what breaks this system, for example works that does not easily get commodified or artists that refuses to sell their art. In other words art works that keeps escaping at least that fundamental fixing of being a commodity. But should we as artists let our art be fixed in this way?

Well, from the artist point of view there is at least one reason to do so: by selling our art we get a guarantee. The guarantee is that by commodifying our work we will, at least on one level, be accepted in society. So even before the content of our works is brought into question or talked about it is already signified as a commodity. And this gives it a nice classification. The commodification is then to me an underlying structure of most art. A structure within capitalism.

This then becomes a secure political position for the work. By this I mean that people already knows something about it and have some ideas about what it does and how it functions in society. The problem with this is that by entering this realm of commodities and of the capitalistic paradigm, one could argue that you have already written off a large area to deal with as an artist. You are always already within a certain structure, and you cannot see it from the outside and critically assess it. You already depend on and subscribe to what I would call an ideology.

After the loss of ideologies and metanarratives we got what could be seen as the worst thinkable ideology: Capitalism, which is an ideology without choice, was there to suck up everything. This also brought about the detachment of form from social life. Pure surface, and aesthetics deprived of real content became a symbolic goods to trade with and use for other purposes. In a way you can say that the loss of ideology was the worst thinkable ideology for art, because it is so hard to exist outside it or really raise a critique that will be heard. Because most people are quite content with capitalism and liberalism!

Furthermore, I think about what happens when an art work becomes a commodity with an exchange value? Somehow it becomes unified. Commodification is a levelling out, art at one level becomes equal to all other goods, and goods already has a whole bag-full of significations attached to it. It becomes a free floating signifier with no attachment to meaning or content, as we call it in the art world.

So if you enter 'the market' as an artist you enter the globalising project, you enter the business paradigm, levelling out of difference, shifting around with signifiers. and the question is if you are deprived the possibility to truly questioning the capitalistic project?

The big question to me is whether it is possible to have something parallel to capitalism? And how art can be one this. Or if there are other possibilities of escaping the effects of commodification that I just described?

I would like to come with an example of project I did myself where something different arosed: When I helped a corner shop refurbish their toilet as an art project I had an extraordinary experience: "What is this thing I am doing, it is not an art piece I can show to people for them to worship, I do not get money for it and it is not to help family or friends!" It was in another type of economy.

Another example that works from within the economic structure is Christine Hill's Volksbutique which she had in Berlin and at the last Documenta, where I saw it. The Volksbutique is a second hand clothes shop but how Christine talks to her customers becomes is the work for her.

Jeremy Deller acid brass band: 19 Got a traditional brass band to play acid house music. 2) At a community cafe he set up a digital sound studio for the elderly people to compose, record and burn a CD. Both projects is about a meeting (old/traditional with new7modern).

What I think is an important project parallel to the making of art is to address the issue of an outside of or alternative to capitalism. I think these fields explicitly needs to be defined and acknowledged as practices that offers an alternative to capitalism and globalism.

In a way this is a project structurally the same as e.g. feminism and post-colonism: An acknowledgement of difference from the dominant: Not from men or colonisers but from capitalism. As well as Sarat's work on non-knowledge, a way of defining the field of art as another language that cannot be easily or at all be translated into our normal language.

So what I am working towards with is very ambitious is to investigate how my art can provide an alternative way of dealing with specific subjects and ideas. A way that lies outside the already defined, outside capitalism or Empire, as we might call it in the future.

This leads me to talk about Empire and the strategy Negri and Hardt (p. 45-46) propose to overcome the widespread of capitalism and globalism. "We should be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics. It is better both theoretically and practically to enter the terrain of Empire and confront its homogenising and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity, grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude." and elsewhere "It is false...to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against flows of capital and Empire." (Remarks on Interventive Tendencies, ed. Lars Bang Larsen, Borgen, Copenhagen, 2001)

The same idea seems to be what Nicolas Bourriaud in 1995 relates to an art practice he calls 'Relational Aesthetic' e.g. artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Vanessa Beecroft and Christian Jankowski.

He says that these art practices are seen to work in the social interstice and that this offers a "historic opportunity", which can be explained this way: "learning to inhibit the world better, instead of trying to construct it in accordance with a preconceived idea of historical evolution. In artistic terms, the aim of the artwork is no longer to form imaginary or Utopian realities, but to come up with ways of being and models of action within actual reality, on whatever scale."

and he continues elsewhere (2001)

He sees this struggle to be fought both locally and globally and says that "This work implies the constitution of temporary subject groups or micro-communities, the modelling of alternative modes of sociality and the appropriation of industrial production and economic structures." Berlin Biennale Catalogue page 42.

So he is talking about how artist should be active everywhere to work against the unifying force of commodification.

This did not give any answers to how I should resolve my position as an artist but I hope it opened up the field of how selling your art work as an artist can be problematic in the fight against the problems of capitalism, globalism or Empire...

Thanks.

Kenneth A. Balfelt